PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Selling lubricants smarter:
The leadership shift lubricants can’t keep delaying
Steve Knapp, Chief Executive Officer, Plan. Grow. Do.
I’ve spent most of my working life in and around lubricants, carrying a bag, leading teams, consulting, training, and, more recently, listening to buyers at scale. Along the way I’ve seen good people lose deals they should have won and win deals they didn’t expect, usually for reasons that had little to do with product and everything to do with how we sold.
That’s why I wrote Selling Lubricants Smarter.
Not as a motivational piece. Not as “sales tips”. And definitely not as a complaint about how hard it’s become.
It’s a practical response to a simple truth: the ground has shifted. Buyers have changed, quietly at first, then all at once. The organisations that thrive now are the ones that adapt their behaviours, language and cadence to match how buyers actually buy today. The ones that struggle tend to cling to an older playbook built for a face-to-face, patience-rich world of long decks, slow follow-ups, and “we’ll wait to hear back”.
That world has gone.
And this is where UKLA and Lube Magazine matter. Because this isn’t an issue that can be solved in private, one company at a time. The sector needs shared language, shared standards, and a place where commercial excellence can be discussed as a strategic priority, not as an internal sales problem to tidy up “when we have time”. Lube Magazine creates space for that conversation. UKLA helps elevate it into something the industry can collectively act on. That collaboration has been a meaningful part of how we’ve reached this point, taking real buyer feedback
and turning it into a leadership discussion about capability, consistency, and competitive advantage.
Where the old playbook broke
The old playbook didn’t fail in one dramatic moment. It frayed across time until the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Working with distributors, manufacturers and OEM partners, we kept seeing the same frontline signals: • Full calendars, thin pipelines. Plenty of activity, little movement. Reviews full of demos and “catch-ups”, not decisions.
• Ghosting after “great” meetings. Deck delivered, demo done, then silence, because nothing new was added beyond what the buyer already knew.
• Single-threaded deals. Strong with maintenance or a friendly engineer; invisible to the economic buyer. Trials passed, business case missing.
• Slow micro-responses. Simple questions took days. Momentum died between emails. Competitors who replied quickly and usefully won by inches.
• Feature-first proposals create price pressure. Proposals written for us (features, history, logos), not for them (risk removed, outcomes, time to value).
LUBE MAGAZINE NO.191 FEBRUARY 2026 49
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