The visible activity and the business result are often connected by a mechanism nobody is managing explicitly.

High revenue did not mean a valuable customer.

An equipment and service business could see revenue by customer, but not the full operational consequences of what had been sold. Some customers had been promised service conditions that the delivery model could not consistently meet as sold.

Delivery compensated through additional visits and exception work. The customers still looked important in turnover, while service effort, travel cost and delivery pressure were absorbing much of the economics.

The product had margin. The way it reached the customer did not.

In the same business, some SKUs created unusually high packaging and logistics costs because of the way they had to be handled and shipped.

Looked at only as product sales, they appeared commercially useful. Once the operational requirements around them were considered, some were absorbing most or all of the margin they appeared to create.

Marketing activity could not be connected to commercially useful demand.

Marketing and Sales operated largely as separate systems of work. Marketing could report its own activity, but the route from spend and generated demand into sales outcomes was weak.

The business therefore struggled to distinguish marketing activity that created useful commercial demand from activity that consumed budget without producing enough downstream value.

Product teams were busy without a reliable customer signal.

A large service organisation had used Salesforce for more than a decade. Teams formally worked in the same environment, but Product and Sales did not share sufficiently consistent commercial definitions or customer signals.

Products could be developed with weak evidence of customer demand, then reach Sales in an immature form. Some products were weakly demanded or loss-making, while product capacity had already been spent creating them.

More clients could have created more work without creating more placements.

A recruitment business was considering reactivating its existing client base through email campaigns while recruiter workload was already high and the accessible candidate pool was under pressure.

The management question was not simply which dormant customers could be reactivated. If the constraint sat on candidate availability, generating more vacancies would increase delivery commitments without increasing the supply available to fulfil them.

Management question: are we creating more economically fillable demand - or simply more work for a constrained delivery system?