How appointing a new business agency can feel like handing your child over.

read

by jim-piper

I was at a meeting recently with a really interesting agency (genuinely imaginative, innovative and pioneering) and one of the most common objections for outsourcing business development to an agency like Alchemis came up.

The objection is similar to the emotional response of passing over your child to someone else (something most parents experience when their child first goes to a childminder or to school). Most of our clients are small-medium sized agencies and are owned and run by a founding partner. Therefore, handing over responsibility for contacting prospects and articulating their proposition on their behalf can initially prove unsettling. How can I entrust my child to another person? How will they able to put across my offer to prospects when they haven’t grown up with it? You can see how easily the experiences may get blurred…

The rational response to this is that someone from the outside can add great value to your business/child. We all fondly remember a teacher who made a difference to our lives by pointing us in a direction we hadn’t previously considered or opening our eyes to an author we hadn’t previously read. Run with the analogy and you’ll rationally understand that an outsider (with decades of experience in this industry) can add enormous value to your business, helping to refine your proposition to work in this current marketplace for example.

However, it’s the emotional objection that is the most difficult to overcome, which is why we would always encourage our prospective clients to meet our team of Account Managers prior to appointing us – the only way they will ever truly feel comfortable with handing over their child is by spending time with the childminder.