NEWSLETTER · ISSUE 001

Last month I spoke with the CEO of a B2B consulting firm — Workday implementation partner, 90 people, strong reputation. He'd spent 18 months and roughly $400,000 trying to fix a growth problem.

New CRO. Marketing agency. ABM campaign. Rebrand.

Revenue was roughly where it was before he started.

I asked him one question: if I called five people on your team right now and asked why clients choose you over another Workday partner — how different would the answers be?

He was quiet for a moment.

"Very different," he said. "Everyone has their own version."

That's the thing none of the $400,000 fixed. Not because the CRO wasn't good, or the agency wasn't capable, or the campaign wasn't well-executed. But because all of it was downstream of the real problem.

There was no consistent story. No single version of why clients should choose this firm that everyone — from the CEO to the account manager — could tell the same way.

Everything built on top of that fragmentation just amplified it.

This is the pattern I see consistently across B2B consulting and technology firms when growth stalls. The symptom looks like a sales problem. The diagnosis is almost always wrong.

What's actually happening is one or more of three things:

• The firm's value isn't described consistently across the team — so buyers form different impressions depending on who they talk to

• The expertise that differentiates the firm lives inside a few people — and doesn't reach client conversations when those people aren't in the room

• There's no structure to keep accounts engaged between projects — so relationships that should grow go quiet instead

Fix any one of these in isolation and the other two pull it back. Fix all three in the right sequence, and growth becomes more predictable — not because more is happening, but because what's already there starts working.

The CEO I mentioned is three months into that work now. Same team. Same market. His exact words last week: "We closed two deals last month we would have lost six months ago. Nothing changed except how we talk about what we do."

The value prop exercise takes about a week. Ask five people separately. Don't brief them. Just collect the answers.

If the answers are consistent — you might have a sales problem. Fix the process.

If they're not — you have a growth structure problem. And no sales hire will solve it until the story is right.