In this blog post I am going to make an argument that might annoy some people and will hopefully save everyone else a lot of time, money, and the specific misery of being on a sales call where you can feel the other person looking for the exit. The argument is this, most small business owners do not have a sales problem. They have a demand problem. And until you fix the demand problem, no amount of closing technique, objection handling, or aggressive follow-up sequence is going to do what you need it to do. I am going to explain what demand really means, why most of us are accidentally doing the opposite of it, and exactly how to fix it, including what I am doing right now in my own rebuild to get there.

The sales advice nobody wants to hear

Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment.

When was the last time you had to sell someone on something they already desperately wanted?

Not convince. Not overcome objections. Not follow up four times and then send a breakup email. Just have a straightforward conversation with someone who showed up already knowing they wanted what you had, already trusting that you were the right person, already half-decided before the call even started.

If that sounds like a different universe from the one you are currently operating in, I want to suggest that the gap between that universe and yours is not your sales script. It is not your pricing. It is not your closing technique or your follow-up sequence or the fact that you have not yet found the magic objection-handling framework that will turn every no into a yes.

The gap is demand. Specifically, the fact that you probably do not have enough of it.

What demand means and why most people get it backwards

When most people think about getting more sales, they think about getting better at selling. More outreach. Better scripts. Tighter funnels. And look, none of that is wrong exactly. But it is the equivalent of trying to fill a bath by turning the tap up higher when the plug is not in.

Demand is the plug.

There is a concept that changed how I think about sales entirely, and it is this, the goal is not to go out and find people to sell to. The goal is to become the kind of person, business, or brand that people are already looking for before you have said a word.

I know this because I lived it, and then I lost it, and now I am rebuilding it.

At my peak I was a professional speaker, a Forbes Top 20 influencer, Oracle Social Influencer of Europe, running an agency with a client list that included IBM, Twitter, and Dropbox. I had spoken on a hundred stages worldwide. I was not chasing sales. Sales were finding me. Opportunities arrived in my inbox that I had not gone looking for. Clients came referred, already sold, already trusting, already half-decided before we had ever spoken. I did not fully appreciate how rare and valuable that was until it was gone.

Then my health collapsed. I spent two years in a wheelchair. Not a twisted ankle wheelchair. A surgeons-are-circling-and-nothing-is-working wheelchair. And while I was focused on surviving that, the business went quiet. Not with a bang. Just a slow silence, the way guests stop coming to a party nobody told you was over. The income dried up. The visibility eroded. The demand I had spent years building quietly disappeared because I had stopped doing the things that created it.

I lost 54kg. I got out of the wheelchair. And then, with the war in Israel adding its own particular flavour of chaos to proceedings, I started rebuilding everything from scratch. Publicly. Which is either brave or slightly chaotic depending on the day.

And the thing I am most focused on rebuilding, before anything else, is demand. Because I remember exactly what business feels like when you have it. And I am not willing to settle for anything less.

When you have demand, sales becomes a sorting exercise rather than a persuasion exercise. You are not trying to convince anyone of anything. You are just having a conversation with people who have already convinced themselves. Which is, as it turns out, a significantly more enjoyable way to spend your Tuesday afternoon.

When you do not have demand, every sale is an uphill climb. Every call starts with you having to establish credibility, explain what you do, justify your pricing, and overcome the natural human resistance to being sold to, all while hoping the person on the other end has not got another three calls booked with your competitors this week.

I have been on both sides of this. I know which one I prefer.

The uncomfortable reason most small businesses have a demand problem

Here is the bit that stings slightly, and I say this as someone who has had to learn it the hard way myself.

Most small businesses have a demand problem because they are invisible.

Not invisible like nobody knows they exist. Invisible like nobody knows what they stand for, what makes them different, why they specifically are the person to solve this specific problem. They are technically present on the internet. They have a website. They might even post on LinkedIn occasionally. But they have not done the work of making themselves known in a way that creates genuine desire before any sales conversation begins.

The goal is to become what I think of as the obvious choice in your market. Not the loudest. Not the most followed. Just the person that the right people, your people, already know and trust and think of first when the problem you solve becomes urgent enough to do something about. The one where someone says oh you need help with X, you should talk to her, without even having to think about it.

The businesses that are oversubscribed, the ones with waiting lists, the ones where clients say I have been wanting to work with you for months, did not get there by getting better at cold outreach. They got there by systematically building the kind of presence that makes cold outreach largely unnecessary.

I know because I had that. And I am building it back.

The five things that create demand before you ever get on a call

After years of building demand, losing it, and now rebuilding it, I have come to believe there are five areas that together determine how much of it you have in your market. I am going to go through each of them in a way that is actually useful rather than just a list of things that sound good and leave you wondering what to do on Monday morning.

Your message

Not a sales pitch. A clear, compelling, specific articulation of what you do, who you do it for, and what changes for them as a result. Most people’s message is either so vague it could apply to anyone (I help businesses grow) or so jargon-heavy it applies to no one in practice.

The test for a good message is simple, can a stranger repeat it back to someone else accurately after hearing it once? If the answer is no, people cannot refer you even when they want to. They cannot remember what to say. They like you, they think you are brilliant, and then someone asks them and they go oh she does something with marketing I think and the referral dies in the crib.

Your message is not just for sales calls. It is the thing that travels when you are not in the room. Get it wrong and the best word of mouth in the world cannot help you.

Your content

This is the one I have rebuilt my entire strategy around, and it is the one that most people either skip entirely or do so badly that it actively works against them.

Showing up consistently with your ideas, expertise, and perspective, in a way that demonstrates your thinking rather than just listing your services, is how you build credibility at scale. Blog posts. Newsletter. LinkedIn content. A podcast. A YouTube channel. Whatever the format, the point is the same, you are building a body of work that exists independently of you and does the trust-building work on your behalf while you sleep.

When someone Googles you, or finds you on LinkedIn, or gets referred to you by a friend, the first thing they do is look you up. If what they find is a website with a list of services and a stock photo of someone shaking hands, they form one impression. If what they find is months or years of genuinely useful, specific, intelligent content that shows exactly how you think and what you know, they form a completely different one.

One of those impressions puts you in the running. The other puts you on a shortlist of people they might get around to calling sometime.

Content is what built everything for me in the first place. Getting in early on social media, building an audience before most businesses had even worked out what Twitter was, publishing consistently and being genuinely useful, that is what turned me from a freelancer into an influencer, a speaker, and an agency owner. Content was not a supporting act in my career. It was the main event.

Which is exactly why I know how costly it is when you stop. When my health collapsed and the consistency disappeared, the visibility went with it. That is the bit I am rebuilding now, publicly and imperfectly, and you can follow the whole thing here if you want to watch someone figure it out in real time.

Your offer

The nature of what you sell affects how much demand you can create before a sales conversation even starts.

If your offer is confusing, highly customised, or requires a long explanation before anyone understands what they are buying, you have a harder demand problem to solve. Not impossible, but harder. The businesses that create demand most easily have offers that are clear, specific, and desirable on their own terms. People know what they are getting. They can imagine themselves having it. They can tell other people about it without needing a diagram.

This does not mean everything has to be productised or turned into a course. But it does mean thinking carefully about how you present and package what you do so that it creates desire rather than confusion.

Your reputation

Your reputation in 2026 mostly means your digital footprint. What comes up when people search for you. What your LinkedIn looks like. What the reviews say. What other credible people say about you and your work.

Reputation is not vanity. It is social proof at scale. When someone is considering working with you and they can see that you have been featured in Forbes, or that you have spoken at relevant events, or that people have left detailed reviews describing exactly the transformation they got from working with you, that reputation is doing sales work you could never do yourself in a one-on-one conversation.

Building reputation is slow. It is the thing that feels least urgent when you have a pipeline to fill today. But it is also the thing that compounds most dramatically over time. The person who spent three years consistently building their reputation and the person who spent three years perfecting their sales script are in completely different positions when it comes to how hard they have to work to fill their calendar.

Other people’s audiences

The fastest way to borrow demand you have not yet built yourself is to get in front of other people’s audiences through people those audiences already trust. This is not cold pitching podcasts and hoping for the best. It is identifying the people, communities, and platforms that already have the attention of your ideal clients and finding genuine, mutual ways to be part of that world. Joint ventures. Guest content. Co-created events. Introductions. The businesses that grow fastest are almost never the ones that do it entirely alone.

A word on the but I do not have time objection, because I know it is coming.

Building all five of these things at once is not the goal and is not realistic. Nobody has the bandwidth for that, least of all someone who is also trying to run a business, deal with clients, and occasionally eat a meal that is not consumed standing over the kitchen sink at 9pm.

The point is not to do everything. The point is to know where your biggest gap is and start there. If nobody can explain what you do after meeting you, your message is the gap. If you have no content presence whatsoever, that is the gap. If you have never asked a single client for a review or a referral, that is the gap. Pick the one thing that would make the biggest difference right now and do that consistently for ninety days before you worry about the rest.

Demand is not built in a sprint. It is built in the margins of a normal working week, by someone who shows up consistently enough that the market eventually takes notice. You have more time than you think. You just have to stop spending it on the wrong things.

The demand audit most people never do

Before you can fix a demand problem you have to know where the gaps are. So here is a quick and slightly confronting audit you can do right now.

Ask yourself honestly if a potential ideal client looked you up today with no prior knowledge of you, what would they find? Would what they find make them more or less likely to reach out? Would it communicate your expertise clearly and specifically? Would it show evidence that other people have worked with you and been glad they did? Would it make you look like someone they want to be in the room with?

Then ask how do people currently find out about you? Is that mechanism reliable and growing, or is it random and dependent on luck and timing? If your best source of new business is referrals, which is great, are you actively doing anything to increase the volume and quality of those referrals, or are you just hoping they keep coming?

Then the hardest one, are you known for something specific, or are you just known as someone who does a thing in a general area? Because being known as a good marketer is fine. Being known as the person who helps B2B founders build personal brands that generate consistent inbound leads is something else entirely. One of those creates demand. The other one creates competition.

What this looks like in practice

I want to be concrete here because I find that most content about demand and positioning stays at a level of abstraction that makes it feel inspiring but not actionable.

So here is what building demand actually looks like, practically, for a small business or entrepreneur.

You pick a specific problem that you solve for a specific type of person and you get ruthlessly clear on it. Not a list of things you can help with. One thing. The thing you are the best at, the thing you can talk about endlessly, the thing that when you explain it to the right person their eyes light up because it is exactly the problem they have been sitting with.

You start publishing about that thing consistently. Not occasionally. Not when you feel inspired. Consistently. A newsletter. A LinkedIn presence. A blog that is useful. You show up often enough that the people who need what you do start to associate you with the solution before they have ever spoken to you.

You make your offer clear enough that people can refer you without having to explain what you do. You collect and display evidence that your work produces results. You look for partnerships with people who are already talking to your ideal clients.

And then you wait, not passively, but you wait. Because demand is not built in a week. It is built over months of consistent, specific, visible activity. The people who have waiting lists did not get there overnight. They got there by doing the unglamorous, incremental work of showing up and being useful until the market decided they were the obvious choice.

The honest version of where I am with this

I have been in the game long enough to have experienced both ends of the demand spectrum.

There were years where inbound was strong, where the phone rang without me having to push very hard, where opportunities found me rather than the other way around. And then there were years, including some recent ones, where I took my eye off the demand-building work and coasted on reputation while quietly wondering why things were getting harder.

Rebuilding demand after a period of neglect is not as fast as I would like it to be. It requires the same consistency and patience that built it in the first place. But what I know now that I did not fully understand before is that every piece of content, every newsletter, every blog post, every useful thing I put into the world is not just content. It is demand infrastructure. It is the thing that means the next sales conversation I have starts from a completely different place than the one I would have if I had never bothered.

If you want to follow the rebuild as it is happening, the whole series is here. It is not always pretty. But it is honest, and there are things in it that will save you years.

The short version if you have stopped reading

You do not have a sales problem. You have a demand problem. The fix is not a better script. It is becoming the person your ideal clients are already looking for before you ever get on the phone with them. That takes time. It takes consistency. It takes being specific enough about what you do and who you do it for that the right people can find you, recognise themselves in your work, and arrive at the conversation already sold.

Start there. Everything else gets easier when you do.

If you want more of this, the specific, tactical, occasionally self-deprecating reality of building a business in 2026 with nothing but experience and stubbornness to rely on, my newsletter is where I do my best work. Join here and I will see you in your inbox.