How to grow a B2B company: a guide for entrepreneurs

You have been running a B2B technology company for a few years, and at the beginning it was simple: you spotted an opportunity, you started working, the first clients appeared. You did not need a grand plan. It was enough to do good work and the next clients came on their own. Referrals, networking, a reputation in the industry.

Over time, however, something changed. The company still operates, still sells, still has clients. But it has stopped growing the way it should. Or it is growing, but you do not feel that growth, because every new client means more work, more confusion and less peace.

Sound familiar? This is not an unusual situation. It is a pattern I see in dozens of companies I have worked with for years. Most of the B2B technology companies I work with have no problem with the quality of what they do. They have a team, know-how, delivered projects, references. And yet sales are not growing the way they should. Or they are growing, but at the expense of the owner, who instead of running the company keeps rescuing it.

The causes are rarely where they are looked for. Not in a lack of leads, not in price or competition. They lie deeper, in the way the company is built, in what it lacks. In this article I describe the mechanisms that most often block the growth of a technology company, and the nine areas in which these mechanisms are most clearly visible. I skip the obvious. I keep what most often decides whether a company breaks through the next revenue ceiling or stays where it is.

“We are managing somehow”: the sentence that costs years

Talking to owners of B2B service companies, I hear this sentence over and over. We are managing somehow. Sometimes in the variant “it’s okay, we are pushing ahead” or “we are doing well, it will get even better”. And it is not a lie. The company really is managing somehow. It has clients, generates revenue, pays salaries. From the outside it looks healthy.

The problem is that “we are managing somehow” is not a description of the situation. It is a rationalization for postponing change.

An owner who says this has usually been aware of the problem for a couple of years. They see that the company is not using its full potential. They know that referral-based sales are unpredictable. They know they are the bottleneck themselves. But they calculate the cost of committing to change, look at the daily overload of various matters and conclude that the current pain is bearable. Change seems more expensive to them than maintaining the status quo.

There is something, however, that this owner does not see. The best window for implementing change is when the company has resources, time and stability. When the situation gets really bad, it is already much harder to change anything. Between awareness of the problem and the moment when it gets really hard, even a couple of years pass. That time is simply lost.

How to grow a technology company when organic growth stops being enough

Most B2B service companies grow organically. Clients come on their own, mainly from referrals and networking, sometimes from occasional marketing, and the owner serves those who come to them. At the beginning that is enough. Intuition, speed of action, constant iterations. At that stage excessive planning would even be a waste of time.

The problem comes later. The company passes through the start-up phase, has clients, has revenue, has a team. And the owner starts treating organic growth as the normal state of affairs. As an operating model. Meanwhile it is not a good operating model, just being reactive towards the market. Relying on referrals continuing to come, client expectations staying the same and the competition standing still can be an illusion.

Organic growth got you to where you are. But it is not enough to get you to where you want to be.

How to grow a technology company that has reached this point? Another marketing channel or another salesperson will not do it. What is needed is a change in the mode the company operates in: from intuitive and reactive, where everything depends on the owner, to systemic, where sales are a mechanism. From the outside it looks like a few big decisions. From the inside it is putting a few areas in order one after another: the owner’s role, strategy, the business model, the value proposition, the sales process and the sources of clients. I discuss each of them below, and at the end I gather them into a list of nine points to check in your own company.

The company depends on the owner: the first bottleneck of a technology company’s growth

In the first years it is the owner who sells. Networking, referrals, conversations at conferences. It works, because the owner knows the product best, can talk to any client, has trust built over years. The problem starts when the company has grown enough that one person cannot keep up, but not enough for sales to work without that person.

At this point most technology companies get stuck and stay stuck for years. The owner works a dozen or more hours a day, the company grows fifteen percent a year, and every attempt to delegate sales ends with the salesperson not closing, the client wanting to talk to the owner, and repeatability in operations not existing. The conclusion the owner draws: “nobody will sell as well as I do”. A very convenient diagnosis. And unfortunately, in nine cases out of ten, a wrong one.

The problem does not lie with the salesperson, but in the fact that all the elements and experience needed to close clients exist only in the owner’s head. They have superbly developed intuition that seems hard to write down and delegate. Until that knowledge is extracted, parametrized and arranged into a process, no salesperson has a chance of effectiveness similar to the owner’s.

You cannot delegate something that exists only in your head.

As long as the sales process is the way you run it but has never been described, every attempt to pass it to someone else will end in disappointment. As long as client objections have no worked-out answers, the salesperson will improvise. As long as the ideal client profile is not defined, everyone will talk to everyone. More about what a situation in which the company depends on the ownerreally means, I write in a separate article.

Operational knowledge is in people’s heads, not in documentation

When I ask how a new salesperson learns to talk to clients, the usual answer is: “they listen to how Marek talks”, “they go to meetings with Kasia for the first month”, “they pick it up over time”. That is not onboarding. That is wishful thinking that the new person will turn out capable of reproducing someone’s unwritten intuition on their own.

A sales playbook, clear qualification criteria, written answers to typical objections, frameworks for conducting successive conversations and clear goals for every stage of the process are not an organizational luxury. They are the foundation without which the team cannot be scaled. Every new salesperson starts from zero instead of starting from the point the company has already reached. Recording internal video tutorials also works well. The new person first watches, and only then comes with specific questions, instead of the question “where do I start”.

The same applies to knowledge about clients, the product, pricing arguments, the logic of service packages. If that knowledge is in various heads in the company, the company is a hostage of those people. If one of them drops out of the company, they take a piece of it with them.

A B2B sales strategy is not a set of activities

Many owners think that a lack of sales is a problem of a lack of leads. Meanwhile I see companies that have enquiries, have meetings, send proposals and still do not grow. Because the problem lies not in the number of sales opportunities, but in what kind of opportunities they are and what happens with them. Strategy is a conscious concept of how to win. Whom you sell to and whom you turn down. What you specialize in and what you give up. Without it the company drifts. And drifting can look like movement until you look at the map.

A sales strategy is not a Google Ads campaign plus a salesperson and a website. A strategy answers the questions: whom we sell to and whom we do not, how we stand out in their eyes, which channels are the most profitable, what the client’s path from first contact to contract looks like, who is responsible for which piece of the process, how we measure and how we know it works.

Most B2B technology companies do not have this written down. Sales activities arise reactively, in response to whatever just happened. We have fewer leads, so we increase the ad budget. The salesperson complains, so we change the script or allow a price cut. A client left, so we introduce a new process. The lack of strategy is not visible immediately, because the successive tactical moves seem to make sense. But a year later the company is in a similar place, only more tired.

A strategy does not have to be a two-hundred-page document. It can fit on one sheet, it just has to clearly show why, what and how we want to achieve. When I ask management boards about a formalized strategy, I most often hear that sure, they have one, only more in their heads, and they can tell me about it. If it is any comfort: that is what it looks like even in very large companies. The best moment to write down a sales strategy was one, two or three years ago. The second best is today. About how scaling without a strategyends, I write separately.

Sales targets without a sales system

“We want to grow by thirty percent this year.” The target itself is not the problem; what is missing is what would make it real. I then ask: what does your sales process look like step by step, how many leads do you need per month to close the plan, what are the conversions between the individual stages, what does the salesperson do in the first fifteen minutes of a conversation. Silence.

A target without a system that delivers it is a wish. B2B technology companies are particularly fond of this trap, because they have an engineering culture and believe that since we built complicated software, sales will somehow fall into place. They will not. Sales are a system too. It has its inputs, outputs, bottlenecks, control points. Until it is treated that way, the result will be random.

Ambitious targets without a process do not motivate the team. They frustrate it. Because the salesperson sees the target, sees the lack of tools to deliver it, and draws the only logical conclusion: this cannot be done.

A technology company’s business model that sabotages growth

The business model is the whole of how your company works: how you create value, how you deliver it and how you earn on it. For whom you do something, what exactly, how, through which channels, with what resources and with what cost structure. In a large company the imperfections of the model can sometimes be hidden with budget, team, image. In a small one everything is on the surface. Every mistake immediately hits liquidity, the owner’s energy and the team’s morale. That is why a technology company’s business model should be as simple, clear and fitted to the realities the owner works in as possible.

One of the most common problems I see is too broad an offer. Software houses communicate that they can build any software. Implementation companies offer ERP, CRM, BI, AI, integrations and a few more things on top. Where does this come from? From history. Different clients came to the company for different services, and cash flow has to be taken care of, so the owner accepted and delivered. Year by year the offer grew, while the scale of the company not necessarily.

Ideas like “let’s add something to the offer” appear as an answer to a lack of sales. The problem is that the inability to sell basic solutions will not be fixed by a greater number of solutions the company will also be unable to actively sell.

The company tries to sell everything to everyone

“We build custom software.” For whom? “For anyone who needs it.” What problems do you solve? “Depends who needs what.” How do you differ? “Quality and experience.”

Such companies have no chance in prospecting, no chance in positioning, no chance competing with specialized companies. A client looking for a partner for a specific problem skips the generalist company and chooses the one that does exactly what they need. Even if the latter is more expensive.

Specialization in a B2B technology company is not narrowing the market. It is the condition for a recognizable value to exist. A company that builds software for the fintech sector has a different pipeline, a different hourly rate, different case studies and different credibility than a company that “builds systems”. The first usually grows, and the second competes on price.

When you analyze what your company earns best on, it will probably turn out to be about 20% of the offer. If you cut the remaining 80%, profits would not suffer at all, operational complexity would drop and margins would rise. Not a broader offer but better selling is the answer to a company’s growth challenges.

The hard decision that changed everything

I invested in a company that was a hybrid of a marketing firm and a software house: web and mobile applications, design, websites, social media. To change that, we bet on one area: corporate websites supporting B2B sales. We gave up the rest. In the year in which we expected a drop in revenue, revenue grew by 40% and profits by 25%. Because betting on one type of project made it possible to build a repeatable process, on the sales side and the delivery side.

Salespeople stopped coming to ask what to propose to a given client and how to price it. The sales process clearly steered towards the first paid element of cooperation. On the delivery side a repeatable methodology emerged, and components worked out in one project came back in the next ones. One caveat: before the company is retooled, you may feel turbulence in liquidity. You have to be ready for that mentally and financially, preferably with a buffer and some cost flexibility. I talk about this more in the episode of the Droga Przedsiębiorcy podcast “Trim the offer, less is more” (in Polish).

Selling time instead of results

The next element is the billing model. Most service companies bill for time. An hourly rate, a daily rate, so many person-days times so many zlotys. In such a model scaling requires a linear growth of costs: more clients means more hours, more people, more costs. And a client buying your time does not see value, only the cost of a unit of time. They can compare your rate with the competition and choose the cheaper one.

The alternative? Selling results instead of time. And building elements of the offer the client comes back for regularly: licenses, maintenance and development after implementation, a support subscription, a consulting retainer. If your offer has no such elements, then either you do not deliver enough value for the client to want to stay, or you simply do not have them in the offer. Both matters need attention.

A separate matter is revenue concentration. If one client generates more than 15 to 20% of your revenue, you are walking a very thin line, even if a profitable one today. I have seen companies that grew for fifteen years and stopped from one month to the next, because problems appeared at their main customer or across its whole industry.

Value proposition: the company talks about technology, the client buys results

This is the single biggest communication mistake of B2B technology companies. The company describes itself through the lens of what it does technologically: the stack, the methodology, the team’s competences, experience in specific solutions. The company website looks like a technical CV, the sales proposal is a catalogue of features.

Go to the website of any software house. “Our solutions are based on the latest technologies.” “We have many years of experience and a team of professionals.” Now go to their competitor’s website. You will see exactly the same thing.

Your client is unable to verify these declarations. If they knew software or ERP implementations, they would not need your company. They come to you precisely because they are not an expert in your field. And since they are not, they cannot tell your “experience and quality” from ten other companies’.

The client does not buy technology. They buy what that technology will bring them in business. A shorter time to implement a process. A drop in operating cost in a specific department. The ability to serve more clients without hiring new people. A reduction in regulatory risk. Dozens of specific business results the company does not talk about, because it assumes “it’s obvious”.

It is not obvious. The client has their own perspective and does not have to know what specific solutions can translate into. They do not work out for themselves that “microservices in Kubernetes” means “releasing new features to market faster, so reacting to the competition faster”. Someone has to translate it for them. If the company does not do it, the competition will. And if they do not either, the client will most likely postpone the decision to a “better moment” that never comes.

The solution is to reverse the order of communication. Instead of starting with the solution (“we build mobile apps”), start with the client’s problem, then show the result, and only at the end present the solution. The client does not buy a solution. They buy a way out of a problem and the result they care about.

I worked with a marketing agency convinced that clients chose it for quality and creativity. We ran interviews with their corporate clients. It turned out that those big companies worked with them for a completely different reason: because you can dump a lot on them at once, they do everything in a short time and at a relatively low price. Our own beliefs about the value we deliver can be completely different from what clients value us for. That is why it is worth simply asking: what exactly does my company help you with?

There is one more thing technology companies forget. Since the client cannot verify the substance, everything else decides the choice: what and how you communicate to them in the sales process, what your website looks like, whom you have in your portfolio, who recommends you, what the contract terms look like. Above all we buy from those we trust to deliver exactly what they promised. Likeability is sometimes a bonus. How to build and describe such a value proposition, I describe in a separate text.

The B2B sales process you most likely do not have

Your company has clients. It has meetings with potential clients. It sends proposals. Some of them turn into projects. So you have sales, right? Not necessarily. If every meeting looks different, if the pricing depends on who happens to be doing it and what mood they are in, if you cannot describe to a new person “this is how we lead conversations and win clients in our company”, then you do not have a sales process, only a series of improvisations.

Improvisation works great as long as the owner does it. The moment they want to delegate it, it turns out there is nothing to hand over.

I have seen this many times. A company hires a salesperson, gives them a CRM and says “sell”. After three months the salesperson has a full pipeline, but thirty percent of it is companies not worth talking to. They do not fit the profile, have no budget, have different requirements. But nobody told the salesperson, because nobody worked out qualification criteria. A salesperson without a process and clear measurement criteria becomes another cost, not a solution.

My experience in small and medium-sized companies points to one more thing. Fundamental processes, and the sales process is such a process, have to be built and tested by the owners. The idea of hiring a salesperson or a sales director who will build sales from scratch usually ends in failure, even when that person has a documented track record in a larger organization. Fine-tuning a company with a validated model, returning clients and momentum is one thing; building it from the foundations is another. Only once the process has been through battle on the market does the time come to delegate it.

A sales process is not bureaucracy. It is a clear answer to the questions: what happens from the first contact to signing the contract, in what order, what goals are to be achieved at each stage and who is responsible for what. If you can describe it, you can measure it. If you can measure it, you can improve it. If you can improve it, you can delegate it. That is exactly how the SalesMachine sales systemI work with at clients is built.

No process of continuous improvement

Technology companies like big moves. A rebranding. A new website. A new client segment. A new service line. Each such move takes a few months, costs a lot and rarely brings an effect proportional to the effort.

Meanwhile real shifts in sales results come from something else: from small, systematic improvements of what the company does every day. Rewriting the follow-up email so that conversion rises from eighteen to twenty-two percent. Changing the order of questions at the first meeting. Adding one step in the qualification process that eliminates poorly matched clients. Each of these moves looks trivial on its own. Together, after a year, they can change results by tens of percent.

Companies that do not do this regularly eventually get to these elements anyway, only under the pressure of external factors, when there is some problem or the biggest client leaves or does not come in. Such reactive action is far more expensive than a process of continuous improvement in sales. A company’s success will be decided by the sum of small matters rather than by one breakthrough event. You have daily influence over the process of continuous improvement. Over whether something spectacular happens to you, you have little.

The owner does not know their own numbers

“How much does it cost you to acquire a client?” I don’t know exactly. “What is the conversion from the first meeting to the second?” We don’t measure it. “How many leads on average do you need to close one client?” Depends on the month.

These are not exotic metrics. They are the basics without which rational sales decisions cannot be made. If you do not know what it costs you to acquire a client, you do not know whether current marketing spend makes sense. If you do not know the conversions between stages, you do not know where the bottleneck of the process is and what to improve to increase effectiveness. If you do not know your average sales cycle, you do not know how many deals you have to open today to make the result next quarter.

In B2B technology companies this lack of awareness of the numbers hits doubly hard, because sales cycles are usually long and contract values high. A twenty percent error in the forecast can end with a sizeable, usually expensive part of the team having nothing to do.

At one event I talked to the CEO of a SaaS company who was actively looking for an investor. The company had existed for four years, had clients and, as he claimed, well-trodden sales processes. I asked about the number of new clients per month, average revenue per client, how long clients stay, acquisition cost. The CEO knew only the average monthly revenue, so he called over the sales director. The director did not remember the acquisition cost from ads or the conversions at funnel stages, but proudly said they had three salespeople and were doing outbound. He did not know, however, how many new contact sequences they initiate per week, what their open rate is or how many calls a day end with a lead becoming a prospect. Would you invest? And now, hand on heart: how many of these numbers do you know in your company?

How to win B2B clients when referrals and inbound are not enough

Referrals are the most common source of clients in B2B service companies and the best in terms of quality. The problem is different: you do not control them. You do not know when they will appear, how many there will be, for what and for how much. You cannot increase their volume on demand or plan a pipeline for the quarter.

The quiet version of the same problem is a company in which all sales rest on inbound. The company creates content, runs paid ads, from time to time referrals come in. Sales are closed from whatever comes in and everything works up to a point.

The problem appears in two scenarios. First: the sources weaken. The algorithm changes, the campaign stops converting, referrals dry up. The company suddenly has nothing to work with and realizes it does not know how to generate potential clients actively. Second: the company wants to grow. Then the volume has to be multiplied, and simply throwing more money at inbound is not enough. Not in a sensible way, not in a sensible time.

Good B2B technology companies have both engines. Inbound builds trust and attracts clients ready to buy. Outbound actively reaches those who do not yet know they have a problem, or do not know that you are the answer. A company without active outbound has limited influence over its own growth.

Moving from “whoever comes to us” to “whom we want to reach” is one of the most important changes a company can make. It starts with precise segmentation: whom you are looking for, in which industry, what size of company, with what problem, who makes the decisions. The only companies that should remain on the list are those you are all but certain your value proposition will fit perfectly.

My experience shows that a cold email can open doors even to CEOs of companies with billions in turnover. The difference between an email that lands in the bin and one that someone reads and replies to does not lie in the tool. It lies in the preparatory process: choosing one element of the value proposition, building the segment and the database, manually qualifying every record. Only then do you write. If you contact only companies you can really help, you have greater conviction in these activities, and that conviction shows in the communication.

The biggest mistake in sales that many business owners make is not selling, but passively waiting and reacting to what happens to come along. Sales will not build themselves and nobody will come to help you if you do not take responsibility for it.

Scaling a technology company: from bottleneck to a company that works without you

Start with one process. Describe it the way you run it today. Test whether someone else is able to repeat it. Refine. Iterate.

Hiring more people without an organized system brings more chaos, not more scale. The same goes for automation, which is so loudly talked about today: if you automate chaos, you get chaos, only on a larger scale.

Many owners still try to manage time: they plan the day, block slots, make to-do lists. But the problem is not in time, it is in energy. An hour of deep strategic work is not the same as an hour of operational meetings. Your energy as an owner is like sunlight. Scattered, it reaches many places, but in none is it strong enough to change anything. Condensed and aimed at one place, it starts a fire.

A simple test I recommend to owners: for two weeks, note how much time you spend delivering value to clients, on projects, on administration and firefighting, and how much on strategy, developing the offer, developing the team’s competences and winning the most important clients and partners. That proportion says what stage your company is at. Changing that proportion within a set time is a good goal for an owner. Working in the company instead of on the company is fine on one condition: you treat this stage as transitional.

Procrastination in business is often not laziness but a symptom of the lack of a system. You put off cold mailingbecause you have no database. You put off meetings because you do not know what to propose. If you had a system, the next step would be obvious. About how to scale a small company without breaking it along the way, I write in a separate article.

Growing a B2B technology company: nine areas to check

Everything I write about above comes down to nine areas. Go through them with your hand on your heart and count how many of them you recognize in your own company.

1. All sales depend on the owner.
2. The company has sales targets but no sales system.
3. The company talks about technology, the client buys results.
4. There is no process of continuous improvement in the company.
5. Operational knowledge is in people’s heads, not in documentation.
6. The owner does not know their own numbers.
7. All sales rest on inbound.
8. The company tries to sell everything to everyone.
9. The company has no sales strategy, only a set of activities.

Each of these nine mistakes has one thing in common: it looks operational, but it is systemic. It will not be fixed by a point action. Hiring a new salesperson, changing the website or another interesting campaign will not solve it. They can be addressed by rebuilding the way the company thinks about sales at all. By moving from the intuitive and reactive mode, in which everything depends on the owner, to the systemic mode, in which sales are a mechanism.

If you recognize more than three of these points in your company, you do not have a problem with leads, price or the team. You have a problem with sales architecture. And that is good news, because architecture can be designed.

The first step

Retooling a company, even a small one, while maintaining continuity of operations can take a year or more. But even the longest journey begins with the first step. Sometimes that step is an honest assessment of where you are.

In the free guide “From intuition to system” (available in Polish) I describe the mechanisms you have read about in this article in more detail, and add more of them.

How to grow a B2B technology company: frequently asked questions

How to grow a technology company that grew organically and got stuck?

By changing the operating mode, not by another tactic. A company that has reached a plateau on referrals and networking needs a sales strategy (whom it sells to and whom it turns down), a narrowed offer, a value proposition described in the language of the client’s problem and result, a written sales process with numbers, and active outbound alongside inbound. Only then can sales be handed to someone other than the owner.

Where to start when all sales in the company depend on the owner?

With writing down one process the way the owner runs it today: the stages, the goals at each stage, the client qualification criteria, the answers to typical objections. Then a test of whether someone else can repeat it, and iterations. Hiring a salesperson before this step usually ends with a pipeline full of wrong clients and the conclusion that “nobody will sell as well as I do”.

Won’t narrowing the offer reduce a technology company’s revenue?

In the short term it may cause turbulence in liquidity, which is why retooling requires a financial buffer. In the company I invested in, betting on one type of project brought a 40% increase in revenue and 25% in profits in the same year, even though we expected a drop. Usually about 20% of the offer generates most of the profits, and the rest adds complexity and lowers margins.

What numbers should the owner of a B2B technology company know?

At minimum: the client acquisition cost, the conversions between process stages (for example from the first meeting to the second), the number of leads needed to close one client, and the average sales cycle. With long cycles and high contract values, a twenty percent error in the forecast can leave an expensive part of the team without work.

How does a B2B sales strategy differ from a set of sales activities?

A set of activities is an ad campaign, a salesperson and a website, launched reactively in response to what has happened. A strategy answers whom we sell to and whom we do not, how we stand out in those clients’ eyes, which channels are profitable, what the client’s path from contact to contract looks like, who is responsible for which stage and how we know it works. It can fit on one sheet.

How long does it take to rebuild a technology company from the intuitive mode to the systemic one?

While maintaining continuity of operations, a year or more, also in a small company. The best moment to start is when the company has resources, stability and clients, not the moment when it gets really hard. Between awareness of the problem and such a moment, a few years usually pass, and that time is lost.

Let’s talk about your company, with no obligation: book a free consultation.