If you’re unhappy with the performance of your salesperson, it might be because you’re asking them to do the wrong job, or thinking about sales the wrong way.
I believe the best sales work begins AFTER a potential client calls about your services. A good salesperson closes the deal by deeply understanding the client’s goals, eliminates competitive bids from consideration, and facilitates the highest value deal for the agency and the client. Almost everything before that call is best left to marketing.
The Pitfalls of Outbound Sales
Too often, agency owners rely on their salespeople to “dial for dollars.” This might have worked well in the past when competition was less fierce and specialization hadn’t yet matured. Nowadays though, most outbound sales work is perceived negatively by potential clients as unwanted pressure and persuasion. Why make people feel that way about your agency?
The Importance of Marketing
Many owners avoid marketing because it requires specialization to be most effective. As a result, they don’t know how to differentiate their agency’s key features in any meaningful way from their competitors. If this sounds like you, it’s likely you’re poorly positioned. This should be fixed ASAP. Because once you’ve clearly defined your positioning, you’ll know exactly what you’re offering, to whom, and how to market to them.
Marketing Becomes Easy
Most marketing work today can be done fairly easily and without having to do a media buy. You can share your informed point of view on the market you serve—just like I’m doing right now with this article. You can then leverage this insight with targeted newsletter marketing services built into tools like Intuit Mailchimp, email sequencing with Copper, hosted events, or speaker opportunities.
Inbound marketing done with valuable insight and interactions can be significantly more cost-effective than outbound sales methods, and strategies like writing have a great track record of producing results. It also increases conversion rates because you’ve brought the potential client to you with interest already set in, instead of you chasing after them.
An Exception to the Rule
There is one major exception to this methodology: hiring a salesperson for lead generation through in-person sales trips. In fact, this might be the #1 method for bringing in new business. It works so well that it even overcomes undifferentiation because the clients are built on relationships, which is very effective, as long as procurement doesn’t come sniffing around. I know a few agency owners with teams who excel at outbound sales through in-person travel. One of them said to me recently, “you can’t make friends and memories with marketing”. True!
So, if you want to scale your biz dev efforts, consider hiring someone with marketing expertise for lead generation, and focus your salesperson on landing the deal once it comes in the door. Or set aside enough time, and budget, for travel.
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