“I’m scared to ask my boss for support.”
We hear a version of this all the time from agency business development people, especially when they’re lone wolves.
For context, our company Sales Schema helps agencies and business development companies scale through tasteful and targeted outreach. We support clients through hands-on outreach training and ‘done for you’ programs.
When most agencies make a sales hire, they give her basic product knowledge, a fresh pitch deck, and maybe a modest budget to attend a few trade shows, and then she’s sent off into the cold.
After 6-12 months, this person usually fails to meet growth goals, and leadership assumes they made a bad hire. And then the agency makes the same mistake, and gives the same excuse, again and again and again…
What’s curious about the agency’s lack of support is that by the time the organization has the ability to bring on a salesperson, they usually have the cash to support them by way of marketing, training, software, data, and most importantly people, even if the ‘sales team’ is part-time or mixed with other functions. It’s not a resource problem, it’s a priority problem.
So why do agencies fail to prioritize and properly support salespeople? After all, it’s not like owners want their sales hires to fail, and most really want to remove themselves from the sales seat so they can set the stage for growth, a better lifestyle, or a future acquisition.
The reason agency sales hires are neglected has to do with legibility.
If you run a successful agency, chances are you’re strong in your service area, be it paid ads, content, or PR. Ramping up and nurturing a salesperson, much less a whole sales team, might seem intimidating and less understood. This problem is intensified by the fact that many owners are combining the sale hire with a first-time effort to expand beyond referrals and organic business development. All of this means multiple unknown quantities stacked atop each other.
When we’re in murky waters, we look for saviors, magic wands, and silver bullets. This is where the perfect storm kicks in: you need help in an important but less-understood area, and great salespeople interview well! (as do bad ones). So you bring on the driver before you have the pit crew and the car, and this person genuinely believes she can win the race on her own, until reality kicks in anyway.
If your agency has been around for a while and you’re getting results for clients, you probably have the crew and car in your fulfillment process. You have a clear division of duties, and you don’t have one person ideating and building that six-figure website from soup to nuts.
The agencies we see ramp up to near-predictably growth implement a division of duties in their sales process, even if the “sales team” is just one or two people. So how do you make that happen?
Here is what we recommend to our clients, in the context of building a successful outreach-focused business development program:
If your team is small, think of your sales roles as “hats” instead of actual people, at least as you’re getting started. Thinking in terms of hats means that even if it’s just you wearing all three, you block off time every week, avoid task switching, and plan your schedule as if you’re three talented people.
The three hats:
1. Strategy
This is a term that’s over-used, but for our purposes, it basically means answering big questions like “Who are we contacting?” and “What are we saying to them?” The trap: getting obsessive about technology before nailing fundamental questions like those above.
2. The Face of the Campaign
Typically this your salesperson, who leads the first call with a prospect, but not always. For example, you may decide to ask a well-motivated leadership stakeholder to be the ‘face’ of your prospecting efforts, and then a different salesperson grabs the baton.
3. Research
In the early days at Sales Schema, we made the mistake of associating this role with basic data entry and virtual assistance, which produced campaigns that were off the mark. Since the success of outreach campaigns nowadays has so much to do with data quality, enrichment, and accuracy, we now consider this a research role. Your researchers is someone who can not just do grunt work, but look at the intricacies of your market and make quick judgement calls. For example, is that one company actually a growth-stage CPG brand and are they good fit for you?
In summary, it helps build the car and assign the pit crew before you hire the driver. If that sounds intimidating the good news is that you and your team can build this out as an MVP before go outside for help. Also, the process of engaging your market and avoiding the lone wolf trap, while not easy, is much simpler than most make it out to be.
Til next time,
-Dan
