I had a potential client call me recently. He wanted to evaluate what was going on with his sales staff. Why weren’t they converting? What were they doing wrong in those final conversations with customers?
It’s a reasonable question. But it was the wrong one.
When I walked him back through his process, the full picture looked something like this. Lead comes in through social media or direct outreach. Gets qualified. Gets farmed out to someone around the country. That person makes contact, books an appointment, has the conversation, hopefully closes the deal.
Simple enough on paper.
But here’s what I asked him. How do you know the problem is at the end?
Because at every single step in that process, something can quietly fall over. Someone clicks an ad and nothing happens. The qualification stage filters out people it shouldn’t. The lead gets sent to the wrong person or the wrong business unit. The salesperson is too busy to follow up. The email they send has the old logo, no capital letters, reads like it was written in thirty seconds.
And then at the very end, the salesperson just doesn’t show up to the Teams call. Ghosts the customer entirely.
Now here’s the thing. Your CRM will tell you some version of a story. But it’ll be the version your staff typed in. “Customer ghosted me.” “Wrong number.” “Not interested.” What it won’t show you is the sloppy email. The missed follow-up. The lead that fell through the cracks before it ever reached a real person.
So when someone asks me to diagnose a problem at the endpoint, I always push back. Because the endpoint might just be where you finally noticed something was wrong. The actual break could have happened three steps earlier.
The way to actually diagnose this is to start at the top and work your way through. What happens when someone engages with that first touchpoint? Do they get a response? Does it move them to the next step? Keep going through each gate in the process until you find where things stop working the way they should.
That’s the part most businesses skip. They assume everything upstream is fine and focus all their energy on training the sales team. Sometimes the sales team is fine. Sometimes the leads aren’t even reaching them.
It’s a much cheaper and simpler problem to fix once you actually know where it is.
But you have to be willing to start at the beginning, not at the part that’s easiest to see.