Myths of Growth: Myth #4, Never Turn Down a Sale

By Mont Phelps and Jane Linder, CRN December 22, 2011

Mont Phelps is president and CEO at NWN, and Jane Linder is Managing Director at NWN, a CRN Fast Growth IT solution provider.

Over five consecutive years, NWN has been on CRN’s Fast Growth 100 list, but growth is not our goal. We believe that sustaining growth is a byproduct of doing all the right things to build a great company.

In this series of blogs, we have highlighted some myths of growth and shared our unique business point of view as executives at NWN, a CRN Fast Growth company. Our last myth concerns turning away business. Here's a scenario:

“What do you do?” the customer asks.

“We provide information technology solutions,” the executive responds. “We try to be a one-stop shop. Our sales people will go after your business whether you have 5 employees or 5,000. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, where you are located, or what kind of technology you need. We try to be good at everything.”

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But many companies end up operating that way simply by failing to focus on serving an explicit set of customers very well. They leave strategy for the large IT firms and carom from sale to sale without knowing exactly why.

At NWN, we have found that sustaining growth takes exactly the opposite approach. The nuances of our company’s operating model are tuned precisely to the clients we want to win and the value we want to offer them. And those intimate details of the way we go to market are the engine of growth for us.

For example, as NWN deepens our expertise with health care clients, we build our lead over competitors. Clients can tell right away that we understand their business and can bring them solutions that get results, not just in general, but for them personally. Our knowledge is inseparable from the technologies we implement, and clients choose us to get that high-value bundle.