The first ten institutional sales of a firm are usually made by a small set of senior people, in conversations that look almost nothing like sales. The next hundred are made by a structure.
The transition
The transition between the two is the most reliably mishandled period in the life of a growing firm. The firm tends, in this period, to assume that the practices that produced the first ten sales — long, patient, trust-led — will scale. They will not. They were not a process; they were a craft, and the craft does not scale by being repeated faster.
What replaces the craft
What replaces the craft, in a well-run firm, is a structure that is appropriate to the firm’s institutional buyer — not a structure imported from a different motion, and not a structure scaled up from the firm’s SME motion. The structure has to be designed.
Compensation and territory
Compensation and territory in the new structure are downstream of the operating posture, not upstream. Firms that lead with compensation design tend to produce structures that are internally consistent but externally wrong. The compensation has to be designed against the buyer’s procurement reality, the firm’s own operating cadence, and the senior people’s actual time.
A note on founders
The founder, in our experience, has a specific role through the crossing — to lead the small number of conversations the new structure cannot yet hold. The role declines over time. It does not disappear immediately.
Practice · Management · Marketing