Your biz dev team is arguably the most important job in a company. Extending current contracts, landing new ones, and growing current client keeps your staff employed and can supercharge growth.
The unquantifiable job that we do is creating brand awareness around your company. When a decision-maker thinks of your expertise and immediately thinks of you, that’s super powerful stuff. Every dinner, every conference, and every zoom call further engrains your brand into your industry.
One might assume that having a full-time employee doing this would garner better results. That may be the case in some industries, but it’s certainly not in default servicing.
The dirty little secret in default servicing is that the target audience (decision-makers at banks and servicers) only consists of about 80 people. That means your full-time biz dev person needs to be calling these folks, having Zoom calls, and entertaining them. Through Covid, we learned that we can move business without excessive entertainment spending. When your target audience is only 80 people, you can run out of people to reach out to very quickly. I keep track of when the last time I reached out to someone was through a CRM and make sure to never reach out too much. To that end, if you do an aggressive reach out, you have hit all of your targets in two weeks. Then what do you do?
Nothing.
That means, for a full-time biz dev person, you are paying a large salary, benefits and entertainment expenses basically for a part-time employee.
You pay a low monthly fee when you hire a good consultant like us. FTEs also tend to get way too comfortable with the corporate card, but a consultant can split all expenses between the sum of their clients.
We closed 15 contracts for our clients in our first year in business. Since September, we have closed another 12, putting us on pace for about 27 deals between the client base. I would estimate that a really good year for an FTE working for a default firm would be four deals.
Now you are starting to see the value.
A consultant never runs out of things to do, because they are usually selling multiple products and services, which takes their target audience from about 80 people to over 200. A good consultant should be able to land you those four deals a year, bring brand awareness to your company, and help retain current clients. You’re not paying them to hit the links because they have run out of things to do.
Obviously, if your company has twenty products or services, these facts don’t apply to you.
Before you choose a consultant, take your time and do your due diligence. Ask them how many deals and how much revenue they were responsible for last year. Also, be wary of anyone who wants to lock you into a one-year deal right out of the gate. We always go month-to-month to make sure both sides get comfortable with one another, and then we talk about long-term deals. We’ve never lost a client like this. When a consultant locks you into a one-year deal out of the gate, they are not incentivized to go out and crush it for you. Not all will take advantage of this, but I am definitely aware of some that do. We post our results on LinkedIn for three reasons. One is transparency, two is we don’t think other consultants can outpace us, and three is we are very passionate about bringing a huge ROI to our clients and this shows exactly how we do that.
Feel free to reach out to us any time. If we can’t help you, we will point you in the right direction.
Let’s go close some deals!
