Why B2B Revenue Stalls Between $1M and $10M

Why did referrals stop being enough?

Referrals are great. They are the easiest deals to close, and they are often your best clients, because they already know your product works. But they have a natural cap. You can't turn the volume up when you want more. If they go quiet, so does your revenue.

There is a second problem. By the time you are doing a few million a year, you have usually worked through most of the market that already knows you. The rest of your market has never heard of you.

So the team keeps calling the same old list and emailing the same old list. You get diminishing returns. You might be working harder than ever, but you are not getting the same return on the effort. That is what a stall feels like from the inside.

Referrals are helpful. They are not a strategy.

Won't more inbound and content fix it?

Inbound is worth doing. Your website, search, content and being recommended all build over time. In some industries content is the big driver.

The catch is speed. Search can take many, many months to get any traction, if any at all. Content takes a while too. For most B2B companies it is a long-term game. It supplements your growth, but it rarely adds your next million on its own in the time frame you want.

And like referrals, you don't control it. Other people are deciding when your next lead turns up.

Why didn't hiring a head of sales or marketing fix it?

This is the pattern we see most. You get to a million or two a year. You finally have enough revenue to hire someone to own sales and marketing. So you hand it over.

At that size you usually can't pay for a true A player. You might think you hired one, from the interview and the resume. Often you get a B or C player instead. Now the most important revenue job in the business is with someone who doesn't know your market the way you do.

Then three things tend to happen:

Vanity metrics. You get reports on clicks, blog posts and nice-looking emails. The real question is what the results are, and whether any of it is paying back.
No incentive to grow revenue. A comfortable base salary with no upside makes it easy to do the least and still get paid.
Salespeople become order takers. When the base is high and the commission is weak, reps work the easy deals that come in by themselves. Anyone could close those.

A rare exception exists. An A player who has already scaled a business very like yours, from a low level to a much higher one, and actually drove it. A lot of impressive resumes were just along for the ride. If you do find the real thing, you will have to pay them very well and tie it to results.

Watch: why B2B revenue stalls between $1M and $10M

Alex Bell on why B2B companies plateau on referrals, why handing off sales and marketing often stalls growth, and what the fastest growing companies do differently. Watch on YouTube

Why don't new leads close like referrals do?

Many founders think their close rate is very high. Really, their referrals were ready to buy. They just needed a few more details.

That is an order-taking sales process. "What do you need?" "Great, we can do that, sign here." It works when the buyer comes to you. It falls over when you go out to them.

A buyer who has never heard of you is skeptical. They need a proper discovery. You have to understand their pains and their current situation, map out the outcome they want, get through the objections and show them a lot more social proof. You are the bridge from where they are to where they want to be.

So when new meetings from outbound close badly, it is almost always a sales process issue, not a lead issue.

Is our offer the real problem?

Often, yes. Ask whether your offer is a vitamin or a painkiller. Does it solve an urgent problem, or is it a nice-to-have the buyer isn't sure will matter?

Then look at how you present it. We have had companies at the top of this range come to us with a website so confusing we couldn't tell what they did. Even an AI tool couldn't work it out.

When you live on referrals, you never need to fix this, because the referrer explains you. A cold buyer gets one look. If the message doesn't land, nothing else will work.

Your offer affects every number in the funnel. A weak offer means few replies turn into meetings. If lots of booked meetings don't show up, it is likely an offer issue, because they aren't excited to speak with you. Most companies at this stage have barely tested their messaging. They keep adding channels while the offer stays the same. Get the offer right and everything else gets easier. Get it wrong and growth feels like an uphill battle.

Do you actually know your numbers?

When we ask founders for their close rate, how many leads and meetings they get, and what it costs to win a client, a lot of them have no idea.

You can't improve something you can't see. There could be easy gains inside what you already do. It is fine to want to add a million, or several. But if you don't know your current numbers and the plan to get there, you are hoping and praying that one new channel will magically do it.

Get clear on your numbers first. Then you can see the gap and plan to close it.

What has to change to get past the plateau?

The founder stays involved. Not doing the work, but owning the strategy and keeping the team accountable. In the fastest growing companies we work with, the founder is always close to sales and marketing. One client of ours runs a very large business, and the founder still goes through every sales and marketing idea personally, often late at night. They don't run the work. They hand it to someone to execute.
Revenue is someone's job. Pay and targets tied to revenue, qualified meetings and closed deals. Not activity. Yes, you will pay more in total. That pay comes from revenue you wouldn't otherwise have closed.
The team works on what drives revenue. Ask everyone for a list of what they do each day. Often most of it isn't moving revenue. Cut it, or hand it to AI or someone else. Most teams also need a system to work from, with clear targets and clear inputs each week.
You go out and get your own meetings. Stop waiting for whatever comes to you. Reach the wider part of your market with channels you control, so you can turn the volume up when you want more.
Specialists where it counts. Some of the biggest companies still bring in specialist teams for specific jobs. A good partner keeps you accountable too, and your team learns from them.

If you add a few hundred thousand a year now and want to add a million, more of the same won't get you there. It needs a different approach, and you need to go harder and faster than you are used to.

What does this look like in practice?

Bruce P. at AspectPT put it simply: "Before this, we were scratching around for word-of-mouth leads." AspectPT went from $700K to $5M in pipeline in 12 months.

Glen Tunny, Founder and CEO of Consignmate: "After many years of failed marketing campaigns run in house, we finally have results which are transforming our business."

Across 20+ B2B companies in Australia and New Zealand, we have helped generate $50M+ in pipeline. Part of how we are paid is a share of the revenue we help create, so we only take on businesses we believe can grow. Past results are examples only, not a promise.

Common questions

Can referrals take a B2B company past $10M?

Sometimes, but you can't control when. Referrals can carry a business a long way, then growth slows because you're limited by how many people are mentioning you. If you want to grow on your own timeline, you need channels you control as well.

Should I hire a head of sales to get growth moving again?

Only if you can find and pay a true A player who has scaled a business like yours, and tie their pay to revenue. Otherwise you risk handing your most important function to someone who reports activity, not results. Whoever you hire, stay close to the strategy.

Why do our outbound meetings close worse than referrals?

Because referrals arrive ready to buy and cold buyers don't. Cold buyers need a full discovery, their objections handled and a lot more social proof. A low close rate on new meetings is usually a sales process issue, not a lead issue.

What should I fix first?

Know your numbers, then fix your offer. If you don't know your close rate and cost to win a client, you can't see the gap. And if a stranger can't tell what you do and why it matters, every channel you add will struggle.

Sources

Read the full video transcript

Auto-generated from the video, lightly cleaned. Some words may be mis-heard.

00:00 If your revenue's going flat somewhere in the one to 10 million a year range, it's usually because of a few key reasons. The first is you're very much relying on referrals at that point. Obviously, that has a natural cap to it as you can't just scale that up as you like most of the time, unless you go and get more referral partners on board. And so, it's not a strategy. It's definitely helpful and it's fantastic, but you can't predict it and you you can't scale referrals whatsoever. The other point to referrals is that you've saturated most of the market that already knows you, right? And so, you may be playing in 5 to 10% of your total addressable market, meaning only 5 to 10% of people in your market actually know you. Maybe they like you and trust you, right? If if you're lucky, you're only playing in a

00:45 you know, a fifth of the market that you could be playing in. And so, a lot of B2B companies continue to play in this because that's what they've always done and their sales reps are calling the same old list and your email marketing to the same old list and you're just getting diminishing returns essentially is the simplest way to put it from what you're doing. And so, yes, you might be working more, but you're just not getting the same return on the effort that you're putting in. And so, a lot of B2B companies often struggle because the founder, the CEO, whoever's leading the company has become less and less involved in the sales and marketing strategy and department and just overall function of the business. What we see is that you'll get to a million or two million a year and you'll have enough revenue to go and hire your head of sales or head of marketing, someone that owns those two

01:32 departments in your business, right? And at that point, you can't really afford to hire absolute A players and top A players. Although you might think they're A players, a lot of the times they're not and obviously you might think that they are through the interview process and the resume and their previous experience, but when it comes to it, they're not a true A player. And so, at that point, you might only be able to afford 100K a year, maybe pushing up to 150 to 200K a year in that sort of one maybe one to three million a year range. And so typically you'll get maybe a B player or a C player depending. And what that means is that you have then outsourced your sales and marketing function which is the highest revenue generating thing that you can be involved in and working on. You've outsourced it to someone that might be a B or a C player. Right? And so what happens is that they're not able

02:19 to effectively know what to do to grow your business. And so they don't have the same understanding that you do, they don't have the same knowledge. And so even if they are technically better, they still won't know how to really drive things forward and grow your revenue rapidly. A lot of the time you'll hire people and they come in, they just work on different activities and you know vanity metrics is what they sort of focus on getting and reporting to you. And so you might think that oh our marketing and sales team's working on all these great things and they you know look at the clicks and look at you know the blogs and the nice looking emails that are going out. but in reality, what are the results like? And are they actually getting a return on your investment for the business? but I still recommend that you have involvement within that. And obviously, you're not going to be doing the actual work, but having that

03:07 understanding and knowing how the pieces fit together allow you to hire the right people, manage them correctly, and then also keep them accountable for. So you'll go and hire a head of marketing, pay them 150 or 250k a year base salary, and there's no incentives. Right? So well, naturally they'll resort to doing the the least in your business to still get paid their salary, right? And live their comfortable life. Right? And so a lot of times you need to have some incentive structure for them to be incentivized to actually grow your revenue and be accountable for revenue and not just vanity metrics that you know make them look good and that they're actually you know doing great work and all of this stuff, but they're actually driving revenue growth which is all that you care about in the end of it. That's why you're paying them. On the other hand, sales people obviously it's very common to have a commission bonus structure in place. The thing that we see is that they are on too high of a base and not a good

03:58 enough incentive structure for them to actively work hard for your business and have the same level of drive to grow your revenue and in turn profits at the end of the day. And so, what you need to do is have a structure where they get a good enough base, but then they're also incentivized to to grow your business and really take control and close those deals cuz end of the day, the sales people will get lazy in the organization and they'll just be focusing on those, you know, layup deals. That's just the deals that come through that are super easy to close, that anyone can close and you don't really need a salesperson cuz they're really just an order taker. But, if you have a salesperson that is on a really good incentive structure and make sure that you are willing to pay out good money for that as well because end of the day, they're going to be closing revenue that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten and so, you want to make sure

04:43 that you're incentivizing that and rewarding, you know, the people in the organization to go out and generate more revenue. And yes, you'll end up paying more overall in compensation to those people, but your revenue has increased a lot more than it otherwise would have. What we see with the fastest growing companies is that the founder, CEO, whoever's just leading the company always has a heavy involvement within the sales and marketing function and oversees that, provides the strategy, advice, you know, accountability to the team to actually go and drive it forward. You know, one of the clients that we we work with, they're multi hundred million dollar a year company and I remember the founder was sending out emails at, you know, 3:00 a.m. in the morning, 4:00 a.m. with different sales and marketing ideas, different strategies. And so, you just needed to give those to someone to go and then execute for you. So, the way to think

05:30 about that is you don't want to just hold on to doing every part of the sales and marketing process yourself. That's not what I'm suggesting or advising on at all, but to have a level of understanding. And so, when clients work with us, we always want the business owner, founder, CEO, whoever's leading the company to be involved on our calls at the end of the day because it's so important when we work with our done for you clients for example, obviously we get paid a base but we are heavily incentivized by the revenue share and that's where the bulk of our profits and incentives are. So the more that we make for our clients, the more that we in turn get as a business as well. The other thing we see is that people will go and hire a full-time staff member and think that they can handle all this stuff, right? Whether it's on your sales and marketing side, often times it's very difficult to hire a really good specialist and often times that's why

06:17 you'll have a head of marketing but they still need to go out and get multiple agencies to get the job done, right? And they're just the orchestrator, right? And often times you don't really know what they're working on either but they are orchestrating everything. What I'm saying is that you can still outsource, right? And and highly recommend doing that obviously, outsourcing to specialists, right? And and understanding, you know, well, is this the right, you know, company or agency to bring on board and obviously know how to work with them and, you know, keep them accountable and vice versa, right? And if you're working with a good, you know, agency or partner they're going to also keep you accountable which is really important thing. The exception, you know, which is very rare is that you might be able to, you know, find an A player, pay them multiple six figures a year in salary with a really good incentive structure that is already scaled a business that is very very similar to yours or, you know, if not a competitor of yours that's already scaled them from a low level to a very much higher

07:07 level in revenue and they've actually had an impact on that revenue and the strategy etc. There's a lot of people with, you know, fancy resumes and, you know, work history where they said, "Yeah, we worked there and you know, we took them from, you know, 1 or 5 million a year in revenue up to 50 or 100 million a year in revenue." Well, a lot of the times, you know, 20% of your employees account for 80% of the results, right? And then, you know, 80% of your staff account for 20% of the results and so maybe they were just a cog in the wheel that were just along there for the journey, right? And maybe just had, you know, a role in the business to maintain things and keep things on track. But the of the day they weren't really the the actual driver of the business, but if you do find an A player, you're going to have to pay them really, really well and incentivize them. Look at, you know, who you've got in the sales and marketing department. Are they incentivized? Are they producing results and ROI? Are they

07:54 directly attributed to, you know, different results, qualified meetings booked, closed deals, leads, whatever it might be? And really analyzing what are they doing and is what they're doing actually having an effect on your revenue? Because a lot of the times it's not. And so, it might just be a simple thing of looking at what your team's doing and going, "Okay, well, guys, can you give me a list of like everything you're doing on a day-to-day basis?" And then you'll find out that 80% of the time is going on pointless and you're paying these people and they're just not working on revenue-generating tasks. So, you want to be keeping them accountable, helping them know what to work on as well because they don't really know what drives revenue. And if you can tie what they're doing to revenue growth and then just switch and say, "Okay, well, is this driving revenue? Does this have any sort of impact or effect?" If it's a no, then get rid of it and stop doing it, right? Or delegate it to someone delegate it to

08:42 AI or delegate it to some offshore team member, right? by making sure that they're working on the highest revenue-generating tasks that they can be working on and keeping them accountable to that. All the times you will still need to hire a specialist, right? Whether that's for your outbound, your paid ads, or whatever it might be. Maybe it's someone to help on the sales side and sales coaching, accountability, or sales management, whatever it might be. So, some of the biggest companies still outsource a lot of stuff to other companies and other agencies, right? Because they get the specialist and the specialist team to do that specific you know, role or task within that organization. And so, you can get a very, very good ROI from that. Your internal team can then learn from that specialist agency as well. If you feel like you need some more help with this and you want another set of eyes on this and you want someone to, you know, come in and take over your outbound, your

09:31 paid ads, and really drive revenue growth for your business, you You click the link in the description and watch the short video. We have two main offerings. One is the done for you. We are very selective with who we bring on board, as I mentioned before, where we get paid a base plus a revenue share as well. Ideally, you're doing at minimum a million a year and obviously you've got potential to grow. You haven't really tried your outbound before properly, maybe you're not running any ads. We can come in there and really drive the revenue growth. The other thing is our done with you, where instead of us doing it all for you, which is expensive, it could be costly You can essentially implement it yourself alongside our guidance over a 2-day workshop, where we'll build out the system and then you just own and manage that moving forward in around about 30 to 60 minutes a day, give or take, maybe a little bit more. But, if

10:18 you do feel like you would be a good fit for done for you or just want it managed for you and just want the whole thing off your plate and us to book in those meetings onto your calendar, so you can turn up and close those deals, then click below and we'll talk soon.