B2B Sales Development Case Study: How OfficePro Used Comp Design and Trade Show Selling to Grow New Business

Most b2b sales development advice never leaves the whiteboard. You get a definition of the SDR role, a generic six-step funnel, and a list of tools to buy. What you rarely get is a look at what actually changes behavior inside a real company. This is that look. Over two engagements, revenueify helped OfficePro fix the two things that move a B2B sales team the most: how its people get paid, and how they sell when they are face to face with a prospect.

B2B Sales Development: What Actually Moves It

The hard part of b2b sales development is rarely knowing the steps. Most leaders can recite the funnel. The hard part is getting a team to do the uncomfortable work the steps imply: hunting unfamiliar accounts instead of farming the comfortable ones, and qualifying a prospect instead of pitching at them.

That work has gotten harder, not easier. Gartner research finds the typical B2B purchase now runs through a buying group of six to ten people, each arriving with their own research and agenda. McKinsey’s work on next-generation B2B sales reaches a similar conclusion: the companies pulling ahead are the ones that build a disciplined, repeatable selling motion rather than relying on individual heroics.

In practice, two levers move b2b sales development more than any others. The first is the compensation plan, because the economics quietly decide which behavior actually gets rewarded. The second is selling skill, because a rep who cannot run a real qualifying conversation will never develop a healthy pipeline no matter how the plan is built. OfficePro needed work on both, and revenueify addressed each one through the Customer Focused Selling® Approach.

Meet OfficePro

OfficePro is a Maryland-based training and talent firm and a longstanding Microsoft learning partner, widely known in its region as the Microsoft training house. The company runs several lines of business, including staffing and recruiting, content creation, and IT and Microsoft 365 Copilot training, and is led by Aaron Udler.

Like a lot of growing B2B companies, OfficePro did not have one sales problem. It had two, and they lived on different sides of the business. On the economic side, the compensation plan was not pushing the sales team toward new business. On the skill side, the team was not converting trade show attention into qualified opportunities. revenueify took on both challenges in separate engagements, and ran each one on the Customer Focused Selling® Approach so the solutions would reinforce rather than contradict each other.

B2B Sales Development Starts With the Comp Plan: The A.I.M. Engagement

In late 2024, OfficePro brought revenueify a quiet but expensive problem. Its sales producer was busy and productive, but almost all of that production came from farming existing accounts rather than hunting new ones. The structure of the plan rewarded the comfortable path roughly as well as the hard one, so a rational rep did the comfortable thing. That is not a people problem. It is a design problem, and it is one of the most common places b2b sales development stalls.

This is exactly what the A.I.M. (Analyze. Implement. Move Forward.) discipline inside the Customer Focused Selling® Approach is built to fix. revenueify started by analyzing the real economics of the plan: where margin actually came from, what each behavior paid, and how much of the company’s selling expense was effectively subsidizing work that did not grow the business. From that analysis we built financial models showing what would happen under different structures, then delivered an executive summary with clear recommendations and ready-to-use plan language. The principle was simple. New business had to pay meaningfully more than managed business, so the plan itself pulled the rep toward hunting.

That is the heart of A.I.M.: analyze what is really happening, implement a deliberate change, and then move forward by watching how behavior responds. For a deeper look at how this planning discipline works beyond compensation, our piece on smarter sales and operational planning walks through the same A.I.M. thinking applied to forecasting and pipeline. A compensation plan is just one place the Customer Focused Selling® Approach insists that strategy and incentives point in the same direction.

B2B Sales Development in the Field: F.I.N.D. at the Trade Show Booth

The second engagement, in 2025, took on the skill side of b2b sales development. OfficePro relied on trade shows for lead generation, but the team was not qualifying opportunities at the booth, which made follow-up after the show a guessing game. They could draw attention. What they struggled with was turning a friendly booth conversation into a qualified opportunity worth chasing.

The old habit was the one almost every booth falls into: leading with a pitch. “Do you want to buy this? Does your team need this?” revenueify rebuilt the approach on the Customer Focused Selling® Approach, anchored by the F.I.N.D. Interview System® (Facts, Important Business Objectives, Needs, and Dreams). Instead of pitching, reps learned to open with genuine curiosity and structured questions: “What are you rolling out that’s new this year? Tell me more about that.” That single shift, from telling to asking, is what separates a booth that collects badges from one that builds pipeline.

The engagement was more than a single class. It started with a REVUP Assessment that reviewed the team’s Everything DiSC® profiles so the coaching could be tailored to how each person naturally sells. From there the team received a virtual training session on the Customer Focused Selling® Approach, a digital playbook for running the F.I.N.D. process at a show, a pre-show coaching session to prepare for the next event, an alignment meeting with Aaron, and a follow-up review session after the show to capture what worked. F.I.N.D. is the in-the-room counterpart to A.I.M.: where A.I.M. decides how the business plans and pays, F.I.N.D. governs the actual conversation a rep has with a prospect. If you want to see how that qualifying conversation fits into a complete selling system, our guide on how to build a sales process maps the full architecture.

B2B Sales Development Results: New Business, Sharper Questions, Repeatable Behavior

On the compensation side, the redesigned plan did what it was built to do. After an initial adjustment period, the rep refocused on new business and began working noticeably harder to land and develop new accounts, putting real time into each one rather than coasting on familiar revenue. Production from that seat grew by roughly 40% year over year. As Aaron Udler put it:

The point of the A.I.M. engagement was never to cut pay. It was to make the plan reward the behavior the business actually needed, and the Customer Focused Selling® Approach treats that alignment as the foundation of healthy b2b sales development.

On the trade show side, the F.I.N.D. method showed up in the field. At the next show, a member of the team fully adopted the approach, working the booth with probing questions instead of pitches and pulling interested visitors into real qualifying conversations. In Aaron’s words:

The training also produced direct sales from the event. As Aaron described the outcome, “We got one or two sales from it from a training standpoint, which was great.” Just as important, it gave the team a repeatable way to qualify rather than a one-time pep talk. The clearest proof is what OfficePro did next: the company is running the same Customer Focused Selling® Approach playbook again at its upcoming show, with a refresher session beforehand. A method only gets re-used when it works.

Taken together, the two engagements show what real b2b sales development looks like. One fixed the economics so the team was paid to hunt. The other fixed the skill so the team could qualify what it found. Neither would have held up alone. A better comp plan without selling skill just frustrates reps, and better selling skill without the right incentives just gets aimed at the wrong accounts. Run on the same Customer Focused Selling® Approach, the two reinforce each other.

Start Your Own B2B Sales Development

If your sales team is busy but not growing new business, the problem usually sits in one of the two places it did at OfficePro: the plan is rewarding the wrong behavior, or the team cannot run a qualifying conversation. Often it is both. The good news is that both are fixable, and you do not have to guess which one is holding you back.

OfficePro’s work began with an honest analysis, not a training event. Contact revenueify to start with an A.I.M. Assessment, the same diagnostic that opened the OfficePro engagement. We will tell you where your b2b sales development is actually stuck, and build a plan, grounded in the Customer Focused Selling® Approach, to move it forward. For another example of how this plays out across a full engagement, see our sales training and coaching case study.