Sales leadership in founder-led consultancies: making growth less dependent on you

All too many consultancies are solely reliant on the founder(s) to drive growth. Often it’s their black books that fill the pipeline, but inevitably, when delivery ramps up, the founders are drawn in, and the sales activity grinds to a halt.

Then, once the busy period has passed, the pipeline is empty and suddenly the founder is left scrambling through their black book again.

If you’re in this position, new business has to go beyond your individual effort and become something your team can contribute to consistently and reliably, to allow you the space to focus on long-term strategy and growth (and perhaps the occasional delivery crisis).

Here are 5 ways to help you achieve that.

Start with a future narrative your team actually wants to work towards

“What do you want to be known for?”

If your growth story only exists in your head, you’ll be the only one driving it. Alan Morton, MD of SBR, a sales transformation and enablement consultancy, said in a recent in-person TCGN event: “a revenue target on its own does not inspire anyone. People need an image of what they’re building and why it matters for them, not just for the owners.”

Marc Jantzen, Founder & CEO of TCGN suggests, “A useful exercise is to imagine a publication you respect writing about your firm in five or ten years. What would you want it to say? What clients are you known for? What impact do you have? What kind of people want to work with you?”

That sounds simple enough, but it does two very important things.

1. It gives your team something to buy into and feel a core part of.
2. It gives you a shared reference point when you ask your team to step up commercially.

Codify the beliefs that make selling feel ‘normal’

“Selling is about creating and demonstrating value to your clients”

For a lot of consultancies, sales sits with a handful of people for whom selling is instinctive. But you can’t grow past that unless you have a shared language around sales that everyone can buy into.

Alan poses the question: “Have you created cultural reference points and mantras for how you think about and talk about selling and are those beliefs codified?”

This matters, because it no longer becomes open to interpretation, it sets an expectation for everyone and changes how your team show up.

Part of that is about addressing the aversion to selling by people who see themselves solely as technical experts. It helps them see that at it’s core, selling is about creating and demonstrating value to your clients, just as they do in delivery.

If you’d like to explore this further, read our insight on creating a sales culture.

Doing great work is not enough to guarantee a steady stream of future work

“Hope is not a strategy”, Alan emphasises. It’s easy to assume that doing great work will keep  the work coming in, but when you’re scaling, that’s rarely the case for long.

As a leader, Alan explains that you need to enforce that proactive commercial activity is non-negotiable. And that doesn’t mean your whole team become salespeople, but that consultants should actively seek new opportunities with their existing clients, create more value and become embedded as a strategic partner to the client, not just a vendor or delivery partner.

Teach the behaviours and habits that “finding and growing clients is part of everyone’s job”, as Alan puts it.

Work with your numbers, not assumptions

“Once you know your numbers, you can plan aroun them

Alan notes that “founders often carry the revenue target in their head. The team carries activity. The gap between the two is where unpredictability lives.”

So both knowing and communicating the leading indicators is critical for achieving your targets. As a baseline, you’ll need to be able to answer these questions.

• How many meaningful outreach attempts typically create one conversation?
• How many conversations become a qualified opportunity?
• How many qualified opportunities become work?

Once you and your team know these numbers, you can plan around:

• what volume of sales activity you need
• where quality needs improving (because conversion is weak)
• where the bottleneck is (because one stage is leaking).

And this is when sales will stop being a panic response and start becoming a managed and predictable system

Make it firm-wide, not a founder initiative

You can write the playbook, build the templates and buy the CRM but if your whole team don’t adopt them you’ll remain the one doing the heavy lifting. To prevent this, focus on:

• a shared process your team understand and actually use
• a coaching rhythm where selling is discussed like delivery is discussed
• a common language so expectations are consistent.

If you want your firm to feel less dependent on you, stop asking ‘how do I get people to sell?’ and start asking, ‘what do we need to make this easy and normal for them?’

Where do I start?

Start with one belief you want to codify and communicate it in your next team meeting. Then calculate and share your conversion ratios and agree one firm-wide habit, a weekly pipeline review or deal prep checklist. Make this a collaborative decision, because if your team has a hand in shaping this, they’re more likely to buy in.

In most cases it doesn’t require wholesale changes, just a mindset shift for you to lead sales in the way you lead delivery: with clarity, standard setting, coaching and repetition.

Can the Network help?

Yes! We’ve supported over 300 consultancies. Founder-dependency is the most common starting point for our members and it’s a shift we help them make.

Our Consultancy maturity Roadmap will help you build maturity across 7 key business disciplines, including sales. Our members get access to our 10 Growth Experts who have all built and sold £10m+ consultancies, so you can learn from their experience. And our learning community includes 150+ on-demand resources and hundreds of consultancy leaders on a similar journey to you.

Submit the form below to explore how we can help you achieve your growth ambitions.