A couple painful memories when founder-led sales was all I knew:

• One Labor Day, when I should've been at a BBQ or enjoying the last of summer, I sat all day at my dining table working through an RFP for a non-profit. We never even heard back after submission.
  
  

• On vacation with my wife to Paris, I wasted an entire morning at our Airbnb to put together a proposal for a web project, valuable time that could've been spent sightseeing or enjoying a croissant.
  
  

It's been many years since, but I still shudder to think that I was so slow to build out systems that could help our agency's sales process be less reliant on me.

For some reason, I felt that only I knew "the right way" to scope & price a project and that whatever the team put together would be faulty & jeopardize our chance to win.

And there were moments when I'd feel overwhelmed & disorganized. I'd sometimes take shortcuts and "mail it in" with subpar discovery, scopes, and proposals. Not to mention, I'd never schedule proposal walkthroughs or follow up to find out why we lost out on a deal. Just didn't have the bandwidth & mental energy.

Also, the examples above were just 2 of dozens of such memories. No wonder I felt burned out.

When the pipeline depends on you, the agency’s growth is capped at your personal stamina. And unfortunately for me, my stamina was weak.

Luckily, I didn't keep doing the same thing forever until I flamed out. We ended up implementing a system that allowed us to move away from the founder biz dev bottleneck.

These included:

• involving more members of the team in the sales process including scoping

• having new biz dev leadership owning deals start to finish

• investing in a CRM and having a handle on pipeline

• weekly biz dev meetings to discuss & track progress

• modularization of proposals and guidance/SOPs on pricing

• streamlined steps on MSA/SOW, invoicing, and client onboarding
  
  

Stacked together, these basic steps delivered leverage. I no longer had the dreaded "last minute proposal" that I needed to do over the weekend or holiday. Some deals even happened without my involvement, an incredible win.

If you are still the sole engine of your agency's growth, start with a small step to codify a piece of the process. Small changes compound quickly, and the freedom you gain is worth far more than any single deal.

Agency leaders can also learn a lot from B2B SaaS companies and their playbook for scaling up sales teams.

Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy features useful models for thinking the different sales maturity stages and the step-by-step process of introducing specialization and scale to a company's sales motion.

The key takeaway for agencies is that you can't really take shortcuts or rush this. A founder has to iteratively build out processes, hire for specialized roles, train people, and validate their way to building a team. It doesn't happen overnight, and it's possible a business may stay in some of the early stages for a very long time.

The "anti-pattern", as Kazanjy puts it, is to just hire a "sales guy" hoping that person would solve the problem for you. This is sure to be a failure and I've seen many agency founders suffer through this.

Will all agencies necessarily need a fully scaled out sales org?

I don't think so. Plenty of agencies have exited successfully with founders very much involved in sales or having built out the makings of an initial "sales pod".

But it's helpful to see what's possible and how the sales part of an org can scale. While not apples to apples, you can start to imagine how roles like partnerships manager or account managers (customer success) can start to fit into a built out team.