Notes for owners who sell.

Occasional writing on offers, follow-through, and the one constraint that is usually sitting in plain sight.

Read the notes

You’re good at the work. Why aren’t enough people buying it?

Small-business sales is usually stuck in one place: the offer, the conversation, the follow-through, or simply asking for the business.

Common Sense Sales finds that constraint. Then we change that. Not your personality, not your CRM, and not twenty other things.

You work directly with me. After we see where it’s stuck, the work is one of these:

Sales Constraint Diagnosis

I sit with how you actually sell, not the funnel on the whiteboard, and name the one constraint that is capping new business.

Offer Clarity

We sharpen what you sell and how you say it, so a prospect can understand the deal in one conversation.

Follow-through System

I help you install a simple way to follow through after conversations, so good leads stop going cold.

Owner-led Selling Practice

Practical, plain-language practice for the conversations you already have with buyers, including price and next steps.

After the first piece of work, I can stay on as a thinking partner while you sell, or I can step back. The point is more of the right yeses, not a retainer that outlives its use.

John Sambrook, founder of Common Sense Systems

“I brought John Sambrook onto a risky and highly political project that had far-reaching consequences within our company. John found solutions to difficult problems, problems I could not have solved without him, thwarting doom over and over again. He produced documentation and code at a professional level I have rarely seen elsewhere in my thirty years of software engineering.”

Places the method was proven

Who I am

I am John Sambrook. I founded Common Sense Systems in 1996 in Kirkland, Washington, after years building software for medical devices and other systems where guessing is expensive. I studied Theory of Constraints under Eli Goldratt and still use that method: find the one thing that is actually stuck, and fix that.

I help owners see the stuck part clearly and change it in language they can use on Monday.

Frequently Asked Questions

I already know how to do the work. Why would I hire a sales consultant?

Because doing the work and getting paid for the work are different jobs. Plenty of capable owners are booked, busy, and still under-earning. The gap is usually a stuck offer, a missing next step, or a habit of waiting for the phone to ring. I help you find that gap and close it without turning you into someone you are not.

Do you take over selling for us?

No. I do not sit in your office as a commissioned rep. I help you and, if you have them, a small team sell on purpose. For some owners that means a diagnosis and a rewritten offer. For others it means an ongoing partner while they build the muscle. We decide that together after we see the real constraint.

Is this sales training, a CRM project, or marketing?

None of those as a default. Training without a constraint is theater. A CRM without a process is a filing cabinet. Marketing without a clear offer just buys you more conversations you cannot finish. We start from how money currently comes in, then choose the smallest change that would increase it.

What size of business is this for?

Owners and operators of small businesses: typically a founder plus a handful of people, sometimes a larger local firm where the owner is still in the sale. If you have a 40-person sales org and a VP of Revenue, you want a different kind of help. If you are the person who still has to ask for the business, you are in the right place.

What happens in the first conversation?

We talk about how you get customers today, where deals stall, and what “more sales” would actually mean in numbers you care about. If I can help, I follow up with a short proposal: scope, fee, and what done looks like. If I am not the right person, I will say so. No pitch deck, no pressure to buy a package on the call.

If the work is good and the sales aren’t

A first conversation is a look at the business, not a pitch.

Talk to John

I've run enough companies to know the difference between competitive and unfair. At Applied Microsystems we had an unfair advantage — and one of the clearest examples came from John Sambrook and the outstanding engineers he assembled and led. HP could sell tools. We could deliver the truth.