Silent Revenue Killers — a book by Jeff Randall

Where the book came from

What are we losing, and why?

I counted it three times, because the number was too large to be right. I was standing in front of a wall 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, and the $4 million stayed on the table. We celebrate the wins. We ring the bell. We put the names on the board. We rarely ask what we are losing.

−$4Mdropped out of the pipeline that year

$2Mtotal new sales for the same year

We were losing twice as much as we were winning.

The sales kickoff

Why do we need a new sales theme every year?

Every January the kickoff arrives. Last year’s numbers get reviewed, the gap gets acknowledged, and then comes the announcement: here is how we hit growth this year.

The ideas rotate. Sometimes they are combined, or repackaged with new language. But the themes keep coming back, kickoff after kickoff.

This book asks the other question. Not what to add. What is already leaving, and where it goes.

Why the losses last

Everyone can see the waste. So why does it survive?

Not because anyone is blind. Three forces keep a known revenue leak comfortable to ignore, and you have felt all of them.

OneThe leak never hurts enough today A slow bleed never forces a reckoning. The fix costs somebody real time this week.

TwoThe easy thing feels like progress Urgent beats important, even when people are told which is worth more.

ThreeThe cause is often ours The symptom is safe to look at. The cause traces back to a decision someone made.

Diane Vaughan called this the normalization of deviance, studying NASA’s launch of Challenger with a known flaw in its O‑rings. Nobody was reckless. Harmless-looking decisions accumulated. The chapter on this is the one readers tell me they think about afterward.

What makes this book different

Most business books put the problem outside the room.

Sometimes it’s the mirrorLeaders, process and people — all three are in the book Including me.

True storiesA shoe store, a wall of sticky notes, a discount I let slide And the worst performance review of my career.

One company throughoutYou watch a single $50M business leak in thirteen places No Apple, no Netflix. The same company, every chapter.

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

What’s inside

The thirteen patterns.

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.

Before you decide

Read the end of chapter thirteen.

The closing pages of chapter thirteen, in full and unedited — the story, the turn, and the line it lands on. If it is not how you want to be written to, you have saved yourself the money.

Read The Excerpt

Free companion · no charge

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.

Why I wrote it

I kept finding the same losses 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

The book is coming. The workbook is here.

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.