3 min read
Client work · ADP, San Francisco · 2025 – 26
ADP
Small businesses ignore cold calls. They listen to their banker.
A payroll referral channel built across fourteen Wells Fargo branches in and around San Francisco.
$23.2K
closed against a $23K benchmark
6
new accounts, hitting the unit benchmark
14+
Wells Fargo branch partners
177%
of the December sales target
2
months ahead of the deadline
Six months in a San Francisco small-business territory, measured against ADP’s own benchmark.
Credits
Role
Bank Account Executive
Channel
Wells Fargo, 14+ branches
Timeline
Jun 2025 – Jan 2026
Territory
Small business, San Francisco
I owned
The full sales cycle, referral to onboarding
Territory
Which branches to work was the whole game
I picked on accessibility and spread rather than on branch size.
Accessibility over size
A referral only converts if the meeting actually happens. I weighted branches customers could drive to and park at over the larger ones downtown.
Spread over concentration
Each branch served a distinctly different small-business community, so the pipeline never rested on one part of the local economy. When one slowed, the others did not.
The six I worked most: West Portal, the Mission, Geary, Chinatown, Pacifica and Potrero.
The work
Not payroll software. A business evaluation.
• Weekly in-person check-ins at each branch with bankers and branch managers, which brought in about two referrals a week
• Partner drops and warm introductions in place of cold outreach
• About three meetings a week with business owners, starting with questions instead of a pitch: where they were overspending, and which savings they were missing
• Benefits and tax incentive reviews, plus compliance checks against state and federal rules
• Proposals built around the business, with payroll and HR as the answer rather than the opening
• Closing and onboarding each new client myself, so the whole sales cycle ran through me
• Joint prospecting with ADP’s larger-business and specialist teams to find more prospects and grow sales revenue
• Salesforce and Excel kept accurate, so the referral pipeline was a forecast I could act on
With my ADP teammates in San Francisco, summer 2025.
What clients got
Compliance
Violations caught before they became fines
I helped clients and prospects find where they were out of compliance with state and federal rules, then fix it, so they avoided heavy fines and costs.
One system
Payroll and HR in one dashboard
A smooth switch from their old provider to automated payroll in one dashboard, where every tool talks to the others instead of separate apps that don’t.
Time back
Less admin, more time to grow
Less manual work across disconnected software and lower costs, so owners could spend their time growing the business.
Reflection
What I’d change about the branch partnerships
Set expectations on day one
Some branches skipped our meetings and held off on introducing ADP because it didn’t feel like the right time. I never set clear expectations at the start, so I had nothing to hold them to.
Build ADP into the banker’s workflow
I should have asked each banker how they work their book of business and onboard new accounts, then fit ADP into that process. A set meeting structure, agreed at the start, would have kept both of us accountable.
ADP is a registered trademark of ADP, Inc. This is my own case study, not affiliated with or endorsed by ADP.
© 2026 Moe Htet
·
Updated September 2026
·
Los Angeles, 8:05 PM