Many companies get caught in the “Earn-it Trap” when they hunt whales, selling a small piece of work to a whale in the belief that it will lead to much bigger things. In our experience, this is a very low-yield strategy for agencies. Most of the time, if you go in through the small door, you get stuck in the little room. Why?

Here’s one angle. Suppose your resume, background, and education clearly qualify you for a senior position at a large company. You go to the Human Resources room, where no VP positions are available, but you can interview for an open job in the mailroom because that is the problem HR needs to solve today.

You don’t want to be a mailroom clerk! Sigh. But you do want to work at the big company. The HR person hints that this company promotes from within and you would have an advantage when the big job comes open.

So you take the little mailroom job hoping to get noticed and promoted when the timing is right. Time passes. Big jobs open and other people are hired or promoted. Often the person hired is both less qualified and from the outside.

You complain: “Hey, I am more qualified, I am a current employee, and I should be getting a shot at that job.”

Your boss tells you:

• You’re doing a great job and we really need you where you are.
• She didn’t know you had experience that qualifies you for that job.
• The company policy is that you will have to compete with outside candidates.
• All of the above.

In like manner, agencies fall for the Earn-it Trap all the time. They take a little deal with a lot of hope, and then they watch the big deals go to competitors.  Or they subscribe to a market “test” of some sort, with fuzzy metrics and vague promises.  And the first test is followed by a second test, and so on.  The lure of bigger opportunities to come almost always falls short, in part because the people who buy small projects are not the same people who buy big projects.

How can you avoid getting locked into the little room?

Knock on the right door. Anyone who has landed a top job with a large company will tell you that the last door to knock on is Human Resources. Likewise, if you are at the Procurement, Diversity, or Purchasing doors, you are starting at the wrong place. If you are calling on a local or regional presence of a national or international corporation, understand that it isn’t a door to the top.  The odds of moving up from local to national are extremely low because national buyers rarely choose to do business with the “lower-level” companies that serve their franchisees or regional affiliates.

Leave the wrong room fast. Sometimes through good intentions from a friendly referral source, you end up at the wrong place.  You know you are in the wrong place if you look around and there isn’t an end-user in the room. Trying to get directions from the wrong place to the right place rarely works. Better to stop, back up, and knock on a different door than to try to find the right door from the wrong room.

Beware of little nibbles with big promises. If a whale-sized opportunity is real, there should be an adoption schedule with volume commitments based upon performance standards for your firm to meet.

If you hear, “We’ll see how it goes,” just say no. If they have no plan, you have no path. No path means no commitment. Remember this: within a whale, any individual can make a promise, but only the Buyers’ Table can make a commitment. You don’t have a real sale unless you have an agreement from the buying group about how and when the rollout or ramp-up will occur.

If you are already stuck with your whale in a little room, understand that for now you have been pigeonholed and forgotten. Growing business with this whale will require a very different approach from your normal sales efforts.