Cases
The expertise was never the problem.
Three firms with real expertise and stalled growth. One worked, one is underway, and one ended with nothing changing.
The CEO was also running sales.
A mid-sized research and consulting firm with a strong reputation and a loyal client base. Growth had stalled and profit was under pressure. The CEO had recently succeeded the founder and was also running the sales organization. He was committed to it. He also knew that sales leadership is a different job, and that doing both kept him from running the company.
The problem was not sales performance. Sales leadership had no dedicated owner. Compensation rewarded individual production while the business stayed flat and near break-even. Contracting slowed deals down. Business development waited for inbound. Sellers, delivery and customer success each described the sales process differently.
None of these alone explained the stall. All of them together did.
We worked with the leadership team on the commercial system, not the sales function.
- A separate sales leader. We identified someone inside the firm and developed them into the role, which freed the CEO to run the company.
- Compensation tied to profitable growth rather than individual production and short-term revenue.
- Simpler contracting. Fewer steps, shorter cycles, and a firm that was easier to buy from.
- A structured business development function that generated qualified opportunities instead of waiting on inbound and existing relationships.
- One sales methodology, taught to sales, delivery, customer success and leadership, so everyone facing a client used the same language.
- Clear commercial roles and management routines, so execution stopped depending on two or three strong individuals.
The firm exceeded its growth targets and grew revenue double digits in a market that was otherwise flat. It kept the sales leader, the incentive structure and the process after the engagement ended.
The engagement started fractional, with us inside the commercial role. It moved to advisory once the internal sales leader could run it.
Most firms answer a stall by fixing one function. This stall was in how the parts fit together, and fixing sales alone would never have found it.
Hired to fix sales. We recommended shrinking it.
Several years of declining growth in a mature market. Leadership believed the problem was commercial execution and brought us in to improve sales performance.
We rebuilt the sales team, introduced new commercial process and started changing selling behavior. Execution improved and growth did not.
The firm's value proposition was no longer different enough to justify a larger sales organization. Sellers worked as account managers. Each relationship ran through a single contact. The client base was too small to grow through account expansion alone, and years of discounted programs had preserved revenue while eroding what made the firm distinct. The business had become dependent on the market improving.
Leadership stopped investing in a commercial engine that would struggle to win and moved the company from a service-led model to a product-led one. That meant a deliberate retreat: commercial investment came down, most of the sales organization was cut, headcount reset, and resources moved to product development and to protecting existing clients. The near-term goal became preserving cash while building something more competitive.
The engagement moved from advisory to fractional at that point, because the recommendation left the company without a sales organization and it still had revenue to protect.
We are the sales team for now. We hold the existing client relationships, keep revenue steady while the product is built, and design the go-to-market for launch.
The company has stayed financially stable through the transition. It is rebuilding in a different order than before: a differentiated product first, then marketing around a stronger story, then customer success, then a sales organization able to sell it. The goal is a business that matches how the market buys now.
The client asked for a bigger sales engine. Telling them not to build one meant doing the selling ourselves until there was something worth scaling.
The market would not pay for the idea, and the founder would not change it.
A founder-led research firm, flat for the first time in its history. We were brought in to restart an underperforming sales team. The engagement was written as advisory, though both sides expected something close to full-time. We were paid on success only. So was the sales team, on straight commission.
There was no lead generation of any kind and one part-time marketer with no marketing background. The core product needed investment to stay level with competitors, and its price was falling fast. There were better features elsewhere in the product, but those needed expansion before they could deliver what was being promised.
Underneath that, the firm's idea was not resonating. Buyers could follow the rationale and would not pay to solve the problem it described. A firm built on one idea has the hardest version of this: changing it looks like abandoning the reason the firm exists, so it gets defended instead of tested.
The largest problem was the founder. He was not ready to change the idea and not ready to invest in product, marketing or sales at the level the situation required.
Not enough. We ran the pipeline, pushed on positioning and tried to build demand without a budget for it. Six months in, we forced a decision on investment. The founder declined and we parted.
The firm is roughly where we found it. Nothing structural changed, because nothing structural was funded.
The failure happened before the work started. We took the engagement without establishing whether the founder would fund the answer, and paying us on success let both sides put that conversation off for six months. We ask it first now, and a no means there is no engagement.
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