Hiring a salesperson when you need more sales is a bad idea
Maybe last year was a tough year for your agency. Maybe it resulted in an empty new business pipeline and now you’re feeling the pressure to fill it. Fast.
Maybe you decide this is the year to hire a sales or business development person.
Your brief is simple: put someone in charge of finding new clients for the agency.
The symptoms are clear: there are too few good leads, an overreliance on responding to competitive RFPs, and a poor pitch-to-win ratio.
It seems logical to solve the problem by hiring someone qualified to help. So, you do. And this is what happens:
You place stratospheric expectations on that person, which she inevitably fails to meet
You expect her to unburden you from the responsibility of new business, then she flounders without direction
Results don’t seem to materialize–your calendar isn’t flooded with meetings and pitches
If you hired someone senior, you’re feeling like you made a very expensive mistake.
If you hired someone junior, your cash flow may be better off but nonetheless, you feel like you’re still too involved in new business and not seeing a positive difference in your pipeline
I don’t want to minimize the new business challenges a small agency faces. However, the decision to hire must be based on scaling your agency, not digging it out of a hole.
When should you hire? When you have enough leads to merit adding the role and you’ve established a scalable, repeatable process that can be assumed by others.
1) Hire a salesperson when you have enough leads to merit adding the role
At a small agency, the CEO is the best business development resource that the agency has.
Why? Quite simply, because they’re the ones with the most at stake.
They have an entrepreneurial mindset, especially if they’re owners or founders. They hustle. They do what they need to do to grow the business
They’re also the agency’s most passionate boosters. I hate seeing the word “passion” being used (or overused) by agencies in describing their culture or work ethic. It sounds empty to me–except when it describes the owner or CEO.
Most successful small agency owners and CEOs I work with have gotten to where they are because they’ve taken responsibility for business development at their agency. The question on their minds is not “how do I fill the pipeline?”, but “how do I do a better job of filling the pipeline?”
It’s not a question of starting from scratch; it’s a question of building on the foundation that’s been established and operationalizing what has been up until then an informal process.
Before investing significant time and money in hiring a salesperson or business development lead, consider whether you’ve got these foundational components in place:
A description of what makes your agency different in the market in which you compete
Your insights into the needs and motivations of your ideal clients
An understanding of the value you provide (ideally in a way that can be quantified)
I won’t get into a debate on the merits of specialization and tight strategic positioning. What I will say is that being crystal clear about what your agency is known for simply makes the job of pursuing new business easier because:
Your pitch is focused, not haphazard
It shapes your messaging strategy so that you’re less likely to be ignored
Instills confidence in the value you offer
It’s simply more efficient. And, when you’re a busy agency owner or CEO, efficiency is important.
Then, when it’s time to bring on a business development team member, you’re inviting her to join you on a journey that’s already underway. You’re not just giving her a compass and a few granola bars and sending her out into the wilderness to kill a beast.
Let her trail you to learn how you speak about your agency, what’s important to you, and what’s important to your clients, especially if they are selling to businesses in a category new to them.
Make sure your new hire doesn’t end up sitting in her office alone, stumped on how to appeal to an impossible set of prospects with a weak pitch that over promises and is easily ignored.
2) You have a scalable, repeatable process that can be assumed by others
What does a scalable, repeatable new business process look like? It will vary for each agency, but the basic components will include:
The way you generate awareness and attract inbound leads.
Aka, your marketing plan.
At a large agency, this is often managed by a marketing team distinct from the business development team.
That’s probably not the case at a small agency.
More likely, your business development hire will be expected to straddle both sales and marketing. All the more important to have a clearly defined set of marketing activities that are done consistently.
This doesn’t have to be complex, especially if you’re just starting to build a marketing plan for your agency. It can be as simple as a monthly newsletter. What’s important, however, is that:
You’re doing it for a reason. In other words, you’ve defined your audience and you have a messaging strategy that appeals to that audience.
You’ve assigned responsibility to yourself or someone on your team.
You execute consistently (or as consistently as possible).
You have a plan for converting. This is not a one-way gesture of generosity. You’re exchanging your intelligence for their attention. What are you going to do with that attention once you have it?
How you maintain and track leads.
The other day I spoke with an agency leader who, in answer to my question about whether they had a contact database, told me it’s “all in my head”. If that’s the case at your agency, I’d suggest you get it out of your head and into a shared repository, ideally by using a CRM software tool.
Your contact database, and the process for maintaining it, must also be accepted and respected by your leadership team and anyone else who’s participating directly in new business activities.
I know, getting people to love updating the CRM is not easy. But the chaos and confusion that ensues when you scale without it are not worth it.
How you qualify a client.
This must go beyond a gut feeling or describing the prospective client in vague, qualitative terms like “team player” or “makes brave decisions”. And certainly, your criteria will evolve over time. Nonetheless, establish basic qualifications for ideal clients and opportunities that can be communicated in specific terms to your business development lead.
Methods for and frequency of status meetings and other internal communication.
I commonly observe a tendency among agency leaders to wipe their hands of business development responsibility as soon as they make a hire.
You’re delegating responsibility, not disavowing it. Assume you’ll need to over-communicate with your business development person, especially at the start of her tenure.
Consider questions like:
How often will your business development person have direct access to you?
Do you have a regularly scheduled new business status meeting already on your calendar yet or do you need to institute one?
When should your BD person alert you to decisions which they don’t feel comfortable making on their own?
How are you communicating to them the decisions you’ve made that affect their job?
How and when other team members get involved.
Business development can be a very lonely role for the person assigned to it. Alleviate that isolation by setting clear expectations among the rest of your team that they will be expected to participate.
Likewise, discuss with your BD person what the parameters are for getting others involved. Whether you realize it or not, you already have a process. You run through the same set of decisions and actions to pull in the support of your team each time you get invited to pitch a new client.
That need for support isn’t going to go away now that you’ve delegated business development responsibility. The difference is that now the need will be voiced by your business development person, not you. Make sure everyone knows that and is familiar with the protocols.
I’ve heard so many stories of disappointing or even disastrous new business hires (I’ve lived through a couple myself). In almost all cases, when I probe agency leaders or take some time to objectively reflect on the situation myself, I realize that the relationship was doomed from the start. Not because of lack of smarts, enthusiasm, or experience, but because that person was being asked to fill a role that had been created prematurely and for misdirected reasons.
Build a framework, even a rudimentary one, that you can envision scaling one day. Define a new business strategy that’s focused on the right clients for your agency and begin to fill your pipeline with them. Then hire your salesperson.