Are Your Sales Missing Plan? Run a Revenue MRI to Turnaround Sales Results
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
It is time to run a “revenue MRI” to turn around your sales results. This article is for CEOs, CROs, and CFOs of manufacturing companies seeking real revenue, profit, and business value growth.
If you’re leading a manufacturing business or distribution business and you’re staring at missed sales goals, lagging profit margins, sales forecasts you don’t believe in anymore, or a P&L that’s trending in the wrong direction, this isn’t a time for guesswork, knee-jerk reactions, or hope. It’s time for diagnosis and decisive action.
A revenue or profitability shortfall rarely has a single cause. More often, it’s the result of several interdependent factors across strategy, people, process, execution, and market dynamics. Through our work with companies over the last 35 years, we have identified three to four key areas that often cause the most significant results shortfalls. To get back on track, you need a rapid, honest assessment of where the breakdowns are—and a clear, measurable path forward. I often refer to this process as running a revenue MRI.
Here’s how I recommend you begin.
You can also find these steps and a deeper discussion in my book Driving Explosive Growth.
Step 1: Assess and Diagnose Before You Prescribe
Many companies jump straight to tactics—more marketing, new sales hires, promotions—let’s run radio ads, let’s buy more Google ads, let’s launch a spiff for our salespeople and our distributors’ salespeople …without understanding the true root causes. This leads to wasted time, wasted money, continued misses of the plan, and more profound frustration.
Instead, think like a business doctor: diagnose first. Below are common areas where growth and profitability challenges originate from my experience helping teams over the past 40 years, along with the symptoms that point to trouble. We hope that sharing the key areas and symptoms to watch for will help your team make strategic adjustments and pivots to improve revenue and profits.
Let’s unpack the areas we would discuss if I were your business growth coach.
- Strategy (or Lack Thereof)
When I work with leadership teams and CROs, I ask if they have a strategic growth plan, a sales plan, and a marketing plan to support sales. I often have leaders share, “Of course we do, Mark, we have been in business for ___years, and we did not grow this business without a plan.”
I want to request a meeting to review your strategic plan and discuss your desired growth, as well as the strategies and tactics you are using to achieve your goals.
Sure, here you go…
I opened an Excel document containing sales projections by month, by customer, and several tabs at the bottom. These tabs include targeted new accounts and projections, a new product launches tab, and sales by salesperson, region, and their expected revenue and profits by month.
This is a great start as it shares your “where.” Where do you want revenues and profits to be, and where do you expect revenue to come from?
But….
This is not a strategic plan that outlines the “how” to achieve the desired outcome. Or it has a strategy they have used for 15 years or more that is not producing the results it once did.
Symptoms to look for:
- Given an Excel document, the client shares it is a strategic plan
- No documented, current strategy aligned to revenue/profit goals, shareholder expectations
- Overreliance on one or two major accounts or channels
- Decisions made reactively, not proactively
- Overreliance on one to three key customers
- Over-reliance on the value of their brand
- No sales or marketing plans to execute the strategic plan
- Goals were assigned, and the team members lacked performance agreement plans with strategies and tactics that each salesperson helped develop to achieve growth objectives
- No market trends identified
- No customer satisfaction or Net Promotor Score data
What does it mean?
A dated or missing strategy causes scattered focus, misaligned teams, and wasted resources. In manufacturing and distribution, markets evolve fast, especially with technology shifts and changing buyer expectations. What worked years ago, or even months ago, may not be working now. ( Last year, when you wrote your plan, we did not have reciprocal tariffs, for example)
What to do next?
Conduct a strategy audit. Revisit your positioning, competitive edge, customer needs, and growth priorities. Update your plan quarterly—not just annually.
Quickly identify the current state of your business, your customers, and market trends.
Conduct Voice of Customer Research and gain actionable insights you will use in developing your strategy.
- People: Employee Engagement & Culture
Is your team engaged and motivated to do what they need to do to stretch and grow your company, or are over 60% of your team not engaged, doing just enough not to lose their jobs?
Is your leadership team aligned, and do they trust each other? Odd question, but we often work with leadership teams where, after a leadership team assessment, we discover one or more of the company leaders are not on the same page as the CEO, Owner, or Board of Directors’ plan. Trust is the foundation of growth as identified in the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team Pyramid. If your team lacks trust, you will not grow profitably as fast as you could. When leadership teams lack trust and a culture of psychological safety they don’t measure and discuss things that matter. As a result, they fail to adjust and reinforce team members who are struggling to execute their roles in the plan.
Symptoms:
- Low energy or initiative on the floor or in the office
- Blamestorming when problems occur
- Protect your Silo behavior…not my fault ___ did not do their job
- Turnover among key people or “just doing my job” attitudes
- Lack of ownership for growth goals
- Throwing it over the fence, a silo execution, and a hand off
- Low NPS score since culture is felt by customers and often the leading influencer in your Net Promoter Score
- Poor performance on the new product and services launch
- Low customer satisfaction
- Friction among teams and team members
What does it mean?
Employees who are not engaged or even disengaged lead to lower productivity, lower efficiency, poorer quality, and inconsistent customer experiences. Often, there’s no clear cultural vision or accountability structure. If teams do not discuss what matters and lack trust, your business is experiencing a trust tax, as Covey explains in his book Speed of Trust.
What to do next?
Run an internal engagement and culture diagnostic. Clearly define your cultural standards and leadership expectations. Assess the skills of your leaders and their teams. Empower managers to coach and lead—don’t just manage. Equip your teams with training, tools, and systems to execute your growth plans. Develop performance agreement plans for each employee and train their managers on how to coach them to those plans. (Do not micromanage) Focus on recently repeatable processes and systems.
- VOC Research: Customer Satisfaction & Retention
Are your customers satisfied? Will they refer others in your industry to buy your products or services? If a prospect calls one of your existing customers for a referral, will they hear positive or negative feedback?
Symptoms:
- Send out satisfaction surveys with less than 3% participation
- Flat or declining repeat business
- Increased price pressure or customer complaints
- Higher than industry and historical customer churn rates
- Higher cost of sales, costs to serve customers
- Sales chasing new logos to replace churned accounts
What does it mean?
Customer loyalty is weakening. That erodes the margin and increases the cost of sales. It often ties back to quality issues, poor communication, or lack of differentiation.
What to do next?
Use NPS or customer interviews to understand where value is falling short. Ensure a culture of psychological safety and trust, allowing open discussion of discoveries, and prevent the hiding of politically incorrect secrets or the manipulation of data by personal or team biases. Reinforce post-sale service and onboarding processes. Don’t assume—they’ll tell you if you ask. There are dollars in your data if you know where to look!
- Marketing Effectiveness
I often have business leaders shrug when I ask how effective their marketing is and if they are receiving a strong ROI.I still hear leaders in distribution and manufacturing share how marketing is like a black box, and 50% of it works and 50% doesn’t, and we do not know today which is which. The good news is that numerous technologies and tools are available to provide a return on investment for marketing dollars quickly.
Symptoms:
- Low lead flow or poor-fit leads
- Low website rank compared to the competition
- High website bounce rate
- Website writing in the context of about you, not the problems you solve
- Sales says, “Marketing doesn’t give us anything useful.”
- Dated sales tools
- Marketing qualified leads, not sales qualified leads
- Poor to low lead volume
- Sales producing their own marketing messages and sell sheets
- Website traffic isn’t converting
- Spray and pray email marketing strategy
- Your sales team cannot articulate your organization’s value proposition. Why your team and not your competitors?
What does it mean?
Marketing is either misaligned with sales and leadership or not speaking to today’s buyers. In manufacturing and distribution many companies rely too heavily on trade shows or referrals—ignoring digital lead generation and feedback from their sales teams.
What to do next?
Audit your marketing-to-sales funnel. Align messaging to current buyer pain points. Update your website to speak to decision-makers, not just specs. Update your website to share the problems you solve and the impact they have on your customers’ business outcomes. Leverage the current customer challenges information and create new sales assets, content, success stories, and business cases. Develop the new asset library and share its location with the sales team. Then, train them on how to use it within your new formal sales process.
- Sales Effectiveness: Sales Process and Skills
How effective is your sales team today? How much more effective could they be? What impact would it have on revenue and profits to close skills gaps and formalize your sales process based on how buyers make decisions today? If you are like many of the teams we meet, 15% to 20% of your sales team is delivering 80% or more of revenues. 60% of your sales team requires coaching and training, while 20% is not trainable or coachable and should be transitioned into non-customer-facing roles.
Symptoms:
- Low conversion rates from quotes to orders
- Decrease in sales team close rates
- Reps discounting to win deals, particularly at the end of the month, quarter, and year.
- Long sales cycles with “we’re still thinking about it” buyers
- Little to no customer discovery insights in the CRM
- No CRM or an ERP bolt-on tool, not truly a CRM
- Assess the sales team and your team scores under 5o with an opportunity of 100 when it comes to following a formal sales process.
- Pipeline coaching sessions help you identify skipped sales steps, improve the sales cycle, and reduce close rates.
What does it mean?
Your sales process may be outdated, or your team may lack the skills to guide today’s buyers through complex decisions. Many manufacturers and distributors rely on “relationship selling,” which is no longer effective on its own. A key new skill is what we refer to as Consultative Sense making: where salespeople are trained to ask discovery questions to understand where decision-makers are in their buying decision-making process, what they have already tried, and what they are currently considering. Salespeople often have a high need to be liked when we assess them. They have limiting beliefs that conducting discovery, qualifying, and asking for the order is pushy and rude, and could hurt their relationships with clients. What it means to your business is you are losing orders you could have and should have won because of your team’s sales skills, not your product, price, or service.
What to do next?
Map your full sales process and evaluate it against best practices and what you learned in the voice of customer interviews. Invest in training that focuses on discovery, value communication, and objection handling. Train sales to take a consultative, sense-making approach to determine where the buyer is in their buying process. Monitor your CRM and identify sales process steps where sales stall or go to die.
- Sales Management & Leadership
Are your sales managers trained? As we have discussed in several posts, less than 50% of salespeople have received formal sales skills training, and even fewer sales managers and sales leaders have been trained. Often, manufacturers and distributors promote their top-producing, top-performing salespeople into sales leadership. One of two things will happen. First, they jump in to save orders and try to close business for underperforming salespeople. They grow frustrated and exhausted, often leaving. Their sales teams become disengaged, and you will lose some of your top producers. Or they micromanage the sales team, without coaching and leadership training. They hold multiple meetings and require several reports, which take the sales team away from customer interactions.
Symptoms:
- Reps aren’t hitting quota, but managers aren’t coaching
- No consistent pipeline reviews or forecasting rhythm
- Sales forecasts are missing by over 30% or more each month
- Managers act more like senior reps than leaders
- Sales team assessment indicates low trust between salespeople and the leader.
- Assessment indicates if there is coaching, it is about price and application.
- Churn, you lose one or more of your top-producing salespeople to competitors.
What does it mean?
Sales leadership is the lever that multiplies or restricts results. The most scalable thing teams can do is invest in sales manager and leader training, particularly coaching skills. Without skilled management, even strong salespeople won’t grow.
What to do next?
Assess your sales leaders. Train them in performance coaching, data use, and accountability systems. Use dashboards and KPIs to drive behavior. Keep a pulse on sales leader and sales team trust and engagement.
- Operations and Quality
Is your team doing what you say you can and will do? Are you meeting on time and 100% complete order objectives, or are you missing the delivery dates promised, and orders are being shipped incomplete? Does your current quality of the entire sales process meet and exceed customer expectations or fall short? How would you know today? Do any of your products have a quality issue that does not have a resolution plan?
Symptoms:
- Orders delayed, reworked, or rushed
- Increased scrap, waste, or returns
- Customer trust eroding from missed deadlines
- Customer churn rate increases
- Loss of one or more large customers
- Poor morale and motivation in customer service due to customer complaints
What does it mean?
Even the best sales strategy can’t overcome operational gaps. This is especially true in custom or engineered products.
What to do next?
Conduct a process and quality audit. Measure on-time delivery, defect rates, and communication handoffs from sales to production.
- Compensation & Motivation
When it comes to motivation, I highly recommend assessments to determine whether the team or individual is motivated and how they are motivated. Intrinsically motivated teams want training, recognition, and advancement. Extrinsically motivated teams focus on compensation and all the forms it takes. I am also reminded of a Native American saying ,,,” the wolf you feed is the one that grows.” We must ensure our compensation programs strategically align with our plan, our culture, the targeted compensation rate for the role, and the role achievement cycle. For example, in sales, if the product or service has a short sales cycle, we might consider a compensation model where 30% is base and 70% of the targeted total is variable.
Symptoms:
- High-performing people leave for “better opportunities”
- Sales don’t push beyond base expectations
- Incentives not aligned with company priorities
- Salespeople have “commission breath,” focused on their goals and not solving customer challenges.
- Low customer satisfaction
- High percentage sales are discounted
- Team friction
What does it mean?
Comp plans may be outdated or not aligned with the desired behaviors. Motivation declines when effort doesn’t equal reward, or when it’s unclear how to win. Top-performing salespeople, for example, have a high utilitarian trait. If I do this, I get this. If that expectation is not met, they become disengaged, and your top performers will often leave for competitors.
What to do next?
Revisit the variable pay structure across roles. Align incentives with profit, customer retention, performance to cultural norms, and cross-selling, not just top-line.
- Competitive and Market Shifts
We are experiencing more market shifts at a more rapid pace than ever before. I promise you, if your team is still using a plan you wrote one or two years ago without adjustments, it is dated, and you are losing business you could have won. In addition to identifying and adjusting to market shifts, we must be constantly aware and sensing what our competition is doing. I never want a team I am helping to replicate what competitors are doing without first consulting customers to ensure their strategies serve the market. Part of training your salespeople in a Consultative sense-making approach is knowing your top competitors intimately, including strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in their portfolio of offerings.
Symptoms:
- Decrease in Sales
- Strained customer relationships
- Decrease in Gross Profit Margins
- Increase sales by Discounting
- Drop in website rank and visits
- One or more top performers are leaving
- Decrease in share of wallet at large customers
- Decrease in market share
- Loss of one or more key accounts
- Less than 50% of the sales team is achieving sales goals
- New competitors are taking share quickly
- Your value proposition feels “meh” to customers
- Losing deals to solutions outside your traditional category
- Low customer satisfaction and Net Promotor Scores
What does it mean?
Your strategy hasn’t evolved with the market. Your team missed one or more key shifts and did not strategically adapt. This is common in mid-sized manufacturers that have grown primarily through referrals and haven’t kept pace with market intelligence. It is also common with distributors who lack a feedback loop with customers.
What to do next?
Conduct a competitive and customer behavior analysis. Look for trends like reshoring, sustainability, digitization, or buyer consolidation. Understand how buyers make purchasing decisions and what they need to buy today. Identify unresolved market problems and understand the economic impact your customers will experience when you solve them. Recalibrate your offerings.
We have now reviewed the key pillars to grow your business strategically. We have identified areas that need improvement based on the symptom, and we are conducting root cause analysis.
How do we build our recovery plan?
Do we need to make a few small strategic adjustments or a strategic pivot?
Step 2: Build Your Recovery Plan
Once you’ve diagnosed the root causes, the next step is to prioritize. You don’t need to fix everything at once, but you do need to focus on the 2–3 areas that are most directly impacting revenue and profit today.
We recommend forming a cross-functional team to share data, followed by the development of your strategic plan.
Build your recovery plan around:
- Strategic clarity (where we’re going and how we’ll win)
- Process discipline (how we’ll operate and measure progress)
- People enablement (who’s in the right seat and how we’ll develop them)
- Performance accountability (what results we expect, and how we’ll manage them)
- Cash flow ( growing businesses require cash; build your cash flow improvement plan)
Final Thought: Results Follow Clarity and Execution
As a CEO, CRO, or CFO, your job is to ensure the business has the right focus and the capability to execute. When growth stalls, it’s not about pointing fingers—it’s about asking better questions and taking strategic action based on data, not gut and intuition.
If you’re missing your numbers, don’t assume it’s just sales. Or what I just heard this week…”Our problem is that our salespeople need to be more accountable.”
Pull back and look holistically, as a sales growth coach would.
Gather data and openly discuss the findings. The truth is there.
The path forward is clear—if you’re willing enough and brave enough to see it and act.
Let’s schedule a call if your team is missing a sales plan and you want to develop your sales and profit recovery plan.