How to build a sales team for your digital marketing agency when you can't find SEO experts

The talent pool for SEO-savvy salespeople is tiny. But the talent pool for great salespeople is massive. So, how do you find good salespeople who can sell your digital solutions?

If you've been posting the same job opening, "Sales representative wanted. Must have digital marketing experience. SEO knowledge required. Understanding of technical platforms preferred."

And you’re getting either crickets or candidates who talk a good game about SEO but can't actually sell. Meanwhile, your pipeline is stalling because you're still doing all the sales yourself.

You don’t need to continue fishing in a puddle when there's an ocean right in front of you.

Why you’re not finding the right salespeople to grow your agency 

When you add the requirement for "SEO knowledge" to a job description, you're not attracting the better salespeople. You're trying to find a rare unicorn so you don’t have to train them from scratch on the fundamentals of digital marketing or how to use complex tools like Semrush.

But you're actually eliminating genuinely talented sales professionals who could learn your service in weeks with proper training.

When you think about it, sales ability is the hard part. Knowing how to overcome objections and build rapport is what gets a deal over the line. By eliminating genuinely talented sales professionals who could learn your services in weeks with proper training, you’re letting great people slip away.

The agencies scaling fastest right now have figured this out. They hire for sales fundamentals and let the tools, training and AI do the heavy lifting on the technical side.

The power of an SEO auditing tool designed for sales teams, not SEO experts 

If you’re a digital marketing expert, you can probably fly through platforms like Semrush or SE Ranking. Which makes sense, because tools are built for you. But if you want to scale your agency with a dedicated sales team who can confidently close deals, throwing them into complex SEO tools will only slow them down. Most sales reps aren’t technical, and they don’t need to be.

What they do need is a tool built specifically for surface-level SEO knowledge; something that gives them a clear, simple snapshot of a prospect’s online presence without the jargon. A strong sales rep only needs to know what’s good, what’s bad, what needs fixing, and where your services slot in.

That’s why platforms like Insites have become a competitive advantage for growing agencies. With a 60-second audit run before a call, reps get instant insight across SEO, website performance and local listings — all mapped to the services you want to sell.

AI recommendations, visual scoring, and features like the local grid make it easy to show value to SMBs who would never understand a full technical SEO report.

Whilst you don’t need to train salespeople on complex SEO tools, they still need reports to prove value. You wouldn’t pay thousands for a new car engine without seeing what’s wrong with it first.

Semrush is the mechanic’s diagnostic tool — powerful, detailed, essential. But Insites is the customer-facing report: clear, digestible and designed to guide a sales conversation.

It bridges the gap between the complex work your team does behind the scenes and the simple, confident narrative your sales reps need to convert.

What you should be looking for when hiring 

When you're interviewing sales candidates at help grow you’re agency, here's what matters:

In the interview:

1. Ask them to explain something complex from their previous job/industry in simple terms.

Can they do it without jargon? Listen for clarity and for whether they can communicate the value.

1. Give them a mock objection to handle. Do they get defensive or do they lean in with curiosity? The best salespeople welcome pushback because they see it as information.
2. Ask about a deal they lost. Do they take responsibility or blame external factors? Someone who owns their losses will own their wins too.

Download our Competitor Playbook

Want to see exactly how top-performing agencies are hiring and scaling with non-technical sales reps? Our latest Competitor Playbook breaks down the complete strategies the fastest-growing agencies use to build sales teams without requiring SEO expertise.

Inside the playbook, you'll find:

• The audit-first method that positions your reps as trusted advisors despite their technical knowledge
• The 4-step translation framework that turns jargon into business outcomes and data into compelling stories
• New ways to leverage Insites audits with AI like ChatGPT and Claude to ask follow-up questions your reps might not feel confident asking themselves
• How to turn sales reps into mini experts with consistent, digestible knowledge about search industry changes and how to use it in sales conversations
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Download the Competitor Playbook and discover what agencies that are winning the hiring game are doing differently.



👋 Happy selling