The Biz Dev Hand Off

Hey, everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee. I was having a conversation with an agency owner and they're struggling because in their new business process, their prospects get very attached to the agency owner, who is the main new business person, and then when they go to hand the prospect off, when they've decided to work with the agency, they don't want the AE team, they want us to keep working with the agency owner, which of course jams up the agency owner's calendar and is not the best use of their time. So, one of the things we talked about, and one of the things I want you to think about is when and where do you plug in the day-to-day points of contact in the new business process? So for many of you, you wait until the final pitch, or even after the work is won, before you introduce the prospect who is now a client to their point of contacts, the AEs, and the other people on their team. That's too late. You need to let your AEs, especially form a bond with the prospect while they're still a prospect. And you need to be able to transfer the trust and the respect from whoever initiated the contact, again, often the agency owner, over to the account service team during the wooing section of the day or the effort, not when you've already won the deal, because that's too late. So, if you have not perfected the handoff, because that's what it is, this does not happen by accident. There has to be a system or a process for that handoff. If you have not perfected the handoff and it's not early in the process, it's time for you to go back and take a look and rethink that, all right? I'll be back next week. Hopefully that was helpful.