Am I Wrong for Putting Customers First Over Sales?
Every SaaS growth playbook says the same thing: get in front of more people, book the stand, sponsor the lanyards. I’ve heard the argument plenty of times. At OpsPal, every pound that could go on a stand goes into the product instead, or into looking after the customers we’ve already got. Call it customer-first growth if you want the tidy label. Whether that’s actually the right call, over building a proper sales operation, is the question I want to put to you — not just answer for myself.
The Sales Team We Don’t Have
We don’t have a big sales team. We’ve never needed one. Every hour our staff goes into improving the product or helping the customers already on it — not chasing the next one. I’ve sat in enough rooms with other software companies to see the other model up close: sales teams two or three times the size of support, target boards on the wall, and a support queue that never quite clears. Plenty of new logos coming in the front door. Just as many old ones are quietly heading for the exit out the back, and nobody in the room seems to be counting that side of the ledger.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean we don’t sell. I think selling done properly is listening to what someone actually needs, understanding the problem underneath it, and explaining honestly whether and how you can help. What we don’t do is push things on people for profit or commission. I call it helping, not selling — because that’s genuinely what it should be. Helping someone solve a problem they’ve already got, not manufacturing a want they didn’t have until you needed the numbers.
I know which one I’d want to be a customer of. Whether that instinct is actually good business or just easier to defend after the fact is a fair question — and one I can’t answer completely on my own.
Word of Mouth Is the Only Marketing Budget That Compounds
Here’s what I’d rather talk about than stand space: people don’t leave us. Not because there’s a contract trapping them in — because we look after them. Most of the growth we’ve actually had has come from word of mouth. One customer telling someone at another leisure trust or university to go and look at OpsPal. That’s marketing. It just doesn’t show up on an events calendar, and you can see some of the people making those calls for yourself or how it’s worked out for operators like DLR Leisure and BH Live.
We’re not keen on long contracts either. We’d rather earn the right to stay every month than lock someone in and coast on the paperwork. I’ve seen how the other version plays out: a supplier goes quiet for three years, then suddenly turns on the charm in year four when the renewal’s up for grabs — all attention and account management right when it matters to them, not to you. We’d rather nobody at a customer’s site ever feels that gap open up in the first place.
My ethos has never changed: concentrate on service, and money is a by-product. Concentrate on money, and the by-product is poor service, bad staff vibes, and customers coming second. I’ve watched enough leisure operators try to do it the other way round to think it doesn’t hold up long-term. But “I’ve watched enough” isn’t proof. It’s experience, and experience can still be wrong.
Three Ideas, Not Three Hundred
Right now, across every customer we’ve got, we have three ideas on our list that we haven’t built yet. Three. Not a backlog spreadsheet nobody dares open. That number stays low because when a customer tells us what they need, the whole team’s job is to go and build it or help them use what’s already there — not to log it, thank them for their feedback, and get back to prospecting. Sales-heavy teams collect feature requests the way some people collect parking tickets. We clear ours. Whether three is a healthy number or a sign we’re not thinking big enough about where the product should go next, I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Turning the Tap On Without the Plug In
Too many leisure providers — and too many software companies — make the same mistake. They push sales hard before the product or the service can actually hold up under the weight of new customers. It’s like turning the tap on full without first putting the plug in the sink. You can run that tap as hard as you like; the sink still won’t fill. All that effort, and the water just runs straight down the drain. New members join, standards don’t match the promise, and they leave just as fast as marketing brought them in.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’re not exactly slow currently either — OpsPal grew 500% last year, and three months into this year, we’re already tracking to more than double that again. So this isn’t really “slow growth that sticks versus fast growth that leaks.” It’s closer to growth that sticks, already moving fast, and an open question about whether it could be faster still — and what that speed might cost if we chased it. That’s the part that really worries me, not the trade show brochures.
The Case Against Me
I want to give the other side a fair hearing, because it’s a real argument, not a straw man. It isn’t “word of mouth is too slow” — the numbers don’t back that up. It’s this: how much faster could that growth be with a proper sales operation sitting alongside it, and would every customer still get looked after the way the ones before them did? For every leisure trust that hears about OpsPal from someone who already uses it, there’s probably a few who’d genuinely benefit from it and never hear about us at all, simply because we weren’t in the room. Some of the fastest-growing software companies in this sector aren’t scaling on word of mouth at all — they’re scaling on pipeline, and they might be outgrowing companies like us while doing so, as fast as we’re already going. It’s entirely possible that “helping, not selling” is a comfortable label for a sales process that still has to happen — and calling it something else doesn’t change the fact that outbound effort might get us to more of the right customers faster than word of mouth ever will.
So, Am I Wrong?
That’s the actual question, not a rhetorical one. Am I wrong for putting customers first over sales? I don’t think so — and the growth numbers aren’t the problem. So the issue was never really about whether customer-first growth works. It clearly does. The key question is whether adding a sales operation would accelerate growth or sacrifice the very factors driving it. Please let me know if you would approach it differently. Please let me know if you think I’m sacrificing growth for the sake of a principle. I’d rather hear the argument against my position properly than assume I’ve already won it.
