Why isn't your sales manager delivering results?

Giving away margin, or buying a customer with your money

In March 2024, we performed an audit at a wholesaler near Radom. The owner was proud because sales jumped 12% year-on-year. However, when we looked at the costs, it turned out that net profit fell by 8,400 PLN per month. The sales manager, wanting to prove results, allowed salespeople discounts of 10-15% for every larger order. They did this without any control because the only measure of their success was turnover, not how much money actually stays in the company.

The problem is that salespeople take the path of least resistance. If the manager doesn't have hard guidelines regarding the minimum margin, the team will spoil customers with free bonuses. We checked this in 14 different trading companies, and in 11 of them, the situation looked identical. The lack of a block in the sales system meant that the company was financing gifts for customers out of its own pocket instead of earning for investments or new machines.

At Złoty Standard Marketing, we count every penny, so the first thing we do is cut off such leaks. At the company in Radom, introducing rigid margin thresholds increased profit by 19% in just 45 days. Salespeople had to start talking about product value rather than just how much they could discount it. It's a hard lesson, but your business must earn to survive in a difficult market.

A manager who only chases turnover is the most expensive employee in your company.

Management through chaos and a lack of hard data

Most sales managers we talk to spend 14 hours a week creating Excel spreadsheets that are already outdated by the time they are sent. In May 2023, we worked with a manufacturing company near Poznań, where reports were prepared manually by 4 people. Data was contradictory, and the manager didn't know how many offers were actually pending. This isn't management; it's guessing with the owner's big money.

The real problem starts when you ask the manager about 'lead acquisition cost' or 'sales closing time'. Usually, we hear generalities. At Złoty Standard Marketing, we talk straight about money: if you don't know how much every zloty of revenue costs you, you don't control your business. The average response time to a quote request in the companies we studied was 2 days and 14 minutes. That's 24 hours too long to win against competition from Germany or China.

We check facts, not promises. Introducing a simple system for monitoring sales stages allowed the Poznań company to shorten the decision-making process by 37%. The manager stopped asking salespeople 'what's up with the customer' and started analyzing at which stage the money was leaking. From that moment, he finally started delivering results because he knew who needed to be pushed and who needed substantive support.

Why do salespeople trick the system and the manager?

People will always choose the path that gives them the biggest bonus with the least effort. If your incentive system promotes only new contracts, then salespeople will abandon old customers who could be buying more. In 2022, we detected that in one service company in Warsaw, salespeople were entering 'ghost accounts' into the system just to boost meeting statistics. The manager knew about it but turned a blind eye because he himself was afraid of confrontation with the boss.

Your business must earn from real transactions, not from pretty PowerPoint presentations. Shifting from quantity to quality is fundamental. At Złoty Standard Marketing, we help set up processes to reward margin and customer loyalty. Changing one entry in the bonus regulations was enough for the average order value in a certain furniture company to increase from 2,340 PLN to 3,120 PLN in one quarter.

When a manager has the tools to see the truth in real-time, attempts to manipulate results disappear. No one likes to be controlled, but in business, trust is built on numbers. Since September 2016, we haven't encountered a company where, after organizing the data, we didn't find at least 5% of hidden profit that previously simply evaporated through laziness or communication errors.

How to fix sales in 3 concrete steps?

The first step is a hard audit of the sales funnel. You need to know how many offers you send and why 82% of them end up in the bin. Don't look for culprits; look for bottlenecks. The second step is to establish rigid margin rules. If a salesperson wants to give a discount greater than 3%, they must have management approval backed by a specific reason. This drastically cuts the giveaway of your money.

The third step is reporting automation. A sales manager should be on the front lines with people, not in a spreadsheet. At Złoty Standard Marketing, we implement solutions that provide a live view of key indicators. Thanks to this, in a company from Częstochowa we have been working with since October 2023, we managed to recover 12 hours a week of a manager's time, who now actually trains his team.

Remember that changes hurt, but lack of profit hurts more. If your sales manager says that 'the market is difficult', ask him for specific data from the last 90 days. If he doesn't have it, it means you need help setting up processes. We don't promise miracles; we simply organize the numbers so that your business finally starts working for you, not you for it.

We check facts, not promises. Only hard data builds stable profit.