This article originally appeared in Forbes Online.

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For the past few years our communications and marketing agency has doubled, and doubled, and doubled again. Growth was good. But it also made us do dumb things.

In our case, one of those aforementioned dumb things was deciding it was time to hire a business development team. We reasoned that even as three founders, we couldn’t take sales meetings, direct our creative department and manage the business operations in what had quickly become four offices across the continent. At the time, hiring a team to recruit new clients seemed like the smartest business move we could pursue; and besides, we had all the “right” strategies and insights.

For instance, we “knew” that selling big-ticket B2B services would take both expertise and a rolodex. So, we went out and found not just sales people, but A-Team sales people. They had contacts, they had experience, and they had excitement. But most importantly – or so we thought at the time – they had tools. We gave them a comprehensive education on our value proposition. We gave them templates for finding, contacting, and meeting with prospects. We gave them takeaways and leave-behinds and case study videos. And none of those tools helped them close prospects.

Was it their fault? Absolutely not. The fault was all our own. You see, despite our past success, we had misunderstood a great many things about selling B2B services. We thought we could simply download our knowledge, upload our core values, and equip these extraordinary people with sales tools to accelerate our growth beyond our own personal abilities. I, for one, figured, hell, I had sold our services before I had any tools at all. If I could sell with nothing, surely these exceptional people could sell with our suite of tools!

Well, I figured wrong. In retrospect, I should’ve seen the big flashing sign all along: our clients weren’t buying tools, presentations or proposals. They were buying the passion of the team. Rocket science? No. Obvious? Yes. Completely surprised, anyway? I sure was.

So, now we’re making changes. After lots of costly hiring decisions and much time spent learning the hard way, we’re going back to the way we originally built the business. The people who founded the company now regard sales as their number one priority and main job function. Our strategy is as simple as when we began: we network, we take meetings, we dazzle our prospects with passionate stories of client success, and we create the kind of intangible magic that produces the best thing you could conjure out of a hat: sales. (Did you think I was going to say a rabbit?)

If you’re wondering whether this strategy has worked for us or not: since we transitioned back to having the founders primarily sell, we wrote more proposals in the first 30 days than we had in the six months prior.

Since talking about our experience with other entrepreneurs, I’ve learned that lots of B2B companies struggle to develop scalable business development. Unfortunately, that still leaves us without a long-term solution, and with more questions than we have answers:

• Do we hire people to open doors and book meetings, leaving us (the founders) to hop from prospect to prospect and close?
• Do we hire people to perform every one of our other functions in the company, leaving us to focus only on selling as we grow new office locations?
• Did we simply have the wrong hiring criteria, indicating that we should try again to hire a sales team, perhaps with the assistance of a consultant or expert in B2B services?
• Are we even asking the right questions to begin with?

While we try to solve those questions, we’re raiding our airline miles, leaving our spouses for longer stretches of time, and otherwise running at a questionably-sustainable velocity. Yes, we’re successfully finding and closing new business – but sooner or later, we know we have to figure out how to scale the all-important sales function as we grow into new markets.

In order to move closer to a solution, my strategy is to actually spend more time selling, even though that may seem counterintuitive. The difference is that now, in every prospect meeting, I’m paying a lot more attention to identifying that special, passion-infused, magic formula that moves a prospect from interest to trial right in front of my eyes. While I know I can’t scale “magic” as a strategic plan for growth, I’m determined to study it until I can figure out the behind-the-scenes secret to the illusion. I’m hoping that dissecting and understanding that yet-unknown formula will help me determine exactly what role I need to play versus what I can outsource to another talented team member. Let’s call it a work in progress, as all good challenges are.

For now, my big takeaway is this: you can teach people to fish, but you can’t teach them to be so in love with the ocean that they start a charter fishing company and build a multimillion-dollar, international business. The former is a recipe for ordinary; the latter is born from pure, passion-infused magic.

As for me, I’m on to the next magic show. Abracadabra!

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