UK business confidence has dropped 12 points in a month and US hiring has stalled. If you lead a sales team, here’s what that could mean for you.
The Lloyds Business Barometer, published on 30 September, shows UK business confidence falling from 53% to 41% in a single month. That’s the lowest reading since April 2025, and the fall was steepest in services, down 21 points to 35%. Firms blamed rising energy costs, global uncertainty and inflation.
Two days later, US employers were reported to have added just 29,000 jobs in September, against the roughly 85,000 economists expected, with unemployment rising to 4.2%.
Neither figure is a collapse on its own. What makes them worth a sales leader’s attention, on either side of the Atlantic, is what they say about the next twelve months: few new people joining, higher costs for the ones you have, and buyers who are more likely to hesitate.
What the other figures say
Read alongside the rest of last month’s data, the picture is consistent in both markets.
- Hiring is flat, not frozen. In the UK, the Bank of England’s Agents said on 11 September that they expect employment to stay broadly flat for the next twelve months, held back by weak demand and high labour costs. In the US, July’s jobs figure was revised down to a loss of 10,000, and July and August together were cut by 60,000. Sales leadership roles are feeling it too: US postings for heads of sales fell 27% in the 30 days to 5 September, according to job-data firm PredictLeads, even as junior sales postings rose.
- Costs are still climbing. Brent crude traded above $100 a barrel in the second half of September, with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz badly disrupted, which pushes up costs for businesses everywhere. In the UK, inflation was 3.1% in August and pay settlements are averaging 3.6% this year. The Bank of England held rates at 3.75% on 17 September, but three of its nine committee members voted for a rise.
- Any recovery is fragile. Three weeks before the Lloyds figures, KPMG and the REC reported UK permanent placements rising for the first time since late 2022. In the US, the Conference Board’s measure of CEO confidence climbed back above 50 in the third quarter. Then September’s figures came in weaker on both sides of the Atlantic.
So it isn’t a freeze and it isn’t a recovery. The team you have is likely to be the team you keep, each person costs a little more every year, and the outlook can turn sharply from one month to the next.
What this means if you own the business
Growth over the next year is likely to come from the people already on your payroll. If hiring stays as flat as the UK and US figures suggest, there won’t be a wave of new hires to lift results, and even when you can hire, a new seller takes several months to become fully productive.
That puts the spotlight on the gap between what your team is capable of and what it’s delivering. With pay rising and margins under pressure, you pay the full cost of every seller whether they’re performing at their best or not. In many sales teams that gap is one of the largest costs in the business, and it rarely has a figure put on it.
It also means development money is going to be looked at hard. In my experience, over 25 years of leading and advising sales teams, training is one of the first budgets questioned when money gets tight. Cutting it is understandable. The bigger risk is carrying on with generic courses that were never aimed at what was holding the team back, because nobody can tell the finance team what that spend was meant to fix. Investing in development isn’t the problem. Spending without knowing where it needs to go is.
What this means if you lead the sales team
For you, the pressure often arrives before it reaches the board, because buyers feel it first. When confidence falls, purchases get pushed back, more people get pulled into the approval, and more deals end in no decision rather than a loss to a competitor. More than eight in ten sales leaders in RAIN Group’s 2026 research already named losing deals to no decision as a significant challenge.
Gartner found earlier this year that 60% of chief sales officers believe their revenue is largely driven by things outside their control. A month like September makes that easy to believe. Energy prices, interest rates and business confidence are all outside your control, but how well your team handles a hesitant buyer isn’t.
The deals that stall in an uncertain market are often the ones that need the most skill, because the seller has to help a cautious buyer see why acting now costs less than waiting. That’s where each person’s capability shows, and where a team average hides the most.
The strategy choices this puts in front of you
When you can’t add people and buyers are hesitating, the decisions that matter most are about where you point the team you’ve already got. Four choices tend to matter more than the rest.
Where to look for revenue. Confidence isn’t falling evenly, by region or by sector. In the UK, Lloyds found it rising sharply in the West Midlands while it fell hard in Wales, and the Bank of England’s Agents reported sentiment improving among exporters even as consumer-facing firms struggled. They also said some essential projects are restarting because they can no longer stay on pause. A buyer whose project can’t wait is a very different prospect from one who is still deciding whether to spend at all, and it’s worth choosing deliberately which of them your team gives its time to.
New customers or existing ones. When buyers get cautious, customers who already know and trust you are usually the safer source of revenue, and many leaders shift effort towards keeping and growing those accounts. That only works if your people are good at it. Looking after an existing customer, spotting where they could use more and making the case for it is different work from winning new business, and the sellers who are best at one are often not the best at the other.
Hold on value or move on price. Discounting to get a hesitant buyer over the line is tempting, and in a month like this some of your competitors will do it. The alternative is helping the buyer see what waiting will cost them, which protects your margin but asks more of each seller. Two sellers with the same activity and a similar pipeline can struggle here for opposite reasons. One can’t get a buyer talking about their problem, so every conversation drifts towards price. The other handles that part well, then gives ground as soon as the buyer asks for a discount.
Who works on what. With headcount flat, the biggest gain often comes from putting each person on the work they’re best equipped to do, rather than spreading everyone across everything. That might mean your strongest relationship builder looks after your largest accounts while your best opener concentrates on new business.
Every one of those choices assumes you know what each person in your team is good at and where they’re weaker. Many leaders are judging that from activity levels, last quarter’s results and their own impressions, which tells you what happened but not why. Choose a strategy the team isn’t equipped to deliver and it shows up a quarter or two later as a missed forecast, by which time half the year has gone.
How you can focus your effort and improve results
Developing the team’s capabilities takes time, focus and investment, and it’s a large part of why we built the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic. Everyone in the team completes their assessments, covering the ten core competencies every commercial role depends on, the skills specific to their role, what motivates them and how they build trust. You get a consistent read on each person, a clear view of who needs what, and a 90-minute debrief to decide where limited development money should go first.
Confidence will move again over the next few months, one way or the other. You can’t plan for which way it goes. You can make sure that by then you know what your team is capable of, and where each person needs help.
If you want a place to start, I built a free mini-assessment for this.
It takes about four minutes. You answer questions on what you already see in your team day to day, and it gives you a personalised report on where the gaps most likely are. This covers skills, motivation, and the potential beliefs that hold people back.
It might not be the full picture, but it does tell you where to look first.
