Growth is still firmly on the agenda for UK SMEs.

According to the British Business Bank, 41% of smaller businesses expect their turnover to grow over the next 12 months, up from 34% in 2023.

Encouraging in this climate! but ‘wanting to grow’ and having a strategy and operation capable of supporting that growth are two different things.

Having spent the majority of my long career in and around B2B SME sales, I rarely see lack of desire or activity; There are customers, sales happen, proposals are going out, people are selling but … Results are inconsistent, good month, better month, bad month, good 1/4 bad 1/4, good year, strong start, fallen off a cliff.

When things are going well the wave is ridden, when things crash down panic sets in, now is the time to:

Pause Take a Breath Review .. Everything

What worked when you were smaller does not always scale

When a business is small, sales can work well with limited structure in place

• The owner or manager knows very customer

• They know what a good opportunity looks like

• They know who needs chasing and when

• They know where to be to find new customers and what to say to close a sale

But the danger is, when all that knowledge lives in someone’s head, it’s holding back serious growth. When growth slows or results become inconsistent, the natural response is often to do more.

More prosecting, more leads, more marketing .. recruit a salesperson

Sometimes that is exactly what needs to happen but often that just ads more elements to a sales operation that is already unclear.

If qualification is inconsistent, more leads can simply mean more poor-fit opportunities.

I can speak from recent experience here. While launching a new offer through Saldi Business Development I’ve spent plenty of evenings and weekends trying to find the right data, from buying a list that turned out to be far too generic, to getting so granular in Apollo that I ended up with three prospects 🙂 It was a useful reminder that more data is not the same as better targeting.

Growth needs some infrastructure behind it

Not layers of bureaucracy, but enough structure to make sure the important growth questions have clear answers:

• Who are we REALLY trying to sell to?

• Where do we find out best opportunities?

• What does a ‘good fit’ opportunity look like?

• What stages does an opportunity move through?

• What needs to happen before it moves to the next stage?

• Where are the handovers – Who owns the follow up?

• How often do we review pipeline?

• Which measures tell us when sales are improving?

When those things are understood and consistently applied, sales becomes easier to manage. It also becomes less dependent on one individual knowing how everything works.

If you’re responsible for sales, either as a founder, the owner of an established business or as a new hire brought in to grow sales, ask yourself those questions, honestly!

What sales growth for B2B businesses actually needs

As a business grows the question moves from

How do we create more sales activity

To

How do we build a sales operation that can support the growth we want?

Because now, planning, process, pipeline visibility, ownership and regular reviews matter. Sustainable sales growth is not just about doing more it’s about making the sales activity you already have easier to manage, measure and repeat.

If sales activity is already happening in your business but results still feel inconsistent, the issue may not be more activity. It may be the structure behind it. For me, sales growth for B2B businesses becomes much more manageable when the structure behind sales keeps pace with the ambition.

The Sales Growth Programme™ is designed to help growing B2B businesses put clearer planning, process, pipeline visibility, ownership and reporting in place over 90 days, with practical changes implemented as you go.