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Sales

Pro Serv Blogs

Scaling on Purpose: Metrics and Questions for Deliberate Growth

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Growing a boutique professional services firm can feel like flying blind. You’re hiring more people and chasing more projects, but somehow it’s getting harder to see where all the effort is going. Many founders and members that I speak with admit they’ve been scaling without the clarity of hard data or many measurable metrics. Here’s one for you.. I won’t name names but I spoke with a founder this month doing $24M in revenue that asked me what EBITDA meant.

Pro Serv Blogs

How Small Firms Win: Stop Selling Services, Start Solving Problems

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If your consulting firm, marketing agency, or IT services firm is struggling to generate leads and close deals, the problem isn’t your expertise. It’s your positioning.
Too many professional services firms start with their services rather than the problem they solve, target a broad audience, and lack a compelling value proposition. This weakens their ability to sell effectively and compete against larger firms.

Pro Serv Blogs

Basic Metrics for Professional Services Firms

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In the competitive landscape of professional services founders are continually seeking strategies to enhance efficiency and drive growth. A critical aspect of this endeavor involves understanding and optimizing key sales metrics. This article is a bit different this time as I want to offer 10 metrics to think about and provide industry benchmarks, and actionable strategies.

Pro Serv Blogs

How the Best Founders Close the Biggest Sales

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The biggest deals of any small to mid-sized company are closed by the founder. Period.

In principle I don’t like this fact. If I hire salespeople, pay them well, give them a target for growth and larger sales, I expect them to close the deals. It’s their job, right? I hear from founders of companies frequently their frustration that, “I have to close all of the big sales myself.” It’s an obvious desire to delegate, but on big sales, it doesn’t work that way.

Pro Serv Blogs

Resist the Itch to Pitch™ — and Sell More

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Sellers often misunderstand the true purpose of an interaction with their buyers and thus miss the mark. They sign into a video call or step into a conference room and start in on a rehearsed pitch. They solely push a “proposition” communicating the solution offering and very little about what outcomes the solution delivers to the buyer. More times than not they fail to even mention how this helps solve the buyer’s current challenges. A pitch with a value proposition lacking any value is simply a proposition — and often a failed one at that.

Pro Serv Blogs

10x’ing Your Sales Team Without Any New Payroll or Comp Plan

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Sure, that title is clickbait-worthy, but you made it this far, so what is the real story? A common mental model: If we only had a larger sales team, we could grow revenues at a pace that is faster than the growth in costs. But salespeople cost us more than any other type of labor, and their comp plans are usually tied to invoices, so we pay them first before anyone else. It can be challenging to afford to grow your sales team, especially before you even know who will make their quota.

Pro Serv Blogs

Unlocking Qualified Leads: Leveraging Amazon Book Sales and PPC Advertising for Professional Services Firms

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In the competitive world of professional services, standing out often feels like shouting into a void—or a crowded networking event where everyone’s handing out business cards. But there’s a better way to establish authority and generate qualified leads: authoring a niche-specific book and selling it on Amazon. This isn’t just a way to flaunt your expertise—it’s a powerful lead generation tool. By combining it with Amazon’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, your book can become a magnet for potential clients, positioning you as a go-to expert while expanding your reach far beyond your usual circles.

Pro Serv Blogs

Stop Selling and Grow Your Business

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When I joined my father’s marketing research company in 1997 as his first employee, I had no idea that letting go of sales would ultimately 10x our revenue. My initial role was building our new research service, while my father handled all sales. Since our new service was an upsell to existing clients, the sales process was relatively straightforward at first.

Pro Serv Blogs

7 Reasons Why Founder-Led Sales Are Failing Your Firm’s Growth (and How to Break Free)

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In professional services, founder-led sales have been the lifeblood of growth for years. Many firms have thrived in their early days by relying on personal networks, referrals, and word-of-mouth.

However, as the landscape shifts, so does this model’s effectiveness. The way buyers make purchasing decisions has fundamentally changed, and the founder-driven, network-dependent approach is no longer enough to fuel sustainable growth. If you want to grow, scale, and ultimately exit your firm, the time to rethink your approach is now.

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