From the Diary of Jonathan Mussen

Before more leads, more activity or another salesperson, there are six questions he wants an owner led business to answer.

The customer already had a very clear idea of the building they wanted and where on the site they wanted it. This was a modular construction project, a few years ago, and the person being asked for a price was Jonathan Mussen. “It would have been very easy to simply price what they had asked for,” he says.

Instead he asked them to sit down with him and talk through the wider project first: how the building would be accessed, delivered and installed, the groundworks involved, and how the site actually needed to operate. The conversation took about 30 minutes. “By repositioning the proposed building to make better use of the site’s slope,” he says, “we identified an estimated saving of circa £60,000 across delivery, installation, groundworks and access costs.”

He now asks businesses about their own sales in much the same way, before anything else is decided. “A lot of businesses assume the answer to growth is simply more leads, more activity or another salesperson,” he says. “Sometimes it is. But often the issue is much earlier than that.” The Office for National Statistics scores UK firms on how they respond to problems, track performance and set targets. In an analysis published in March 2025, firms in the top quarter of those scores were associated with 43.3% higher turnover per worker than firms in the bottom quarter.

Jonathan is a Sales & Growth Consultant based in Nottingham and the founder of Jonathan Mussen Consulting, which he started in July 2026 after eight years at Pickerings. He describes the consultancy in one sentence: “Sales training, coaching and fractional sales leadership for businesses that want practical, sustainable growth.”

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What He Asks First

Ask Jonathan what he tells a business first and he answers with what he needs to find out. “The first thing I normally want to understand is what is actually happening now,” he says. “Who are you trying to sell to? Where are enquiries coming from? What happens to them? Who owns the next action? What gets measured? Where are opportunities being lost?”

He lists what can sit behind the answers. “There may be no clear sales process, people are unclear on responsibility, follow-up is inconsistent, the proposition isn’t strong enough, or the team is simply very busy without being particularly focused.”

There is a published figure for that last one. Salesforce’s State of Sales survey of 4,050 sales professionals, released in February 2026, found that the average seller spends 40% of their time selling.

“That is really where ‘there is no growth without stability’ comes from,” Jonathan says. “Before you keep adding activity, you need to make sure the foundations underneath it can support the growth.”

What the Line Means

He set the line out as his philosophy in the post that launched the consultancy, and it is the one he wants to own. “For me, it means that chasing growth without having the right people, processes, communication and commercial foundations underneath it eventually catches up with you,” he says.

“Winning new business is great, but not if you are losing customers at the back end because the business cannot deliver consistently, follow up properly or look after what it has already won.”

Jonathan Mussen, Sales & Growth Consultant, Jonathan Mussen Consulting

He puts the alternative this way: “Sustainable growth comes from knowing what is working, what isn’t, and creating enough stability that the business and its people can handle the next stage.” What he does about it depends on what the business needs.

A Training Session, or Three Months Alongside the Team

Jonathan Mussen Consulting covers training, coaching and fractional sales leadership. “I think the difference in how I work is that I don’t particularly see training, strategy and sales management as separate things,” he says.

“Sometimes a business needs a training session. Sometimes it needs someone to sit alongside the team for three months and help make the changes happen.”

Jonathan, Sales & Growth Consultant, Jonathan Mussen Consulting

His profile lists the forms the work takes, from sales training, workshops and mentoring to sales process reviews and interim and fractional sales leadership. “Most businesses don’t need another motivational sales talk,” as he puts it on his profile. “They need practical advice, clear process and someone who can work alongside their people to improve confidence, consistency and performance.”

How he behaves inside a business is something he describes as a habit. “I always try to build a genuine relationship with the people I’m working with,” he says. “I do care about how people feel in the process, and I try to make sure they feel consulted rather than transacted.”

He had been selling for a long time before he began advising on it.

From Fixings to Modular Buildings

“For over 20 years, I’ve worked in sales, commercial leadership and business development,” Jonathan wrote when he launched the consultancy. “While I’ve always enjoyed winning new business, the part of the job I’ve found most rewarding has been helping people and businesses grow.”

His profile gives the order. From 2006 he was a sales consultant at Würth UK, covering the East Midlands and selling consumables, fixings and tools to manufacturing businesses, with a specialism in stock control. He then managed regional and key accounts for Buckler Ltd, working with retailers of safety footwear. In 2011 he joined Portakabin Ltd, where he hired out temporary washroom and welfare facilities across the East Midlands and then modular buildings for education and commercial customers.

Pickerings followed in 2018. He started as National Account Manager, went on to lead the internal modular specialist team as Modular Hire & Sales Manager, and from January 2023 was Head of UK Sales, responsible for a function that took in national accounts, internal modular sales, marketing and design. In his final six months he led compliant modular sales and marketing.

While at Pickerings he hosted a Q&A session and presented modular case studies at UK Construction Week in London, and wrote afterwards of “plenty of honest discussion around the realities of modular construction, where it works well, where projects go wrong, and the importance of getting design, planning and practical delivery aligned early.”

When he left, what he singled out was not a project. “The biggest highlight has been the people,” he wrote. “Seeing people develop, progress and succeed has been one of the most rewarding parts of the job.” He says the people side of selling was developed in a job he knew within three hours wasn’t for him.

Eleven Months at a Desk

“I once took a desk-based job in a bank selling finance,” Jonathan says. “The people were great, but about three hours into my first day I knew I had made a mistake. At that point in my life, being in an office all day simply wasn’t for me.”

He went back in the next morning, and he stayed. “In fact, I stayed for 11 months because I was worried leaving quickly would damage my CV. I did a good job, but it took a lot out of me and, for a while, it nearly put me off sales altogether. I even considered moving into a more clerical role.”

“Looking back, though, it did me a lot of good,” he says. “You were dealing with people’s money and some of the most sensitive information in their lives, so you had to build trust quickly, listen properly and handle conversations with care. That developed the people side of sales for me in a completely different way.” The following year he was, in his words, “back out on the road, which suited me far better, and I’ve stayed close to people-led sales ever since.”

Listening is also where he starts when asked what someone new to sales should know.

“Good salespeople are often seen as the people who can talk well, but the best ones I’ve worked with are usually the ones who listen properly and qualify properly.”

Jonathan, Sales & Growth Consultant, Jonathan Mussen Consulting

“Qualification is everything,” he goes on. Then comes the follow-up: “A lot of sales are lost simply because people don’t stay close enough to the opportunity or the relationship.” The relationship he names, when asked who saw this work in him early, is with Nicola Anderson.

The Person Who Saw It First

“She told me years ago that I should be doing this kind of work, well before I had seriously considered going out on my own,” Jonathan says. “Our working relationship has changed a lot over the years. We started as peers, she then became my boss, we moved into different businesses and eventually found ourselves back working alongside each other again.”

“Through all of that, the relationship has always been built on trust, honesty and a really strong understanding of how the other person works,” he says. “She has supported and encouraged me throughout, and she saw this route for me before I properly saw it myself.”

He describes her now as “someone I work closely with where trust, complementary skills and strong relationships are central to how we support clients.” When he announced one of the consultancy’s first client partnerships, he thanked her for making the introduction.

Where Jonathan Is Now

The consultancy is in its first months. “At the moment my work ranges from helping businesses develop sales strategy and sales teams, through to fractional commercial leadership and developing new products and routes to market,” he says. One week he described in a post took in a sales training plan for a growing engineering business, a team strategy review alongside a colleague, and “a couple of really positive meetings with businesses looking at their next stage of growth.”

The client partnership he has named is ModCon Cabins, which he is supporting as it develops and grows its modular offering. His initial focus, he wrote, is “on identifying and developing modular opportunities, strengthening the route to market and supporting the wider team as the proposition grows.” ModCon Cabins is one example of his business development work, alongside training, coaching and fractional sales leadership for other businesses.

Self-employment has brought what he calls “plenty of new firsts”. Before a few days off with his family he put “one of the big questions of self-employment” to a LinkedIn poll: “What do I put on my out of office?” Of the 36 votes, 66% went to “You’ll check emails anyway!”

“Music is a big part of my life,” he says. “I’m part of a long-running Album Club with friends, where we pick an album each month, listen to it properly and then meet up to argue about it over dinner and a few drinks. It’s probably a good reflection of me generally, I like hearing different views, having a proper discussion and not taking myself too seriously.”

Asked what comes next, he keeps it to one line. “What’s next for me is continuing to build a consultancy that works closely with businesses, helping them strengthen their sales teams, improve how they operate and create sustainable growth.” The people he wants to hear from are “owner led businesses, managing directors and sales leaders in growing SMEs, particularly in construction, modular and engineering related sectors.”

The customer with a building already placed on the site got half an hour of questions before anything was priced. “For me, that is what good sales looks like,” Jonathan says. “A customer will often tell you what they think they need, but if you have the experience and industry knowledge, your job is to ask enough questions to understand the real requirement and then recommend the best solution, not simply the most expensive one.”

Five Lines from Jonathan’s Diary

“There is no growth without stability.”
“The first thing I normally want to understand is what is actually happening now.”
“Build relationships, follow up properly and ask far more questions than you think you need to.”
“Qualification is everything.”
“For me, trust and relationships make everything else easier.”