Research Live article November 2023: How do you motivate Client Teams to sell?
That’s right, you read it correctly. The kind folks over at Research Live gave us some print space this month with an article we offered to write that we thought would help agencies with their plans for next year.
Below is the unedited version. Enjoy!
Client Teams aren't Sales Teams, how do you motivate them to find growth?
The post-Covid client spending boom is over, clients no longer find consultative selling appealing, and the market is slowing. Yet your targets continue to rise. In this article we take a look at one of the most important pathways to growth for agencies – their client and expert teams - and what you can do to help them enjoy finding growth, consistently.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t involve turning them into salespeople, because no matter how hard you try, that is something they will never be.
Roughly ten months ago, a marketing insight and comms agency came to us with a problem. They had been forced to rationalise their workforce, meaning they no longer had a dedicated Business Development team. Which meant the onus of finding more revenue fell onto a smaller team overall, and specifically client service and solution experts.
The reaction to this in these teams was mixed. Some were eager to be more commercial. Others were worried that they didn’t have the skills. A couple were already starting to pursue other opportunities.
In talking to the senior team about the challenge they faced, it soon became clear that it was one we see being faced increasingly by senior agency teams, not just in the UK but around the world:
We need our client and expert teams to find growth consistently, but how?
The need for this in agencies is increasing. Clients no longer want to spend as much time interacting with you in the sales process and the market is slowing.
Yet your targets continue to rise.
If you’re not on a client’s list of potential suppliers to work with on a brief from the outset, then you’ve got little chance of winning the work with them as an ‘outsider’.
Yet your targets continue to rise.
Other reports point to the fact that agency incumbents are now less likely to re-win the contracts they have with clients. According to Merkle, only 66% win again, down from 71% even just a year ago.
Yet…you guessed it.
These, and numerous other trends, are conspiring to create market conditions that demand a swift move to proactivity by agencies. From order-taking to order seeking, and an ‘always on’ commercial attitude. This, however, is far easier said than done.
As trainers who are solely focused on working with research agencies and consultancies, we know that the most effective way of doing this is through motivating your client and expert teams to don their very own growth hats, building whole teams of growth finders around your business.
This is in no way new news. Agencies cottoned on to this fact years ago. What is concerning, however, is that after all this time very few have actually succeeded in driving growth in this way consistently. When they try, there’s an initial spurt of growth, but then it’s not sustained.
We know what’s happening here. The path is fraught with pitfalls and wasted investment.
There is a pattern to how agencies, without previous first-hand experience, tend to approach motivating teams to find growth, using a combination of some/all of the following levers:
Focusing on the revenue target via communications and overt measurement of wins
Introducing an initiative to whip up enthusiasm
Bringing in incentives
Training them to sell more
Making it a part of performance KPI’s
This works in some instances but on the whole it doesn’t stick because:
These teams are not sales teams and are motivated differently. Incentives don’t drive equal engagement if much at all.
These teams are not sales teams but are trained or developed to be like them. Which only works for those with a sales disposition. Meaning no groundswell of a new commercial culture taking hold.
The focus on the target again only motivates the few, and also makes it seem out of people’s control/comfort zone, so the status quo ensues.
Initiatives are too many, don’t last or aren’t supported at the right level after the initial launch. They tend to last weeks, not the full period needed to change behaviour for good.
In other words, the focus is on doing more stuff, faster, with people who aren’t really engaged to come on the journey. Not on the real mechanisms that unlock growth that come from within them.
All this means the agency ends up back at the beginning, experiencing peaks and troughs of new work and often a scrabble to hit year end. All that hard work and cost in creating incentive structures, initiative ideas and collateral ends up being mostly forgotten about.
There are, however, agencies generating growth with these teams, through thinking differently and then doing differently:
‘Our clients are changing and we are constantly adapting to meet their needs’ Jonathan Firth, Director at Kantar Worldpanel, says. ‘Where we both win is by us striving to understand our clients deeply, consistently; to read between the lines to uncover how we can help them in the best possible way. In other words, being researchers of our clients as well as their markets. This means we can proactively suggest the most effective path for them to take, meaning they achieve their objectives earlier.’
Speaking to Robin Horsfield, co-founder of Trinity McQueen, he also believes a different approach is needed: ‘We’ve long been aware that our client and expert teams are not sales teams, and therefore the training and support we provide them needs to reflect this. We’ve taken a different route in developing them, and as a result we’ve seen big-time growth come through. Both new work with our existing clients and work with new ones are accelerating our pace of expansion. There’s a buzz around the business about it too.’
Thinking differently and only then doing differently, therefore, can lead to everyone in your organisation contributing to growth, and enjoying it. We help our agency clients around the world take this exact approach. One that leads to teams that are motivated and accountable, working in a smart way to integrate growth into their Business As Usual.
There are two fundamentals to get right in order to take the first steps on the journey to having your teams motivated to find growth, consistently:
1. Focus on giving clients help.
Instead of asking client teams how much revenue they’ll get next year and focusing on targets, ask what help they think their clients need, both now and over the client’s next year. Then ask them where they currently help their client and where they currently don’t but could.
This aligns your services perfectly to your client’s requirements, making it more likely they will see you as a potential provider of help. It automatically makes you genuinely client focused, meaning what you deliver will increase in value to the client and therefore repeating and even scaling your work becomes easier. ACTION: Ask them how they will go about having conversations with their client about that help. Agree a date for them to do that by, and any support they might need in doing it.
2. Be Knowledgeable.
We recently ran a webinar where we interviewed Ashley Anzie, Senior Manager Global Insights at Lego. We asked him, if he could give one piece of advice to agency teams that have a meeting with him, what would it be. His answer was ‘Be prepared.’
There’s no getting away from it. Getting your teams to build knowledge is critical to clients taking you seriously. Hardly revelatory but it should be a top priority. It’s proven that building knowledge is the number one driver of sales effectiveness, with the added bonus of helping teams feel confident when in front of their clients. ACTION: Give your teams the opportunity to build knowledge of their client, the client’s market, and your solutions. A little and often approach mitigates time suck, as does treating every communication with clients as an opportunity to learn.
The marketing insight and comms agency we mentioned at the start now employ these approaches, along with other frameworks that integrate with their day-to-day work, and growth now comes naturally. From a ‘non-sales’ team that now enjoys developing new work as well as delivering it, constantly.
Want to talk about it more? Get in touch here.