The founding partner was the entire commercial function — no CRM, no defined process, no pipeline visibility. Every deal lived in one person's head and calendar.
£2.1M of structured pipeline built in 90 days. First non-partner-led proposal sent successfully. Business now ready to make its first commercial hire.
The situation
Twelve people. Roughly £1.8M in annual revenue. A founding partner with a formidable network and an enviable close rate on the opportunities that came his way.
No CRM. No defined sales process. No pipeline visibility beyond what the founding partner could hold in his head on any given morning.
The firm had been talking about hiring a salesperson for eighteen months. Each time it came up, it got deferred. The reason was never stated clearly, but I’ve seen this enough times to recognise it: the founding partner wasn’t confident the business was ready. There was no process to hand over. No defined territory. No way to measure what the new hire was doing or whether it was working.
He was right to be cautious. Hiring a commercial person into that environment would have produced the same outcome I’ve seen elsewhere: an able person, given no infrastructure, failing — and the failure being attributed to the person.
Discovery Week: what we actually found
The Discovery Week process exists precisely for situations like this. You can’t solve a problem you haven’t properly defined, and the stated problem (we need a sales process) is rarely the complete picture.
Three findings stood out.
The founding partner’s calendar was the CRM. Meeting notes lived in email threads. Proposal status was tracked in a shared spreadsheet that hadn’t been updated consistently in months. The state of any given opportunity existed, accurately, only in one person’s memory. When I asked what was in the pipeline, the answer required a twenty-minute conversation during which things kept being remembered or revised.
There were no stage definitions. The firm had language for deal stages — “in conversation,” “proposal stage,” “progressing well” — but these meant different things in different contexts. A deal “in conversation” might be a thirty-minute introductory call two months ago or a deal that was about to close next week. There was no way to distinguish them from outside.
The ICP existed in the founding partner’s head but nowhere else. He knew instinctively which opportunities were worth pursuing and which weren’t. That knowledge had never been written down, tested against historical data, or made available to anyone else. It was one of several things that made the business commercially dependent on one person.
What we built
The engagement had a clear scope: build the commercial infrastructure the business needed to grow without being entirely dependent on the founding partner. That meant CRM, pipeline architecture, and the foundational process documentation.
CRM implementation. We chose HubSpot — I’m a HubSpot Solutions Partner and it’s generally the right fit for a professional services business at this size. The implementation itself was straightforward. The data migration was not. Pulling historical deals, contacts, and context out of email threads, a barely-used spreadsheet, and the founding partner’s inbox took longer than expected — closer to three weeks than the one we’d planned for. This is worth naming honestly: migrating from “no CRM” isn’t a clean technical exercise. It’s archaeology. You find things you’d forgotten, things recorded inconsistently, and things that were never recorded at all. We got there, but if you’re in a similar position, budget for this taking time.
ICP definition. We did a closed-won analysis on the firm’s last four years of engagements. The pattern that emerged was clear: their best clients — highest-value, longest relationships, most referrals generated — were SME businesses in the £30M–£150M revenue range, in sectors adjacent to their advisory network, almost always referred through a specific type of professional intermediary (accountants, lawyers, other advisors to that market). Engagements under £50k were disproportionately time-consuming relative to their value.
Writing that down and building it into the CRM as qualification criteria sounds obvious in retrospect. But it had never been made explicit, which meant there was no filter on what got put into the pipeline. Defining your ICP properly is one of the highest-leverage early steps in this kind of engagement.
Stage definitions with exit criteria. We defined five stages — Initial Contact, Qualified Opportunity, Discovery Complete, Proposal Submitted, Negotiation — each with specific exit criteria. For a deal to be “Qualified,” for example, the ICP criteria needed to be met, the decision-maker identified, and a genuine problem confirmed through a structured conversation. Not a promising email. Not a scheduled call. Those things needed to have happened. The principles behind these definitions apply broadly, but the specifics here were built around how this firm actually sells.
Reporting the partner could use. One of the things that kills CRM adoption is reporting that’s designed for a VP of Sales at a hundred-person company. We built three views: a pipeline overview showing total value by stage, a weekly activity summary showing what had moved and what hadn’t, and a forecast showing weighted opportunity value against the next ninety days. All of it visible in under three minutes each morning.
A proposal template. The founding partner had been writing every proposal from scratch. This is common in professional services and it’s a significant time cost — forty-five minutes to two hours per proposal, depending on the engagement. We built a structured template with a defined problem framing section, a scope section, a commercial section, and a credibility section. Not a generic document, but one that reflected how the firm actually positioned its work and what their best proposals had in common.
What changed
Ninety days in, the pipeline had £2.1M of real opportunities in it — properly staged, properly qualified, visible to anyone who needed to look.
That number matters less than what it represents: for the first time, the founding partner could look at a screen and understand the state of the commercial pipeline without having to reconstruct it from memory. He could see what was moving, what had stalled, and where the attention needed to go.
The first non-partner-led proposal was sent in week eleven. The founding partner reviewed it, suggested two changes, and signed it off. The junior partner who sent it described the process as “the first time I’ve felt like I knew what I was doing commercially.” That was probably the clearest signal that something had shifted.
What comes next
The business is now evaluating when to make its first commercial hire. That conversation looks different now than it did a year ago.
Before, the question was: “Can we find someone capable enough to figure out our business?” Now it’s: “We have a defined ICP, a working CRM, documented stage criteria, and a pipeline the founding partner can supervise without being in every deal. When does the volume justify a dedicated commercial person?”
Those are very different questions. The first is a bet on finding a unicorn. The second is a sensible hiring decision with a clear onboarding path and measurable success criteria.
The founding partner is still involved in the highest-value opportunities — that’s appropriate and probably always will be to some extent. But he’s no longer the only person capable of running one.
Sector, size, and identifying details have been changed to preserve client confidentiality. The commercial situation and outcomes are real.