The CEO came in convinced the problem was the sales team. The Diagnostic flagged pricing discipline and management cadence as the binding constraints. One Operating System, twelve months, zero customer churn.
Top-line was flat for six quarters. The board wanted a new VP of Sales. The CEO had already interviewed four. Volume was fine — quotes were converting at historical rates. Something else was wrong, but the noise pointed everyone at sales.
Across five performance axes, profitability — not growth — scored lowest. Gross margin had drifted 6 points over three years. List prices hadn't moved in 30 months. Every regional manager had silent discounting authority. The leak was structural, not behavioural.
Twelve months. A re-priced catalogue (+3% list), a discounting policy with three approval bands, weekly margin reviews with the regional GMs, an incentive flip that paid on margin instead of revenue — and time spent training the GMs to run those reviews themselves. No new headcount. No new software.
By month four, gross margin was +12 points. By month nine, +19. Five customers pushed back on price; four accepted within a fortnight, one walked — and was unprofitable anyway. EBITDA swung fourteen points, from −4% to +10%. The sales team, untouched, hit their best quarter on record.
The expensive lesson wasn't the pricing leak — it was the cost of misdiagnosing it. The Diagnostic took an afternoon. The fix took a year. The board had been on the wrong problem for two years.
"We thought our problem was the sales team. Michel's Diagnostic flagged pricing discipline and management cadence as the binding constraints — and we'd have spent another year chasing the wrong fix. Fourteen points of EBITDA in one year, no customer churn."
Operator names and identifying details are withheld by mandate. Numbers are real.