Turning Your Delivery Team Into a Sales Team

Blair has five steps creative agency leaders can take to turn their account managers, project managers, developers, engineers, and advisors into a source of instant scale to their sales efforts.

Links

“Turning Your Delivery Team Into a Sales Team” article by Blair on WinWithoutPitching.com

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair, today our topic is turning your delivery team into a sales team. Normally, when you throw a topic at me, I just think immediately, "Oh darn, that's a great topic. I wish I'd have thought about that." Then I struggle for areas to disagree with, so I don't seem a little lackey, just nodding my head.

Blair Enns: This one is different. [laughs]

David: This one is different. You are so screwed with it. No, not really. No, I really did nod my head a lot and thought, "Oh yes, that's right." Then I wrote down these questions. One of them, it almost seems like it sort of contradicts some of the earlier stuff. Maybe you've changed your mind or maybe I didn't understand it originally, but this is going to be a good discussion. Are you looking forward to it as much as I am?

Blair: I am always looking forward to any conversation I have with you, Mr. Baker.

David: Okay, so let's first talk about changing the title.

Blair: It's a little lengthy.

David: Yes, it is that too, but I just wonder about one word, turning your delivery team into a sales team. When I hear that, my first thought is, "All right, everybody's going to be in charge of new business," but you're not talking about bringing new clients in, unless that just happens organically, you're talking more about growing existing accounts. Is that right?

Blair: I think this primarily happens in the area of growing existing accounts. That's how I've been thinking about it, but I also acknowledge that there are some delivery teams out there that are also in charge of bringing in new business. It could apply to either, but you're correct, I have been thinking about it through the lens of growing existing accounts.

David: The other thing I wanted to clarify for everybody, I don't think I'm confused about this one, but you're not just talking about AMs, you're talking about the full delivery team, and you define that more broadly than just the AM people.

Blair: Yes. Account managers, project managers, experts that interface with the client. Developers, might be engineers, consultants, advisors, any practitioner or advisor on your team. You notice I've been broadening out the language recently. We'll talk about that, I think, in an upcoming episode, because these lines that used to delineate these firms nice and cleanly are really blurry. We have talked about that before, we'll talk about it again.

Whoever your delivery people are, that's who I'm talking about. You look at them and you think, "Well, they're already interfacing with the client." I've got X number of them. It might be 5, it might be 500, whatever it is, I could just flick the switch and activate these sales robots that are out in the field and look at all of the revenue that's going to come pouring in. Now, obviously I'm somewhat cynically overstating this, but that's the idea.

David: You and I both know Jenny Plant and we've all talked at different same events and so on. One of the things that all of us have said is that if your account people aren't good at growing an account, then it's one of two things, either the account's not growable and we should have thought about that before we brought them in, or more likely, this is not a good account person if they are not also capable of growing an account without bringing the new business team back in play. Are you at the point where you would broaden that statement and say that's true for the delivery team or not, or is it more, there are some delivery people that are good and some aren't? How does all that work?

Blair: I think when we narrow it to account managers, and we narrow it specifically to traditional creative firms, I think account managers is the one area where there's always been an expectation that you as an account manager will grow the account. Whether or not the training was there, the ongoing post-training support, the compensation supported the behaviors you're pursuing, those are open questions. When I think of other experts or delivery team types, such as developers-

David: Designers, writers, programmers.

Blair: -yes, all of these people who are interfacing with the client. There's a time in the life of many of these businesses where the owner looks at them and thinks, "If I could just get these people to sell, it's a whole new ballgame."

David: Yes. Then we have the issue of changing the goalposts after somebody's been hired versus hiring them out of the gate with a certain expectation, right?

Blair: That's the fundamental issue here. I'm sure there are some people listening to this and who will read the related post on it and go up like, " What are you talking about? All of our consultants sell." The big consulting companies, they're the best examples of these organizations where the expert, the advisor in the case of a consulting firm, is also the salesperson. Now, in these large organization, this is clearly laid out to that consultant before they are even hired. That expectation is spelled out in the job description, it's spelled out in the interview, and at least part of their compensation is tied to that function of selling.

There are these organizations, and in those organizations, there is this understanding that it is everybody's job to sell. I don't think it's universally appropriate that all organizations have that mantra because I don't think it is universally everybody's job to sell, but you can decide that you want it to be everybody's job in your organization to also sell in addition to whatever their primary job is. If you make that change late in the game, if you hire people to do delivery work, however you want to define it, and they don't also have the second job of sales, and then you one day say, "Hey, wait a minute, everybody, in addition to doing what we hired you to do, we're also going to ask you to sell what you do," that type of firm, that's who I wrote this post for and that's who this podcast episode is for.

David: There's really two things. There's the expectations set at the beginning, and then there's the training to support those expectations. Say the firm that you just described is listening, they hired a bunch of people that was not the expectation for the delivery team. Now they've had a change of heart, they want to provide the training. That, I presume, is a pretty slow process, to get people not only trained, but engaged in doing this.

Blair: Yes, and many of these people, so they didn't sign up for this initially, so they might not like selling. They might actually harbor a deep dislike for it. They might not have faith in their ability to do it well, and they may wonder where they're going to get the time to, A, learn the new skill, and B, implement the skill. If any of this is going on, then you're going to find that your people are going to spend almost all of their time and energy on their first job, the one for which you originally hired them, and very little on the second job.

Now, there are ways to combat this, you just need to understand that when you try to flick this switch and turn a delivery team into a sales team, you're endeavoring to change the culture of the organization, and it doesn't happen quickly.

David: Right. If it happens, well, it can't happen quickly, must happen slowly. Just think about the change management side. The other bullet point I would add to that list would be the firms where their culture is not all that great. Here's an example. I was an upper-level manager at a company one time, and there was the expectation that we would sort of snare or sell to our friends, or at least provide referrals, and I never did it once. It's like, "There's no way in hell I'm sending one of my friends to this place. I've seen the level of care behind the scenes here. We're not doing anything unethical, but it's not the forward-thinking I want to recommend to people." Anyway, you can just really see the connection between an engaged culture and a team that is excited about pursuing this path.

Blair: Yes. You think of those consulting firms, all of those consultants, when they started, they were told, "Listen, it's your job to sell, but don't worry, we're going to train you for it."

David: Then did they train them or not?

Blair: Yes. In the large consulting firms, I can't speak to the training that they deliver in terms of how they do what they do, but I know in the most successful, larger consulting firms, there's an element of sales training. All of these organizations have a codified understanding of how they sell what they do, and there is training, often quite rigorous and very good training available to these people. You have this culture, top to bottom of an organization that sells and delivers. If you're in the delivery business, you're also in the sales business.

Now, many of the listeners to this podcast don't have that culture. They have a more a tolerant culture. We'll come back to this idea of a tolerant versus intolerant culture, which we've talked about before. This culture where the experts also sell, it's actually more of an intolerant culture. I mean intolerant in a good way, like high expectations.

High expectations and expectations are enforced, where if you don't meet the expectations-- There will be expectations in terms of the quality of your primary job, whatever your delivery job or mechanism is. There are standards there, but there will also be sales or growth standards. If you can't keep up with those standards, you can't stay. That's quite a different culture from a lot of the creative firms whose owners might be listening to this.

David: Yes, for sure. More permissive, more a sense of family rather than a team, which I don't agree with at all.

Blair: You don't agree with it being?

David: I don't think it should be viewed as a family. I think it ought to be viewed as a team.

Blair: Yes. David Maister wrote what I think is the smartest piece of thought leadership I have ever read on this subject. It's called The Problem of Standards. I've written about this before. I'll just use some of my language to paraphrase the key part of it. If you find that piece online and you scroll down, you find the section that says, what team do you want to belong to?

Basically, he says, in my words, I see this as a macro culture. There are only two macro cultures that an organization could have. One is a macro culture of tolerance and one is of intolerance. A tolerant macro culture is one where you can't really lose your job for poor performance. The priority is everybody is happy. An intolerant culture is one that has standards and sets them.

It's like a professional sports team or an athlete trying to win the Olympics. The standard is like, "We are trying to be the very best that we can be. If you can't keep up, you can't stay." In these organizations where the people who are delivering are also selling, it's my theory that you have to accept this macro culture of intolerance. You have to have standards and enforce those standards around, A, what you do, and B, the growth requirement that you're looking for from your growth people.

Now, if that hasn't scared you off, and I hope it doesn't scare you off, because like you, David, I want to win Olympic gold. I want to be on a team and I want my team to be comprised of people who strive to be the very best they can be. Our first core value at Win Without Pitching is greatness. We strive to be the very best in the world at what we do. If you can't do that, you can't measure up, you can't stay.

That macro culture, I think it makes sense to roll that thinking, that ideology into the role of this person who you want to build the business and deliver the expertise. When you do, you will attract people who want to go for Olympic gold. Right now you might have a team of people who just want everybody to feel okay.

David: It's like your first experience with a tolerant culture was when you got paired with three other people in science class to do the experiment, and you knew, "By God, I'm going to have to carry these three fools." That's the tolerant culture rather than picking the ones that you want. Listening to what you just said, I can see why this takes a long time, because of these two elements, one is some people are not hired with that expectation. They're still high performers at your firm, they either need to get trained or they need to be swapped out in a humane sort of way, and then all of the training that comes along with it.

Let's assume I'm listening, I'm buying all of this. You've got five key steps to take in order to change your culture. The first one you have is take the long view, which I guess dovetails with the idea that this is going to take a while.

Blair: Yes, it's going to take a while. If you decide you want to do this, I don't want to discourage anybody from this. Let's start by managing expectations. I think this is actually a really great move. Every business owner with a large delivery team should think about this if they're not already selling. You should also think about the consequences, the trade-offs. Do you want to change your culture from a tolerant to an intolerant one? The most important thing is understand that this is going to take time.

Yes, you can start to see results immediately, but really, you are talking about changing the culture of the organization. You want to create a culture where every employee is bought into this idea, this idea that they have to sell in addition to delivering, every delivery personnel has been trained on how to sell and is supported in that way. There are different ways to support people with coaching, and I mean internal coaching, all kinds of ongoing training, other resources, et cetera.

The culture of the firm has changed to one where sales is everybody's job. Like I said before, I don't believe that that's a universal truth that it's everybody's job to sell, but it's your business. If you decide that in the culture of your firm it is everybody, here I'm talking about delivery people, they also have the responsibility for selling, that's your decision and you can shift the culture in that direction. All of this stuff takes a while.

David: If I could add two little footnotes to your plea to support these folks, one would be, let's have a positioning that allows that selling to be easier, and let's have somebody doing a consistent drip marketing plan so that the selling is easier too, because your new business efforts are not just for new clients, they're to communicate something to your existing clients too. It's not fair to put high expectations on somebody if the agency isn't proud of itself too, like the website, how you articulate things and so on.

You've said, reinvent the firm, one new client at a time. The corollary for that here would be?

Blair: Reinvent the firm one new team member at a time as well. You're taking the long view. Then we're going to get into the four remaining steps where we'll talk about how to actually work with existing team members. I'm not saying give up on them, I think there are things you can and should do with them. Just understand that people are going to select out, if you're serious about this, and probably not quickly, probably take them a while. As you swap them out, you get the opportunity to replace them with somebody who understands from the very beginning that they have this second job, maybe even first job, of selling.

David: I was hoping you would use this opportunity to throw a compliment my way, because I have taken so much crap for saying that longevity in employee relationships is not necessarily the best path. This would have been your perfect opportunity to say, "You know what, David? I think you're right about that. It makes change happen fast here."

Blair: That reminds me of something genius that you've said many times, David.

David: Oh, no.[ chuckles]

Blair: I don't remember what it is, but what you just said. [laughs]

David: Your tone of voice tells me I don't want you to finish this sentence.

Blair: No, I'm with you. I got that from you. It's this idea that churn is healthy. We've talked about this before, and you've really opened my eyes to this. Churn in your client base is healthy, churn in your employee base is healthy. There's a pace at which it's too fast and it's unhealthy, and there's a pace at which it's too slow and it's unhealthy. You view the churn as an opportunity to improve, and you're changing the culture of the firm, you change it one team member at a time.

David: Are you saying I need a new illustration rather than throwing the weak kids off the merry-go-round as it spins faster?

[laughter]

David: All right, so the key steps, five key steps. The first was take the long view. The second is help those who are good at it get better. When I read that, the first thought I had was Jack Skeels, when he talks about project management, he makes a point over and over again that it's the bad, unprofitable projects that you need to abandon and concentrate on the good ones and not suck all the profit out of the good ones to fix the bad ones. It's like, oh, man, this is so apt here.

One of the things that occurs to me is about 15 years ago, I think, somewhere in there, I did a study on how many people on delivery teams are naturally good at managing client relationships, and I'm assuming here that there's enough overlap between those two things, that there might be something to read into it. It turned out the answer was 40%. The other 60% needed help. They needed training. They had some tendencies that did not create great client management scenarios without some training, without some coaching. Anyway, it'd be interesting to see if that's true across this concept too.

Blair: Yes. This step of helping those who are good at it to get better, my recommendation is, if you're serious about this, you're going to train your whole delivery team, obviously. You train everybody, but you understand that performance will vary based on aptitude and attitude. We deal with this a lot, not just in situations where an organization is trying to turn a delivery team into a sales team, but just, broadly speaking, in sales training.

This new organization, Win Without Pitching, with a new point of view, shows up and trains people on it. Some people really gravitate to the approach and some don't. The key that we found is, so you train everybody, and then there will be the enthusiastic group who really wants to get better at it. Focus your efforts on those people and help them get better at it, understanding that you're going to have this distribution of attitude and aptitude, and don't be discouraged by it.

Because remember, it's your fault. You're showing up late to the game and saying, "Oh, by the way, you now have this second job." Just accept that some will step up and some won't, for whatever reason, and those reasons are often very valid, so there's no judgment here. The ones who do, the ones who are interested, these are the ones that you want to support moving forward.

David: Right. Just catching people up is where we are. First, take the long view. Second, help those who are good at it get better. Third, which you're touching on, is train everyone, but support those who need it. There's this base level that everybody gets. The people that either have the aptitude or that attitude or both, obviously, to really shine in this area, you support them even more. You don't necessarily make the standards apply to everybody so that you don't let some people fly to the top of this and be better at selling.

Blair: On the surface, you're trying to change everyone, but you're making the opportunity for change available to everyone. You're seeing who really gravitates to this, and you're investing in those people. The corollary would be, there's initial training and then there's very often ongoing training support in the form of coaching, et cetera. I've seen managers get frustrated with not everybody taking advantage of ongoing support afterwards.

My advice, hard-earned advice after quite a while is, you know what? Support the people who need it and want it. They'll put their hands up. They'll say, "Yes, can we get some coaching? Yes, I'll attend coaching," et cetera, and don't spend too much time trying to force people to go take advantage of supporting resources that are available to them. View it almost as a test, are you going to step up and take advantage of these resources and opt into the new approach or are you going to pass? Observe, see who makes the decision, and those people who want support, give it to them.

David: Do you ever worry about the people who don't pursue this additional training and support, they don't embrace this the same way? Do you ever worry that they are going to feel like second-class citizens, or if that does happen, I don't know if it does, if it does happen, is that okay? Is that part of the intolerant culture?

Blair: This is really point four. It's a great question.

David: Oh, I should have been reading ahead. Thank you.

Blair: No, that's fine. It's a nice segue. It's a perfect segue, where I say you're going to be preoccupied with the laggards, but don't, you want to celebrate the achievers instead. To your specific question, do you worry they're going to be seen as second-class citizens? I'm okay with that. Again, this is just my point of view, my belief on it. You don't berate or badger somebody who-- a little bit of nudging is fine, but you don't punish somebody who doesn't take advantage of these resources, because, again, this is on you. You've showed up late and said, "Oh, by the way, you now have this second job."

What you do instead is you celebrate those who do gravitate to this. You celebrate their efforts, you celebrate their wins. It can be praise, you can reward them financially, promotion, but really, just talking about, look what so and so did, and you celebrate them with more training and support. The key to this step, though, is it's not going to be intuitive to you because your focus is going to be somewhere else. You are going to be obsessed with the people who aren't getting it, who aren't taking advantage of the supporting resources, who aren't putting the new training into practice, who are not embracing their new second job of selling.

I promise you, you are going to be obsessed with these people, but in strategic coach, they have this idea of the gap and the gain. You're standing at a starting line and you set a goal, and let's just say it's a physical distance. It's a hundred meters out. It's an ambitious goal for you. You only make it halfway. You get to 50 meters, and you're standing there and you're stuck, and you're looking at the gap between the goal and where you are. What Dan Sullivan and his people at Strategic Coach say is, "No, turn around, turn around and look back, look at the gain that you've made."

It's human nature, and I think it's even more so among entrepreneurs to focus on the gap in front of you, what you did not achieve versus the gain that you've made. What I would say to you is, when you're working with your initial team and you're trying to transition your initial team, think of this gap and gain idea and be appreciative and celebrate and reward the people who have made the change. Celebrate those people, raise them up to be-- heroes is too big of a word, but raise them up to be the model of what you're looking for, and other people will either come along because they don't like being left behind or they'll opt out. None of this will be sudden, it's a gradual process.

David: I could see it actually taking two to three years if it's a bigger firm.

Blair: Yes. I think two to three years. Do you have a point of view on what the average tenure is among the listeners' businesses?

David: I don't have science on it. My instinct tells me it's just under three years on average.

Blair: Yes. It feels to me like it's similar to what it used to be with clients. I think things are getting more project-oriented these days, so we should revisit this topic of how often you turn over your client base. I got this from you, three to four years to turn over your client base, it sounds about right. Three to four years to turn over your employee base to any typical firm.

David: Yes. The first point, take the long view. Second, help those who are good at it get better. Third, train everyone, but especially support those who need it, those who are rising to the top. Fourth, don't be preoccupied with the laggards. This is the same person that straightens the picture on the refrigerator every dang time I walk by it. Don't be obsessed with something that's not conforming. The fifth you have here is to aim to create a sales-oriented culture. How do you do that?

Blair: You do that one new hire at a time.

David: Oh, so just like the client.

Blair: We've touched on this too, but the goal is, so in your new hiring criteria, you have this expectation of the fact that you also have to sell built into the job description. It's also built into the compensation plan. I don't have a point of view on how much of an expert's compensation should be tied to the sales function. I think it's going to vary from firm to firm. I think it actually can be quite a small amount. It also can be a larger amount. You open up issues that we've talked about years ago. I think it's around compensating your new business people. We can post a link to that. You open up some issues when the incentive part of the compensation structure gets too high, but it can be a small amount.

When you have that type of culture where there's an expectation that the delivery people also have to sell and they can increase their income based on their ability to do so, now you're going to start attracting the right type of people. You also, in addition to that, have to think about changing some things in the firm today, or if not today, at some point in the not too distant future, like middle management or even senior management.

David: Oh, why? Because they're not on board? They're sort of fighting it, especially if they don't fit the mold, or why? Why middle management?

Blair: If they're going to fight it or they're not of the cloth of the people that you want to hire, when your delivery people are also selling, I don't know if people can appreciate how night and day different the culture is. It becomes this high-achiever culture, and you might find that there are certain individuals in management just don't fit this new culture, even though they're part of the team that's trying to drive the change.

David: If a particular middle manager may be in charge of quality assurance and they're more of a plotting, objective, accurate, A-B sort of person, they're going to value other people like that and they're going to resist maybe pushing their team to sell more when they don't want to do it themselves necessarily.

Blair: It comes down to, are these people going to hire the right people? I don't have any standing guidance on which people would work or which people would not work. You will just see a pattern after a while. Your management team understands what you're trying to accomplish and they're hiring for the right people or they're not, they're hiring the same old people.

David: If sales is the-- What is it you say? Sales is the--

Blair: The sale is the sample.

David: Sales is the sample. The employee interview might be the sample too. I got a big question for you, are there downsides of a culture where everyone likes to sell?

Blair: Wow. There would be trade-offs.

David: Maybe that's a better word. Maybe trade-offs would make more sense.

Blair: Yes. I think one of the things you lose is this tolerant culture that-- When Maister writes about tolerant versus intolerant, he says there's no judgment attached to this. It's perfectly reasonable to have a tolerant culture, you just have to make sure that everybody who's on the team is bought into this idea. If it's a culture of tolerance, if we're one big happy family and we want to make sure everybody is happy, then everybody just needs to be aligned to that.

I think when you decide you want your delivery people to sell, and maybe after thinking about it longer, I'll retract this, but I doubt it, I think that once you make that change, you are becoming a more intolerant culture, where you're having standards of what you want to achieve and growth is going to be one of those standards, and you will not allow people to stay who cannot meet the standard.

David: Yes. The slider between patience and performance might move slightly, very slowly.

Blair: That's a great way to think about it. Yes.

David: The theme under all of this as a summary is that there really are two different kinds of firms. You can't flick a switch. It's going to take a while. I guess the question is, why wouldn't somebody consider this? There got to be some reasons why they wouldn't.

Blair: I've thought about this, I don't know. I think it comes back to this issue of, that's not the culture of firm I want to have here. I fully respect that. I'm not trying to impose my preference on any other business owner. I just think if you want to have the one big happy family tolerant culture, you might be putting at risk if you're entertaining this idea of turning your delivery team into your sales team.

David: I could think of a firm that's focused in the nonprofit for good space, and I could see how they might react to something like this negatively. On the other hand, it's like if you really feel like you have the power to change the organizations you work for, why wouldn't you have a sales outlook? It's like you're cheating them if they don't hire you. That's just my arrogance speaking, but I'm trying to think of why you wouldn't want to do this. I think there are legitimate reasons. I think it comes down to the personality of the entrepreneur, really.

Blair: Yes, I think the two answers are culture and it takes time and effort. If those two reasons aren't your reasons and you do have a sizable delivery team interfacing with the clients, I think it's not a bad thing to entertain. Just manage your expectations. Understand that this is going to take a while and you need to be serious about it.

David: Yes, well, this has been fantastic. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.