Article - Where To Find Good Sales People For Your Agency
READ: 2 mins
AUTHOR: Janusz Stabik
As the owner, you’re usually the one taking care of the entire sales function of your agency. You bring in the leads, qualify them, generate proposals and ultimately, onboard the new clients.
All this can be a time-consuming process and when you’re trying to grow your agency and focus on the bigger picture, it can feel as though you just haven’t got the time anymore.
This leads tired and frustrated agency owners to ask our team - “Where do we find good agency salespeople?”
Our answer? Unfortunately, they are few and far between. Trying to find a salesperson who is the perfect fit for your agency, can be a little like finding a needle in a haystack.
But, don’t be put off, we still have a solution to your woes - just keep reading.
But First - Why Are We, As Agency Owners, So Much Better At Sales?
It’s true that you, the owner of the business, would (or should have) the best grasp on what it is your agency does, how you do it and how well you do it, better than anyone else in your team. This makes you a confident and knowledgeable person to consult with and buy from and is why you so often succeed in the pitch room.
As agency owners, you’re usually on your own when it comes to meeting with prospective clients; you’re the one asking questions, listening, and empathising before proposing ideas and strategic insights, which ultimately lands the client. This process and the associated sales admin is demanding and often leads to agency owners wanting to seek out support and look to hire a sales team.
I understand that once you’re out in the job market and you try hiring and working with new sales recruits, it often doesn’t work out the way you thought it would. Loads of professionally trained salespeople have the tendency to sell like a car dealership salesman, rather than an innovative, digital savvy, agency expert - like you.
Why Can’t You Find Other Sales-People Like You? And What Can You Do About It?
As we said earlier on, the sad fact is that a good agency salesperson, who is available most likely won’t exist. This is usually because anyone who is good at this consultative sales process, is passionate about digital and is good at generating leads for an agency - is probably already out there running their own agency.
So, what can you do? In our experience, you have three options:
1- Buy Or Merge With Another Agency
Typically, an agency with a successful business development function is of a certain size and has either acquired or merged with another agency in order to get there. By doing this they have been able to utilise the successful salespeople, business development manager and agency owner from both agencies.
This is why our first recommendation to finding good salespeople might be to seek out talent from an existing agency and utilise the power of a tried and tested sales team to grow your agency, while you return your focus to the business management or the finances.
2 - Recruit From Within Your Niche
It’s not particularly common to find great salespeople within the agency space, who know and understand our agency world. But, they do exist in other verticals. This leads us to your second option, to recruit salespeople from within your niche.
Let’s say, for example, your agency specialises in the automotive sector, there are very strong salespeople within the automotive sector who are great at selling, and better yet - they know how that industry works and they’ve got all the contacts.
If you look to your service niche and recruit within the same sector, suddenly you begin to find great innate salespeople who are able to learn the intricacies of your agency and the agency way of life.
3 - Suck It Up, Create A Process & Delegate The Admin
Our third recommendation is far more practical and exciting than it may seem at first.
If you’re struggling to find a salesperson who fits the bill, perhaps the best thing to do is understand that actually, you’re the best person for the job. After all, you've been doing it so well all along and have succeeded in growing your agency to this point, so why fix what isn’t broken?
In this case, instead of seeking new salespeople, we’d advocate hiring administrative team members to support and manage both you and your sales process. Of course, this only works if you have a regimented, documented and template sales process which is able to be copied and pasted each time you receive a new lead, so make sure you think about doing this first.
Recruiting support staff to whom you can delegate elements of your sales process will ultimately save you hours of time. If this is managed well, you can simply show up for the calls and meetings and then use your time for the important tasks like costings and proposals, without having to manage the initial lead qualification, emails or onboarding surveys.
This will not only give you more time to focus on the bigger picture and get back to growing your agency. Documenting and delegating tasks within your sales process will ensure that any prospects receive the same, complete sales process each and every time, which as we all know, is going to land you more sales.
In Summary
In all our years of digital agency experience, we’ve determined that readily available, quality agency salespeople are as rare as hen’s teeth. The very few out there who do fit the bill, seem to all be busy running their own agency.
If you’re seeking support within your business development or sales function, you can either look to buy or merge with another agency, recruit a non-agency salesperson from within your niche or re-imagine your own responsibilities, systems and procedures to alleviate some of your work-load.
At GYDA, we’re all about More Revenue, More Profit, Less Stress and More Time, which is why the latter of these recommendations is usually our preference.
This approach allows agency owners who are struggling to independently run their sales process while managing the broader agency, to concentrate their time and efforts into areas of the business where it will have maximum impact.
