What to fix first when sales stall

When to use this

Use this when demand, supply, cash collection, and partner accountability are being managed in separate conversations that never quite meet — the commercial team believes volume is growing, finance believes collections are lagging, and operations believes fulfilment is fine, and all three can be true at once because nobody is tracing the same unit of value through all four functions. It is built for a service, product, or partner network with proven underlying demand and a genuine operating problem, not for a pre-revenue idea still searching for its first buyer.

It is not a fundraising narrative or a strategy deck exercise. If the honest diagnosis is "we do not yet have a customer who reliably pays," this framework will surface that fast in Phase 1 and there is no point running Phases 2 through 5 until that is resolved.

The five phases

Phase 1: Diagnose (days 1–3)

Start with a single transaction or referral path, not a strategy session. Trace one unit of demand from first contact through to payment or completed care, reconciling the CRM, appointment book, stock record, invoice, and bank or payment evidence against each other. Mark every hand-off where ownership of the unit changes hands — that is almost always where the leak is.

Working questions

• Which customer segment is actually buying now, and who genuinely authorises the purchase?
• What is the real difference between booked, delivered, invoiced, and collected in this business — not the textbook definition, the one people are actually using?
• Where do referrals, stock, approvals, or documentation go quiet?
• Which partner activity is evidenced, and which is only reported verbally?

If this table cannot be filled in from existing systems, that gap is itself the Phase 1 finding — the business is running on memory, not records, and Phase 2 needs to fix that before anything else.

Phase 2: Protect cash (days 3–7)

Freeze avoidable leakage before adding another unit of volume on top of a leaking system. Put one named person on a daily exception list covering unpaid invoices, cancelled appointments, stock-outs, price overrides, unfulfilled referrals, and partner claims without evidence. Resist the urge to "clean" historical data in this pass — preserve the trail and label the uncertainty instead, because a tidied history is a history you can no longer learn from.

First controls to test

• One approved price list, with a recorded reason for every override.
• Same-day confirmation of delivered service or dispatched stock.
• Aged receivables split by payer, owner, next action, and promised date.
• Referral or order IDs that survive the hand-off to the partner intact.
• Escalation within twenty-four hours for missing documentation or a stock variance.

Phase 3: Rebuild the offer (week 2)

Choose a narrow commercial wedge: one priority customer, one high-friction problem, one credible promise, one measurable next step. A good offer at this stage is operationally deliverable by the team as it exists today — it does not depend on a perfect market, heroic staff performance, or an exception that hasn't been priced.

A row left blank here is not a formatting gap. It means the team does not yet have an answer, and shipping the offer without one just moves the leak from Phase 1's data problem to a Phase 3 clarity problem.

Phase 4: Activate the field (weeks 2–4)

Translate the offer into a site-level routine: readiness check, staff briefing, an approved script, referral or order capture, a stock check, end-of-day reconciliation, and an escalation path. Run the Field Activation Control Sheet for every site or partner team involved — this is where a well-designed offer either survives contact with a real pharmacy counter or doesn't.

Phase 5: Institutionalise (week 4 onward)

Keep a forty-five-minute weekly commercial review. Bring only the agreed scorecard, the exceptions list, decisions made, and owners assigned — nothing else earns a slot on the agenda. Retire any metric that cannot be defined precisely or acted on directly. Update the playbook when a control actually changes, not on a fixed schedule someone remembers to keep.

Decision gate

At the close of each phase, record one of three decisions — continue, narrow, or stop — with the evidence used, the accountable owner, and the date of the next check attached. This is the mechanism that stops a weak channel or an unproven offer from surviving purely on enthusiasm; without it, Phase 3 offers have a habit of quietly becoming permanent regardless of whether Phase 4 ever validated them.

How to read the result, and where the framework breaks

The framework fails in a specific, predictable way: teams run Phase 1 properly, feel the discomfort of an honest diagnosis, and then skip straight to Phase 4 activation because it feels like progress. Activating a broken offer at scale just leaks faster and with more people watching. If a phase's exit test is not met, do not advance — narrow the scope and repeat the phase rather than carrying an unresolved gap forward.

Worked walkthrough

A generic example: a diagnostics company with twelve pharmacy partners across Ikeja, roughly a year into the partnership model, with pharmacy foot traffic clearly converting to test bookings but revenue growth stalling for two consecutive quarters.

Phase 1 traces a single test order from pharmacy counter to lab payment and finds a real gap at "invoice/claim raised" — pharmacies report activity weekly by message, but only about sixty percent of it has a matching order ID in the lab's own system; the rest is a claim without a record, unverifiable rather than a proven leak. Phase 2 puts a daily exception owner on that mismatch and, within a week, traces most of it to three pharmacies using a paper log never keyed into the shared system same-day. Phase 3 narrows to redesigning the offer for those three, with same-day digital logging as an explicit, non-negotiable exclusion going forward. Phase 4 activates that routine at the three sites using the control sheet, with a two-week window before judging it. Phase 5 folds the digital-logging requirement into the standard partner onboarding checklist, so the next pharmacy partner never has this problem at all.

If your team can quote its funnel numbers but not its evidence sources for them, contact Dr Tolu Ajidahun to run this as a structured sprint.