Martin Knowles: Why Sales Untangled Became a B Corp to Prove What It Already Believed

Martin Knowles didn't set out to build a B Corp. He set out to run Sales Untangled the way he already believed a business should be run, and the certification came later, as proof.

Martin co-founded the sales consultancy with his wife, Lynne, six years ago, after two things forced the decision: COVID, which wiped out the face-to-face client work the business had relied on overnight, and a more administrative problem. Martin had achieved his individual B Corp certification just a month before the pandemic hit, but Lynne, working separately as a consultant, technically couldn't claim it. Merging their work into one properly certified limited company took real effort in the background, but it's what makes Sales Untangled a B Corp today.

B Corp is, by most measures, the global gold standard for running a sustainable business: a rigorous certification covering environmental impact, supply chains, and the people a business works with, recertified every three years rather than earned once and forgotten. The UK is now the fastest-growing B Corp market in the world and the second-largest overall. Martin came across it in 2018 and, as he puts it, it didn't feel radical: "It wasn't as though we knew about it and aspired to it. It was more the opposite — that's the way we do business, isn't it? Now can we prove it, can we demonstrate it, can we get through the certification?"

Proving it has gotten harder, not easier. Sales Untangled is currently recertifying under B Corp's newer, stricter standards, among the first wave of businesses to do so, and Martin describes it as genuinely difficult: practices that feel naturally interrelated in a small business now have to be documented and evidenced as separate, auditable proof points. Under the old standards, the business scored most of its points not on the "customers" pillar you might expect from a sales consultancy, but on "community" — the hosting, mentoring and coaching work Sales Untangled does with other local businesses.

What B Corp status has actually changed, Martin says, is less about operations and more about psychology and perception: once you've earned it, you don't want to lose it, and clients notice. Sales Untangled now works with a disproportionate number of B Corp clients relative to its size, and the certification has opened conversations and speaking opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist.

The sustainability thread runs alongside Sales Untangled's actual purpose, which Martin is just as direct about: changing how people feel about selling. Most business owners treat sales as something uncomfortable, pushy or beneath them, a reaction Martin traces partly to childhood memories of door-to-door sales tactics. Sales Untangled's work is reframing it entirely: selling as listening, understanding a customer's actual problem, and sometimes telling them a competitor's product is the better fit for now. "That's our sort of mission statement come purpose," he says, "helping people think differently, start changing the perception that people have of selling."

That reframe is also where Martin landed when the pinwheel spin gave him Performance as his spoke. Discomfort with selling, he argues, isn't a personality quirk. It's a business constraint with a direct cost. "It is a performance inhibitor. It stops the revenue line. It stops them recruiting people, building the business. It's a massive block." Helping a business owner find a sales approach they're actually comfortable with, in his view, is one of the more reliable ways to improve performance that has nothing to do with strategy decks or targets.

On the environmental side, Martin is candid about how counterintuitive the real numbers can be. A carbon report once showed Sales Untangled generating roughly as much emissions from food as from heating the office with gas, a result that initially seemed implausible. His conclusion, after digging into it, wasn't to chase a perfectly precise figure. It was to focus on materiality, the handful of choices that actually move the number, rather than visible-but-marginal gestures. Swapping to an electric car and switching the home office to green energy mattered more than treating every individual choice as equally significant.

His advice for anyone earlier in this process is simple: start the conversation. "Just take some first steps and talk to the people you're working with. Talk to your clients, talk to your suppliers. You'll be surprised how interesting and how engaged people are in those conversations."

Sales Untangled works with small and mid-sized teams on sales strategy, people and the systems that support both. Find Martin at salesuntangled.co.uk or on LinkedIn.