At the EN Sales Leaders’ Summit, Jo Edwards (Group Sales Director) and Louise White (COO) from Sift shared the story of a transformation many revenue leaders would love to emulate: moving from transactional sales to scalable, predictable growth.
Their challenge was not incremental improvement. The brief was stark: grow a flagship event by 93% in a single year while increasing the underlying business by 20%, without adding a single salesperson.
The result was not just hitting the number. It was fundamentally redesigning how the organisation thinks about revenue.
For CROs and senior commercial leaders, the lesson was clear: sustainable growth doesn’t come from chasing more deals. It comes from redesigning the system that produces them.
The limits of transactional growth
When Jo joined Sift in 2025, the business looked healthy on the surface. Targets were being hit and the sales team was working hard.
But underneath, growth was fragile.
Revenue relied heavily on one-off transactions. Forecasting was unreliable. New business acquisition was inconsistent. Success often depended on a handful of individuals delivering last-minute wins at the end of each quarter.
The sales team was busy — but busy is not the same as scalable.
The issue wasn’t effort or talent. It was structure and mindset.
Like many organisations, the company had evolved around short-term revenue cycles. Deals were closed, customers were served, and the process started again. Retention, expansion and long-term value were rarely part of the strategy.
To deliver the growth target, that model had to change.
Start with the market, not the pipeline
The transformation began with a deeper understanding of the market itself.
Before restructuring the sales team, the company invested in total addressable market (TAM) analysis to identify the real opportunity available. The results were revealing: the business was penetrating less than 14% of a high-value customer segment with strong propensity to buy.
This insight changed the entire strategy.
Instead of chasing incremental deals across familiar accounts, the team could focus on a clearly defined group of high-potential customers. It created focus and clarity about where to direct sales effort.
For revenue leaders, it is a reminder that many pipeline challenges are actually targeting challenges.
Changing roles, not headcount.
With hiring off the table, the next step was restructuring the team around the opportunity.
The diagnosis was straightforward: there were too many account managers and too little dedicated new business capability.
The solution was described internally as “hats, not heads.”
Headcount stayed the same, but roles changed. A new business leader was brought in from outside the media industry, introducing a different approach to prospecting and market expansion. The rest of the team was reconfigured to create clearer focus between new customer acquisition and growing existing accounts.
Growth didn’t come from hiring more salespeople. It came from aligning capability with strategy.
From funnel to flywheel
Perhaps the biggest shift was philosophical.
Instead of treating sales as a linear funnel — prospect, pitch, close — the company adopted a flywheel model centred around customer lifetime value.
In a funnel, the relationship effectively ends when the deal closes.
In a flywheel, the deal is just the beginning.
Sales, marketing, operations and customer teams aligned around a shared objective: compounding value with each customer over time. The focus moved from selling inventory to solving customer problems and building longer-term partnerships.
This required new discipline across the sales organisation: clearer ideal customer profiles, structured account planning and a deliberate “land and expand” approach to growth.
When relationships replace transactions
One long-standing client illustrates the impact.
Historically, the customer spent around £25,000 on an event package each year — a typical transactional purchase.
Under the new approach, the sales team focused first on understanding the client’s broader objectives. Multiple meetings were held with stakeholders across both organisations before any proposal was presented.
The result was a £125,000 partnership, built around year-round engagement rather than a single event purchase.
The difference wasn’t selling harder.
Process drives scalable growth
By the end of the year, the flagship event had delivered 93% revenue growth, alongside 40 new customers and significant expansion within existing accounts.
But the leadership team emphasised that the real success wasn’t the number itself.
It was the system behind it.
Sales success is often portrayed as charisma or individual brilliance. In reality, it is largely the product of structure, process and focus. Once the fundamentals are in place — targeting the right customers, building repeatable processes and aligning teams around lifetime value — growth becomes predictable.
And when growth becomes predictable, scaling the sales team multiplies revenue rather than diluting it.
Removing the artificial ceiling
The final lesson was psychological.
Many organisations operate with self-imposed limits. Growth targets are often set based on what feels achievable rather than what the market opportunity truly supports.
By redesigning the revenue model around customer lifetime value and market opportunity, the company moved beyond incremental improvement to something far more powerful: scalable, repeatable growth.
For CROs and commercial leaders, the question is simple.
Are you optimising the system you already have — or redesigning it for the growth that’s actually possible?