🌱 Scaling Service x Brittany Atkins: how to build a community around your business
Scaling Service is a monthly newsletter from The Family. This month we’re speaking to Brittany Atkins former UK Business Development Lead at Hotwire about how she built the F in Fintech community.
Atkins is now the UK&I Country Lead at Streamtime, the platform that helps creative companies manage their projects, teams and business.
If you ask Brittany Atkins to identify the biggest sales mistake that non-sales people make, she'll be clear about it: "Trying to sell."
As an answer this is both funny and encouraging, which is just as well, since she reckons that a lot of people in the agency space are "terrified" of sales. "They're scared of failure. It's like looking at the sun. It's too big a challenge to even get started, so it just gets put off forever."
One major problem she identifies is that a lot of would-be sales people just haven't quite worked out what they're going to say.
"People think they're supposed to just say 'Hi, do you want to buy something from me?' And that feels a bit desperate. So now they'd rather not say anything, or it doesn't work and they won't ever touch it again." The solution, she suggests, is to work out what it is that you have to offer, and then become an expert. Then people will come to you.
The power of community
When done right, a community around your business can be an incredibly valuable asset. When done wrong, it can be a huge time sink that delivers little to no value.
So how do you harness the power of community in a way that gets results?
"Define that niche: where is the opportunity, and what are the products and services that you can offer? Find that little area in the middle where you're going to add value to a community. And once you've got that, it becomes a little easier."
Early in her time at Hotwire, Atkins identified an area in which she could add genuine value. "I'd never worked for a fintech company, I didn't know a huge amount about financial services. But I found one of the industry's challenges I could speak to: getting more women into fintech roles.
“Fintechs were positioning themselves not to be like the big bad banks, but they were creating the exact same dangerous foundation: everyone looking the same, no diversity of thought."
The power of community
That's the origin story of F In Fintech, an initiative focused on boosting women within fintech that resulted in Atkins being named on the Women in Fintech Powerlist 2019.
"I built this network of people and I had an evergreen subject I could speak to them about." Over time many people in this network then came to Brittany when they had another problem to solve: PR.
This meant Brittany wouldn’t have to phone people up and ask them whether they wanted to buy something. They’d come to her because they were already part of the same community.
This necessitates a long-term perspective on targets: "If somebody would ask me 'How many opportunities are you going to close this quarter? Or this month?' I don't know. But I'm confident for the year, based on the sturdy relationships I've got."
The project of community-building can seem to run against the usual logic of sales, that drive to get in front of the decision makers. But overseeing F In Fintech taught Atkins not to be "too concerned about whether the person you speak to is a person you can sell to. Consider who their network is: they may be able to refer a lot more business to you than just one individual."
A community is a long term play
Thinking about the practicalities of community-building, she recommends getting your sales prospects working with you ahead of any potential deal: here she cites the F In Fintech podcast, created to "get prospects to come on it".
She sounds another cautionary note: don't be too quick to drop one good idea and go looking for another one. "The question internally was 'What's the next ‘F in Fintech’?', and I thought: why do we need what the next one is? Go bigger with it, go further with it, keep expanding, keep developing." This isn't just a question of maximising returns on a good thing; it connects to that push for expertise.
"I felt like it would be detrimental to my credibility: I've positioned myself as an expert, I've done a lot of homework on it, I feel like I can talk knowledgeably on this subject. But then how many times can I keep reinventing myself? Then I become a jack of all trades, which is not necessarily a great thing. The more you stick with it, the more credible you are in whatever you've defined as your niche."
Having moved to Hotwire from a position with an internet service provider, as an account manager with hundreds of other sales reps and "a bucket of old and cold leads", Atkins delighted in her newfound capacity for creativity and experimentation.
"Marketing should take place in the science lab and not in an art gallery. Rarely are failed marketing attempts remembered, as long as they're not offensive, but great ones can continue to drive leads and new client wins for years to follow."
So what would an entry level sales professional find themselves doing, if they came to work for Atkins? First of all, they'd be learning about their product. "A big mistake I see is people bring sales and marketing people into a business and they're like: Go! Sell! Make sales magic happen!
“But if your people don't believe in it, or even worse don't understand it, I don't know how you can expect them to be good at selling it. Then they rely on just being sales-y, which nobody likes. If a sales person is new in a company, you really really need to immerse them and educate them well on the company or products or service that you offer."
And in one final note of encouragement for any nervous agency people, Atkins adds: "I think everyone can be a sales person. I think the worse you think you are at sales, probably the better you are at it. No ego. It's just listening and matchmaking. If you're a good problem solver, you're a good sales person. If you're an honest person, you're a good sales person. If you're a good listener, you're a good sales person."
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