Agencies, for the most part, aren’t built as sales engines. Salespeople may get tacked on as an agency grows, but having a bona fide sales manager is more of a rarity. More often, the responsibility of overseeing the new business development team is just another hat assigned to someone already wearing too many hats, and often that someone is the agency owner. Unfortunately, however, agency owners are ill-equipped to take on any more hats of any type.
Just as most new business activities tend to get pushed to the back burner out of necessity, so does management of new business professionals. But having someone to provide that oversight, coaching, and to hold salespeople accountable is a crucial part of success in sales.
Likewise, be sure that your commission structure is consistent with the type of business you want to close. For example, if its structured to offer zero commission on projects but 20% commission on AOR contracts, that may not reflect current market conditions and it may also encourage your new business person to pursue opportunities that are not right for the agency or have little chance of closing.
Holding them accountable means establishing a certain number of activities that they need to achieve on a weekly basis. This is a crucial step and one that must be monitored on a consistent basis to achieve maximum results. We suggest weekly check-ins are a good place to start.
This is another reason that you need to track your KPIs and have a sales process and plan in place. The new business generation activities that you agree on with your new business professional should be based on your agency’s target benchmarks and should be realistic according to historic performance, and be aligned with your sales plan and processes.
In other words, you should be able to determine with a fair amount of accuracy how much new business you need to close to meet your revenue goals this year, and based on your win/lose ratio and average sales cycle, how many activities (calls, conferences, emails, meetings, new connections, etc.) must be completed each week to be likely to hit your goals. Throughout the year, as accounts are won and lost, be ready to adjust those top-of-the-funnel activities accordingly.
The other thing that needs to happen are pre and post-call debriefs. What worked and what didn’t work, and why? This is a critical learning opportunity for everyone who participated in the call, and it will help your team avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. (Get our tips for your next call or meeting here). If you don’t have the bandwidth to take these managerial functions on, think about how you can delegate them to someone else so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle. Again, outsourcing the managerial functions on a part-time basis can be a sensible and cost-effective solution.
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