Introducing… Alex Hill, Sales Director

We caught up with one of the first members of our team, Alex, to talk about his career with us, what his role involves and more!

Please Introduce Yourself…

Hi, I’m Alex Hill – the Sales Director here at The SEO Works, and I joined the business way back in 2013, when we were only a team of seven!

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of watching the business grow to more than 80 experts, and helping to steer our new business operations to success has been a crucial part of that.

What Does Your Role Involve?

I’m ultimately responsible for the new business arriving at the agency, which includes dealing with enquiries all the way to qualification, solution building, pitching, and then ultimately the negotiation and agreement of rates and contract T&Cs.

Our Business Development team is intrinsically linked to our Marketing team, and together we have developed a fantastically successful inbound lead generation model for the agency – so the relationship of our own marketing and lead generation efforts, as well as marketing spend, also requires my input and oversight.

What’s the Most Rewarding Part of Your Role?

Being someone who gets a lot of satisfaction from relationship building, I find the relationships we’ve built up with a huge number of satisfied clients over the years hugely rewarding.

But I also find the culture I’m keen to instil with the other Directors in the agency from top to bottom hugely rewarding. We like to think of ourselves as a very ‘low vanity’ agency, with all of our colleagues working together with a huge amount of autonomy and freedom to do their best work, and without any ‘glass door’ culture.

Tell Us Something You’re Particularly Proud Of

I think it’s seeing how we’ve built the agency up over the last 12 years or so to what it is today. This includes onboarding household names as clients, seeing the fruits of the effort the SLT have put in to develop ourselves into a large employer in the Sheffield region, and seeing the national and international reputation we’ve built and sustained.

All of this makes me incredibly proud of the journey so far, not to mention the latest chapter of transitioning to being employee-owned!

How Do You Ensure Our Solutions Keep Up?

We regularly pivot and evolve in the Business Development function, as to how and why we pitch certain offerings and processes to prospects. The key is to be in close dialogue with our campaign delivery teams across all of our service departments, to ensure that what we pitch is what is delivered to clients.

A perfect recent example of this is the emergence of AI results in Google and how we optimise clients’ websites to rank for certain queries, as well as giving them the best chance to be featured on AI platforms like ChatGPT.

It’s been essential that our expertise on this emerging subject is showcased properly in our solution, but also accurately.

What Challenges Do You Face in New Business?

The biggest one has to be the ability to demonstrate value! For many of our prospects, before becoming new clients, we often have to progress through a rigorous education of our services, on top of then pitching the virtues of our agency and also the likelihood of campaign success over the medium/long term.

So demonstrating value is always a huge new business challenge! But we firmly believe it’s also a huge opportunity, as when done well and thoroughly, it gives our prospective new client a great sense of confidence that they’ve picked the right agency partner.

Thanks For Joining Us

Thank you for having me. It was really great to talk about my career, my amazing team and my role within the agency.