In a lot of engineering and technical consultancies, business development quietly sits with one or two people — usually the founders or the principal consultants. It works, often for years. The catch is that it can work well enough that nobody notices how much is resting on so few shoulders until one of them moves on.
When the Client Relationships Sit With Too Few People
In 2023, Jim Herbison, General Manager of Aqualinc, got in touch because sales had become a struggle. Part of the problem was that selling had become siloed. As Jim put it: “We were relying on a small group of people to secure work. This was already an issue, then two of our founding directors decided to move out of the business. They held relationships with a lot of key clients, so we were at risk of losing that connection.”
The words worth noticing there are “at risk.” It doesn’t automatically end badly when senior people move on. But if the relationships live with them, rather than with the business, you’re relying on goodwill and good timing to keep them. That’s not a position most consultancies would choose on purpose.
Who’s Who in the Zoo
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does take a bit of deliberate effort. Jim described it this way: “You can’t have one point of contact within clients’ organisations. You have to have multiple connections.”
A good starting question is whether you know who’s who in the zoo on the client side. Who actually makes the decision? Who influences it? Who’s the client contact’s second-in-command, and would they know your name if the main contact moved on tomorrow? In my experience, the second question gets more honest answers than the first.
And I’d suggest getting on the phone to do it. A short, friendly call — no agenda beyond “how’s it going?” — builds a relationship that an email chain rarely does. It also means the relationship doesn’t live in one person’s mobile phone.
It helps to keep a shared record too, so a colleague heading to see the same client can see what’s already been discussed rather than going in blind. That’s really what a CRM is for — we’ve got more on that in our piece on CRM for sales teams.
Your Delivery Engineers Are Already on the Front Line
There’s another group worth thinking about. Your installation and technical teams are often the last people your client deals with once a project is delivered, which makes them a fairly natural part of your sales front line. They’re in the building, on the site, and usually the first to hear about whatever the client is wrestling with next.
Most won’t want to be called salespeople, and they don’t need to be. A few simple, curious questions on site can be enough to surface something worth passing back to whoever looks after the account:
“How’s this working for you compared with what you expected?”
“What’s the next thing on your plate that’s giving you grief?”
“Who else on your team should we be talking to about this?”
None of that is being salesy, it’s just being curious and passing on what you’ve heard.
Sales Coaching for Teams: Making It Everyone’s Job
Almost two years after the first workshop with Aqualinc, Jim described where the team had landed: “Everybody is responsible for business development. Before, sales were falling on our principal consultants.”
It’s worth being honest about what that does and doesn’t mean. Jim was clear that the principal consultants still carry their job too — building relationships, finding out what clients are struggling with, and talking about how the business can help.
A single workshop is a good foundation, but in my experience it rarely changes habits on its own. At Aqualinc, I followed the workshop with monthly coaching for a year, which is where a lot of the practice happened. That’s really what sales coaching for teams is for: turning a good session into something people actually do on a Tuesday.
Ready to Spread the Load?
If business development in your consultancy sits with one or two people, it may be worth asking what would happen if either of them were suddenly unavailable. I work with engineering and technical teams across New Zealand on exactly this, through sales training for teams and ongoing B2B sales coaching, built around solving problems rather than pushing a pitch.
You can read the full story of how Aqualinc went from relying on a small group to sharing business development across the team in their case study.