From Lead Generation to Sales Excellence: Fixing IT Sales Problems

It’s fascinating how goals have shifted over the past 3 years in IT companies that provide outsourced service solutions. Most clients don’t come with the request – give me more leads through a cheap lead generation system, but rather the opposite – teach us how to sell quality. Most have already realized that lead generation, specifically the problem of finding clients independently, is a small part of the problems that IT companies face. The biggest problem is sales, and most sales teams have a low level of professionalism and energy. Working with the funnel effectively and servicing clients properly – that’s the focus of all IT companies that have come to us for consulting over the past 3 years.

Making first introductions with clients and being able to briefly tell them about the company in such a way that they no longer want to go to Upwork and fill out contact forms at Clutch for 10 other IT companies. Being able to build a chain of reminders for the client that doesn’t make the client feel like they’re being rushed to make a decision, but rather gives them a better understanding that we are the right choice and they can execute their project in an environment of super specialists.

As a consulting company that has been working in the IT consulting market for 10 years and focuses solely on helping organize sales, we see this as a qualitative shift. Ten years ago, hardly anyone worried that a client would leave or find someone else – there was limited choice and most clients selected from a group of about 100 companies across Europe that had set up their marketing well at that time. Now everyone has excellent websites, everyone understands how to develop sales channels, but there’s no sales training system or it’s in an extremely poor state.

The Sales Training Crisis

Training a sales manager to sell is the company’s most difficult task. Out of 10 hired sales managers, only 2 will meet their sales plan, the rest will barely reach the required metrics over 5 years. According to recent industry research, the average sales rep achieves only 54% of their quota, and this number has been declining steadily. Therefore, constant training and support for the sales department has been the focus of all managers over the past couple of years.

What’s the point of spending a huge amount of company money on paid traffic or trips to clients if sales managers can’t handle high workloads due to lack of skills? Most IT companies started looking for sales managers long before internal problems arose. Usually it happened like this: a major client leaves the company and the whole company frantically starts looking for clients, the CEO goes on indefinite business trips, and the HR department searches all platforms for sales managers at once and hastily hires less-than-ideal candidates. This was mainly a big part of the second problem – rushing.

The Cost of Rushing

Rushing in the sales department is flushing money down the toilet. Nobody wins in this rush. The client doesn’t receive quality information throughout the entire funnel, and the IT company underearns, while thinking that everything is under control and there’s enough work for everyone. Studies show that companies with structured sales processes achieve 18% higher revenue growth compared to those without, yet only 46% of B2B companies have clearly defined sales processes in place.

A sales department audit helps IT companies in a rush to realize a number of obvious problems – conversions, quality of meetings with clients, quality of understanding client requests, and quality of filling out information in CRM. You’ll be surprised, but at the beginning of 2026, 20-30% of IT companies will have an account in some CRM like Hubspot, Pipedrive or Zoho, but the data there will be outdated or simply all salespeople work in their own Google spreadsheets. Research indicates that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, often due to poor CRM utilization and follow-up processes. Therefore, a sales audit from us is a quick solution to problems associated with rushing.

The Management Skills Gap

The third and final problem is the lack of management skills among leaders. IT companies starting from 2005 grew very quickly and not all leaders were able to find time for fundamental management training in this race for clients. Not all IT company leaders have an MBA level, most don’t know how to work with clients who are accustomed to certain standards of documentation or simply knowledge of processes. Industry data shows that only 23% of tech company founders have formal business education, yet they’re expected to build and manage complex sales organizations. When we created our working frameworks for areas such as CRM and intro calls, IT company leaders were able to see how to properly structure information for the sales department and started updating everything accordingly.

The Bottom Line

What’s the conclusion? More sales doesn’t mean super, more sales with a motivated and trained sales department – that’s victory! Companies that invest in continuous sales training see 50% higher net sales per employee and experience 24% better profit margins than those that don’t. The future belongs to IT companies that understand that sales excellence isn’t a one-time achievement but an ongoing commitment to developing their most valuable asset – their sales team.