Hey CEOs: Still Hoping Everyone Will Start Selling?
TLDR: 3 Takeaways from this Post:
If you want more sales, you need more salespeople. Trust-based services revenue doesn’t scale like product sales do.
Seller-doer models only work when they are designed intentionally. You need clear roles, training, incentives, and communication.
Your sales strategy is a brand issue. How your team behaves with clients either reinforces your position or undermines it.
Is everyone doing their part?
If you want more sales, you need more salespeople.
Product companies can restock best sellers, enter a new marketplace, and offer discounts and BOGO offers. Services? Not so much. Services are sold through trust, relationships, insight, and reputation. You can’t manufacture that, and it’s hard to speed it up.
Which is why, at some point, almost every professional services CEO has the same idea:
“Everyone should help us sell.”
By “everyone”, they usually mean the consultants, project managers, and client-facing roles that deliver the daily work. These roles are closest to the clients, so they hear their frustrations, notice their needs, and understand them best.
Sounds reasonable.
Which is why it may surprise you that, at some point, almost every professional services CEO has the same question:
“Why isn’t everyone helping us sell?’
Here’s why.
When leadership says, “Everyone should help us sell,” that’s not what delivery teams hear. They hear something more stressful and frustrating:
“I’m now responsible for revenue.”
“I’m going to be measured against a quota.”
“I’ll be evaluated on skills I don’t have (and don’t want).”
“I’ll have less time to do my actual day job.”
“No matter how good I am at my work, I’ll be penalized if I don’t sell.”
Meanwhile, most executives are thinking something far simpler:
“I’d be grateful if they just flagged opportunities.”
“I don’t expect non-salespeople to close.”
“I’ll never replace my top engineer just because she didn’t hit a sales number.”
So now, thanks to subtle and widespread miscommunication, we’ve got a messaging and culture problem on top of the growth problem.
The Super Secret Issue Behind Seller-Doer Pressure
Most founders and leaders were themselves seller-doers once. Which makes the model so easy to defend – “Look! I did it, and it got us here. Now let’s all do it!”
But your team is not building your company - they are building their own careers. And asking doers to be sellers can trigger understandable panic or distrust when it’s introduced as an expectation rather than designed as a system.
Consider these real-world examples of typical friction points:
No shared language.
If you expect delivery teams to contribute to growth, what exactly are they responsible for? Identifying pain points? Asking follow-up questions? Logging leads?Without clarity, people fill in the blanks, usually with worst-case assumptions. And if your plan is to wing it, you are ignoring the anxiety that vague expectations can trigger for a hard working and results-oriented employee.
What that looks like in practice:
The CEO of a $80MM technology firm expected consultants to sell, but they were not offered the same incentives designated for the sales team.
When a consultant introduced an opportunity to a sales leader, and the sales leader finalized negotiations and contracting, they both expected the sale to count towards their individual goals and to be compensated for the sale.
The leadership team started making after-the-fact judgments about who contributed most to the sale closing, which created tension between teams and distrust between the sellers and the leadership team.
The experiment failed.
No training.
Sales is a discipline. It involves frameworks, qualification criteria, and opportunity shaping. If you want non-sellers to participate successfully, you can’t rely on their instincts alone. You don’t need to turn every project manager into a sales machine, but you do need to provide them with the foundational skills to support growth.What that looks like in practice:
The CEO of a 30-person consulting firm expected consultants to develop business. One excellent consultant established a strong relationship with a client at a large, high-profile company, and they started meeting regularly for coffee. They eventually became close friends. The consultant no longer felt comfortable asking for business or negotiating sales with their contact because the nature of their relationship had changed so much. In addition to losing a year of business development opportunities, the firm now had to introduce a new business development lead to the contact and grow the relationship from scratch. If the consultant had received proper training, they would have been more ready to navigate the grey area between commercial and personal interactions.
The experiment backfired.
No alignment around incentives or workload.
Traditional sales roles are structured around pipeline responsibility and compensation. Seller-doers are expected to grow revenue on top of full delivery loads. That imbalance creates stress, even without any formal quotas. Asking busy consultants to increase their sales contribution can tip a high performer over.What that looks like in practice:
A 70-person agency had become overly dependent on a single client, and when the client pulled back spend, they were forced into a RIF. They were a tight-knit group, so the layoffs were painful for everyone. The leadership team was confident that a company-wide approach to sales would rebuild revenue and create stability. A win-win.
But the remaining team members had already stretched their capacity to take on the work of their departed coworkers, and taking on a new and intense responsibility like sales felt overwhelming. If they were going to take on more work, they wanted to be compensated up front. But the leadership team felt that this should be added to their job descriptions without any change to compensation.
The experiment resulted in a stalemate.
Yes, This is a Brand Matter
In professional services, your brand is more than messaging and logos. It’s also how your people behave with clients. Every interaction fulfills – or denies – the brand promise.
When delivery teams are unclear about their role in growth, clients are also unclear. Promises drift. Positioning gets muddy. Marketing messages don’t match real-life interactions.
Collaboration between your sellers and doers works best when the workflow is clear:
Leadership designs the system and aligns incentives. (Hoping they won’t ask for commissions is not a plan.)
Delivery shares insights from the front lines.
Sales or business development shapes and qualifies opportunities.
Patterns in client needs and sales results are communicated to Marketing.
Marketing translates recurring patterns into stronger positioning.
If you want everyone involved in growth, hoping they will start selling is not a strategy. You’ve got to design how growth works, and communicate it early, often, and clearly.
In the next post, I’ll outline a different way of thinking about seller-doers and why that can make a difference between a failed experiment and real growth.
Have you hit a growth wobble? Let’s compare notes.
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