Every one of these gets blamed on something else. Bad leads, a tough market, a sales team that can’t close. And every one of them shows up years before anything appears in the accounts.

I’ve worked in eight of these businesses. Different sectors, different sizes, different decades.

The same six conversations happened in every single one.

For a long time I assumed that was just what working in B2B was like. A set of permanent frictions everybody complains about and nobody fixes, in the way every office has a printer nobody can work.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice they weren’t six problems.

They’re six symptoms of one problem, and they all point the same way.

Here they are, in the words people actually use.

“The target’s gone up again and it feels harder than last year.”

Targets go up. That’s normal and nobody’s arguing with it.

What’s worth noticing is the effort. If you’re winning customers profitably, a bigger target needs proportionally more activity. Ten per cent more target, roughly ten per cent more work.

When each customer costs a bit more to win than last year, or returns a bit less, the extra effort isn’t proportional. It’s steeper. And it gets steeper every year, quietly, while everyone puts it down to a tougher market.

The sales team feels it first. Management usually reads it as a motivation problem.

“Sales says the leads are rubbish. Marketing says sales can’t close.”

This argument is in every business I’ve ever worked in, and it’s never resolved, because both sides are partly right. That’s what makes it permanent.

Here’s the bit underneath it. When it starts costing more to win a customer, the instinct is to get more leads into the top. So targeting widens and qualification loosens.

More leads arrive. A smaller share of them convert. So you need more leads again.

The cost goes up. The argument gets louder. Round it goes.

Diagnosed as an execution problem, the answer is more volume, which makes it worse.

“We’re having to discount a bit more to get deals over the line.”

Cycles lengthen, the pressure to close builds, and discounting is the nearest tool.

A deal planned at forty per cent margin closes at thirty-two. The revenue target is hit. It books as a win, and by every measure anyone is looking at, it is one.

But what a customer is worth to you is built on margin, not revenue. That customer is worth materially less than the one before, and the reported numbers won’t show it.

Repeat it across enough deals and the economics move a long way while revenue and customer count sit perfectly still.

“Churn’s within tolerance.”

Probably true, and it’s the wrong question.

The rate tells you how many left. It doesn’t tell you who.

If the ones leaving are disproportionately your best, or if they’re going before they’ve repaid what it cost to win them, a healthy churn rate is describing an unhealthy business.

Replace good customers with adequate ones for long enough and your average customer value falls year after year while churn holds steady.

That’s the most invisible of the six, because the number people watch stays green.

“New logos are a bit flat, but the base is growing nicely.”

Expansion revenue is real and it’s good, and it can carry a business for years.

What it also does is let the acquisition engine rust without anyone noticing, because nobody’s looking at it while the top-line number goes up.

Then the expansion runs out, as it eventually does, and you go back to the market to win new customers. And you find it costs far more than it used to, and you’re not as good at it as you were.

Flat new logo growth alongside growing revenue isn’t a neutral signal. It’s a bill arriving later.

“Marketing’s budget is the first thing we look at when it’s tight.”

Of course it is. It’s the most visible discretionary line on the cost base.

So it gets cut. Activity drops, pipeline slows, sales pressure rises. Marketing defends itself with impressions and leads and campaign ROI. Finance isn’t convinced, because none of that answers the question they’re asking.

Next quarter it gets cut again.

Everyone calls this a relationship problem between the CMO and the CFO. It isn’t. It’s a measurement problem. A function that can’t say what a pound of acquisition spend returns will lose that argument every time, no matter how well it’s actually performing.

What I’d want you to take from the six.

Every one of them is routinely diagnosed as an execution problem. Try harder, hire better, run a workshop, fix the handover between sales and marketing.

Every one of them is the same thing underneath. It’s costing more to win a customer than it used to, or each one is worth less than it used to be, and usually both at once.

And here’s the part that matters. All six of these show up years before anything appears in the accounts. Revenue, EBITDA, budget variance and churn are all rear-view mirrors. They report decisions you made two or three years ago.

By the time the comfortable numbers move, the thing causing it has been compounding since before you noticed anything was wrong.

If you recognise four or more of the six, it’s already running.