Scaling a modern SaaS business is hard. Scaling one inside a professional services organization with a 100-year history in civil engineering, architecture, energy and urban development is an entirely different challenge.
When I (Roland) joined GHD Digital two years ago, my mandate was to grow a high-performing SaaS startup operating within GHD, the legacy engineering consultancy. While governments trusted us and communities relied on us, there was little or no market awareness about our relatively new products and platforms division in the highly competitive GovTech market.
The Sales Challenges We Inherited
GHD Digital had strong technology and an enormous opportunity to meet the increasing demand for digital solutions. What we didn’t have was a scalable go-to-market engine that fit the real-world needs of a SaaS business model.
The challenges included:
Undefined sales roles. Project managers with government expertise were labeled “account managers,” and they did the work of an entire sales organization from prospecting to writing requests for proposals (RFPs). This hindered proactive business development and account growth.
No consistent selling process. These account managers relied on their individual styles. There was no shared discovery approach, no qualification framework, and no repeatable way to advance sales opportunities. Long story short, we didn’t know what good looked like.
No commission structure. Without competitive compensation structures, we struggled to reward new logo acquisitions and attract true SaaS talent.
Successes were happening, but they were isolated and unpredictable. We needed a complete sales transformation.
Restructuring the Sales Organization for a High-Growth SaaS Model
To build a modern sales engine inside the legacy organization, we had to rethink everything: roles, processes, culture and leadership expectations. That’s when Tony from ValueSelling Associates stepped in, guiding us to adopt value-based selling as both a methodology and a mindset.
Value-based selling reshaped how we operated. It forced every rep and leader to start with a single, grounding question: What business issue are we solving? I often remind our team, “money follows problems.” My point is that if we’re uncovering the real business issues driving a customer’s decisions to buy, the budget will naturally follow. If a rep can’t articulate the core problem, we don’t have a real opportunity.
This discipline changed everything: the quality of our discovery, the integrity of our pipeline, and even the accuracy of our forecasts. Today, we’re hitting quota quarter after quarter and forecasting revenue to the dollar—giving our CEO and global executive teams a level of confidence that simply didn’t exist before. ValueSelling has become the backbone of how we think, operate, and lead.
Our results speak volumes:
- 450% increase in annual recurring revenue from 2023-2025
- 140% improvement in year-over-year growth over two years
- 160% pipeline growth year-over-year
- 125% increase in average deal size
Want to replicate this success? Start with these five tactics:
5 Initial Steps to Restructure the Sales Organization
With our new value-based selling mindset, these are the first five steps we took to restructure the sales organization:
- Created clear, specialized roles. We established dedicated positions for account executives (AEs), account managers (AMs), and a centralized RFP team. As a result, revenue ownership became clearer and accountability became sharper.
- Stood up a full SDR function. Our AEs and AMs were capable of building pipeline, but we needed predictable demand. A dedicated sales development representative (SDR) team ensured we could consistently feed the funnel.
- Aligned everyone to a common sales language. Without a budget for sales training programs at first, we started with something simple. We read the ValueSelling books together, chapter by chapter. We met weekly to discuss how the principles applied to our buyers. Over time, this language became part of the culture.
- Built competitive compensation. To attract top SaaS talent and reward new logo wins, we introduced commission plans on par with tech-industry expectations.
- Challenged the services-industry status quo. Instead of sitting back and waiting for RFPs, we began proactively building multi-threaded relationships with our key prospects. We quickly realized that if we were going to scale, we needed to be top of mind long before a procurement cycle kicked off.
Of course, there’s much more to the story of how we restructured the sales organization, with the most transformative work at GHD Digital happening in leadership first.
Changing Leadership Philosophy From ‘Command and Control’ to ‘Trust and Collaboration’
We began our ValueSelling training with a cross-functional leadership session across product, management, marketing, sales leadership, and our divisional CEO. This unified our revenue engine and introduced value-based principles across the entire customer lifecycle. This mindset shift also enabled us to break away from the traditional “command and control” mindset common in engineering-centric environments. From here on out, we built a culture of trust, clarity and shared accountability.
Our CEO Ali Carden fully embraced the ValueSelling Framework®. Once she and the executive team adopted ValueSelling terminology and expectations, alignment spread throughout the sales organization. Deal reviews became sharper with a consistent sales process and all of us speaking the same language.
Tony also spent time with our CEO developing a forward action plan, centered on five leading indicators of the behaviors that drive high-performing sales reps. This became our “religion,” as we often say. Every manager and every rep knew exactly what good performance looked like and the standards by which they were being held.
Today, our leadership meetings with our CEO are simple. We review the leading indicator metrics from the forward action plan and determine if reps are on target or need to make changes to get back on track.
Stop Selling Features and Start Solving Business Problems
Before our sales transformation, sellers leaned heavily into promoting tech product functionality and features, and these deals were not forecastable. No government organization is going to rip and replace a system using taxpayer money because a new tech system is “easier to use.”
They will, however, invest if we demonstrate that we can help them attract tourism, drive economic development, improve citizen engagement or generate new revenue.
To shift reps from feature-selling to problem-solving, we took three intentional actions:
Conducted persona-based research to understand the business issues, priorities and obstacles of our government buyers.
Regained control of sales meetings, steering conversations toward business issues, not feature comparisons. Whenever buyers lead sellers down the road of features and functionality, it becomes a price bake-off.
Reviewed discovery calls and demos in Gong, consistently listening for:
- What problem are we solving?
- Is there a clear business issue?
- What is our product going to solve?
If the answers weren’t clear, the opportunity wasn’t qualified.
Building Credibility in Every Sales Interaction
There are three pillars of credibility: rapport, trust and cementing your position.
Establish Rapport
The first step is genuinely connecting with your buyer. You have to skip small talk about the weather and listen deeply, asking questions to understand their challenges and goals. The ability to keep quiet and listen is often more powerful than any pitch.
Develop Trust
Trust grows when you ask intelligent, purposeful questions that highlight your unique capabilities. This approach shows the buyer that you understand their needs and can provide relevant solutions, rather than offering a generic menu of options. It also reduces friction and positions you as a collaborative partner rather than another vendor.
Cement Credibility
Once you’ve established rapport and built trust, you solidify your credibility by presenting solutions in the customer’s own words, reflecting their requirements and priorities. This demonstrates not only that you’ve listened, but that you can translate their needs into actionable solutions, accelerating decision-making and reinforcing why you’re the standout choice.
When executed within a value-based selling framework, these pillars increase the likelihood of purchase while keeping the customer at the center of every step. Buyers must be active participants, helping to build the case alongside you.
Keeping the Sales Process Simple
One lesson I learned quickly is that overengineering the sales process stifles authenticity.
We didn’t want our reps to lose the magic that makes them great, worry about exactly what words they’re saying, or to feel like they’re a robot reading scripts. We wanted them to feel confident and have flexibility to sell their own way.
That’s why we provided guardrails to keep the conversations with buyers on track. To embed consistency without stifling creativity, we integrated ValueSelling directly into HubSpot, with the help of a custom set up from the ValueSelling team that mirrored the proven eValuePrompter®, a revenue tech tool that ensures alignment from first conversation to closed deal.
This makes deal reviews straightforward. If the any of the ValuePrompter fields are blank, the deal is not getting forecasted. When it’s complete with all elements lighting up green, and, most importantly, the business issue identified, that’s a deal I’m prepared to stand behind.
Forecasting Accuracy Comes Down to Preparation
Forecasting with precision is a byproduct of disciplined preparation. Every month, our CEO joins the forecasting deal review meeting. Every rep knows to show up prepared, or you’ll embarrass yourself in front of the CEO. On the off chance, the team is unprepared, we stop meetings midstream. Trust me, that lesson only needs to happen once.
Our deal review process focuses on five elements:
- Discovery completeness
- Vision mapping with the client
- Clear alignment to business issues
- Stakeholder engagement confirmed
- Concrete next steps
In our opinion, we built more than a sales organization. We built a forecasting machine with a culture rooted in clarity, consistency and customer value. And we did it while staying true to GHD’s community-driven values.
Takeaway: Your Sales Transformation Starts with One Question
Are you focused on solving real business issues, priorities and challenges for your clients? That’s the key to revenue growth. Whether you sell hardware, software, services or SaaS, the principles behind ValueSelling are universal. They work because they center on the only thing that truly matters: understanding and solving the customer’s business issues.
If your revenue team can articulate the problem they solve, forecasting improves, deals accelerate and customer trust deepens.
The ValueSelling sales methodology enabled GHD Digital to align its entire revenue engine – from the divisional CEO and sales leadership to product management and marketing – and provide them with a shared process and language to approach prospects and customers, building seller confidence and ensuring a consistent customer experience throughout the buyer journey. Instead of leading with product features and benefits, GHD Digital builds relationships with buyers by solving their pressing business problems and delivering meaningful value.
That’s how you build a modern, scalable sales organization inside a legacy enterprise.
Equally important, GHD Digital recognized that transformation requires continuous investment in people. By doubling down on skill development across business development reps, account executives, and customer success teams, the organization ensured every role was prepared to demonstrate value and deliver impact for customers. This ongoing commitment to individual development and team-based learning has become the foundation of a high-performance culture—one that actively embraces change as a catalyst for next-level growth.
If you want to dive into the details, connect with either of us on LinkedIn. We’re always happy to talk shop with fellow revenue and sales leaders.
