For Engineering-Led and Complex B2B Businesses
Before You Spend More on Sales, Marketing, or BD, Confirm What You’re Scaling.
A diagnostic framework for engineering-led and complex B2B businesses.
Every Business Scales Something - Conversion Capability or Conversion Friction
The Default Growth Strategy
When growth slows, the advice is predictable.
Push harder on sales.
Increase marketing spend.
Hire BD.
Post more content.
Try new channels.
The underlying assumption is simple:
If results aren’t improving, effort must increase downstream.
Most leadership teams follow this logic because it sounds reasonable — and because it’s what everyone else does.
The Truth Most Businesses Discover Too Late
Effort is rarely the real constraint.
When conversion is hard, the cause is almost always upstream - long before sales conversations, campaigns, or content calendars begin.
If a business hasn’t been deliberately designed to convert:
More sales activity doesn’t fix it
More marketing amplifies the problem
More content feeds the hamster wheel
Scale doesn’t resolve uncertainty.
It exposes it.
What That Creates in Practice
When activity is scaled before conversion is designed, the symptoms are consistent:
Sales cycles stretch
Buyers hesitate
Price becomes the differentiator
Marketing feels busy but ineffective
More meetings produce the same outcomes
What looks like a performance issue is usually a design issue.
And the longer it goes unchecked, the more expensive it becomes to correct - because scale locks decisions in.
Why This Happens to Smart Teams
This isn’t a failure of sales or marketing.
It's a sequencing error.
Most businesses are taught to execute first and diagnose later.
They’re rewarded for visible activity, not upstream clarity.
By the time friction becomes obvious, the business has already accumulated design debt - implicit decisions reinforced by scale and difficult to unwind.
If you’ve been pushing harder without seeing proportional results, you didn’t miss something obvious.
You followed the default playbook.
What Needs to Be Designed Before Scale
Before increasing activity, spend, or volume, one question must be answered:
Is the business actually designed to convert?
That requires clarity on:
1: Market Selection
2: Critical Problem Being Solved
3: How Value is Being Articulated
4: Where Buyer Risk is reduced
5: How Decisions Are made Safe
Not tactics
Not hacks
Design.
What This Framework Does
Design Before Scale is a practical diagnostic framework for answering a single question:
Are you scaling conversion capability - or conversion friction?
It applies first-principles engineering thinking to growth, covering:
Why marketing fails when design is skipped
How positioning governs conversion
How design debt accumulates quietly
Why scale is a stress test, not a strategy
How to identify the real constraint before it gets expensive
Design Before Scale is not a motivational book.
It’s not a collection of tactics.
It’s a structured way to determine whether pushing harder makes sense — before you pay to find out the hard way.
What Design Before Scale Is / What It Is Not
Design Before Scale is:
A diagnostic framework
A way to validate conversion upstream
A pre-scale design check
Design Before Scale is NOT:
A sales funnel
A set of marketing tactics
A motivation play
A “growth hacks” book
Choose Your Option
Option 1 - $25
Design Before Scale (Digital Book)
Read the framework and examine/validate your own business design.
Option 2 - $95
Design Before Scale (Digital Book)
PLUS - Applied Interpretation
Includes short, chapter-by-chapter videos explaining what each section means in practice - and where conversion friction typically hides.
It costs very little to check the design.
It costs a lot to discover the mistake at scale.
Final Note
If your business is already designed to convert, this will confirm it.
If it isn’t, you’ll see exactly where scale will get expensive.
Either way, you’ll know before you spend more time, money, or effort scaling the wrong thing.
About the Author
Aidan Montague is an engineer by training who has led and advised sales and marketing efforts in complex B2B and engineering-led organisations. He has been featured in Australian media discussing conversion challenges in complex products and services.
Design Before Scale reflects his focus on treating growth as a design problem - identifying conversion constraints upstream, before effort and spend compound friction.