Retail Scaling & Commercial Growth

These are two stories years apart, told together because the underlying pattern is the same. The first: a retail business with a modest turnover, a loyal customer base and no commercial engine. The second: a specialist ERP consultancy with strong delivery, growing referrals and no repeatable way to bring in new work. Both businesses had the same diagnosis from the outside, which was a sales problem, and the same diagnosis from the inside, which was a positioning problem.

The retail piece came first. Luke took the Managing Director seat with the brief to scale. The retail proposition was sharper than the marketing suggested: a specialist offer with a defensible niche but messaging that read as generic. The first work was positioning. Who is the customer, what is the alternative they are choosing today and what makes our offer the obvious step up. With that rewritten, the sales conversations got shorter and the conversion rates climbed.

Sales process followed positioning. The retail business had no shared definition of a lead, no agreed handoff between marketing and store, and no view of pipeline. We built the simplest credible version of each: a one-page lead definition, a two-step handoff, a weekly pipeline review. None of it was sophisticated. All of it got run consistently. Turnover moved from roughly GBP 200k to GBP 500k inside the planned window.

Years later, the ERP consultancy presented the same pattern at a different scale. The delivery work was excellent. The commercial engine was missing. Luke joined to head business development and went through the same sequence: positioning first, ICP second, sales process third. The ICP work was the most consequential. The consultancy had been chasing every lead that arrived, including some that did not fit. Narrowing the ICP dropped the close-rate denominator and lifted the close rate inside the right segment.

Building the sales function meant hiring, structuring the team, defining the metrics that would let leadership see what was working and what was not. The CRM stopped being a place where activity got logged after the fact and started being the place where the next move was decided. Weekly reporting was discipline more than analytics: did the pipeline progress, did the right deals advance, what is in the way.

The consultancy reached ERP Gold Partner status under that work, with GBP 1.65m of revenue overseen across the engagement. The lesson worth carrying forward is the negative one. Scaling is rarely a tool problem. Both businesses already had everything they needed in their CRM. What they needed was commercial discipline applied weekly, and a positioning that gave the salespeople something to say.