When a company needs a sales process consultant
Outside help pays for itself in a narrow set of situations. In the others it is a waste of your money, and I will tell you so on the call.
Consulting · 6 min read
When sales process consulting is worth paying for
Sales process consulting pays off when results swing wildly between reps, when the forecast keeps missing in both directions, or when the team has grown past the point where the founder can personally sell every deal. It will not fix a product nobody wants, and it does nothing if leadership will not enforce the new process after I leave. The work itself is an assessment, a redesign, then coaching until execution looks the same across the team.
Bringing in a sales consultant is frequently the wrong call. If the product does not fit the market yet, or the founder is still the only person who can sell it, no amount of process design moves the number. Those are different problems, and I will say so on the first call rather than take the engagement.
There is a narrower set of situations where outside help pays for itself fast.
Signals that outside help is worth it
Results swing wildly between reps
Two reps, similar territories, similar tenure, one produces three times the other. That gap is almost never talent. One person figured out a method and nobody ever extracted it or taught it to anyone.
The forecast is consistently wrong
Not off by ten percent. Off by half, in both directions, quarter after quarter. The pipeline is not describing what buyers do, so every decision built on it is a guess with a spreadsheet attached.
New hires take too long to produce
When ramp keeps stretching, there is usually nothing concrete for a new rep to learn. You are asking someone to invent an approach from scratch while carrying a quota.
Sales leadership is closing deals instead of leading
A VP or founder who personally rescues the quarter is a stopgap that gets harder every quarter. Nobody develops, and the dependency deepens.
Everyone knows something is wrong and nobody can name it
Common, and a legitimate reason to bring in outside eyes. People inside a sales org are too close to it, and reps almost never tell their own leadership the whole truth.
When a consultant will not help
- The product does not yet solve a problem people will pay to fix
- There is no pipeline at all, which is a demand problem, not a sales process problem
- Leadership wants a report to justify a decision already made
- Nobody inside is prepared to enforce the change after the engagement ends
That last one decides more outcomes than everything else on this page. I can design the process and coach the team into it. Someone inside your company has to hold the line after I am gone.
What a real engagement involves
- 01An assessment period with the team, on live calls and inside the pipeline, ending in a written read on what to fix and in what order
- 02A process redesign built with your sales leadership, shaped to your buyer and your deal size
- 03Workshops that put the new process in front of the team
- 04Weekly coaching on live deals for long enough that the new way is the only way anyone remembers
The coaching phase is the part companies try to cut for budget reasons, and it is the part that decides whether anything changes. A process introduced in a workshop and then left alone reverts inside a quarter. I have watched it happen.
Questions worth asking any consultant, including me
- Will you sit in on live calls, or work from interviews and documents?
- What is the deliverable, and who has to act on it?
- How long do you stay after the training ends?
- What would make you tell us not to hire you?