Custom Sales Strategies and Playbooks For Growing B2B Businesses
Built to solve why sales hires fail and grow revenue without adding headcount, whether you're the bottleneck, growth has slowed, or you're ready for what's next.
What This Looks Like in Practice
When the Business Still Depends on You
You built this by selling it yourself. You know the challenges you solve and why they matter, you know the clients, and for a long time that worked. You know your "why" better than anyone, and everyone wants to talk to the owner. When you meet with someone, it's easy for you to close the deal. But things slip through the cracks when multiple follow-ups are needed. And you're ready to focus on more long-term strategic work.
So now you have a sales team (or you're about to hire one) and everything still runs through you. Deals stall when you're not in the room. Clients ask for you by name. Your sales leader is capable but can't close without your credibility behind them. This isn't a people problem. Or even a pipeline problem. It's a systems problem. It's the same reason sales hires fail elsewhere: not because the hire was wrong, but because the system they were hired into was never built.
Before you can step back, the business needs to be able to sell without you. That means your process, your instincts, and your relationships have to live somewhere other than your head. We build that infrastructure: the playbooks, the qualification process, the handoff points, the sales success structure. So your team can execute at your standard without you in every conversation.
And before you add headcount, we look at what you're already sitting on. Most companies have untapped revenue in their existing base: partnerships that aren't producing, follow-up that isn't happening, clients who would expand if someone asked, referral programs that exist on paper but not in practice. We close those leaks first. Adding salespeople to a leaky system just scales the problem.
The goal isn't to remove you from sales overnight. It's to build the system that earns your trust enough that you can step back. and the business doesn't notice.
When Growth is Slower Than it Should Be
At some point the strategies that got you here stop working as well as they used to. Not because you did anything wrong it's because you outgrew them. What works at $2M doesn't scale to $8M. What works at $8M breaks at $20M. If growth is feeling harder than it should, that's usually why. This isn't about starting over. It's about recalibrating.
We look at the full revenue engine and ask three questions: what's still working and should be scaled, what's dragging and should be cut, and what's missing that needs to be built. What's missing looks different for every company. For one it's a partner motion with real structure and accountability, so partners move past willingness and actually contribute to revenue. For another it's a client success motion that keeps clients engaged long after the deal closes, so they hit their goals, feel valued, and refer business. For another it's a repeatable sales system that new reps can step into without depending on the institutional knowledge of two people you're hoping stay loyal. For another it's an events strategy designed to generate real ROI instead of booth traffic and branded pens. Or it's something else entirely. That's what the Diagnostic is for.
The output isn't a deck with recommendations. It's an installed system your team can run; built around how your business actually works, not an enterprise playbook that requires three times your current budget to execute.
If you've been saying "next quarter will be better" for a few quarters in a row, it's worth asking whether the strategy itself is the problem. That's exactly what this engagement is designed to find out.
When You're Ready for What's Next
Some companies aren't behind, they're ready. Revenue is stable, the team is executing, and the founder or CEO is already thinking about the next move. A new service line. A new market. A product expansion that clients have been asking about, or one you're convinced they need. This is where a lot of growth-stage companies quietly burn budget and credibility. The vision is real. The excitement is real. The gap is that no one has pressure-tested it yet.
Before you build it, launch it, or hire for it, there are questions worth answering. Do your current clients actually want this? Do new clients care enough about it to pay? Is there a noticeable gap in the market you're targeting, or is it already crowded with better-known competitors? What would it actually take to deliver this well, and is that realistic at your current size?
This is work we do before the launch, not after. Validating demand, stress-testing assumptions, sizing the opportunity against your actual capacity. The goal isn't to talk you out of the vision. It's to make sure what you build has a real chance of working.
The founders who do this right don't move slower. They move with more confidence because when they launch, they already know the path to profitability.
Whichever of the three situations above sounds like you, the path runs through the same three phases.
Diagnose: A paid, structured diagnostic that identifies whether the real problem is capacity, process, or something else, before you spend a dollar on a hire or a rebuild.
Build: A custom playbook built around how your buyers actually buy, not a templated framework adapted to fit. This includes the qualification process, the handoffs, and the sales success structure focused on your company's unique differentiator. Your team executes at your standard without you in the room.
Sustain: The playbook isn't something built once and left alone. This is a quarterly partnership, priced as a percentage of the Build engagement, that keeps execution on track, measures results, and adjusts strategy against what's moving across the dozens of companies I work with in any given year. It's what keeps a system from going stale once attention moves elsewhere. quarterly, timed to board meeting cadence, so what you're bringing into the room holds up to scrutiny.
How We Work
Summer brings extensive hands-on leadership at growth-stage companies including: sitting in every seat in the customer journey (service, CS, sales, Marketing/PR), scaling a company through M&A, and co-founding an investor-backed fintech.
Most engagements begin with a diagnostic to assess readiness and identify priorities. Ready to discuss your growth plans?
Curious what this costs before you book? Here's the range.