How We Built a Powerful $4M Sales System – with Only 2 People

For a long time, my business was stuck. Stuck at 10 people and around $1M revenue. I didn’t know how to break through the ceiling that seemed to be above us. It wasn’t until I implemented an input and KPI-driven sales system that my digital agency grew reliably, year-over-year, to $4M a year at the time of my exit. Here’s how we did it.

If you’re new here, I ran a 30+ person design and development firm until it got acquired. A designer by trade, I learned everything the hard way including sales – I had no business background and struggled to find consistent mentors. And that’s a common story: many of us are creative people who stumble into running a business. We have misguided assumptions about subjects like sales, too. We think being incredible craftspeople should be enough; that we shouldn’t have to “sell”; that sales is a dirty word aligned with plaid-jacketed, greasy-haired dudes on the used car lot.

When you eschew those beliefs, and understand that sales is about helping people make the right choice–even if it’s not choosing your company–the sooner you can look at sales as an interesting problem to solve. A problem that, when solved, will help you sleep better at night and scale your business in the predictable ways you have always dreamed about.

Let me show you how.

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*Note: this is relatively specific to running a digital agency or marketing agency, but can be easily applied to any professional services company.

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1. We Started Using a CRM

This is first for a reason. If you don’t use a CRM—and there are plenty of affordable ones out there—you don’t know your sales data. And you can’t create a system or KPIs without accurate data. So, we started with Pipedrive (and later moved to Hubspot, which was way more expensive and not any better) and logged every deal, phase, and email.

Why This Works

CRMs help keep your sales activities and communications in one place, providing simple, clear reports based on your data and sales activities. This is crucial later on when setting sales KPIs and delegating sales activities for scaling.

Often, founders don’t feel they need a CRM yet. They think they’re too small or that it’s just the founder handling sales, so it isn’t necessary. Those reasons don’t matter—start using one now, even if it’s just you, so you have data in the future when you need it.

2. We Set Reverse-Engineered Sales KPIs

The foundation of this sales system is understanding what we can control, and what we cannot. We cannot control if a client signs a contract or how many dollars we close. However, we can control how many dollars we pitch, how many deals we pitch, and so forth. Basically, we can control leading indicators, or “inputs” into the sales system.

So, we started with our overarching sales goal—what we want to close, dollar-wise, for the entire year. Let’s say $4M. Then we’d use the data from our CRM to answer key questions, and set targets for our KPIs.

For example, if we wanted to win $4M this year, we’d need to know:

• How many deals will we have to win overall?
• How much value ($) will we need to pitch?
• How many deals will we need to pitch?
• How many leads will we need to generate?

To answer these questions, we need data from our CRM:

• Average Won Deal Value (aka Average Contract Size)
• Percentage of Pitched Value Won (the percentage of value won from pitches; e.g. you pitched $1M and won $400k, that’s 40%)
• Win Percentage (how many pitched deals actually close)
• Percentage of Leads that Become Pitched Deals

Why This Works

Once we had the data alongside our overall sales goal, it was just math to reverse-engineer back to the KPIs that drove our sales efforts. These KPIs are the inputs you can control—the logs to your sales campfire—and without them, you are left to simply hope you have enough sales to keep the lights on.

The key KPIs we focused on were:

1. Total Value to Pitch (leading)
2. Pitched Deals (leading)
3. Leads to Generate (leading)
4. Number of Won Deals (lagging)
5. Total Sales (lagging)

If you want to avoid the math, use the free calculator I built for specifically this purpose.

3. We Created a Business Development Coordinator Role

Once we had a CRM—including processes for its use, and data from it—alongside data-informed sales KPIs, we were ready to get some dedicated sales help. After all, having the owner tackling all the sales is not scalable, not to mention a single point of failure.

This led to the creation of a Business Development Coordinator (BDC) role. This role was not a boots-on-the-ground sales role, designed to drum up business. Instead, it was created to:

• Help deals through the pipeline more efficiently (authoring quotes and estimates, authoring/customizing proposals and contracts)
• Qualifying leads
• Sourcing and qualifying deals (primarily RFP-based)

Why This Works

This seat was filled by a former project manager who knew what we do well. She was detail-oriented, a good writer, and self-sufficient. She had a reasonable process to follow, the CRM helped me oversee and understand where we were at, and she knew what success looked like (meeting the KPI goals) and what it didn’t look like (missing them). At the outset, we worked very closely. Nearing my exit, she was effectively doing everything and I was just doing an up-front proposal strategy meeting, and a first-pass edit on the proposals.

4. We Narrowed Our Service Offering

We started out as a generalist graphic design and web firm. Over the years, we tightened our positioning until we were “web + mobile app experts”. We offered effectively 4 services:

1. Design + build large, complex websites
2. Design + build web applications
3. Design + build mobile applications
4. Support + maintain the above.

Later on, we started doing more UX research work, but I’ll focus on the key four services listed above for now.

Why This Works

Tightening our horizontal positioning had a variety of benefits—our team became true experts, our knowledge wasn’t spread too thin, we only had to understand and support a reasonable number of tech platforms, and so forth. An additional benefit on the sales side was that our BDC had a manageable amount to learn in order to customize proposals, and we could ballpark ranges of estimates easily given our experience and historical data from Harvest. Furthermore, as we had basically four types of deals in the pipeline, we had several data points for each deal type (e.g. average size of web application deals vs. mobile application deals), which in turn helped in strategy.

5. We Created a Templated Proposal Process

Proposals are important, but professional services firms often spend way too much time on them. At least 80% of the content should be boilerplate, with the remaining 20% tailored to the prospective client. Lastly, because we’re precious about design, they’re often locked in some proprietary layout software (InDesign) or beautiful but inefficient authoring tool (Google Slides, etc).

We decided to make a proposal template for each of our four service offerings and do it all in Google Docs (since we ran on Google Workspace). Yes, a beautifully designed proposal can be made in Docs or Word with good mockups (we used SmartMockups), solid typography styles and effective use of white space. This allowed our BDC to quickly customize a new proposal for each pitch, and us to collaborate on the editing/writing process where necessary with comments and suggestions (as opposed to emailing around Draft-Proposal_v1-final-final.doc documents, which makes me want to die).

It wasn’t just about the proposal templates. There are a few critical pieces to make the whole proposal process work incredibly efficiently:

A Proposal Strategy Form and Call

The Proposal Strategy document was filled out by the BDC prior to a meeting between myself and the BDC. In a bulleted-list format, it answered critical pre-proposal authoring questions such as:

1. How we win
2. Cost estimates for each range
3. Five reasons to choose us
4. Technology to pitch
5. Case studies + references to insert, etc.

This ensured that, when the BDC went to author the proposal, they were galloping off in the right direction. Myself and/or a specific in-house SME would get on a call and go through the form with the BDC, answering and clarifying any of the key points for the proposal. This saved a ton of time in editing, and ensured there were no giant rewrites.

Doc Variables

Doc Variables is a simple Google Docs add-on that allows you to insert variables in your template (it looks like this is native functionality now, called Variable Chips, for work/school accounts within Docs). Then, when you load up the proposal, it generates a form with a field for each variable. Fill out the form and all your content is swapped in for the variables.

e.g. {{Client Name}} renders a Client Name: field. Enter ACME Corp and it’ll populate everywhere across your document. Super handy.

Pro-tip: this is also great for contract templates.

One-Page Case Studies + Reference Snippets

We kept our Case Studies short, styled exactly like the proposal template, and saved them all in a Case Studies folder. These could then be copy/pasted in, or inserted with Doc Variables. No designer or repeat authoring required.

We did the same thing with our references.

Fixed Phase 1 Discovery, Range of Cost for Phase 2

This is incredibly important for a variety of reasons which I outline a bit further down. We changed our model and almost always pitched a fixed-fee, paid Phase 1 Discovery (productized, low-risk, effort-managed), then a range of cost for Phase 2 (implementation, or design + build). For the purposes of quick proposals, this allowed us to avoid time-consuming, costly estimation processes, which slow down the proposal process an incredible amount (and are laden with huge assumptions).

Why This Works

The whole templated proposal process works for a number of key reasons:

1. Narrowing our services means only a few templates to maintain/create, and the BDC could actually understand most of what we do without being a hardcore tech person
2. The proposal strategy document meant the BDC could confidently author the proposal without guessing at key elements, and would save me tons of frustrating editing time (which was frustrating for them too)
3. We could refine our proposal, or the objects in it (case studies, references), over time to make them continuously better
4. No proprietary software like InDesign means you can delegate proposal authoring to non-designers
5. Pitching a fixed Phase 1 meant no estimation, which meant we can get proposals out the door super fast (without the lazy guesswork that often comes when companies adopt “value-based pricing”)
6. Collaboration in a cloud editor like Google Docs eliminated the need to email files back and forth with feedback scattered across a million emails.

We reached a point where we could produce a high-quality, 55+ page proposal in about 4 person-hours (2 total if I did it myself) and had a win rate of around 40% (and we routinely submitted $100k-$250k proposals).

The best part? I spent thirty to sixty minutes in the proposal strategy call, and thirty minutes editing the proposals. That’s it.

6. We Moved to a Phase 1 Discovery Model

I already mentioned that having a fixed-fee Phase 1 was crucial for completing and submitting proposals in a time-efficient manner. It avoids pulling in the team for estimation (and coordinating all those schedules, removing them from paid projects, etc.) and leaves authoring and submission entirely in the hands of Business Development.

After closing Phase 1, the project would get handed off to the project team. They’d do all the required Discovery work (I wrote a whole book about it, which is still up at the Paper Leaf site), including a big ol’ list of prioritized requirements and how to meet them.

That would lead into a Team Estimation exercise, so those who understood all of the client, the project, and the tech could actually estimate on the work required.

Those requirements would then get packaged up into a one-page, three-option sheet, wherein the client gets a choice between three options for what Phase 2 (Design + Build) looks like. At least one, but usually two, of those options fall within the estimated scope provided in the proposal.

Why This Works

• The team who understands the work, and will be doing the work, estimates the work—in a much more thorough, detailed, and informed fashion than anybody could have at the proposal stage. This also bakes in accountability for the future build phase and its budget management.
• The client gets an actual price for Phase 1, and then multiple options for Phase 2, so they feel like they have a choice—which often results in a bigger spend than anticipated.
• The client is well-informed about the work required for Phase 2, and has built strong trust and rapport with the team
• This type of work—estimation and presentation of Phase 2 options—is handled by the project team, which means the BD team can be off sourcing new deals and submitting proposals at the same time

7. We Sourced Deals + Filled the Pipeline

This is probably the biggest headache for professional services firms across the board. There are countless articles about lead generation out there, so I won’t regurgitate them. Instead, I’ll tell you how we worked.

Part of our sales KPIs, you’ll remember from above, was Pitched Deals. In order to have enough deals to pitch (including proposals) is having enough leads, or opportunities, that will become pitched deals.

So, as a team, we had a goal for the Leads to Generate (or, New Deals if you prefer that term) KPI. We’d fill that pipeline a variety of ways:

1. Inbound leads. Most semi-established firms get a few of these a week or month. For us, they came from brand-building, content marketing, and referrals.
2. RFPs. Yes, you probably hate RFPs and feel like they’re against your personal values. And while plenty of RFPs made me shake my head, I’m here to tell you that if you have an effective proposal process, they aren’t a big deal (and can add significant top-line revenue to your business). We had a recurring weekly task for the BDC to scour a list of RFP sites and do targeted Google searches, alongside email subscriptions to RFP sites and services that would send RFP opportunities to our inboxes.
3. Existing Business: When we finally added an account manager, responsible for existing business, we developed a process for upselling. This included site/app maintenance, pitching retainers, and suggesting new features or micro-projects. When someone is actually responsible for this, it immediately stops falling by the wayside.
4. Partner Referrals: The agency that acquired Paper Leaf (ZGM) started to send us sizeable leads for their existing clients, which was a big part of the strategy behind the acquisition. We also had a few handshake partnerships over the years with SEO firms, PPC-only shops, and the like.

Note: the above was all handled without a true marketing / ad strategy or spend. Paper Leaf now has in-house marketing.

8. We Kept Tabs on Sales KPI Pace

Lastly, we implemented a reporting process that was designed to keep us on pace to hit our sales goals, and avoid nasty end-of-the-month surprises. It was fairly straightforward, but hugely valuable for me and feeling okay about delegating something as important as sales.

Bi-Weekly Sales Pace Check

First, we had a Bi-Weekly Pace Check. This was a recurring task that popped up every 2 weeks, assigned to the BDC. They were tasked with using CRM data to provide an update on critical sales KPIs:

• New Deals (Leads Generated)
• Pitched Deals
• Value Pitched
• Deals Won
• Total Sales

They provided a few pieces of information in the update:

1. Total vs Monthly Goal (e.g. if we were supposed to pitch 17 deals a month, and had pitched 4 thus far, that’d be 4/17).
2. Total vs Expected Pace (e.g. if this was a half-month check-in, the above example would be 4/8.5 – 8.5 is half of the month’s goal).
3. Percentage of Goal (4/17 is 24% of our monthly goal)
4. Pace Percentage (4/8.5 is 47% of where we should be pace-wise, adjusting for the fact we’re halfway through the month).

Furthermore, a red/yellow/green stoplight system was in place (so I could quickly glance at the yellows and reds, and celebrate the greens), and additional information was added to provide context. For instance, if we were only at 47% of our pitched deal pace but had three proposals and one estimate being sent out in the next few days, then we were effectively at our goal. That kind of information was added for context.

This Pace Check would be completed and sent to me shortly before the weekly 1-on-1 I had with the BDC, and in that meeting, we could strategize on what we needed to focus on, ignore, or otherwise do to course-correct if needed.

Monthly Management Meeting

Since I was accountable for sales to the leadership team, I would report on all sales KPIs for the month and provide a snapshot of how we were entering the upcoming month. This process kept me accountable to sales targets, kept the leadership team informed, and allowed us to brainstorm solutions to any sales-related issues we encountered.

Quarterly Company Meeting

Finally, I would report on sales to the entire company during our Quarterly Company Meeting. This presentation also included highlights of major wins and prospective deals that were close to closing. This had several benefits:

1. It demonstrated accountability from leadership to the rest of the company
2. It celebrated all the hard work the Business Development team did (mostly the BDC, and then the Account Manager when we added that role in my last year)
3. It kept the team informed about sales and company stability in that vertical
4. It kept the team excited about what was coming next

Bringing it All Together: Sales is an Eco-System, Not Just a Process

This whole process took years of iteration, trial, and error. We learned every step the hard way, starting with having no idea if we were selling enough. It wasn’t until we finally adopted what I’m dubbing the Reliable Revenue system that I was able to sleep better at night.

This approach worked for us—and it will probably work for you too. The key thing to remember, though, is that this isn’t just a process; it’s an ecosystem. Ecosystems, by definition, function as a whole—if you remove one component, the entire system can fail.

In this sales eco-system, that means:

1. You can’t just throw someone in a Business Development Coordinator role and expect them to succeed. They need KPIs, a process to meet those KPIs, a manageable range of services to understand and sell, and more.
2. You can’t just use The Reliable Revenue™ Sales Calculator to set sales KPIs and goals, then expect them to be hit. You need to adopt a CRM, and have a speedy process to get enough deals through the pipeline while maintaining high standards of work.
3. You can’t just template your proposals and expect everything to speed up. You need to delegate that job, and defer estimation, and have a strategy call before the authoring starts.

And so on. While the steps we took to build a $4M sales engine worked for us, it isn’t necessarily a turnkey system. You’ll need to adapt the specifics to your people, your company, and your clients. But the overarching principles and steps are proven to work together to form a sales ecosystem that can turn you and your under-resourced sales team into a powerhouse. No more guesswork, no more sleepless nights – just reliable revenue.