Founder Magic: Why Your Team Can't Sell Like You

You sell with founder magic.

I'm not blowing smoke. It's real. You get on a call with a prospect, and inside ten minutes you know whether they fit, what's actually broken, what they will pay & what needs to happen next. You don't use a playbook or a checklist. You are the goddamn checklist.

Then you hire someone to sell, and they can't do any of it. So at first you think, “OMG, this person SUCKS!” You switch to another sales resource & the same thing happens.

Then you decide:
I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SELL FOR THIS AGENCY…😟

The evidence is real enough - you are 0 for 2 on getting a sales resource. But your conclusion is wrong.

WTF Is Founder Magic?

When I say founder magic, I mean the rare elixir of gumption, experience, context & confidence.

Judgment: This is the pattern recognition you built over years of doing the work. You've seen this problem before (like 40 times). You know "we need more leads" means "our sales process is broken" and “we need better leads” means "our ICP has changed and we didn’t know it." Your brain takes a shit-ton of shortcuts, and most of them are right.

Gravitas: This is the authority you have before you open your mouth. You are the founder…you built the thing. When you say "I think we can help here" the prospect leans in, because the person who owns the agency is personally interested in their problem.

WTF Is It So Hard To Hire Someone Who Can At Least PRETEND To Do That Stuff?

A lot of it is just because of experience & position. A CEO or Founder is almost always going to have more impact than somebody with business development or sales in their title.

Further, without the benefit of having started at the beginning and getting to where you are, a new sales hire (even if they are super experienced) is standing on top of something you built. They don't have the blueprint. They don't know what the builder did. They just know they are living on the third floor, and don't have the context of what has worked for you, what hasn't worked for you, and what you’ve been brewing up in the back of your mind. They don't have the position of authority or the forward vision you do.

Your Judgment Has To Leave Your Head & Become Company Property

Your judgment feels instinctual. It isn’t…it’s actually the result of your brain rifling through all of your experiences and creating patterns from those experiences. Then, when you see something new, it looks just like some experience you have in your back pocket. But your brain is so fast that it doesn't let you know what it is doing. It looks for structure in the problem you are trying to solve and runs into your memories and asks, "Have we seen this structure before, and what did we do?" That happens instantaneously, so it's not instinct. It's really just practice.

That's why judgement is so hard to hand off.

Your brain does a pattern match and quickly categorizes the outcome of previous times you’ve seen that pattern, or it gets hung up on something that doesn’t precisely match a pattern.

You can't explain why you passed on that prospect…you just knew.

When your sales resource makes a call you wouldn't have made, you can’t point to your sales playbook or ICP and say “Lauren, it says right there on page 3 that years ago, we had two similar clients, and they were nightmares.”

That’s not Lauren’s fault. She can't make decisions based on information she doesn't know exists.

The fix is to make your experience a kind of company property - start historically and keep it up to date:

• Document why you qualify or disqualify leads. Jump into your CRM and give two sentences on why, over the last 12 months, what about THE PROSPECT made you want or not want the business. IMPORTANT NOTE: What about the PROSPECT made you want the business? Money can’t be an answer…because that is about you and not the prospect. Even if you have 500 leads over the last year that you dealt with (which would be unusual for founder lead sales), it's not going to take more than 2 weeks of 30 minutes a day going through these.
• Record all of your sales calls (if you don’t do that already). Use your favorite AI to define the structure of the call…and after you have a good structure, start mapping the inputs and outputs for each section. (If you want some help there, Discovery Lab & Call Lab are two free resources that will give you insight into questions you should be asking and the structure and effectiveness of your calls.)
• Start building call context by buyer type & role. Document the stories, experiences & insights that you load up for a particular vertical. Your stories and facts for a hospitality client will be different than for a real estate client. Then do the same with positions - what approach do you take with a CEO vs a Head of Marketing? With all of that context OUT of your head, your sales resource hops on a Zoom thinking "OK, it's a hotel, & and I am speaking to the owner. Cool - I have the hospitality & CEO context."
• If you’ve been doing the sales all yourself, I know that your definition of “sales stages” is pretty loosey-goosey. Take the time to map out your agency sales process from end to end. But we all know that you skip steps and smush steps together. Imagine you are mapping your sales process for an incredibly demanding boss who, at 8am EVERY Monday morning, is going to ask you the status of ALL the deals in each step of the process. What are the stages? What makes someone move from 1 stage to the next?

I learned this the expensive way. I hired an experienced agency sales resource, had him shadow a few calls, vomited everything I could at him about our work & launched him into the market with a PowerPoint template and an unlimited cell phone plan. Months went by with zero sales, so I joined a call, watched him fumble easy questions, bigfooted him & closed it myself. Then I started building the case to fire him.

I finally asked him why he was struggling. He told me that didn't have my stories, he didn’t understand how we actually did our work. I had never bothered to understand how I sold, so I had nothing to hand him.

He didn't suck. I did.

You can make your judgement company property. In fact, if you don’t, you are choosing to limit your agency growth (and choosing to tie yourself to a sales role) forever. Get it out of your head - it isn’t that hard. Just lean into the suck a little bit so you make your experience and story bank an asset that your agency has…not just you.

Gravitas Isn’t Something That Can Transfer…Save It For When It REALLY Matters

Gravitas is the part founders forget about. Being a founder or CEO says something about you. You have authority to make calls others can’t. The buck stops with you…

That authority works because you give yourself permission to wander & because you are the head of a tribe full of experts, the prospect will follow you. Your curiosity reads as a compliment. When a sales resource isn’t structured, it feels like a a waste of everybody's time…because someone on the sales team doesn’t have the authority to discover something new on a rambling call and make a plan around it. It's the same chat with a completely different outcome.

No amount of documentation, or training, or sales role playing will ever make a sales resource have the same clout as a founder. You need to replace it with things that carry authority on their own:

• Structure: A sales resource running a clear, buyer-centric discovery process looks prepared, and gives the client a real sense of agency competence. Structure is borrowed credibility. (The discovery call playbook is a good place to start building structure for you team.)
• Proof: You need a library of case studies, methodologies, & research the agency owns. (Do yourself a HUGE favor and add some metadata around these, like vertical, client size, situation, etc. so that the right case study or the right research is available when it is needed.)These are the assets that make the agency credible when you aren't on the call.
• Specialists & SME (Subject Matter Experts): Sales doesn't have to sell end to end - in fact, for most agencies, they shouldn't. Your sales resource generally doesn't have their hands on the work, so when needed, pull the SEO nerd into the SEO conversation & your creative strategist into the UGC discussion. Depth of knowledge IS authority.
• You, When It Matters: For a good long time, until the context, stories and insights settle, a little founder magic can make the difference. That's fine. Show up when your team tells you it matters.

Sales Will Lose Deals You Would Have Won

They will. It'll make you want to pull your hair out.

BUT, they will also close deals you never would have sniffed. They are a different person with a different read, and some buyers will trust them more than they'd trust you. Founder magic is your edge, other people have their own sort.

There is a huge temptation, when you watch a deal get fumbled, to say, “Never mind, I'll do it…" and take sales back. That sentence is an agency growth killer. Every time you do that, you tell your team that they aren’t competent enough to close business. Do it enough and you make it true.

Keep The Magic, Lose The Monopoly

Founder magic is the best growth engine an early agency has. Past a certain size, it's also REALLY FREAKIN’ EXPENSIVE. (Take a gander at the founder tax, go ahead and read it right now, I’ll wait.) The goal isn't to kill founder magic…it’s always going to be there if you need it. The goal is to make your judgment company property that can be accessed on demand, and to replace your gravitas with structure & proof.

Save your founder magic for the moments that actually need you.

The difference between agencies that outgrow their founder and agencies that don't isn't better salespeople. It's founders who did the work of getting the magic out of their heads.