Most financial services firms know their sales function is underperforming. Pipeline data lives in spreadsheets. Forecasts are based on gut feel. Incentive plans are opaque. The best sellers operate on instinct while everyone else guesses.
Knollwood Capital changes that.
We redesign the operating model - strategy, process, measurement, incentives, and technology, so that every person in your sales organisation knows exactly what is expected of them, how they are being measured, and how their performance connects to the company’s growth plan and their own compensation. Then we make the whole system intelligent: AI that doesn’t just report on performance but actively manages it - flagging risks, recommending actions, and predicting outcomes before they happen.
The Problem We Solve
Sound familiar?
Financial services firms share the same sales challenges - and most have tried to solve them with generic CRM and off-the-shelf tools.
01
No Visibility
You can't see what's really happening
Pipeline data lives in spreadsheets, email threads, and the heads of senior sellers. Leadership makes forecasting decisions based on instinct, not evidence. The pipeline looks healthy on paper but conversion tells a different story.
02
No Discipline
Success depends on heroes, not systems
Your top 20% of sellers drive 80% of revenue. There’s no codified process, no institutional knowledge capture, and no way to replicate what great looks like. When a top performer leaves, the playbook leaves with them.
03
No Alignment
Sales teams don’t understand the strategy or their place in it
Quotas feel arbitrary, handed down and "spread around" based on politics or history. The result: disengagement, gaming, and a culture where hitting target feels like luck.
04
No Predictability
Growth is a target, not a trajectory
Revenue arrives in lumps. Quarters are either feast or famine. Incentive plans are complicated to calculate and harder to explain. The board wants predictable growth, but the commercial function isn’t built to deliver it.
The gap is widening. The performance you need from your sales organisation versus the way performance is actually being managed today. Performance is too important to be left in that state.
Partners & Clients
Trusted by leading financial institutions across Europe
We work with firms managing billions in assets - from global banks to specialist investment houses. Our clients include teams of 40 to 400+ sales professionals across wealth management, asset management, and asset servicing.
What SPM Actually Is
Sales Performance Management is the end-to-end system for planning, executing, and rewarding sales performance. It unifies three critical elements:
Planning - How you set quotas, territories, and targets. Data-driven, not political.
Execution - How you track pipeline, activities, and progress. Real-time visibility, not quarterly surprises.
Rewards - How you design incentives to reinforce the behaviours and outcomes you actually want. Transparent, auditable, compliant.
For sales people, this means one thing above all else: clarity. Clear visibility into how their bonus is calculated, what drives it, and where they stand in real-time.
How We Work
Knollwood is a hybrid practice - part commercial strategy, part systems engineering, part embedded change management. We don’t just advise. We build. And we stay until it works.
Insights
April 2026
Why 'Better CRM' Isn't the Answer to Sales Performance in Financial Services
Most firms invest in technology expecting it to fix a sales problem. But the gap isn't in the system of record - it's in the intelligence layer above it. Here's what the highest-performing firms are doing differently.
April 2026
Why 'Better CRM' Isn't the Answer to Sales Performance in Financial Services
Most firms invest in technology expecting it to fix a sales problem. But the gap isn't in the system of record - it's in the intelligence layer above it. Here's what the highest-performing firms are doing differently.
Get in Touch
Ready to professionalise your sales function?
It starts with an honest conversation about where you are today and where your commercial function needs to be. No pitch deck. No pressure. Just clarity.