If you want to improve your close rate, tighten your sales messaging, and better understand your buyer, there’s no faster path than a structured win-loss call process.
And yet, very few professional services firms do it well (or at all).
In a market where visibility is fractured and trust is earned in milliseconds, how you plan for growth in 2026 will determine whether you lead or fall behind.
From May through August, most executive teams, whether at brands or professional services firms, are knee-deep in building strategies and budgets for the coming year. But many are using outdated models: departmental budgets created in isolation, growth projections rooted in past performance and plans that treat customer experience as a byproduct rather than a priority.
By very definition, salespeople sell. But here is the paradox: buyers do not like being sold to. In fact, only 29% of buyers say they prefer to talk to a salesperson when making a purchase. Meanwhile, 62% would rather consult a search engine (HubSpot). That is a striking indictment of traditional sales, and the experience buyers are having with selling organizations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to scale your business beyond founder-led sales (and let’s be honest, which one of us in C54 doesn’t?) You’ll need to come face-to-face with a three letter acronym: CRM.
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.
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.
