I asked when someone knows themselves

Write down everything you remember from the perspective of a story teller

One of the aphorisms in selling is to stop selling once the deal is made. The sale happened, and so what came next was not a failed sale but a return of merchandise or a cancellation of service; a failure to renew a contract or nullification for cause. Had you been offering and never managed to show him how your product met his needs, that would have been failure to sell. You succeeded in the original sale. You got him to accept your product to meet is needs. Then he found, for whatever reason, that the condition of having his needs met was not happening. Maybe the initial set of conditions present at the time of sale were met, but then subsequent conditions arose that a continuance of the relationship could not meet except by ending the relationship. Sales are events and relationships are ongoing transactions. Being good at showing the relationship between the customer's needs and your products is a good sales skill. Delivering on the promise made in the sale is about performance to specification, which takes ongoing maintenance. It sounds to me like you have sales down and then your reaction to customer dissatisfaction is to sell again, that being the skill you have on hand to apply. But that is not the skill to apply past the sale. Next comes the skill of performing the service that was sold to the customer. That skill is to be able to monitor conditions to tell if needs are met and providing for those needs as indicated. It's the same underlying principle of meeting needs but applied with different skills. And you may find after the sale is made and the performance begins that it is not in your best interest to continue providing the service. It could be a losing proposition, and if so, then trying to renegotiate the terms and sell the customer on a different service would fail because the deal is structured according to what you can deliver but not what they need.

I called time on it when I did because I have been the hapless, oblivious wife who didn't have a clue what was going on right under her nose

There is a lie in a relationship that if you cross, you are putting that relationship in jeopardy