Here is a handy checklist of issues, aimed at improving your new business marketing processes and techniques.
Today’s post is primarily focused for smaller or start-up agencies. If you are a big, established agency then you may run a finely tuned new business or demand generation system already. However, if you are a smaller or a start-up agency and growth so far has been ‘accidental’ then where do you start with a more proactive, controlled approach to generating a new business?
New business is more competitive than ever for some reasons:
- The sheer number of agencies of all types.
- Client (prospect) time is stretched thin with smaller teams and more to do. It follows that decision makers are less willing to hear you out, unless they have a burning need and you catch them at that exact time.
- An increasing understanding of all things inbound marketing means some of your competitors are already attracting more interest than you are.
- Face to face account servicing is still (to my mind) important but clients are more comfortable with their agencies being out of town, in remote rural locations even. Meaning you can’t rely on proximity as being a plus point for you.
This reflects the competitive times indeed. So, it’s totally normal if you might think everyone was on the case and had a solid plan for new business. However, there are two surprising facts:
- Everyone (minus the 14% who are either awesome or just plain complacent?) says that they’ll be aggressively chasing new business next year (making it the most aggressive year since the survey started).
- A vast majority, 80% of agencies say the New Business Director lasted less than 2 years. Of those, 66% said that was because they didn’t have a methodology for new business.
The role of the Agency New Business Director
The New Business Director role can be a precarious one. They can be seen as the right solutions, shouldering all of the responsibility for magically attracting work. However, without everyone’s buy-in and senior team ownership, it’s a flawed appointment from the start. The New Business Director (if you have one) needs to ‘own’ business generation but you (the agency owner / senior team) shouldn’t leave them in isolation to devise the methodology or indeed ‘police’ it. Which is where the accompanying checklist comes in.
Whether you hire a specific senior person or not (I have worked with a couple of very successful agencies who don’t have a dedicated New Business Director) you should plan out your new business machine (demand generation strategy) to make sure that conveyor belt always has some new work trundling down it. Don’t start trying to fill it once it is empty.
Some principles for your New Business Marketing
Before you get to the checklist here are some principles for New Business Marketing.
- Make time for new business. There’s always the existing client work and you’ll never have enough time. But that’s an excuse you can’t hide behind. And likewise, whilst you need to make sure all of your collateral is up to date, don’t use that as an excuse to not to get prospecting.
- Spread bet. By that I mean you can’t rely on just one channel or technique to attract business. No doubt your advice to clients is to continuously test, learn and optimise for any campaigns. Do that for yourselves.
- Think data. Successful new business marketing is underpinned by segmentation, testing and learning and fuelled by data. So develop an ethos of continual data collection and analysis.
- Inbound Marketing first. Focus on your inbound marketing first. Try a range of content and channel mixes. Blogs are hugely important but you can do more. If Inbound marketing (and within that, Content marketing) are still fuzzy concepts to you have a look at our Simon Swan’s post on SEO and Inbound Marketing.
- Use Outbound. There is a lot written about outbound approaches having had their day (direct mail, telephone approaches) and there’s truth in that but well researched, targeted, clever (creative) proactive approaches can still work and you should employ them for selected prospects when your inbound strategy is up and running.
- It’s continuous. If you bunch your new business activity into sporadic efforts you’ll have gaps in the pipeline / conveyor belt. It can take weeks or months to convert initial enquiries so you should always have some prospects that you’re developing into a live client.
- A culture of New Business. Everyone has a role to play. Ask your whole team to keep an eye out for new opportunities. Things they may have read about e.g. job changes (on LinkedIn, Twitter, Trade press etc). And remind them to always have business cards real or metaphorical) to hand at any networking events. They may not be ‘salespeople’ but they should feel empowered and motivated to sell the agency’s brilliance wherever they meet prospects.
- Keep New Business visible. Add new Business reporting as an agenda item in your board and senior management team meetings. Discuss what is working and what isn’t. Set up either shared Google Docs, basecamp or a CRM platform that everyone can access (not just the New Business Director / team).
Checklist for new business marketing
1. Positioning
Spend time to get the right knack before completing the rest of the form. A quick review will show you that many agencies have identical About Us / Proposition pages. Make yours stand out and be buyable.
2. New Business Tools
There are a host of tools you can use for new business and across a range of use cases: content creation, (pitch) project planning, market research and of course lead tracking / CRM.There’s a blur between prospect management / lead tracking and customer (client) management CRM tools and they come in all shapes and sizes:
- Standalone platforms
Some examples of relevant platforms:
- Sugar CRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com/products/sales ),
- Salesforce (https://www.salesforce.com/uk/ ),
- Contactually (https://www.contactually.com/ ),
- Base (https://getbase.com/solutions/small-business-crm/)
- Hubspot CRM platform (http://www.hubspot.com/products/crm)
The standalone hubspot CRM launches 2015. If you were looking at automating your inbound marketing then this may be worth investigating as a first step.
- Integrated platforms
Integrated platfors where you have a CRM function built into a wider agency management suite (job bag management, finance reporting, and many more) include:
- Synergist (http://www.synergist.co.uk/)
- Concept (http://www.conceptintegratedsystems.co.uk/concept-software/customer-relationship-management-crm).