Sooner or later your client is going to come to you for help with growing their sales team. This is a challenge that every business must overcome if it is to progress past the level of sales that the founder can sustain. Unfortunately, this challenge proves too much for many businesses. These businesses are marked by a succession of people with the title "salesperson" who arrive full of hope and leave some months later under a cloud having failed to deliver. So what do you say when your client calls?  Well, here 's an analysis of two businesses that have overcome this challenge and are growing fast.  Maybe you could take a line through their approach and discuss it with your client. (They are in entirely different sectors - one selling software (transactional up to complex solutions sales) and the other a builders' merchant (almost entirely transactional sales). Both sectors are highly competitive, which makes their performance even more impressive.) The things...

It is sometimes insightful to think about what stage of growth your clients' businesses are in.  This will not only help you identify the challenges they face but also help you think about your marketing; that is, which growth stage are you targeting? You could start by reading this HBR paper on the stages of business growth (The Five Stages of Small Business Growth by Neil C. Churchill and Virginia L. Lewis link ). It's rather old but remains, like all good management models, relevant today. It provides a useful tool for gaining insight into an individual business, its stage of development, strategy and challenges. You might see this model as somewhat inaccessible to your clients, the owners of small businesses; maybe they would see it as theoretical or corporate.  From the practical, over-worked perspective of a business owner, the theories don't look like their business. They must be talking about someone else. You could talk to them about a simpler, three...