Building an agency from the ground up is no easy feat. You have to invest a lot into your business to ensure its growth and longevity. As a service-based business, sales is one of the deciding factors as to whether your company will sink or swim. With that said, it’s very easy for sales representatives to fall into the trap of working hard to close a deal, only to have the unsuspecting project team realize – after speaking more with the client – that they’ll be delivering a very different product or service than what was sold. You could file this situation under “you don’t know what you don’t know,” but once you find yourself there, you need to take steps to redress it or risk the project’s success (and profitability).
Misalignment between your clients and your team is dangerous. It can put your agency at risk of onboarding the wrong clients, delivering a product or service that does not meet your client’s needs or expectations, or completely changing the trajectory of a project unnecessarily. I recently spoke with Rachel Gertz, the Director of Growth and Delivery at Louder for Ten, a project management and operations consulting firm for digital agencies. Leveraging her keen insight into how digital agencies can operate more effectively to achieve growth, we discussed how you can manage your operations to ensure your clients and team stay aligned. A few of the tips we discussed are detailed below.
Encourage your sales team to get to know the client and their goals.
Closing the deal is the sales team’s objective, but a bad case of tunnel vision in pursuit of that goal can cause the team to forgo getting to know the client and gaining an understanding of their goals. This approach can put an agency in a challenging position or cause a business to unintentionally lose out on opportunities: “We’re not spending enough time on surfacing possible risk and opportunity in that sales process,” says Rachel. “We’re just jumping to try to close the sale without getting to know the client, the need, and their own business goals.”
With that in mind, having your sales team gain better insight into the client and what they want will help ensure that you onboard clients who are a good fit for your business and that you’re setting up your project team for success.
Ensure your sales team loops your project team into the sales process.
Including your project team in the sales process allows them to get a better understanding of a potential client’s goals and expectations from the very beginning.
It can also help ensure that they know what they will be delivering, which will prevent misalignments down the road. To avoid selling one thing and providing the client with something else entirely, both the sales and project teams must address the breakdown that happens during the handoff process.
“Hands down, if we can tackle the issue of sales to project management handover process first,” Rachel says, “you’re going to see a big difference in the way that that team is able to deliver and how successful they can be.”
To prevent this potential issue from becoming a problem, consider having your sales team invite your project leads into sales team meetings with the potential client after that initial sales call. Then, after that meeting, encourage both groups to discuss details about the client that may impact the decision to pursue a deal and initiate the onboarding process. These details may include agencies the potential client has worked with before or whether they’ve mentioned past pitfalls that prevented them from achieving their goals. Finally, both groups should discuss their sales and project approaches to ensure they’re aligned.
Check-in with your client and your project team throughout the onboarding process.
“The client should always understand three things: where are we, where are we going, and are we okay?” Rachel suggests posing these questions in order to initiate discussions with the client throughout the onboarding process to ensure the project team is heading in the right direction and that their work aligns with the client’s expectations.
Project managers can also direct these questions toward their project teams for the same purpose. By asking, “Where are we?” in relation to the client relationship, you can create the opportunity for your team members to voice any communications they’ve had with the client that may be cause for concern and address them before they become substantial threats to the project’s success.
By inquiring, “Where are we going?” you can learn more about what upcoming tasks your team members will be working to complete in relation to the project. Doing so will help ensure that the work your team is doing aligns with the client’s objective.
Finally, by posing the question, “Are we okay?” you can determine by your team’s response if they need anything to ensure the project’s success. “The best role of a project leader is to get in there and remove obstacles for their teammates,” Rachel says. Taking on this role will help you prevent your team from having to navigate obstacles that could hinder their ability to meet client expectations. Also, remedying issues your team members encounter can help them operate at their best.
You want to have your clients and your team “going in the same direction, fighting for the same things, and looking at the same big picture together.” To achieve this alignment, your sales and project teams must understand the client and their goals, but they must also work in lockstep with one another. If these stakeholders aren’t on the same page, you risk providing the client with something that doesn’t meet their expectations or gets them closer to achieving their objectives. To ensure happy clients, long-term work and a broader customer base, use onboarding to keep everyone on the same page.
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