Mark: 0:00

In your firm, where do your professionals, your experts, fall on the doer, seller, bell curve? Are we talking about a normal distribution curve, or is it lopsided or completely different than what we picture as a. Bell curve. Let's talk about it today in the podcast.

John: 0:41

All right. Welcome marketers, sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and a special welcome to our friends, the Doer Sellers. Welcome to the Breaking Biz Dev Podcast. My name is John Tieman, and as always, I'm joined by my trusty co-host, Mark Wayne Wright. Mark, how you doing today?

Mark: 0:57

Hello, John. I'm well. We're gonna invite our friends, the doer sellers into the conversation today. And, I'm excited about this conversation. A lot of times we hear the term. Doer sellers. There are some professional services industries that use it a little bit more than others, but it's to define the doer seller. It's an individual who has responsibilities in both winning the work and then doing the work. And if anyone out there has listened to us for a while, they know that I am a big proponent of that. and there's a lot of talk. Out there about the doer seller and how a doer seller can be successful in a professional services firm. So we're gonna, dig into doer sellers today.

John: 1:51

This is gonna be a fun conversation and we'll open it up with some, some research on doer sellers in the marketplace. And then we'll talk about this, doer, seller bell curve. I think this, this is an interesting, visual anchor that I think our listeners will enjoy. so Mark, let's set the stage with some research from the Society for Marketing Professional Services, SMPS. A, uh, well-known organization with regional chapters throughout the United States, the, and PS created this report focused on, doer sellers and how firms engage with doers within their organization to also sell their services. And, uh, we'll link to the research in the show notes so that you can check it out. But in the research there was, it answers this question, you know, why does this hybrid role exist in so many professional services firms, doers, sellers? the number one reason why professional services firms use the doer seller model is because clients expect to meet with the individuals who would ultimately work on the project.

Mark: 2:59

the big one that big 70% of people surveyed said, oh, because our clients actually expect to talk to the people you. Who are selling the work and then doing the work, they wanna be interfacing with them. So that's always my number one. It's because this, the doer seller model is a client-centric model.

John: 3:20

Yeah. Then there are some internal reasons as well, like the ability to articulate the services. But yeah, I think that's a, that's a great point. We should always be focused on the clients and they expect to be engaged with the people that are actually gonna do the work. So folks that are listening along right now, here's a question for you. If you were to map your team on a bell curve with one side of the scale being the doing end and the other side being the selling end, where would most of your people fall on that distribution? So as we walk through this, why don't you just keep that in the back of your mind and then at the end of this episode. Send us a note on LinkedIn and tell us what you think.

Mark: 4:04

Yeah, I, I, you know, the bell curve visual, often indicates a, uniform distribution

John: 4:12

Mm-hmm.

Mark: 4:12

from one end. The other, you know, it increases, it tapers off on either end and it's this, this big middle. I don't know if that's the case necessarily here. The bell curve could be skewed one way or another. it could be completely lopsided or backwards. You could have, you know, nobody in the middle. You could have people who are specifically, doing the work, and then others, you know, participating in developing new business. So it could be completely outta whack. The bell curve could be completely inversed, but the, but before we leave the research end of thing. John, I just wanna add one more point here that you had noted, and that is, most of the firms, in that survey or in a similar survey, about two thirds to three quarters of people surveyed or firms surveyed. Said they employ doer sellers. Maybe they, you know, that's just kind of how they do business. Or they have very specific, you know, a very specific business model around it. Two thirds to three quarters use that model, but only about a third provide any training to those individuals. So in a lot of those firms, people are just kind of finding their way through. okay, so let's, let's wander through, the bell curve from one end to the other and kind of see where we end up. you and I have put this together, John, as a series of questions that we can pose and then respond to. So I kind of like the format here. So let's, walk through this.

John: 5:44

let's start on this doer end of that bell curve. And, we'll start with this question, what traits define someone who's great at doing, but maybe they resist selling? when I first read this question, the first thing that kind of jumped out to me is the people that are focused on doing are, and, and they, maybe they resist selling is maybe they're a little bit more introverted, right? Maybe they're, they don't really like to engage with people they don't know. They just wanna focus on what they wanna focus on and then go home at the end of the day,

Mark: 6:17

Sure. Yeah. I like

John: 6:20

What, what, what kind of came to mind first on your end?

Mark: 6:23

Yeah. Traits. To find someone who is great at doing but resists selling. The thing that came to mind for me was, that the doers who don't like to spend time selling have this belief and it's deep inside them that they're. Any future work that they will win, their firm will win, is going to be completely based on their ability to deliver the work in hand today. So, and it's a common refrain I hear from people is like, look, all we have to do is knock this one out of the park. Do a fantastic job here and that will in some way guarantee our future success or more work coming down the pike. So I hear that a lot and I think that, a lot of these, I'm a doer. I'm not a seller, sort of have that belief and they just, in the back of the mind, they're thinking we don't really have to, you know, sell.'cause selling's an ugly word and we don't even use that word here. It's a four letter word. We just have to do the work incredibly well, and we're gonna win more work than our competition because we're gonna do the work better than our competition. The challenge there, of course, is the baseline fact that your clients expect you to do a plus plus work all the time, right? you've signed a contract and you, you're just gonna do it and. You may s you may be looking at this thinking, oh, we're doing a really amazing job, but your client is just saying, look, you signed up to do this work, you're just gonna do it. And yeah, if you do a great job, that's great. I kind of expect that. So, um, that's the rub. And I think a lot of, at their soul, the doers, they're really believe that this is gonna, you know, if they're the best doers out there, they're gonna, they're gonna just have work forever. And that's a lot of times not the case.

John: 8:24

They need to knock it out of the park. Yeah, I, I totally see that. You know, another thing that dawned on me as, as we were just talking about this is, someone might be like overwhelmed currently, right? And they're inundated with a bunch of project work or a bunch of work right now, and the thought of selling more is just repulsive,

Mark: 8:44

You are always in the, today, you know, you're not necessarily in the. In the tomorrow. So you're constantly just busy today and you're like, how can we sell for tomorrow when we're too busy today? So you're constantly just caught up in this today thing, and you have the inability to look forward. So, and, and you know, even the very best doers out there, seasoned professionals can find themselves in that trap. So, yeah, so that's a, that's a great question.

John: 9:10

Yeah. Okay. Well here's another one, and this is kind of a fun one. resistant to selling. Could be, there could be a lot of different factors to that, but let's say it boils down to three different things. Let's say it boils down to personality, training and compensation structure, if you've got a hundred chips, how would you allocate them to those three things? In terms of their weight to resistance to selling.

Mark: 9:35

A hundred chips. All right, so I'll do it in, in reverse. so compensation structure. Compensation structure works really, really well. So you put a ton of chips on compensation structure. If you have people who are intrinsically motivated, to, you know, go, go get it, right? And, and, and intrinsically motivated around selling their, selling their expertise, right? these are people who can be motivated in other ways, but so that's a, that's a, a, a carrot and stick around comp structure and, um. For some people it's just not gonna work for some, you know, lifetime, you know, doers. it's just not gonna work. You, you will see the people who the carrot and stick thing you dangle it out in front. You'll see people that, that works really, really well for. and, you know, the not so secret, secret from a selling standpoint is that organizations who do vary compensation and have compensation structures built around, people who sell, uh, the sellers kill it. You know, I. because you know, the carrots and sticks work really, really well. The next thing, training, I think people who are doers want more and more training on their craft and less on selling, but, they are still process oriented people. So I think, you know, having some amount of training practice and improvement in a sort of process centric way, in an organized way is gonna help those people. So I would probably put some chips, on that, personality is always the last one. The personality is always the wild card for me. I, think that introverts, uh, and people have a certain personality type. can be very good at selling their expertise because they're their posture, allows people to build trust with them. I think people who are introverted and experts, present themselves as being very trustworthy, they're, they tend to be very open and honest and transparent. so. personality is, is important. And if I'm gonna divvy up my chips, I'm having doing a bad job of this. Uh, probably in this when we're talking,'cause we're talking about the doer end of the curve, that's where we started, right? I think compensation structure's not gonna get a lot of chips. I think I'm gonna evenly split between training and personality and probably just drop a couple more on personality. So maybe that's where I end up.

John: 12:01

That's, it's funny because when, when you started talking about comp structure and then you said it, it's completely dependent on the motivation, just like the people and their personality and, and I'm okay that, that makes total sense. Yep. So maybe like 60 chips on personality, maybe 35 on training, and then five on comp

Mark: 12:20

yeah. Maybe something I don't, yeah, it's, um, I think that, you know, it's, it's interesting, a lot of organizational leaders, CEOs, presidents, whoever else. Really wanna, lean into compensation structure.'cause they think it's this kind of like silver bullet inside their firm. It's like, oh, I just throw more dollars at'em. They're gonna do better. I've seen it not work. just because you have to have that specific individuals who's, gonna be ready for it. Like, oh yeah, bring it on. Bring it on, you know? And if actually someone really excels at, you know, within that structure, they're gonna do incredibly well. You know? so,'cause all right incentives are there, so there you go.

John: 12:53

Let's flip over to the other end of the curve here. So let's go to the seller end of the curve. And let's start with this question mark, and let's kind of like, let's explore this topic. At what point in their career should experts be selling more than doing?

Mark: 13:11

Yeah, good question. And, I'm gonna start overlaying'cause I almost see this as a bell curve, you know, so maybe we're using the same bell curve thing. So we're on the, selling end. But I'm even gonna throw a second bell curve thing in there.'cause I think that as, as, individuals grow and change throughout their career, I almost look at it like a, a bell curve. And here's why I say that, because I think if we look and we've actually talked about this in another episode, which was connected to another podcast that I was a guest on about sort of the different state, what people should be doing in different stages of their careers. we can probably link to that one. I think. I, think that one was a lot of fun. I enjoyed that one. early career professionals, are they well equipped to sell? Maybe, They can be smart, they can be good professionals, they can, you know, be good doers. They can be motivated to sell. I don't think early career professionals have, a lot of built-in sort of client orientation. That's the X factor, right? So I think that the X factor for an early career professional is that they're, internally and organizationally focused and personally focused, and they're not necessarily focused as much on their, clients. Maybe mid-career professionals I think are much more so. So I think on the bell curve, I think mid-career professionals can be fantastic doer sellers. Absolutely. And I'm gonna go against convention here and say late career professionals probably should not be your firm's number one doer Sellers. Even though people are looking at their own firms and thinking, all of our great doer sellers are our long timers, you know, they're the people that have been around for the longest time. The challenge there, of course, is that. they're wrapping things up. You know, they're towards the end of their career, they're looking to, what does the next five years of their professional life hold? If you're putting too much revenue responsibility on their shoulders and then they leave, it's tough to make up. So that's my curve ball here. Is that actually. Lean hard on your, mid-career and even early transitioning to mid-career professionals, and don't lean as hard on your long timers.

Mark Wainwright: 15:14

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 15:16

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 15:30

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 15:40

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 15:46

and now back to the show.

John: 15:49

It sounds like what you're, what you're saying is that sales needs to be embedded in the culture in a layered fashion for early career professionals. Give them a safety net. Mid-career professionals, this is where they should start to take on more opportunities on their own, and then the, the later career professionals. They, they present a risk, right, if they end up leaving the firm. So you need to have that succession plan in place for your business development organization.

Mark: 16:16

Exactly. It needs to be structural, it needs to be kind of built into the organization, which means you are working to develop, these young and mid-career professionals likely faster than you otherwise would. cause a lot of firms are just, they wait till the long timers are, You know, go out and winning the work. And, um, it's great. They have good networks. They have good connections. They have trust in the community. They have, you know, maybe they've made a name for themselves, who knows. But, yeah, I think that's all, you know, I, I mean, I don't want to go get, you know, too extreme on this, but I think that's a lot why a lot of firms fail is that they put way too much responsibility, revenue responsibility on the shoulders of the long timers, and then they leave, retire, whatever else, or. the long timers who are owners in the firm are looking to transition that ownership and maybe some of the young and mid-career professionals aren't even, probably mid-career professionals at this point, aren't able to buy into the organization. So, if the longtime owners of the firm can't transition ownership and revenue responsibility and everything else to the next generation, they're gonna look, they're gonna turn outwardly to start to look for someone to buy the firm because an outside party is gonna be able to come in and acquire the firm, and they're gonna be able to compensate the owners. Great. Then the whole thing blows up and so many firms find themselves in that situation.

John: 17:42

we talked about the doer end of this bell curve. We've talked about the seller end of this bell curve. Let's jump into the middle, how should these doer sellers balance the doing versus the selling?

Mark: 17:55

Yeah, it's, it goes without saying that this is a challenge. There are very few individuals that I have seen worked with, that I'm familiar with, that do a fantastic job of, of balancing the, two things. There's a bunch of layers to it, but let's just, let's just talk,'cause we could talk an hour on this one subject, but I'll just talk about two aspects that we kind of noted here. One would be sort of just the overall organizational structure is, you know, is your organizational structure built in a way that it, develops, fosters, supports Individual doers, sellers, in a way that, lets them balance the doing the work and the winning the work. it has to be fundamental, you know, it has to be, what their week looks like. You know what their expectations are for, what, you know, utilization rate, right? So it's, you know, what percentage of billable work do they have, all that kind of stuff. So the organization has to support it. And I guess part of that is was looking at this as kind of a second thing, but it's similar. The compensation structure has to support it as well. I'm not certain that, having a very, very aggressive variable compensation structure based on selling performance is a fantastic, path forward for a lot of firms out there. But I do believe that, some discretionary compensation structure that varies relative to sales performance is smart.

John: 19:19

Yeah,

Mark: 19:19

Particularly in firms who have a clearly defined, quote sales team, people who are responsible for both in the selling and doing the work. Anybody who is responsible for revenue generation, having that group of people clearly defined so it's not sort of thready and ambiguous and also putting in place a variable sort of discretionary. And what I mean by discretionary is that that's the bonuses, right? so having a good system in place can incent the right types of, behavior and. Compensation is part of it, and I talk to a lot of firms who want to jump into a compensation structure. They want to rejigger things, introduce a new compensation structure. It is very challenging and unfortunately, one of the things that a lot of individuals will default to is, is, look, when I walked in the door, my job description said nothing about selling. Right. And we've talked about job descriptions in the past, so I think a lot of individuals will default to that. They're like, look, this is not why I do what I do. Right? I'm not here to, I'm not here to sell. So that can be a huge barrier. So organizational structure, comp, structure, whatever else, it just needs to be developed and introduced early in someone's career so that there is that expectation from day one that at some point in their career they're gonna be coming across. And yes, the organization has to kind of support that. So those are the two kind of pieces of balancing the two. The organization needs to support it. Obviously the individual needs to have the skills and the comfort and the confidence to balance the two, but the organization needs to support it. And then, they need to have the right sort of incentives in place, that aren't, Too hard to achieve or, you know, defeating for certain people, but are good, healthy, you know, incentives.

John: 21:09

to me, it boils down to building a habit of good unbillable work. Right. Whatever that looks like for your, you know, we've talked about it in the past where, you know, if everyone is pitching in and playing to their strengths, your role in contributing to sales or marketing may look different than other doer sellers, right? So I think that's kind of like building the habit around whatever that is, the highest use of your un billable time. and then presumably if that's happening across the organization. Everyone's kind of pitching in and doing that, and it's sustainable. So I think that's like, it's, it just kind of dawned on me there that like making a habit of that, of that work and focusing on the right stuff.

Mark: 21:54

I think you know, kind of the empirical evidence that I have around what you just said there is the best doer sellers are the people who are organized and diligent and focused and, do good, follow up and have a rigorous kind of organized process. So, yeah, so absolutely.

John: 22:11

So let's talk about shifting the curve, right? Maybe you are an individual and you are a doer and you wanna get better, better at selling. Or maybe if we take a step back and look organizationally, maybe your bell curve isn't what you want or need it to be, so. I guess let's use this as a jumping off point mark. Does the curve distribution itself, can that shift or should it shift depending on your firm culture, maturity, makeup, et cetera? What do you think?

Mark: 22:42

Yeah. my brain just immediately goes to, you know, most firms have, are, are, are shifted. Which way am I shifting to the, to the left. Most firms have a whole bunch of people who are the do. Right. And it, and it gets kind of thready and thin towards the selling end of thing. Right. That's, kind of the status quo, I would say. Right? Most firms will nod and do that and they're like, yeah. And that structure is actually okay for us because we only need a few people taking their non-billable time. And going and winning the work.'cause they do a good job, right? They go out hunting and then they, bring the work back. But the glaringly obvious problem with that is that they're doing nothing to shift the curve. IE develop young, mid-career professionals exposing them to new business opportunities, putting some amount of responsibility on their shoulders. So yeah, if I could just take the picture in my brain, it's, most firms have. they're shifted, they're skewed towards the doing end of thing and not enough on the, the selling. And I'm not saying that needs to get reversed. You need to have, you know, a hundred people out beaten the streets or, you know, whatever salesy term that you want to use. Um, but, you know, getting more people involved in or and engaged with it is, is important. So, yeah. So, you know, firm culture, maturity. Yeah, I would say that firm culture needs to be built in a way that it supports that, that there's expectations inside culturally that people who are out there selling are recognized and rewarded. and there's not this fundamental foundational belief, like I mentioned earlier, that boy, if we're just the best doers out there, we're gonna win a ton of work and we're gonna be just fine. Right.

John: 24:30

It's interesting. I, uh, uh, so I, I suppose like. In summary, the, bell curve may be lopsided for smaller firms. And then over time, if you're doing a good job instilling a healthy sales and marketing and business development culture within your organization, it becomes that right side or the seller side of that, curve here. Our bell curve distribution starts to get filled out a little bit more.

Mark: 24:54

Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right.

John: 24:56

So, on an individual level. When should when? I guess we talked about this kind of like in the early, early career and mid-career and later career, but maybe let's, let's talk about like the systems or support that firms can have in place to help individuals move along that curve and maybe towards the selling end. What are some systems that you've seen firms put into place that have effectively helped people move along that curve?

Mark: 25:23

Well, you know, not to point you the extremely obvious, but, you know, working with third parties, to help train coach, you know, whatever else. Just seeking greater wisdom throughout the firm and, and kind of having a belief that, you don't know everything and you don't have all the expertise within your four walls, to be able to do this well and. Also, you know, don't make the mistake that you just automatically think that you're long timers who have shown some ability to go out and, generate revenue, are able to immediately turn to the organization and teach and coach.'cause a lot of times They're not great at that.

John: 26:02

Experience. It does not always translate to

Mark: 26:05

no, no, it, it doesn't, so Sure. Having a third party perspective or some third party expertise, you know, expertise come in is, is helpful. But the other big thing is people getting opportunities to try to practice, to be exposed to it. So that's important. And this comes with tricky cost to it in that if someone who is younger in their career, less experienced somewhere earlier on, that curve, finds himself in a situation where they do their best, but they fail, Then that has sometimes some real consequences. You know, it's got revenue consequences of the firm. It's like, oh, you know, the person stuck their neck out and they didn't do well, so, um, we're not gonna have them do it again. Well, it, that's practice, right? So in order for people to move along the curve, in order for firms to build that into the, that selling end of the curve better, they have to have people who are trying and failing and growing and learning and trying it again, and practicing and improving, and then ultimately. Winning at some point. So that's the, that's the challenge. I see.

John: 27:06

the best way to, to get better is to do reps and have practice. Otherwise, you're not going to, you're not gonna grow. this has been a, uh, a fantastic episode. Mark, what if, like, what are some closing remarks? Is there anything else you want to tell listeners?

Mark: 27:19

So the, idea of a model, right? And the bell curve is an often used model. The idea of a model is to create a visual image, a snapshot, and in this case, you know, we're talking about people creating in this visual model, this snapshot of their organization, understanding where their organization is currently in this bell curve model. Because I think that, Hopefully people agree with us that there is some sort of a distribution when it comes to doer sellers, right? they're not all the same. They're not all doing a great job. They're not all doing a bad job, but they're just, there's a distribution of them, and that relates to experience and tenure and, you know, just ability and, you know, can be influenced by training and, you know, culture and organizational support and everything else. So I would invite anyone listening to take a, snapshot. Of their organization, overlay it on the model and kind of understand what types of things they need to put in place or changes they need to make inside their organization to create or change or, alter. The current shape of their organization to something that they would consider ideal. Right. And like we said here, I think that, uh, we don't want the bell curve shifted too hard to doers. We also don't want the bell curve shifted so that we have a bunch of long timers doing all the selling. So I think in this case. Hopefully this conversation and sort of the argument that we're kind of making here is, is that, understand what an ideal model would look like, and what changes you need to make in-house. And we talked about a few compensation and organizational support and everything else. So yeah, that's the go and do here, right? That's the invitation for people to reflect and understand. they are now and where they want to be in the future.

John: 29:03

All right. Well Mark, this has been a fantastic conversation. Until next time.

Mark: 29:07

Okay, John, until next time.