How we do sales
Our consultants mostly sell themselves and each other. Most of our sales is reactive (clients contacting us) rather than proactive (us contacting clients). That’s why we don’t have a sales department - our strong brand minimizes the need to “chase” clients.
As a consultant or contractor, timing is a huge challenge. How likely is it that my next client, client B, will come knocking on the door precisely when I’m done with client A? Forget it! Instead, client B will get in touch while I’m still busy with client A. Or I’ll finish with client A, and there’s no other client knocking on the door. Consultants tend to have too much work or too little work, never just enough.
Part of our solution is load balancing - having a group of trusted colleagues that you can send clients to and receive clients from. And that’s exactly what The Agility Collective is - a bunch of trusted colleagues!
More likley, many of our client engagements will require a diverse team to solve complex business problems. A main focus of the Collective is to build a portfolio of consultants offering different skills. This way we can engage in complex projects, by building dynamic teams within our network.
The bun protocol is our main tool for routing client requests between each other. It helps connect the right client with the right consultant at the right time, which benefits everyone! And it works pretty OK without any kind of central control.
How do we handle conflicts, such as two consultants competing for the same client gig?
See the bun protocol page for answers to that and many similar questions about how we route clients internally.
Do we have a “finders fee” for finding client gigs for each other?
Nope. If you pass a client on to a colleague, you won’t earn a provision or finder’s fee or anything like that. Why? Because the underlying purpose of The Collective is not to maximize profit, it is to maximize happiness. We earn money from our clients, not from each other.
This would impose an overhead in managing which would negate any benifit.
What about a business developer role?
This is a role we are considdering.
A business developer adds an element of pro-activeness and long-term strategy to our otherwise mostly reactive sales process.
As opposed to most traditional consulting companies, her job is not to maximize profit or sell as many consulting hours as possible. Instead, she optimizes for the happiness index, which means learning and adapting to each person’s individual needs. Some want to work a lot, some don’t. Some want a lot of help with sales, some want just a little bit of support, some don’t need any help at all.
The business developer complements the consultants by focusing on things like long-term strategy, seeing connections between different clients we’re working with, networking with possible future strategic clients, spotting market trends, etc. As an individual consultant that kind of stuff is harder, because you spend most of your time in the trenches with client X.
The business developer also provides practical assistance around the sales process, things like contracts and negotiation that many consultants are bad at (or just don’t like dealing with).