josh_nyc

I run a small, "boutique" web consultancy under my own name. Thus far I've done my own sales and project management. I'm a back-end developer and sub out my design and front-end. I've finally hit my new year's resolution of delegating more: I'm now subbing out most of my back-end dev as well, leaving me to focus on client relations and management. My subs are all remote folks I've coded in the trenches with and trust. My customers are all word-of-mouth and view me as a "developer + team" rather than a Brand, LLC type of firm. I follow the (somewhat risky) model of One Large Client + Several Smaller Clients, and cashflow is usually decent.

The sales cycle in my business can be lengthy -- a few weeks of courting followed by a few weeks of estimation, proposals, and contracts. I typically receive leads from my contacts and do the rest myself, but I want to delegate this process as well if possible.

Question: how can I leverage a commission-only tech-knowledgable sales-person in this situation?

Challenges are:

a) I can only take so many clients at once (until I scale up operations), so I definitely won't be this salesperson's only source of work.

b) Beyond procuring the lead and getting the customer excited about the business solutions we can provide, it seems that the bulk of the sales cycle (the in-depth proposals, etc.) is out of scope for most salespeople.

Is the occasional mid-4-figures (USD) commission enough to attract a salesperson who can do more than just get me leads? One who can go deeper with potential clients before I have to jump in?

Advice and feedback welcome, as I'm sure I may be overlooking some possibilities here.

I run a small, "boutique" web consultancy under my own name. Thus far I've done my own sales and project management. I'm a back-end developer and sub out my design and front-end. I've finally hit my new year's resolution of delegating more: I'm now subbing out most of my back-end dev as well, leaving me to focus on client relations and management.

My subs are all remote folks I've coded in the trenches with and trust. My customers are all word-of-mouth and view me as a "developer + team" rather than a Brand, LLC type of firm. I follow the (somewhat risky) model of One Large Client + Several Smaller Clients, and cashflow is usually decent.

The sales cycle in my business can be lengthy -- a few weeks of courting followed by a few weeks of estimation, proposals, and contracts. I typically receive leads from my contacts and do the rest myself, but I want to delegate this process as well if possible.

Question: how can I leverage a commission-only tech-knowledgable sales-person in this situation?

Challenges are:

a) I can only take so many clients at once (until I scale up operations), so I definitely won't be this salesperson's only source of work.

b) Beyond procuring the lead and getting the customer excited about the business solutions we can provide, it seems that the bulk of the sales cycle (the in-depth proposals, etc.) is out of scope for most salespeople.

Is the occasional mid-4-figures (USD) commission enough to attract a salesperson who can do more than just get me leads? One who can go deeper with potential clients before I have to jump in?

Advice and feedback welcome, as I'm sure I may be overlooking some possibilities here.

So, Ms. Foo can blog her heart out about her favorite hobby without telling a soul or attaining any links, yet she will still be found (to some degree) via search engines due to the inherent SEO of her blog title, pages of content, etc. (all blog-SEO specifics aside for the sake of simplicity).

If Mr. Bar launches a reddit-clone for his favorite topic, tells a few like-minded friends about it and fills it with some initial links and intelligent discourse, I suspect that there won't be as much inherent search traffic. The front page contains links and would always be changing, and comment pages might be too narrowly focused. There doesn't seem to be an obvious opportunity to say "hey -- here is our site topic, and here are some naturally-used keywords to back it up."

I first discovered reddit a few years ago because a fellow developer I respected said "yeah, I found that on reddit." I discovered HN recently because same developer said "hey, much better focus and discourse on HN." I'm not sure how I would have discovered HN, for example, without word-of-mouth of some kind (in person or online).

Am I missing something? Should Mr. Bar have a static, expository front page or something?

(Yes, I am thinking of becoming Mr. Bar for one of my favorite topics: modern music production. Currently if I hear a new radio hit and want to quickly google it to see what others think of the production values, I am bombarded with lyrics, ringtone, and mp3-downloady results. That's getting into a whole other discussion though.)