Silent Revenue Killers — a book by Jeff Randall

How it starts

I counted it three times.

The number was too large to be right. I was standing in front of a wall in my office covered edge to edge in sticky notes — the whole pipeline drawn out by hand, every point where a prospect came in and every point where one left.

None of it was hidden. Every one of those deals sat in the system with a name on it, a date, and a dollar value. Nobody had stolen anything. Nobody had lied to me. Nobody went looking. Including me, for years.

The company was sold before the work was finished. The $4 million stayed on the table. This book is what came of asking the question anyway.

−$4Mdropped out of the pipeline that year

$2Mtotal new sales for the same year

We were losing twice as much as we were winning.

What are we losing, and why?

You have sat through this

Every January, the same wheel turns.

Last year’s numbers get reviewed. The gap gets acknowledged. Then comes the announcement: here is how we hit growth this year.

Sometimes several get combined, or repackaged with new language. But the themes keep coming back. Year after year. Kickoff after kickoff.

This book asks a different question: why do we keep needing a new theme at all? Not what to add. What is already leaving, and where it goes.

A page from it

Read a page before you buy it.

This is the voice the whole book is written in — the last page of chapter thirteen, unedited. If it doesn’t sound like something you want 150 pages of, you have saved yourself the money.

But I want to be careful about the word nobody, because it lets too many people off the hook. Including me.

Somebody always knew.

The rep knew, on at least a few of those deals, that the customer would have signed anyway. The manager knew this wasn’t one discount, it was the fortieth that quarter. Somebody in finance had watched the average selling price slide for years and could have said so in a meeting. I knew — I was the one with the spreadsheet, staring at a number that wasn’t a number, and it took me a long time to say it out loud to anyone who could do something about it.

None of us were blind. We were quiet.

Chapter 13 · The Discount Is the Profit

What makes it different

Most business books put the problem somewhere else.

Sometimes it’s the mirrorThe revenue killers are not always someone else Leaders create the conditions that let them thrive. Processes accumulate and nobody questions them. Individuals make daily choices about effort and honesty. All three are responsible, and all three are in these pages — which is not the usual arrangement.

True stories, including mineI am in most of them, and not always well A shoe store on a dead Tuesday when I was eighteen. A wall covered in sticky notes. A discount I watched slide for years and said nothing about. The worst performance review of my career, and the six months of customer calls that came after it.

One company, thirteen timesYou watch the same business leak in thirteen places No Apple, no Netflix, no founder origin story. Veridian is a $50M software company with 150 people, and every chapter comes back to it. By the end you have seen what thirteen ordinary losses do to one ordinary business.

You do not have to finish it to use it. Any chapter works on its own.

What’s inside

The thirteen.

Not a comprehensive list — every company has its own version of waste and friction. These are the patterns that show up most often, in most places.

Fictional PipelinesDecisions made on numbers nobody fully trusts.

Reactive FirestormsTime spent on recurring problems instead of the system creating them.

Busy Is Not the Same as WorkingInvisible underperformance, and the weight it puts on everyone else.

Stolen Productive TimeMeetings, interruptions and admin consuming the hours you pay for.

Overlooked TalentGood people screened out before anyone ever meets them.

The Path of Least ResistanceBadly built systems quietly teaching people the wrong behavior.

Unequal TerritoriesSame quota, completely different work behind it.

Customer NeglectRelationships that erode long before anyone churns.

Ideas That Never Make ItSignals arriving and dying before they reach a decision.

Legacy Processes Nobody QuestionsComplexity mistaken for necessity.

The Money Nobody Is WatchingSpend nobody checks, and revenue earned but never collected.

Too Busy to ImproveNo capacity left to fix what keeps causing the problems.

Unmanaged DiscountingThe price you charge drifting away from the price you think you charge.

The part most books leave out

If everyone can see it, why does it survive?

Someone newer asks why a thing is done the way it’s done. The answer comes back: that’s just how we’ve always done it. Everyone in the room knows it doesn’t quite make sense. Nobody writes it down. A year later someone new asks the same question and gets the same answer.

That moment is where revenue killers live. Not in the dark — in plain sight, acknowledged, and somehow never anyone’s job to fix.

It never hurts enough todayA slow bleed never forces a reckoning It costs a little every month, spread across everyone. The fix costs one person real time this week. The sharp cost wins.

The easy thing feels like progressMotion is mistaken for movement In five experiments, people chose urgent tasks over more valuable ones — even when told which were worth more.

The root cause is often oursThe symptom is the safe thing to look at A tool or the market is out there. The cause traces back to a decision someone made. Sometimes that someone is us.

The sociologist Diane Vaughan called this the normalization of deviance, studying NASA’s decision to launch Challenger with a known flaw in its O‑rings. Nobody was reckless. A series of seemingly harmless decisions moved the agency toward a catastrophic outcome. The same drift is what lets a company run for years past a leak everyone in the building can see.

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The book’s own tables, as a spreadsheet you can fill in.

Every calculation in the book is worked through on one example company. This file is those same tables — the example sitting in a grey reference column, and an empty column beside it for your numbers. Fifteen calculations across twelve chapters.

Ch 1 · Manual work one of fifteen tabs

	Veridian	Yours
Reps	20
Hours per rep per week on CRM admin	8
Loaded hourly rate, rep	$100
Annual rep labor cost	$832,000

Where to find it: ask three reps how long they spend each week on CRM admin, and average it.

Every tab looks like that. The book’s example company on the left so you can see a finished one, an empty column for yours, and a note saying where the number usually lives.

Fifteen tabs across twelve chapters, plus a summary that refuses to inflate — it leaves out figures that would double-count — and a last tab listing the five losses a spreadsheet genuinely cannot reach.

Send me the workbook

One field. The file is on the next page.

I keep the address, and I may write to you about the consulting practice. That is the whole trade — there is no sequence behind this and nothing else happens.

Before you buy it

Who this is for, and who it isn’t.

Read it if

You run or report on revenue somewhere between $10M and $100M
Somebody has asked you for another ten percent and you don’t know where it comes from
You suspect there is waste but can’t point at it, and guessing has stopped feeling responsible
You are willing to open your own records while you read

Skip it if

You are pre-revenue. Nothing is leaking yet. Enjoy it while it lasts
You want growth tactics. There are many such books and they are all at the airport
You want a story with no arithmetic in it. Every chapter ends in a number and I am not sorry
Your RevOps function already costs less than it finds. Genuinely, congratulations

Why it exists

I kept finding the same things in different companies.

Thirty-five years on every side of the revenue question — building a company’s first sales performance reporting, carrying a number, running an inside sales team, then running the analytics function that told a combined company whether any of its numbers were real.

Every time, someone would ask a straightforward question and it would take days to answer, and the answer would be soft. The money was never hidden. It just wasn’t anyone’s job to find it.

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And the practice

The book is where the method came from.

Writing it forced the pattern into an order — what has to be established before anything else can be believed, what can be measured, and what can actually be changed in time to matter.

That order became the way I work with a client. The book isn’t marketing for the practice and the practice isn’t built around the book. They’re one argument: written down, or run on your numbers.

If you have read it and want it run on your own numbers, that is the practice, and the first step costs $5,000.

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Get a copy

It’s coming. The workbook isn’t.

Paperback and Kindle, shortly. The companion workbook is finished and free today — it is the book’s own tables, set up for your numbers. Leave an email and I’ll tell you the day the book lists.

Get The Free Workbook See The Practice

Bulk copies for a leadership team, or a copy for a review — email me at hello@jeffrandall.co.