How to Position 3rd Party Vendors When Selling

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Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by the Agency Sales System, the online course designed specifically to teach you how to build a rock solid agency sales system inside your HubSpot CRM. Learn more at doinbound.com salescourse. Now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome back to Inbound Sales Journey. I'm Ryan, joined by Gray.

I'm here.

Here he is. We are on episode 107 today and we are going to be chatting a bit about working with third party vendors. So what we mean by this is you are working on a project or some sort of retainer and you're going to be outsourcing some of that work. Talk about how we manage that during the sales process. A lot of times during the sales process, we'll get asked, what does your team look like? Internal team, do you guys work with contractors, freelancers, that kind of stuff too. So that definitely overlaps a bit into this. But we're just going to chat about how we deal with that relationship and deal with it specifically in the sales process. Gray. We have used contractors since the dawn of time.

Wow, it's been a long time.

I was wondering how old we are. We're as old as time itself.

Yep. So we've, we've dealt with this a lot. A lot of agencies do. I mean, it's a very common agency model. Whether it's, yeah, we work with contractors or I'm gonna bring in, you know, some extra help to get through this project or whatever it is. So why don't you just start us off and kind of walk us through your thoughts here and I'll fill in the gaps.

Yeah, well, I guess first, just to clarify the contractor side of things, a lot of agencies are using the contractor model, especially if they're distributed, have folks who are in multiple countries. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not a full time team member and still operating in a lot of ways as an employee would just if they're not required to classify them as an employee, if they haven't gone over the legal line of now someone has to be classified as an employee, in a lot of cases they'll keep them as contractors. So contractors themselves. At some point, I feel like this word is going to change because there's just so many more people who are 1099s in the US it's the tax form for independent contractors. But so many more people who are these independent contractors than there used to be. And I think that you think of contractors and a lot of people think like a freelancer who's jumping in for a project, but a lot of times it's a dedicated team member. So. But anyways, to get back to it, there's two ways that people primarily handle this. The first is disclosed. So they say, hey, just so you know, like we don't do the PPC side of things well. So we're going to bring on this other agency who does that well and they're going to be handling the PPC side of this agreement and that revenue might be going to us and we're then paying them or it might be going directly to them. There might be a totally separate agreement, but that relationship is at least disclosed. Then there's the other way of handling it, which is the white label route that a lot of people take, especially in the development world where hey, we're.

Going to do the website design, but.

Really we're outsourcing that to another company and that happens in a lot of different situations for a bunch of different types of deliverables or things for clients. So a couple different ways to handle it. And wanted to hit on this because this is a question that does come.

Up from folks who are trying to.

Figure out how to navigate navigate through what's the best way to do this to one, still close the deal, but two, not be in a lot of trouble on the back end of this where we the client's expectations aren't being met. So I'm going to start off with what I think the easiest way to do this is. And the easiest way by far is to just be straight up with the client on the front end. So we've done this, we've had projects where we've brought in other people on the development side, on the design side, on the content side, on a lot of different aspects and components of what we've done. Where they are other companies or individuals who are going to be taking that in logo design, something that we don't do in house have never really done well, that's something that we're going to send out somewhere else. So rather than one common example, there are agencies out there who said we're designing this stuff and they go and run a 99designs contest and they bring those back as examples and then kind.

Of just are managing the process back.

And forth and that's a way to make money. It's not a way that I want to make money where the client thinks that I'm the one doing the work, but really I'm sending that out to crowdsource that we would always much rather say, listen, here's exactly what's going to happen and just charge them. Clients are really not going to be upset as long as you can present the value. A lot of agencies who've done that type of thing, the contest itself to.

Run might be $300, $299 or whatever to run it and say, well, this is easily worth a thousand dollars to the customer because I'm going to be managing the feedback and making their life a little bit easier here. I feel much more comfortable just telling the client, listen, let's run this. And if you want to bring us in to help manage that, it's going to be well worth your time. We're going to take $700, they're going to take $300 and we're going to get you the logo that you need. And they know where it's going and it's totally fine. Then we've had situations where I've said, like, if you just want. We already have the 99designs account. You want us to go run that contest and you just pay us everything, that's fine. You don't have to pay multiple people and have your own account or whatever. We can handle that process for you. That, that's a super uncommon. Try to stay out of that as much as possible and, and don't do that at Guava Box at this point. But that's, that's the way in that example that I would much rather handle it and just be upfront with the, with the prospect about what's going to happen or with the client about how.

This is going to work and what's going to happen.

A question for you, Greg.

Go for it.

So is it during the sales. So let's say you go through a sales process and they never ask about the team or like how the work's done and distributed. You know, I think for us, almost 50, 50, about that question specifically being asked, like independently, is it when you start to talk about the different services and what you're going to do that you, that you preemptively bring it up and just say, hey, we don't do this. Like personally, not one of our strongest suits, but this is how we would handle a situation like this. And that's when you kind of bring it up or when I guess at what point. And it's hard because I Think there's different situations. So this is kind of an unfair question, but when have you seen as the best time to bring up the team dynamic and what you are and aren't going to be doing in house?

I think as soon as you're talking about the process and at some point as you're walking through, if you're getting into the pricing area of things, I don't think you ever want to let this go. What you don't want to happen is let this go and try and have this come out later. So you don't want to go through the process, get to the point where you've got the deal ready to close at a $50,000 website project, and then they ask, are you guys doing the development in house or is that happening somewhere else? And you say, well, actually, that piece is outsourced. That's what you want to stay away from as much as possible is have that come out later. And at that point you don't. There are a lot of folks who've made this mistake where they don't want to screw up the deal at this point, so they just say, we're handling that. And then it winds up that somehow that comes out. Maybe it never comes out, but either way, you're sitting on something there that that's your dirty little secret that you don't want to. You don't want getting out. And now you're stressed about that. And that's not, that's not the way to go through, to go through life and have to be running an agency. So I don't know. I mean, like you said, it's a little bit situational, but my general philosophy is the earlier the better. That doesn't mean in the first five minutes that you start saying, well, if you want web design, that's not going to be us, that's going to be this. If you want ppc, that's going to be this other agency. But it does mean once you're getting into the specifics of those services and talking about how it's going to get done and talking about pricing and stuff, that you're up front and you address and attack that question head on when it does come up with folks and just let them know what pieces and there's a big difference, I guess probably the bigger episode or the more valuable piece of this, because everyone's got probably has a way that they're either trying to figure out or attacking this right now, but how you position this and pitch this, so. So you don't want to Say we don't do web development well, but we found this other agency that's pretty cheap and we can hook you up with them. That's not the way that you want to position that.

That doesn't get you excited?

Surprisingly not. You want to position it as assuming this is true. Here's the agency who does this really well. This is the piece that they do really well. And we partnered up with them and we're working with them on these projects, and here are folks you can talk to about it. Now, we obviously have an agreement with them because we've chosen to not focus on this and just work with them for it. We have an agreement with them where we're going to handle this important piece of your project. They're going to handle that piece. You don't have to worry about paying multiple vendors. You just pay to us. We then take care of them. And we're basically, we're providing a lot of these services. But we're also your general contractor here. And you and I, Ryan, we're going to do an episode here in the coming weeks talking about metaphors, but I think trying to help people understand, like, what is this? What's the analogy here between what our role is and what they've experienced in the real world? No one's upset with general contractors in the real world. Well, other than when something goes wrong. But no one's upset with the business model itself, that they're managing multiple different contractors and bringing in different pieces for what needs to get done. People understand that. So I think just communicating that and letting them know the other thing you want to be not. You don't necessarily kind of need to read the situation, but in a lot of cases, you're going to want to be positioning this against. The alternative is I go out and find somebody who's a full service agency and they offer this service. And you've got some easy ways to combat that in a lot of cases, which is, you know, they've got one person in house who occasionally does this and they're saying that they do it. You don't need to attack that full service agency, but you do need to share. Here's the reason that we've chosen not to do this at our agency, the reason that we found this other partner who's really good at this piece, and the reason that you're going to want to work through us, because we can add value to them. Because with our strategy and their web development chops, you're getting the best of both worlds here.

What's the perfect. The general contractor is the perfect analogy here, because I don't want to hire one person that knows a little bit about electric, a little bit about plumbing, a little bit about demo and repair.

Oh, perfect. You do that 5% of the time. That's awesome. You're the guy I want.

Yeah. I want the guy that can bring all that together, the best people at all those things to work on my home. So hopefully that's helpful and clear for people. And on that note, I think Gray were good to wrap this one up. Now, next week, we're going to be talking about preparing for your sales calls and how to do the best prep work possible and our strategy and what we found to be really helpful there. So that is next week. But until then, have a good week and keep on selling.