Sales Process & Systematic Selling
What 20+ Years as a Sales Consultant Taught Me About Growing Businesses
What 20+ years of sales consulting have taught Sam Kariuki about sales performance, business growth, sales systems and building predictable revenue.
Many years ago, I read something that stayed with me.
If you want to be successful, find something you love doing. Once you find it, do it, even if nobody is paying you to do it.
I liked the idea.
But as I grew older, I discovered a problem with it.
If you spend your life doing only what you enjoy without figuring out how to make a living from it, you may have found a hobby, not a career.
I came to believe that meaningful work sits at the intersection of three things:
What you love.
What you are good at.
What people are willing to pay you to solve.
When those three come together, something powerful happens.
You do not just have a job.
You have a purpose that can become a business.
I Found Mine in Helping
More than 20 years ago, I began to discover what that intersection looked like for me.
Helping.
I enjoy helping people solve problems.
I have always found it difficult to walk away when I see someone struggling with a problem I believe I can help solve.
But I still had to answer the commercial question:
How do you build a business around helping people?
The answer came from observing businesses.
I saw entrepreneurs working hard but struggling to turn that effort into growth.
I saw salespeople under pressure to hit targets without the capability, tools or management support to do so.
I saw managers struggling with questions such as:
Do I have the right people?
Why isn't my team performing?
Why does one salesperson succeed while everyone else struggles?
Why does sales improve for a few months and then fall back again?
I saw businesses with good products that could not translate those products into sustainable revenue.
And I saw entrepreneurs who had built businesses around their dreams but were working harder than ever without seeing the returns they expected.
I felt for them.
And I realised:
These were problems I could help solve.
That was the beginning of my journey into consulting.
Consulting Is Not About Giving Advice
One of the best definitions of consulting I encountered early in my career described it as helping people and organisations become more efficient and effective in pursuing and achieving their goals.
That definition still resonates with me.
But more than 20 years of experience have taught me something else.
Consulting is not really about advice.
It is about results.
A strategy document can be excellent.
A workshop can be brilliant.
A presentation can receive a standing ovation.
A sales training programme can receive exceptional participant feedback.
But if nothing changes afterwards, what have we accomplished?
That question has shaped the way I work.
The Measure of Our Work Is What Changes Afterwards
My definition of a successful consulting engagement has become simple:
The client should be better off because we were there.
Better revenue.
Better sales performance.
Better salespeople.
Better managers.
Better systems.
Better customer relationships.
Better execution.
Better profitability.
Better organisational capability.
And, ultimately, a business that is less dependent on individual heroics and more capable of producing results consistently.
That philosophy was present when I wrote the original article more than a decade ago. I wrote that I wanted clients to make more sales and profits, become more efficient and competitive, and develop happier, motivated and professional people.
What experience has done is strengthen that belief.
What Twenty Years of Consulting Has Taught Me
Over the years, I have worked with businesses at different stages of growth and across many industries.
The problems may look different, but I have noticed a pattern.
Most organisations do not have a single sales problem.
They have interconnected problems.
Sometimes the problem is strategy.
Sometimes it is sales talent.
Sometimes it is leadership.
Sometimes it is the sales process.
Sometimes the value proposition is not compelling enough.
Sometimes the organisation is targeting the wrong customers.
Sometimes the sales team has been trained but not coached.
Sometimes the CRM contains plenty of information but nobody uses it to manage the business.
Sometimes the organisation has good people but a poor system.
And sometimes the problem is simple. Everyone is busy, but not everyone is working on the things that will produce growth.
This changed the way I think about sales performance.
I stopped asking:
"How do we make this salesperson better?"
and started asking:
"What is preventing this organisation from consistently producing the results it wants?"
That is a different consulting question.
I've Seen What Happens When the System Works
One of the most rewarding experiences in consulting is watching a business move from potential to performance.
I've seen businesses grow by 600% over three years.
I've watched sales teams move from inconsistent performance to consistently achieving their targets.
I've seen sales managers who spent most of their time chasing their teams begin to lead, coach and develop them.
I've seen organisations that depended on a few individuals build sales capability across the wider team.
And I've seen people who lacked confidence become capable sales professionals because they received the structure, coaching and support they needed.
These experiences have reinforced something I now believe:
Great sales results should not be occasional events. They should become an organisational capability.
The Rockstar Salesperson Is Not the System
Early in my career, like many people in sales, I admired the exceptional salesperson.
The person who could walk into a room, build rapport, persuade almost anyone and close deals that others could not.
Those people are valuable.
But there is a problem when a business depends on them.
What happens when they leave?
What happens when they have a bad year?
What happens when the market changes?
What happens when the business doubles and their personal network can no longer carry the growth?
Over time, I became less interested in creating exceptional individual performers and more interested in creating systems that allow more people to perform exceptionally.
That thinking became the foundation of Systematic Selling™.
The idea is simple:
Don't build a business that needs sales heroes. Build a business that enables ordinary people to produce extraordinary results consistently.
Training Alone Does Not Transform Sales Performance
Another lesson came from seeing what happens after sales training.
A team attends a good programme.
Everyone is enthusiastic.
They learn new techniques.
They practise.
They leave motivated.
Three months later, many are back to their old behaviours.
Why?
Because knowledge does not automatically become behaviour.
And behaviour does not automatically become performance.
For sales capability to translate into results, it needs reinforcement through:
Coaching
Management
Systems
Accountability
Tools
Practice
Measurement
Leadership
Repetition
This is why our work has moved beyond traditional sales training.
We do not only ask:
"What do these salespeople need to know?"
We ask:
"What needs to change in the organisation for these people to consistently perform?"
That is a bigger question.
The Most Important Thing I Have Learned About Consulting
Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is this:
A consultant cannot create results for a client.
We can bring knowledge.
We can bring experience.
We can bring frameworks.
We can challenge assumptions.
We can develop strategies.
We can train people.
We can coach managers.
We can build systems.
We can provide tools.
But ultimately, the client has to act.
I wrote about this in the original article more than a decade ago. I said that I did not want to be involved in writing plans and papers that would never be implemented. We wanted strategies to be simple and practical enough to execute, with systems to monitor implementation and keep the organisation moving.
I still believe that.
In fact, I believe it more strongly today.
The Difference Between Activity and Progress
One of the biggest reasons consulting projects fail is not necessarily bad advice.
It is lack of action.
I have seen organisations become busy without becoming more effective.
Meetings.
Reports.
Presentations.
Strategies.
Workshops.
Emails.
CRM updates.
Sales calls.
Proposals.
Everything looks active.
But the fundamental question is:
Is all this activity moving the organisation closer to its strategic objective?
That is the difference between activity and progress.
A mediocre strategy that is executed can produce better results than a brilliant strategy sitting in a boardroom.
As I wrote years ago:
"A semi-good consulting engagement backed with strategic action will bear more fruits than a perfect one without strategic action."
I would still stand by that statement today.
Why We Sometimes Say No
This philosophy has influenced the type of consulting work we accept.
I have learned that not every consulting assignment is a good assignment.
Sometimes a client wants a training programme but does not want to change the management practices that undermine performance.
Sometimes they want a strategy but are not prepared to invest in implementation.
Sometimes they want a quick fix for a problem that took years to create.
Sometimes they want us to "fix the salespeople" when the real problem is the commercial system.
In such situations, saying yes may generate revenue for the consultant.
But it may not generate value for the client.
And that is not the kind of consulting business I want to build.
From Helping People to Building Systems
My understanding of "helping" has evolved.
Initially, I thought helping meant giving people answers.
Then I realised that sometimes helping means asking better questions.
Sometimes helping means challenging people.
Sometimes it means telling a CEO something they do not want to hear.
Sometimes it means telling a salesperson that their problem is not the market.
Sometimes it means telling a manager that their team's performance problem is a management problem.
And sometimes it means helping an organisation build a system that makes the right behaviour easier and the wrong behaviour harder.
That is where I believe the greatest leverage lies.
What Success Looks Like to Me Today
Twenty years ago, I would have described consulting success as helping a client solve a problem.
Today, my definition is bigger.
Success is when I can look at an organisation and see that it has become more capable because of our involvement.
When salespeople consistently hit targets, not because they had one extraordinary month, but because they have developed repeatable habits.
When sales managers know how to coach rather than simply demand.
When leaders have visibility into the health of their revenue pipeline.
When customer acquisition becomes systematic rather than opportunistic.
When the business can grow without everything depending on the founder.
When a company can withstand the departure of a high-performing salesperson without its revenue engine collapsing.
When strategy becomes execution.
When capability becomes performance.
When performance becomes predictable.
That is the kind of transformation that makes consulting worthwhile.
And After 20+ Years, I Still Love It
Consulting has taught me a lot about business.
But it has taught me even more about people.
I've learned that most people want to do well.
I've learned that performance problems are often capability problems before they are attitude problems.
I've learned that people perform differently when they understand what is expected, know how to do it, have the tools to do it, and receive consistent coaching.
I've learned that entrepreneurs do not necessarily need more motivation. They often need clarity, focus and systems.
I've learned that salespeople do not always need another sales technique. Sometimes they need better leadership.
And I've learned that businesses do not necessarily need to work harder.
They need to work systematically.
That is why, after more than two decades, I still find myself doing what I discovered all those years ago:
Helping.
Only now I understand helping differently.
It is not simply helping someone solve today's problem.
It is helping them build the capability to solve tomorrow's problem without you.
That, to me, is the real measure of a consultant.
And that is what continues to make this work worthwhile.
I love it. I enjoy it. And after all these years, it still pays.
Sam Kariuki
Founder & Lead Consultant, Growth Partners
Sales Performance | Revenue Growth | Systematic Selling™