• Every month, our agency invites a guest speaker from other startups and agencies around town, typically offering related but different services. The goal is always to expand our knowledge base and develop deeper relationships for strategic partnerships. We do these in the form of a “brown bag” lunch session for a more casual lunch-and-learn type vibe. This month, however, we decided to switch it up and invite a past employee of ours that has since moved in-house.

We thought it would be insightful to get the perspective from someone who not only has been on both the agency and client side, but who knows the ins and outs of how we as an agency operate on a day-to-day basis. An insightful experience, indeed it was. I’ve highlighted a few of my favorite takeaways as they relate to both sales and account management.

Top Sales Takeaways

1. Getting budgets approved takes a lot of legwork.

Depending on the size of the company, there can be A LOT of red tape in getting the green light to sign off on new budgets. For starters, many companies may need to write an internal brief detailing the pros and cons of working with the new vendor, making the case for outsourcing versus tackling in-house, projecting ROI, and more.

So, what does this mean for us vendors as we wait for proposals to get pushed through? For starters, manage your own expectations and be patient. Getting approval may take some time, depending on the number of hoops the prospective client needs to jump through. In the meantime, while you are being patient however, be helpful. Provide case studies, testimonials, references, etc. Anything that can help to build the case for internal buy off.

2. Understand what level of priority your solutions are to the prospective client.

This is something I’ve never consciously sought during discovery meetings, but makes perfect sense. If your solutions are