Editor's Note: This is the 7th installment of our Business Functions Series. Find the other issues here: Activities To Functions - AIC #178, Client Delivery Function - AIC #179, Admin Functions - AIC #180, Agency Cash Management - AIC #181, Account Management - AIC #182, Marketing & Demand Gen - AIC #183

It’s a killer movie about sales, aging, and the unbearable fragility of being a human being. At it’s core, I think it’s ultimately about power dynamics, the human need for respect, identity & the essential inequality of capitalism. If you haven’t seen it, it is magical and heartbreaking. Do yourself a favor and watch it soon, k?

There is this scene where Shelley Levene, one of the salesmen leading a life of not so quiet desperation, complains “…the leads are weak…” and the retort from his sales manager is “…no, YOU are weak…”. It is a brutal scene. Watch a short snippet below:

Today, we're going to dig into what is almost always the hardest function to create for most agency founders - SALES. From day one, sales almost always lives with the founder.

That makes sense in many ways - you generally have the most experience, the broadest perspective. For all intents and purposes, sales means more to you than to the rest of the team. Sales is your evidence that your value proposition and process work. Sales is PROOF that your agency is a sustainable enterprise.

Quite typically, founders are really good at selling because they have sold their families on the idea that they can be an entrepreneur. They have sold their team on the idea that they can build a business that will make the employees safe. They have sold themselves on the idea that they can turn their nearly delusional idea of making a better agency into reality. Founders are masters of sales.

In my second agency, I was in the middle of building out a sales team when we agreed to be acquired, I then turned my attention to building a new division inside of the acquiring agency and creating a sales team that could sell both the new stuff that we did and the existing stuff that the agency did. I decided that it was time to build a sales team because I had just closed a $3,500-a-month sale to a mid-sized retailer. I just didn't give a fuck. It wasn't enough revenue for me to be really excited. The client wasn't sufficiently complicated for it to spark my interest. It was just a transaction.

I may have been a little burnt out, but sales was no longer exciting unless the sale was really big. At the same time as the $3,500 sale, we were also working on a 7-figure deal to Dell. That was exciting, and it kept my interest, but I was the only one doing the selling. And I thought, in my melon-headed way, that somehow I had “graduated” from sales and could just plug someone in - after all, sales weren’t hard…I closed most sales pretty easily.

So, I hired someone who had real experience in agency sales. I thought he was going to be a relentless shark. He shadowed me through some sales calls, I vomited everything I could at him, and launched him into the market with a PowerPoint template and an unlimited cell phone plan.

He landed a couple of meetings, and they never got much beyond discovery calls. We went 4 months without a new sale…that was a LONG time for us. He set up a meeting a prospect & I joined. He fumbled some easy questions. He missed an easy angle of attack. He didn’t understand what the client was really asking for.

I couldn’t help myself. I bigfooted him & took over the sale. I didn’t coach or include him any more. He watched me sell. I closed the deal, and he wasn’t part of the equation. I actively wondered why I was paying his base salary, and he asked me after the client onboarded when his commission would be paid out.

After watching him in action, I thought he SUCKED. As I kept on building the case in my head for letting him go, I decided to ask him why he thought I closed the deal and he didn’t. He looked at me and said “I don’t have all those stories in my head! I haven’t ever talked to someone about technical SEO…I don’t even really know what it is!”

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The reason that I wanted out of sales was so that I could focus on whale hunting & tech & being cool conference speaker guy. I didn’t want to do the “boring” stuff anymore. And, were were on the edge of getting acquired, I was thinking about how I could maximize the financial exit…

So, I hired this guy, let him watch me for a couple of hours, talked at him for a couple of hours, and expected him to be a revenue driver. I was an idiot.

At some point, if you want to sell your agency, or even step back from revenue growth, you’ve got to build a sales function. Your “enterprise value” goes up when your agency can generate revenues and profits without you being a link in that chain.

I never invested the time to really understand how I sold, why my clients bought (and why the didn’t), or even followed a process. I just did it…I thought that’s how it worked. If you could sell, you did.

As part of our acquisition, I had to develop a sales process and integrate it into the other agencies sales approach. As it turned out, their sales process was pretty “seat of the pants” selling too… I wasn’t going to let my poor leadership get in the way of maximizing my impact on the new agency (and my earn out, too…)

So I started to create a sales system that took the acquiring agency’s skill set, my agency’s skill set and create a sales process that could accommodate the needs of the prospect, regardless if their need was handled by the acquiring agency’s expertise or my agency’s skill set.

It was really freaking hard.

Curation: You have to “curate” your work. As a founder, you have an extraordinary amount of context. You’ve got to look at the steps that you take in order to accomplish the task and understand which parts of your context feed that activity. What's the context that you bring to crafting a cold email? What's the context you bring to having a discovery call? What's the context you bring into a sales presentation?

Literally, I needed to make a diagram after diagram and fill in all of the pieces of context needed to make a decision, an insight, and eventually, an agency client relationship.

Once you have all of the tasks and context pieces mapped. You now have something that you can teach to someone else because they know what to do with each task. They know how to get the information they need in order to do it through context.

Influence: Once you have that fundamental map, your job changes from cartographer to behavioral scientist. Your job is now to influence the people that you work with to follow your task and context map in the case of building a sales process, it starts with you showing that you follow this process. If you are doing founder-led sales, that means you fill in the freaking CRM if you want your sales resource to do the same.

You are setting the expectations here. You are creating the standard of excellence from which no one will stray.

Stewardship: After you’ve built the process, modeled excellence, set the standard, it’s time to become the caretaker. By this stage of ownership your team is executing. In order to be a good steward, one must invest in understanding the changes necessary to maintain or improve the process outcome. This time, it is not you who is setting the standard of excellence. It's your team, and you are there to figure out what they need in order to maintain and improve that standard. You go from the creator of something to something that's more akin to logistics. Your job is to bring in whatever tools, information, people, or technology to keep the standard improving.

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I’ve built an end to end Agency Sales Playbook, but building a successful sales function is much more tribal than it is technical. Back before I merged “Fire Yourself From Sales” into SalesOS, I argued that a sales playbook isn’t a process document, but rather an epic romance. Here is a sales playbook sample that you might like.

But your job as the influencer and the steward means that you have to create this idea of a story, because stories are more powerful, easier to remember, and easier to follow than any process document you can create. You are creating a cultural artifact that has emotional resonance so that a sales resource can always know where they are in the story. They can help identify people in the buying committee as characters in the story, and they can think of deal-killing threats as the ferocious dragons that steal the princess (the prospect) from the arms of the knight in shining armor (hey - that’s you).

Because sales is so trust-based (please read The WTF Sales Method when you have a minute), a story brings such a human element to the sales process that it's more easily translatable than your original task and context mapping. A story is how you bake your Vibes, Vision, and Values into everything from your outreach through your sales process into your onboarding process, because the story carries your culture and your intention and your meaning into a sustainable relationship with a client.

I’ve said for years that the best skill an agency owner can have is the skill of picking great clients. As we've discussed at length, great fit clients are higher revenue, higher profit, & sources of greater satisfaction for both sides of the table. Even as steward, there are pieces that will always belong to you. Here’s The Kilroy Matrix once again:

Building a sales process is an exercise in redesign and amplify and eventually get out, but there are things that are always going to live with the CEO. They are the definition of a good client. It's the understanding of financially important, strategically important, skill development importance. Also, the financial aspect, on some level, will always live with the CEO because the CEO has a responsibility to the company to ensure that its services are being sold at a reasonable margin to create profit.

So, the activity becomes a function that is run by someone else, the steps inside that function will at some point be defined by someone else, but the outcome of that function, which are agency growth, agency revenue and agency profit remain under the ownership of the CEO.

You are accountable to your shareholders, which might be only you, and to your stakeholders, which is your team, the people that they support, the people that you support. You remain accountable to them for the success of the sales process that you curate, influence, and steward, but in an agency, you are always the accountable party for success and failure.

In many of the other functions that we have defined, your job is to allow your team the autonomy to run the function and authority to improve the function.

Sales is different. It isn't a machine that ingests marketing problems and spits out marketing solutions the sales process? Is it deputizing a team to go out and represent the culture and values that your agency holds at its core.

You reflected those values as you sold, because the values your agency espouses are inherently intertwined into how you think. The primary tipping point for changing a founder-led sales process to a business function that other people operate is you being aware enough of how your agency's culture is aligned with your agency's sales behavior. Your agency only creates client relationships with prospects who are inclined to create a relationship with your agency. If your deputies are out representing different values and different vibes and a different vision for a successful agency-client relationship, you aren't going to be bringing in the right-fit customers that create outsized revenue, profit, and satisfaction for both parties in the transaction.

Your sales efforts are your agency lore. It's the myths that are true (or true-ish) and fantastic tales that set your agency apart so that the market can recognize you as different. But more importantly, it is that lore that sets your agency into alignment with what your prospect wants to achieve.

The steps of your sales process & the decision points that are reached during that journey are parts of the epic story that starts with agency & prospect seeing one another for the first time.

It’s your job to keep the epic romance that drives the story alive by investing your curation, influence and stewardship to earn thousands of epic love stories that will spawn thousands more.

Too much? There is process. There are decisions. There are forms to fill and qualifications to evaluate. But at the end of the day, the success of your sales process & the growth of your agency depends on the passion that lives in the tales your agency tells.

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