How an ERP Consulting Firm Closed $1.8M
in New Government Revenue in 12 Months
Overview
- Industry: ERP consulting
- Target market: State and local government
- What we ran: A CRO revenue assessment, then Sales Team as a Service
- Headline outcome: $1.8M in new business closed within the first year
- The shift: From referral-dependent and unpredictable to a forecast-able revenue engine
This firm was excellent at the work and poor at predicting where the next deal would come from. New business arrived through referrals, which is a wonderful thing to receive and a dangerous thing to depend on. When growth rides entirely on who happens to recommend you this quarter, you do not have a pipeline. You have a hope.
They had ambitions in the government sector, where budgets run larger and relationships last longer. The door kept closing. Procurement complexity and long RFP cycles made it hard to compete, harder to win, and nearly impossible to plan around. Twelve months later that stalled ambition had turned into $1.8M of closed government revenue and a pipeline they could finally forecast. Here is how.
The situation: a business built on referrals it could not control
Referrals had carried the company a long way, and that was the trap. Every good month came from relationships rather than a repeatable system, so the team could never answer the one question that matters for growth: where is next quarter’s revenue coming from? Some months the inbound flowed. Other months it went quiet for no reason anyone could name. Hiring, forecasting, and any kind of confident planning all sat on top of that uncertainty.
Referrals are a result of doing great work. They are not a go-to-market strategy. The company knew it, which is why they came to us.
The wall they kept hitting
The growth they wanted lived in the public sector, and the public sector is built to keep newcomers out. Government buyers move through formal procurement, weigh heavy compliance requirements, and run RFP cycles that can stretch for the better part of a year. For a firm without a dedicated motion to navigate that world, the sector looked less like an opportunity and more like a closed market.
So the real problem was never the quality of their offering. It was the absence of a system to reach a buyer who does not respond to the tactics that win commercial deals.
What we did
Our CRO team started with a revenue assessment over five weeks. Before touching tactics, we needed the full picture of how the business actually made money, where it leaked, and which paths to market were worth pursuing. That assessment became the foundation for everything that followed.
From there we built a path to market designed to do two things at once: open the government sector and reduce the company’s dependence on one-off projects. We helped them shape new offerings that moved a portion of their project-based revenue into recurring revenue, which made the business more predictable and more valuable at the same time.
Then we put a motion behind it. Through Sales Team as a Service, we ran a targeted outbound effort built specifically for the public sector. We rewrote the messaging so it spoke to what government buyers actually care about, and we built a repeatable outbound rhythm the company could count on rather than hope for.
The sharpest move was structural. Rather than line up behind every competitor in the standard RFP queue, we re-positioned their offerings to fit alternative purchasing pathways. That let them sidestep the longest procurement cycles and bring deals home faster, in a sector famous for making everyone wait.
The outcome: a predictable engine, not a lucky streak
Within the first year, the company closed $1.8M in new government business. Just as important, qualified opportunities started arriving in the government space every month rather than whenever a referral happened to land. The pipeline became something they could see coming, plan around, and scale.
The recurring offerings changed the shape of the business too. Revenue that used to end with each project now carried forward, which made forecasting calmer and the company itself worth more.
Why it worked
The company did not have a sales problem in the sense people usually mean. It had a system problem. Referrals are not repeatable, and the government sector does not reward firms that show up without a plan for how it buys. We replaced luck with a motion: the right offer, aimed at the right buyer, through a path built for how that buyer actually purchases.
Lead generation alone would never have done this. Someone had to own the work from first message to signed deal. That is the part most agencies hand back to the client. It is the part we keep.
Ready for a pipeline you can forecast?
Runway Selling is the outsourced revenue engine for companies that are tired of waiting on referrals. We do not hand you a list of leads and walk away. We build the system and we close the business. If your growth depends on luck, let’s run a revenue assessment and show you what a predictable pipeline looks like.