Almost every leader of a business of expertise has a moment when they realize their delivery team—account managers, project managers, developers, engineers, consultants or advisors—could be a source of instant scale to their sales efforts. 

Inspiration tends to hit in moments of sales stagnation or decline. If you’re considering enlisting your delivery team in your sales efforts now, I applaud the idea—the gains could be significant—but there are steps to take and a big tradeoff to consider. I’ll map them out here so you can go into this with eyes wide open. 

Been There, Done That?

Of course many expert firms have already mastered the dual delivery/sales role. The big consulting firms, which tend to excel at the land-and-expand strategy, are shining examples of firms where growth is driven by the delivery team, with the consultants ably performing the second role of sales. This post is for the rest of you. 

The distinction between the two types of firm—one where the delivery team also sells and one where they do not—is pretty clear. In the former:

  1. It is clearly communicated to each member of the delivery team that their job includes selling (typically in the form of expanding existing accounts). This expectation is explained even before a new team member is hired, in the job description and the interview.
  2. The core training, received at the beginning of the delivery professional’s tenure and throughout, includes sales training on the firm’s particular model of selling.
  3. Some of the expert’s compensation—even if only a small amount—is tied to sales performance.

If these three elements are not in place then your delivery team is not your sales team, even if you’ve told them they are. But let’s map the path to making it happen should you desire to make it so.

Take the Long View

I’m fond of saying that you reinvent the firm one new client at a time. That reinvention also happens one new hire at a time. 

Begin by accepting that asking people to now find the time, inclination and skill to start selling doesn’t mean they will or even can. Your current team signed up for their core jobs of practicing or advising, not this second job of selling. Some will doubt their ability to sell and some will harbor an outright distaste for it. It’s my own belief that these issues can be overcome in most people, but I disagree with the age-old refrain that it’s everybody’s job to sell. Some just aren’t cut out for it. They will move on to another role or another organization where they are not required to sell. 

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort with your current team—you should, but think of the earlier distinction. Yours will become an organization that grows via the delivery team when:

  1. Every employee has bought in,
  2. The delivery team have been trained and supported,
  3. The culture of the firm has changed to one where sales really is everyone’s job (more on this soon).

This is going to take time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start seeing results quickly. Let’s now look at the steps to take with your current team.

Train Everyone

After announcing the initiative itself, training is the first step. It should be broadly applied to the entire delivery team. There is a case to be made for first training the most senior and influential people, but everyone on the delivery team should be trained on what you mean by selling, how you expect them to do it, and the tools, frameworks, decision-making criteria they are required to use.

After initial training you’ll get more selective about applying resources to the cause, knowing that some people will buy in immediately, some will try it on and evaluate whether or not this new role is for them and a few might opt out quickly and move on. Put yourself in the shoes of the latter two groups when dealing with them. You’ve changed their job description midstream, adding something they didn’t sign up for, so be prepared for the range of reactions but give everyone a taste of what you want them to do. From there the group will start to sort itself. 

Offer Broad Support

Training is the beginning but it is a small part of ensuring that learning has happened, behaviors are changing and results will be achieved. Support in the form of discussions, practice, coaching and additional training resources is vital to the outcomes you seek. Once you’ve shaped how you will support the team, offer that support to everyone, but don’t force it. Observe who participates and who does not.

Consider it part of the measuring and sorting process that lets you discover who is serious about building new sales skills and who’s doing the mandatory minimum hoping to outwait you on your latest new initiative. Have conversations with those who do not take advantage of the support early—it could be they’re just too busy with their first job at the moment—and nudge them along, but you’ll place your bets on the ones using the resources.  

Celebrate the Achievers, Don’t Obsess Over the Laggards

Now raise up and celebrate the engaged individuals, the ones who continue to use the post-training support, whether it’s showing up to the lunch-and-learns or coaching sessions, or continuing to reference and use the training material and tools. Celebrate each of their sales wins, showing the team that this behavior is valued and rewarded in the new culture that you’re building.

It’s important to keep your focus on the ones who are embracing change because it’s easy to get distracted by the laggards. Even if the majority of your team is taking to the new material and mission, you will be obsessed with the minority who are not. This is a real problem. Even if you eventually get near wholesale adoption (let’s say 95%), the 5% will take most of your mental energy and even make you feel like the initiative has failed. It hasn’t failed, you’re just looking the wrong way. Turn around and look at how far the team has come. 

Keep accentuating the positives, keep demonstrating through your attention and praise that this new behavior—selling—is valued and rewarded in the firm’s changing culture.

Build a Sales-Oriented Culture

This combination of upskilling willing legacy team members, including supporting, celebrating and rewarding their new behavior, plus hiring for sales aptitude, will change your culture over time. You’ll find the new hires who are attracted to the opportunity to drive growth bring a hungrier, more entrepreneurial energy to the team that speeds up the change.

Culture will take care of the holdouts, the ones who just can’t do this or won’t try. When they are the pained minority they’ll succumb to the pressure to evolve, or they’ll be crowded out and leave of their own volition or otherwise indicate they are obvious candidates for removal. When they move on, the new hires will bring more of the new growth energy you desire. 

The Big Tradeoff (Surprise—It’s Culture!)

I suspect I’ve lost some readers who are interested in the results an expanded sales team would bring (something I’ve not addressed in this post but will in a  future one) but they quit reading because they’re not interested in changing their culture. I understand that, but if that’s you I would implore you to think more deeply about it for a while longer. Consider exploring the culture tradeoff with your most prized team members, your A players. Their thoughts on the subject might surprise you.

Twenty three years ago David Maister wrote a piece of thought leadership that has had a profound effect on my own thinking on organizational culture. (It’s a long piece—a speech transcript actually—but you can skip to the section titled What Team Do You Want to Belong To?) He effectively says that there are only two macrocultures (my word, not his) an organization can have. They can have a macroculture of tolerance, where the priority is belonging and cohesiveness (“We’re a family and we take care of each other”) and nobody ever gets fired. Or they can have a macroculture of intolerance, where the ambitious goal of the organization requires high standards that are enforced. (Maister’s piece is titled The Problem of Standards. The “problem” is they are rarely enforced therefore they are lies.) 

At Win Without Pitching our first of five core values is “Greatness” (not to be confused with the more ubiquitous and amorphous “Excellence”). “We strive to be the very best in the world at what we do.” That’s a meaningless goal or value in a macroculture of tolerance. Simply put, if you’re not great and not striving for greatness then you can’t stay. If you are allowed to stay then our core values are lies. It’s pretty simple. 

The large consulting firms that have mastered the dual roles of delivery and sales famously have an “up-or-out” culture where it is understood that if you haven’t been promoted in two years then it’s time to move on. If you don’t do it of your own volition then you’re helped out the door, politely and respectfully. 

I believe that to properly make your delivery team your sales team you have to sign on to a macroculture of intolerance. This isn’t a license to treat people poorly, only a commitment to enforcing your standards, which now include the standard that delivery people must also sell to a certain level of performance. 

So, What Team Do You Want To Lead?

I believe I’ve laid out the key considerations, steps and tradeoff to consider when deciding whether to leverage your delivery team into a sales team. If you’re entertaining this move you now know roughly how to go about it. 

Your biggest consideration is probably the last—do you want to change your culture—and I doubt there’s much middle ground here. It’s Derek Sivers’s “Hell Yeah! Or No.” Whatever you decide is fine. As Maister says, it’s a personal decision and not a moral one. But when you reach out for training just let us know if we’re training a local house team, serving orange slices at half time, or if we’re training for Olympic gold.