An Israeli SaaS company sold to the wrong market for 6 months. The reps knew.

$0 in deals. CEO was about to fire the whole sales team.

The reps had been screaming the actual problem for months. Nobody listened.

Here's what happened.

Agriculture tech. IoT + software. The obvious target market: South America. So they built everything for South America.

Spanish website. Spanish decks. Spanish outreach. Spanish-speaking reps.

Six months in: zero deals.

Management's answer was obvious. The sales team doesn't know how to sell. So they changed the comp plan. Rewrote the scripts. Added more training.

Still zero.

The reps kept saying the same thing the whole time:

"The farmers love the product. They're not the buyers."

That's when I got the call.

24 hours later the problem was obvious.

The South American farmer was the user. The actual buyer was the farmer's customer. European retail chains in the Netherlands and Germany, deciding which technologies suppliers were required to use.

The company was selling in Spanish in South America while the decision-makers sat in offices in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris, worked in English, and had never heard of them.

The reps had been saying it for six months. Management didn't want to hear it because the answer meant rebuilding the entire go-to-market.

We did it anyway.

New ICP. New positioning. New messaging. Same reps.

First deal closed in 10 days. Five more in the following month.

If every salesperson on your team is failing at the same time, and they actually know what they're doing, the problem is rarely the salespeople.

It's the niche, the buyer, or the positioning.

And most of the time? The reps already know. They just don't have the authority to fix it.

Before you fire the team, or the VP Sales, ask them what they've been trying to tell you.

Two days of listening will save you a year of compensation drama.