Balancing Sales and Operations: Avoid the Utilization Trap
TLDR: 3 Takeaways from this Post:
Stopping Sales is a Short-Term Fix with Long-Term Consequences – Pausing sales to address capacity issues disrupts momentum, demotivates sales teams, and creates future revenue gaps. By the time operations catches up, the business is left scrambling for new work, creating an unsustainable cycle of feast and famine.
Alignment Between Sales and Operations is Critical – Instead of halting sales, businesses should refine their offerings, improve forecasting, and ensure sales teams remain engaged.
Inconsistency Damages Brand Trust – Frequent shifts in sales activity create confusion in the market, making clients question the company’s reliability. A strong brand is built on consistency—continuing to sell while managing capacity smartly ensures a company remains a trusted partner.
Choose your adventure.
Does this sound familiar?
“Leadership is telling our salespeople to close more business and close it faster. Meanwhile the operations teams are saying, ‘we can’t breathe. If you bring in one more project, we are going to fail.’”
This tension between sales and operations is common, but stopping sales isn’t the answer. The right solution is better planning, smarter resourcing, and a proactive approach that keeps sales and operations teams aligned.
Hitting Pause on Sales is a Bad Idea
When operations asks sales to stop selling or turn away work, two big problems pop up:
Sales Momentum Takes a Hit – Selling professional services isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s relationship-driven and takes time. If you tell sales to slow down, they lose steam, pipelines dry up, and when you finally need new business again, it’s way harder to restart the engine. Since most salespeople earn commission, pausing sales means pausing their income—leading to frustration, disengagement, and turnover.
Future Revenue Holes – Stopping sales today doesn’t actually fix today’s capacity crunch—it just guarantees a revenue hole down the road. By the time operations catches up, sales will be in a slump, and suddenly the business is starving for new work—only to put unnatural pressure on the sales team to hit the gas again.
Smarter Ways to Balance Sales and Operations
Instead of shutting down sales, here are four smarter ways to manage capacity:
1. Refine Your Offerings – If some services are causing bottlenecks, rethink how they’re delivered or adjust your approach to fit available resources. This could mean standardizing certain offerings to reduce customization time, developing self-service options for lower-tier services, or automating parts of your process to free up team bandwidth. It may also involve reprioritizing high-margin services that align better with existing capacity while phasing out or restructuring more labor-intensive ones. Senior IT and Operations leader, Marc Pollard has had a front row seat to the delivery/sales challenges, and had this to say, “A stressed delivery team will tell the revenue team that a project is outside of their wheelhouse even though it is within their capability. This is because they don’t have the mental capacity to take on innovation when they are drowning in deadlines.”
📌 Sales & Service Alignment: Keep Sales in the Loop
If salespeople sense delivery is going haywire, their motivation will plummet. Good salespeople put their reputation on the line and are careful with it. Instead of panicking about capacity constraints, communicate how the operations team will deliver and uphold the brand promise.
2. Adjust Sales Activity Strategically – If you’ve analyzed your forecasts and still believe sales is the answer, don’t stop—scale back judiciously. Sales teams can focus on nurturing existing client relationships, refining messaging, enhancing sales collateral, or developing thought leadership content. One compromise is for sales teams to push bread and butter work that is well understood and has low risk. Marc recommends “Offer a proof of concept or entry-level solution that keeps the client engaged while buying the delivery team some time.”
📌 Compensation Matters
If sales activity slows, consider adjusting compensation structures to keep salespeople engaged. This could include bonuses for non-revenue-generating activities like pipeline development or client retention efforts.
3. Get Better at Forecasting – Sales and operations need to talk—constantly. Use data to predict demand, track pipeline health, and plan ahead so you’re not always reacting. You should understand your typical sales cycle, time to revenue, and onboarding pace. Match that data with your current capacity and project close dates to better understand how today’s actions impact tomorrow’s business.
📌 Client Deadlines: Ask 'Why?' Before Reacting
Not all 'urgent' deadlines are actually urgent. Many clients are flexible if you ask the right questions. I’ve had countless clients tell me they need something immediately, only to find out their definition of “immediate” was much more forgiving than mine. Simply clarifying expectations can relieve pressure on the operations team without sacrificing service quality.
4. Build Flexible Resourcing Models – Whether it’s tapping into contractors, forming partnerships, or maintaining an on-call talent pool, building a pipeline of backup options keeps things running smoothly. It can be tempting to have all of your solutions providers billing at maximum capacity, but consider reserving some hours for professional development and skill building—hours that can also serve as a buffer when capacity crunches hit.
Elise Connors, who has extensive experience in creative services agency marketing and operations, says: “We know that fluctuations in capacity are going to come up, so start strategizing early and have a plan that works in service of the overall growth objectives. Outsource. Bring in AI. Use systems to work smarter. You must build in valves to take off the pressure on the operations team, but the valve is not the sales team.”
Inconsistency Hurts Your Brand
Beyond the operational headaches, there’s a bigger issue: brand perception. When you stop selling and then suddenly start again, potential clients get mixed signals. One quarter you’re out there, full of energy, and the next you’ve gone silent. That kind of inconsistency can make people question your stability. A strong brand is built on reliability—showing up consistently and delivering on your promises.
Fact: Tell a customer you're too busy once, and you may lose them forever.
Bottom Line: Do Not Stop Selling. Take Care of Your Delivery Teams.
These fluctuations are inevitable, so you should plan for them. Your plan must consider the sanity of your delivery team, the success of your customers, and the growth expected by your leaders.
The healthiest businesses don’t ask whether to sell or not—they plan, adapt, and execute with foresight. Sales and operations are two sides of the same coin, and when they move in sync, the whole business thrives.
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Additional Resources:
Product-style marketing Will Not Grow Your Services Business
Knowing What You Want is a Skill: Decision Making in Brand Management
