How Founders Should Be Leveraging Their Time to Drive Growth—Especially if They Dislike Sales

As founders of professional services firms, C54 members know the value of every hour.

Most feel they simply do not have enough hours in the week.

Many admit that they do not get around to business development because they are wired, even trained to dislike “sales”, so when they look at their calendar, any other option seems more attractive.

So today let’s talk about how to get the best leverage out of your business development time even if you hate selling.

My assumptions:

You’re running a seller-doer model, or you have a productized offer others can deliver, but you don’t have a sales team yet.

The client industry you mostly work with is healthy, in growth, not dying.

Your goal is to grow revenue with minimal risk.

You don’t love sales work, maybe you even actively dislike it.

Your goal is to grow and scale – hence why you’re here in C54.

With those in mind – and with respectful recognition of the wiring many ProServ founders have against “sales” work, you should first do everything to maximize what you already have so that you can build your war chest ready to step out into the investment phase needed to scale.

OK, with that said – what should you make time in your calendar for?

The easiest paths to more revenue are as follows:

1. Sell more of the same service to existing clients.
   
   
2. Sell new additional services to existing clients.
   
   
3. Increase your prices.
   
   
4. Gain referrals from your happy clients to their contacts.

Ideally – you will do all of these in 2025, which will provide you with the resources to invest in scale.

Selling more of the same service to existing clients:
Have you maximized the share of wallet that’s possible within all of your current client accounts?

With the relationships and data you have, your knowledge of what the client is working on and where they hire consultants to help them should be second to none.

Your knowledge should enable you to figure out approximately how much of their consulting spend you own. The gap between what they spend with you and what they spend overall is your opportunity.

Where else in your client company are there similar projects that you could potentially help them with?

Action: explore conversations with the people who already know, like, and trust you.

This is an extension of your existing partnership. Minimal friction exists here and a competitor is already doing the work. You can deliver better than them for your client, right?

Sell new additional services to existing clients.

Most firms love to innovate way more than they love to sell an existing service to new clients.

If that is you, you must listen carefully when you’re with a client serving their existing needs because you should always be listening to what else they need.

Caution: This is NOT a license to chase shiny objects, or start a SaaS firm.

This is a call to pay extra attention to the actual needs multiple clients have and serve them. This way, when you launch a new service, you launch with paying clients, and your R&D investment is worthwhile.

For example, we at Mindracer identified that many of our clients needed help with their CRM, Sales, and Marketing tools. After some extensive testing and development of services we recognized the value added to the client and the revenue opportunity, so we decided to invest in building out a partnership with HubSpot and became a certified HubSpot partner.

Are you thinking about what additional services naturally answer your clients’ existing needs?

Action: bolt on new services to additional client relationships.

Cross-selling additional services is much easier than selling to new clients.

Increase your prices

If you have been a C54 member long enough – you know how important this is, in fact, perhaps you are like Mindracer, and you were told directly by C54 account managers that your bill rates are too low.

The action here is to check out the benchmark bill rates for your services, make sure you’re not fundamentally under market price, and then make the time to plan for increases.

We get it, In the growth stage, many founders are still working to figure out their value proposition and offerings, in fact, we had a popular session at the C54 Founders Summit on that topic.

Teams can focus too hard on other things, and forget that the rest of the market moves fast, and their competitors are locking in billing rate increases each year.

It is highly unlikely that your client will tell you to increase your prices. So, you will have to make it happen.

If this is you, pay attention – did you just renew a contract at the same rate as last year? Or the same rate from multiple years ago?

Action: Have the conversation.  Yes, it can be awkward – but when you know benchmark rates, you have the data-backed confidence you may need to make this happen.

Again, if you hate selling to new customers, and your existing customers are getting great value from your work – then increasing prices is a way to grow revenue.

Finally:

Gain referrals from your happy clients to their contacts.

I’ve served over 700 founders in the last ten years. Without exception, when we meet, the founders of Professional Services identify referrals as their top source of revenue.

If this is true for you – I want you to ask yourself a question:

Have you written down your referral strategy and trained your team on it?

I know the answer. Over 80% of you said no. Mindracer has assessed hundreds of firms and fewer than 20% have any type of referral program written down.

Caution: you are not a SaaS company. Do not copy their strategies here.

When done thoughtfully and within compliance, this is one of the lowest-hanging fruit you will find to grow revenues naturally alongside other conversations you’re having.

Action: Make time to develop your referral program. Train the team on how to roll it out. Make sure they are clear about what their roles are in the client referral program.

Don’t be lazy and skip these four opportunities on your path to scale.

Building this foundation gives you a strong revenue baseline. When managed well you should be able to create a war chest of cash, and you should feel confident that you can expand within each client you acquire.

In fact, if you can do these – then you might be ready to scale.

Mindracer Consulting is honored to be invited to provide this guidance to the C54 community via this insights newsletter. If you’re not already a C54 member then you are missing out on real value.

Mindracer is a Boutique Growth Advisory firm specializing in helping professional services businesses scale revenue using our ACQUIRE framework. C54 members can access a free scale readiness assessment by reaching out to C54 member Dan Morris via the member portal.