How to stop consultancy sales feeling like a rollercoaster

If growth in your consultancy feels unpredictable, it’s rarely because your team lacks talent. It’s usually because selling is still too informal.

It tends to look like this: a bit of outreach here, a few referrals there, a strong quarter when someone has time to lean in. Then delivery ramps up, sales slip, the pipeline thins and it’s all hands to the pump. It becomes reactive, not systematic.

The answer is not as simple as ‘doing a sales blitz’. It’s about building a structured sales capability that makes winning work repeatable and predictable.

Here’s what I advise consultancy leaders do.

1. Start with mindset, before you touch technique

If your team sees ‘sales’ as something pushy people do, any process you introduce will fall flat. So start by resetting the frame.

“Once your team embraces the idea that being better at sales is good for the firm, good for their career and good for the client, you’re on to a winner.”

Two truths are worth making explicit:

• without sales, none of us have a job
• a good sales conversation follows the same structure as a good consulting conversation: you’re diagnosing needs, exploring options and helping a client make a better decision.

If you want people to step up commercially, help them see it as a professional skill, not a personality trait. Asking direct questions and pushing for a decision are learnable skills. But the mindset comes first. Once your team embraces the idea that being better at sales is good for the firm, good for their career and good for the client, you’re on to a winner.

2. Build a minimum viable sales kit that ensures some easy wins

If you don’t yet have a sales playbook, start with something small and usable. The aim is not documentation for its own sake. Put some basic tools in place to build your team’s confidence and ensure some consistency of approach. For example:

• a crisp ‘elevator pitch’ that explains who you help and the outcome you create
• strong case studies for your team to reference
• a qualification checklist (so you stop saying yes to the wrong work)
• a proposal structure that sells outcomes and return on investment, not time and materials
• follow-up templates that add value and move things forward, not ‘just checking in’.
• build a call guide with a bank of excellent questions for your team to ask, for example:
  • ‘What’s most important to you about the provider you choose?’
  • ‘How will you define success?’
  • ‘What’s the cost of doing nothing?’

It’s simple, but it stops every call being reinvented from scratch.

If people can’t find these quickly, they won’t use them. Put them somewhere obvious and keep improving them as you go.

3. Clear accountability from marketing to sales

“Once everyone knows what is expected of them, accountability becomes a lot easier”

Before we create accountability we need to define role clarity which means tackling what is often referred to as the ‘messy middle’. Marketing creates attention and demand. Sales converts opportunities into clients. Sounds pretty straight forward, where does the confusion arise? Let’s dig a bit deeper: What is the measurable result from marketing activity? MQL’s (Marketing Qualified Leads’ which I define as; a prospective client from a target organisation, in a target role, has shared their data in order to gain access to one of your lead magnets.

From there the goal is to convert that MQL into a SQL – a Sales Qualified Lead which I define as a meeting where the client expresses the need for your services. This may also come in the form of a written request for a proposal. Those responsible for selling, know their job is to convert opportunities however a common gap is blurred accountability for converting MQL’s to SQL’s.

A documented sales process defining roles and targets for all involved in the end-to-end process is a great place to start. Once everyone knows what is expected of them, accountability becomes a lot easier, and the flow from marketing to sales stops stalling, and it stops becoming a blame game.

4. Do the funnel maths, then focus on the fastest wins first

“Once you have the numbers, you can stop relying on hope and start planning.”

Work backwards from your revenue target. How many new clients do you need, at what value? How many proposals, how many meetings, how many first calls? How many outreach attempts are needed to create those opportunities?

This is where fantasy meets reality, which is exactly why it matters. Once you have the numbers, you can stop relying on hope and start planning.

It also tends to focus the mind on your lowest-friction opportunities. For most consultancies, that means exploiting your network properly and asking for referrals consistently. They’re often the fastest, lowest-cost, highest-converting routes to pipeline, but they only work consistently if you systemise them.

To learn more about this, read our guide on ‘How to maximise your referral strategy’

5. Nail the three answers that drive every deal

Every good sales conversation answers three questions:

• why change
• why now
• why us.

If your outreach reads like a brochure, or your proposals feel like a list of deliverables, you haven’t nailed these yet. Write your answers in plain English, then cut it down until you can distil it into the core ingredients: the value you create, who you create it for and the problem you solve.

6. Treat CRM discipline as all-or-nothing

“Consultants don’t love admin, but they do love good decisions. Your job is to connect the dots”

A CRM won’t fix a messy process, it will only record it. But if you use it properly, it becomes a decision tool.

The key point is this: it’s all-or-nothing. If eight out of ten people keep it up to date but two don’t, it becomes unreliable and people stop trusting it. Think about pipeline. If one person hasn’t updated their deals, it might look like you’ve got a £50k gap. If they had updated it, you might actually have a £50k surplus. That difference drives completely different decisions.

So you need buy-in, role modelling from the top and consequences for non-completion. Consultants don’t love admin, but they do love good decisions. Your job is to connect the dots and then create new habits through a simple rhythm: clear stages, clear rules for qualification, a next step and owner on every opportunity and a weekly pipeline review that actually gets used.

Bringing it together

If you want sales to stop being a heroic founder effort, accept one thing upfront: you’ll need to dedicate time to getting the team bought into the process. It takes sustained effort, not a one-off announcement.

From there, keep it simple:

• get the basics written down (your ‘why change, why now, why us’, your qualification questions, your definition of a good opportunity)
• remove friction by giving the team a small sales kit they can actually use
• lock in a weekly rhythm where the pipeline is reviewed honestly and actions are owned.

Do that consistently and sales becomes part of how the firm runs, which is how your consultancy grows beyond reliance on a few individuals.

If you’d like to see where your sales capability stands, take the Consultancy Sales Maturity Assessment: