When you start an agency you manage all aspects of the business. You wear many hats and are the head of every department.
As you grow you begin to hire people for specific roles and functions within the organization.
Every agency owner needs to be able to sell their services to some degree. The question then becomes, when do you hand that role to someone else?
In this episode of Inbound Sales Journey, we discuss the good the bad and the ugly of founders selling their own services.
The Good
In the beginning it’s sell or die. There is no team of sales people and you the founder is all there is. If you cannot sell your service you cannot grow your company, simple as that.
To be honest you don’t need to be a killer sales person to grow your company. Most owner’s do not have the problem of selling too little but rather having a team and process in place to handle what they do sale.
Getting a bunch of new clients quickly can be worse than only a few clients early on. You need those first few clients to help your develop the proper processes to handle more work.
This is why most agencies will choose to hire a project manager full time before a sales person.
The Bad
Now at some point your processes will be set and your team poised for growth. At this point you as the owner have been handling most of the sales.
Now you may not be a great sales person but you were good enough to close a couple of deals. What you need to realize is whether you are good enough to close not just some but most opportunities presented.
It is hard to know for a fact which ones that got away could have closed. You need to have a level of self awareness to make a judgment call.
If you are ready to scale the agency, are you the right person to make that happen on the sales side?
The Ugly
You are not good at everything.
When agency owners have built something from nothing you get a false sense of your abilities.
Selling inbound services is a challenging job and requires a specific skill set to make the most of the opportunities.
Here is where things get really ugly.
To train someone and get them to the point where they are a rock star for your company you need to be willing to lose money.
I’m not just talking about paying them a salary or commission. During training people will make mistakes and deals will be lost. Deals that you may know you could have closed.
In a sense you have to be willing to take one step backwards to take two steps forward.
Do not view this as a setback. See far enough into the future to understand that hiring someone with a specific skill set will allow you to scale your agency beyond your own abilities.
It all boils down to the law of the lid. Find someone with a higher level of ability in sales than you. Then train them to a point to take sales to a level you never could on your own.
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