How a Catering Company Doubled Revenue with Sales Systems

You get the help you get, the coaching you put in the CRM, leadership's ready to change. We're all on board. Then you get to scorecard. It's all there and it's always been there.

It's just we've never taken the time to look in the right places or to extract it the right way. Welcome to Driving Growth, the go-to-market podcast for traditional B2B businesses that are looking to build systems to create predictable revenue. In short, turning their company into a revenue factory. I'm your host, Steve Whittington, president of Roadmap, and a believer in one simple truth: sustainable growth is not an accident.

It's engineered, and my company Roadmap is a builder of go-to-market systems. On today's show, we have a special episode. We've never done this, but we have a current client that has gone through the transformation of putting in a go-to-market system and turning their business into a revenue factory. And why you should listen to this episode is if you are trying to think about what the next step is, or maybe it's overwhelming or you feel this is too hard, listen to Marie's story to give you insights and inspiration about what you too can do in your organization.

Marie Galeana leads revenue at Sky and Table, a catering and events company based in Lethbridge, Alberta. Me and Marie have been working together since 2021, and we've done strategy, customer understanding, brand, websites, CRM, and ongoing growth retainer work together. So this has been a great relationship. And over that time, the business has doubled in size.

Marie has grown significantly as a leader. She sits on the board of Lethbridge Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Lethbridge, which reflects both her standing in the community and the role that plays into how Sky and Table goes to market. What makes this conversation worth your time? Marie came into this role without a formal revenue system.

Today, she can look at her scorecard and tell you to the dollar what's going to close this quarter, what pipeline needs to be created, and what her team needs to do this week to keep things on track for a year. And that's the transformation we're going to be unpacking. Marie, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you on the show after all this time of talking about it.

Thank you, Steve. I'm so excited to be here. I'm ready to dive into this. Excellent.

I want to go right back to the start. So when we think back to the starting point, 2021. What did your revenue leadership look like before the systems that have been put in place today? Well, it was a lot of historical data.

It was looking back, looking forward, going off a Google calendar, if you will, guest meeting, hoping it was just kind of all over the place. So there was nothing formal at all in place at that time. And what was the impact like, you know, with your sales team just on the overall organization with that, that style of hope casting? Exactly.

Yes. That's right. You nailed it. Was hope casting.

We did have some spreadsheets that we created and obviously we had some goals. But again, it was very dicey. It was sort of, you know, picking here, picking there to try to get an idea and hope cast for the future. So for the team, honestly, I think it was just take whatever you can get without really having any sort of clear vision of what was expected or what was to come.

So we had no way of measuring if we were really performing where we should be or, you know, we had to work on certain things. So it was all very loosey-goosey, for sure. And it worked for a while. Like, honestly, it did work for a while.

We were lucky enough that we could ride that wave without having anything formal in place. But then, of course, everything came to a halt and sort of became aware once Covid hit. Right? Right.

And Covid - like Covid was just a hard reset like that. It hit the catering industry arguably harder than almost any industry. Catering and events can be considered very relationship driven, certainly for the stuff that happens year over year. You've got clients that come back to you and say, "Hey, yeah, we're going to do this event again," but there's no guarantee of that.

And then you have all the one-off stuff that happens, and it can make forecasting really difficult, especially considering that sometimes you get booked for an event that's like 16 months out, so you don't have this clean pipeline you have. It's seasonal. It can be blocked and lumpy. And what I want to unpack is: what was the mental shift for you when you said, "I'm really going to double down and I'm going to figure out how to make this forecasting work"?

So I know exactly how many things that my team needs to do for, say, the month of August in this venue. And there was a mental shift that occurred for you to double down on that type of thinking, to say we can make forecasting happen and predictable for our business. So let's talk about what you went through there and how you kind of brought that into the team. Right?

I think it all again goes back to the client profiles and knowing sort of which segment we're working with. So we have retention. We have the social ones. We have the social one-offs.

You know, the one-timers I should say. And so I think for us what really worked was getting that forecast, building that forecast, but then dialing into what a feature event is worth and how many of those events do we need in the month of, say, May, to make our target based on the retention? So we know the recurring ones that we're going to get, the new ones we're going to have, what they're worth, how many inquiries that we need to have to close to get there. So I think having all those metrics in place and now so far out, we can easily say a year from now, you know, this is the forecast, this is what we need.

This is how it's broken down per event to get there. So I think that has been very helpful for myself and my team because they're just better equipped and better educated on, okay, this is what I need to do. It's not just I need to get business for May. I need to be strategic and get this type of business for this venue or that venue to make that target.

Yeah. And you've built out a process where you can say, hey, in May 2027 like that, far out, you know, how much revenue you have across your various different venues and what it is that you need to load in? And you were talking about that mathematical model where it's like, okay, we got to make sure we have this amount of lead volume because we have this amount of close rate, and then we can fill that in. Yeah.

And I never actually tracked how many inquiries we got per week. And as you know, now that I do that I started to see a trend. And so now I know for us what that threshold is and what, you know, when it starts to dip down, I'm like, okay, that's odd. I would have never been able to say that two years ago.

I would never have been able to say last week, "You know, we didn't get enough inquiries. I wonder why." And look at it and see where the pipeline is and where it all fell for. You know, for now, I can even look out and say, "Okay, this is where we are for Q2 or Q3 in 2027.

You know, this is where I want us to be. This is where it's all coming in." So it's just - yeah, it's just such a wealth of information just to have it in one spot, right. And so what is the impact for the whole revenue team?

And let me unpack that. You have marketing reporting to you. You have sales reporting to you. You have planners reporting to you.

So, like, customer experience. So, like, that entire umbrella of revenue is reporting to you. Having that information available, knowing the targets that they have to chase - how has that changed how your team now shows up and how they execute? It's been great because, you know, it's even sometimes when they feel like they're falling short, they'll look and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm only $50,000 from my goal for the year.

That's awesome. We're not even - we're only six months in or whatnot." So, you know, it really helps them and motivates them. And at the same time, it's also, "Hey, so-and-so, I'm this short from my goal.

I need to really look at what can I do? How can I get marketing on board? How can I get the planners upselling? How can we start working together to get to that number?"

So really starts to dial back and think, you know, what needs to occur to get there versus "I just need to grab business," you know? Yeah. And that's - that's a change that's reflective of but once where you once were into where you are today. Hey, we'll get back to the show in just a second.

Here's a shocking stat: less than 30% of Canadian B2B companies have a documented go-to-market strategy. And if you want to know where you stand, go to Roadmap and become part of the Go to Market Readiness Index and get yourself benchmarked across your peers. It's free, it's worth doing, and it gives you a one-on-one gap analysis in which you can define your future. Links in the show notes.

Walk me through. You know, you now have a scorecard. It's quite detailed. Your forecast is built out quite, quite a far ways.

It's all tied in with your CRM. What does this look like today? So, like, you know, give people a feel for, like, you know, Marie's dashboard that she looks at that says, "Hey, you know, I've got my revenue lens on. Here's what I'm looking at.

Here's what I need to do." Just, sort of, you know, help us visualize what that looks like for sure. So every Friday we meet - actually, I just came from there. We have our scorecard meeting with the senior leadership team.

And basically I go through the week. So I go through the past week and we just look at how many inquiries came in, how much we added to the pipeline, where those inquiries fell in what quarter and what year. We look at the closing rate. We look at the won deals, obviously the lost rate with the lost deals.

We look at where we're at for this year, where we're at for next year. Then we also do monthly - a monthly summary. So we just went over April and we looked at all the April numbers. And then my team, my sales team, they do their own scorecard every two weeks, and it's really neat to see how the dial's been moved over two weeks, because you can start to really see, "Okay, we picked up $100,000 at this venue, picked up $8,000 at that venue."

So they update their own, which goes into the mother of spreadsheets. I like to call the motherboard, where we have it broken down by venue. So, sort of a rolling tally of where we're at versus the goal. So again, it's been really great for them to see that personally and to see that movement over the two weeks.

So yeah, these are all the numbers we look at. And if we notice in two weeks one venue hasn't picked up anything - for example, we kind of go and we meet with the person and we talk about it. We realize, "Oh, it's as simple as we're running out of real estate for the year. So, you know, there's only a few dates left at that venue, so we're obviously not going to see that increase like we were.

But now let's look at 2027. Let's look at 2028. How is that moving?" So yeah, it's been awesome for all of us, I think, to be involved in that.

So you're beating a drum with a weekly cadence, looking at your numbers, looking at exactly where you are as an organization against your goals. This cascades down to a biweekly cadence for the sales team members with their quotas, which obviously always rolls up to the top level, rolls up to the goals. Everything is all lined up, right? And it's fed from a system of record, so it's all very transparent and you can dive into stuff.

You've got complete clarity about where you stand and what you need to do. Okay. So how does that feel compared to, say, 2018 or 2019? However far you want to go back to say where there was a big shift.

So how does today feel compared to then? Words that come to my mind: clarity, control, and confidence. I just don't have anything else to say. Like, it just really - it's that.

It's just the confidence is in the clarity and the control, you know? Now I don't feel like I'm just, you know, we're just hoping on the - you know, we have some actual control, and I think it makes everyone more confident in the day to day. You know, it makes leadership ownership more confident, obviously. You know, it's clarity and transparency all over.

There's not a "you're doing bad, you know why aren't the sales there?" There's not that sort of shame or guilt. It's all - and you've talked about this - it's all transparent, and you know, it is what it is. And we look at when we don't have, when we have down months, what do we need to do?

And it's just as simple as that. And we get to work and do it. So I think it's been, yeah, just without a doubt one of the biggest changes that we have made as an organization. Yeah, you have an issue if things are not trending the way you want it to be.

You attack it, and you just objectively solve it as an organization because you have all the data there, the entire mathematical model there. This has opened up capacity for you as a leader. You think about the mental load that you had back in 2018, 2019, 2020 - well, even start of 2021, right - we're now, you said you've got this confidence. You know clarity.

You don't have to worry about that stuff anymore because it's all there in front of you. And you have become a community leader. You know, I mentioned at the beginning you're on the chamber board, Tourism Lethbridge - how does that connect back to helping you with overall revenue as a community leader and helping just the standing of the brand? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I've always been very community minded, and I was a Rotarian for many, many years as well. And I did it because I love it. I love to get back to community, be part of this great place that we live in. And I'm also really big into relationships.

So I've never really looked at clients as transactional. I've looked at them more as relationship based. You know, what do we have in common? How can I help them?

How can we achieve things together? And so I think it's the building of that relationship that has enabled me to become so successful in my area, as well as the trust there. So they know when they're coming to me that they're going to get a certain type of service, a certain level of excellence. They know what they can expect.

There's the trust there. And I think that's everything. And I think, you know, the retention that we have is so incredible. And I think it's because again, we're out there, we're with the community.

We're building those friendships. Basically, a lot of my clients are my friends. And that just doesn't happen unless you're authentically present and genuine about your intention. And I have always been about that.

I've always been more interested in them and what they're doing and what's going on with them versus what I can get from them. And I think that comes across. And yeah, I think that's why we do have that retention. Providing surplus value shows up in spades in how you show up.

And, you know, I think the message here to other revenue leaders is to engage with your community. But, you know, as you said, about what you can give versus what you can get: always provide surplus value, and you show up in spades doing that all day long. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. Revenue leaders are under more pressure than ever.

Growth from the top, utilization from the bottom. That is why we launched the growth table, which gives you a revenue leader a trusted group of peers who get it and help you work through the challenges that you're facing. Go to Roadmap Agency Growth table. Link in the notes.

Apply today. The business is doubled. We said that at the beginning. And you know it's always multifactorial.

All these different things occur to help a business grow. Where would you say the credit goes, you know, in your mind? Yeah, I would have credit. I would credit that tremendous success to the ownership, the leadership of the company also, you know, instilling and bringing Roadmap on to help us out.

That was massive when we made the decision to work with yourself and your folks over there at Roadmap. That kind of changed everything, really. Like it was a whole new language for us. And, you know, we needed that coaching.

You know, I do believe in all areas of your life you can only get so far, and then you really do need to instill a coach of some sort to help you get to the next level. And so I think it was a combination of all that. We were ready as leadership, we were ready as ownership. We brought on Roadmap and together we just went guns a-blazing.

And this is sort of where we are now. And I'm excited to see what happens in the next few years. Yeah. And as someone that's been alongside you for this journey, we can't underscore the fact that the leadership team is a committed team and accountable.

And those are two ingredients that are necessary to make change happen. So if you didn't have that, none of this would happen. And so definitely credit has to go where credit is deserved, where you have committed players, committed leadership and accountable leadership to enact a revenue system. So if you were going to talk to another revenue leader today and you recognize that they were where you were - I think you said running on gut feel was the term you used - and you see them running on gut feel, what would you say to them to help them with their next steps?

I would honestly say, yeah, instill and help get the help. Find a coach, find an agency, you know, or find the books. Do the research yourself if you need to. But definitely look at getting the scorecard in place.

Look at getting those metrics in place. Look at getting committed to the discipline of the cadence, like you said, because, you know, it's so important. If we skip a meeting, it's almost like detrimental to that week. Like it has to happen.

So yeah, I would say that would be step one. And of course, hopefully they have a CRM, and if they don't, get one, because again, you introduced us to that CRM, and that also was part of this huge transition as well. Yeah, fair enough. Discipline thought, discipline action.

And it's not rocket science. It's just about rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Continue to get progressive elaboration. Get better every time, and the results will follow.

So I want to ask a few questions because I was listening to this and I thought, "Well, geez, let's pull out a few gems here." So you've got a lot of metrics that you look at. Is there one metric that jumps out at you that - hey, this week, this is the first thing I go to. I look at this.

That's like, because I have that, right? What is, for me in my business, the one that you jump to right away? I'm just kind of curious. I love the closing rate.

Like, I love to see that above 30%, and I love to see it consistently. Like, last week we hit 60%, and I'm like, "Yay!" Now, I know it's very - it fluctuates a lot based on - so we actually keep deals for 54 days before we turn them. So there are times where a salesperson might be cleaning up their pipeline, and so it could be like a dumping, which will affect things obviously greatly.

But that's something that gets me excited, just as a salesperson in general, just to see how much we're closing. And then the new inquiries, obviously, I really like to see how many are coming in because that, to me, is the driven interest, right? I want to see that interest. I want to see it at a certain point.

And if I don't see it at that point, then we need to start looking at marketing and other areas and how we can increase that. So that's a real big trigger for me. Yeah, you like to see those fresh inputs. You're a hunter.

You want to see that's the close rate. How many new inquiries? Yeah, that's awesome. I love it.

When you think about this thing, you had forecasts that you were missing, or you didn't know how you're going to get. And now you can reflect on how you have that confidence that you're going to be hitting your numbers. What do you feel a bad forecast actually costs a business? Besides, you know, they miss their numbers.

So what's the real cost? They miss the relationships. They miss the, you know, the retention. You know, without the preparedness, there's just so much on the line.

Yeah, I would say the relationship. And that's hard to get back. You've lost them to the competitor. They might be more savvy than you are there, and you might not get them back.

So that has happened to us in the past without the systems. And, you know, it took me - I lost a massive client and it took me a few years to get them back again. And so I think it's so much more than that, and it's so much further out than you realize of what you could be leaving on the table. Let's go back to before you remastered all this kind of stuff.

What's the one thing you wish you had known back then from where you are today? Just how easy it can be. I probably gave you a hard time at first because all of us, you know, we're scared of change and we're scared of, you know, the word "revenues" can even sound scary to some people, right? And then you put in the, you know, you get the help, you get the coaching, you put in the CRM, leadership is ready to change, we're all on board.

Then you get to scorecard. It's all there and it's always been there. It's just we've never taken the time to look in the right places or to extract it the right way. So once it's done and rolling, it's easy.

Like I can do it now in a few minutes, you know, maybe every other day I go in there and it's just so habitual, right? And it's just become my language. And so yeah, I would say that if I could tell Marie three years ago: "Don't worry. This is actually going to make your life much better.

You're going to be so much more prepared for market, and it's going to be easy, and you're actually going to like it." That would have been the biggest shocker - is that I actually secretly like it. Yeah, you like it? I love it.

You're all over it. You just get excited about numbers, which you couldn't say that three or four years ago. I got excited about numbers and winning, but I never got excited about looking at all of this. Right.

The big picture. So yeah, right. The system. Exactly.

Marie, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find you and learn more about Sky and Table and yourself? Absolutely. So we are Sky and Table, A.

That's our website. You can also find us. We have various brands. One of our most prominent brands is Chef's Catering.

We're on Instagram, on Facebook. I'm also on LinkedIn - Marie Galeana Galeana. Yeah, there's various places that you can find us. Full disclosure, I've been wanting to get Marie on the show for a while because of the transformation that she has been part of leading at Sky and Table, and really, what her story represents is that these systems are not just for enterprise.

In fact, Roadmap doesn't deal with enterprise. We deal with small to medium enterprises, and their market is local. Their pipeline can be seasonally driven, their sales motions can be emotionally charged for weddings and relationship-driven for their ongoing recurring business. The math model still works.

The scorecard, as she said, creates confidence and clarity. The weekly discipline drives the business, and it hurts when they miss that. So all this is what's changed. It's not anything to do with her industry.

What changed for them is the commitment to run revenue like a system, instead of through effort and hoping. Marie led that shift, and the business has doubled. This is what engineering revenue looks like, regardless of what you sell. And as she said, there was effort, but it's way easier now that she's on the other side of it.

And all of you can do this. If this podcast resonated with you, I would suggest you participate in Roadmap's Go to Market Readiness Research. You can get an individualized report that tells you how ready you are to scale. Go to Roadmap Resources and download the 2025 report and apply to be part of the research.

Also subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, with new episodes dropping the first and third Wednesday of every month. I'm Steve Whittington. Thanks for listening. Keep building your revenue factory one brick at a time.