Field sales breakdown is rarely a talent problem.
It is almost always a system problem — unclear territories, absent accountability, a pipeline that reflects activity rather than real commercial progress, and pricing discipline that exists in policy but not in practice.
The team is working. The business is not getting the return.
What This Usually Signals
- EBITDA underperformance relative to the revenue base
- High customer attrition in accounts managed by field sales
- No consistent pricing — territory managers setting their own rates without governance
- Pipeline data that cannot be trusted — stages are status reports, not probability-weighted forecasts
- Management cannot explain which accounts are actually profitable
What This Means in Practice
- Operational: Field resources spread across accounts of wildly different commercial value — no prioritisation by margin contribution or strategic importance
- Financial: Revenue appearing stable while margin erodes — driven by unmanaged discounting and high cost-to-serve on low-value accounts
- Execution: No connection between individual sales activity and business-level outcomes — accountability is aspirational, not structural
- Working capital: Working Capital Improvement increasing as low-margin revenue grows — more stock, more debtors, less cash
Where This Shows Up
- Industrial distribution businesses with geographically dispersed sales teams and limited central oversight
- Multi-branch operations where each location manages its own commercial relationships with minimal reporting standards
- Businesses that inherited a field sales model from a different era and have not restructured it to reflect current margin and customer realities
- PE-backed businesses where value creation depends on commercial improvement but the management team lacks the capability to drive it
When to Act
- When field sales headcount is growing but margin per sales rep is declining
- When pricing exceptions are being approved without senior oversight
- When customer profitability analysis has not been done in the last 12 months
- When the sales team cannot articulate what a good account looks like
- When a board or investor is questioning whether the commercial model is fit for purpose
The fix is structural. Territories need to be designed around commercial logic. Accountability needs to be explicit and measurable. Pricing governance needs to function. This is an operating partner mandate — not a sales training programme.
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Last updated: April 2026
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