When Should You Hire a New Business Person?

Was last year a tough new business year for your agency?

Maybe you’re feeling the pressure to fill the pipeline fast and so you decide this is the year to hire a business development person. 

Your brief is simple: put someone in charge of finding new clients for the agency.

And the symptoms are clear: the sales cycle is frustratingly long and too often it ends in no decision or a client that disengages for no reason. 

Or you rely too much on responding to competitive RFPs and you’re tired of the poor pitch-to-win ratio that results from it.

Or you simply feel like someone else might be better at finding new business than you.

It seems logical to solve the problem by hiring a qualified person to help. But, proceed with caution. Here’s what happens when you hire a new business person before you’re ready: 

• You place stratospheric expectations on that person, which they inevitably fail to meet

• You expect them to unburden you from the responsibility of new business, then they flounder without direction

• Results don’t seem to materialize (why isn’t your calendar flooded with prospect meetings and pitches?)

• If you hire someone too senior, you’re feeling like you may have made a very expensive mistake

• If you hire someone too junior, you’re still too involved in new business and still 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 a new business person must be based on scaling your agency, not digging it out of a hole.

When should you hire? 

When you’ve established a scalable, repeatable process that has already been proven to generate leads (even if modestly) and which can be assumed by others. 

A scalable, repeatable new business process will look a bit different for each agency, but here’s what I advise you do first:

You’ve defined a core positioning and an ideal client profile

Be crystal clear about what your agency is known for and the types of clients it serves best. This is the single most effective thing you can do to make the job of pursuing new business for your agency. 

Defining your agency’s core positioning isn’t the responsibility of your new business person. They may be in a position to contribute great ideas and market insights, but at the end of the day, it’s your job.  

You have a basic strategy for generating awareness and attracting 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 your 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.

In the Build Win Scale Accelerator program, I recommend a “minimalist marketing” approach built on three core channels:

• A Nurture channel – a searchable channel, like a blog or a YouTube channel, with evergreen content 

• A Visibility channel – borrowing someone else’s audience through speaking at events or guest spots on podcasts

• An Email Marketing channel – engaging and connecting with the audience you already own

This doesn’t have to be complex. Start with one and build from there.

You have a method for maintaining your contacts and tracking 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 CRM software is not easy. But the chaos and confusion that ensues when you scale without it are not worth it. 

You defined communications protocols around new business 

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. Ask yourself:

• 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?

Err on the side of over-communicating with your business development person, especially at the start of their tenure.

Your team is onboard to offer support that’s needed

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 around the process and how they will be expected to participate. 

Whether you realize it or not, you already have a process. You probably run through a similar set of decisions and actions with your team each time you get invited to pitch a new client. Before hiring a new business person, turn that informal process into a document standard operating procedure.—

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.