Five Easy Steps You Can Take At the End of The Year to Drive Growth

The year is almost over.  If you work at a small to mid-sized ad agency or other small service industry business, chances are your company is scrambling to get client work in good shape before the end of the year. Since your job requires you to juggle multiple priorities, you may find yourself working late every night to make sure you can get everything done - and done well. But you also have to develop a plan for growing business for your agency in the New Year.

You totally agree that this is important, however you are feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment so you have put new business initiatives on the back burner. You haven't even begun to think about your holiday shopping or to plan the festivities for the twenty relatives who are coming to town in a few weeks. In fact, when Cathy in the cubicle across from your office happily chirps she's gotten everything done for the holidays as she skips out of the office at 5PM, and Brad smiles smugly and says his wife worries about all that stuff, you have to fight the urge to throw something at them.

To make things worse, you know that as you procrastinate, your biggest competitors are making friends and developing relationships with the prospective clients you have been salivating over. You've read all the press on them touting their latest client wins so you know they have found ways to service their current clients and proactively pursue new prospects at the same time. You also have a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that they have a healthy pipeline of new leads that could have been yours. 

STOP WORRYING AND GO FOR IT!

There is light at the end of the tunnel, however. Making a new business action plan doesn’t have to be a long and laborious process as long as you already have a clear company UVP (Unique Value Proposition) also known as USP (Unique Selling Proposition), Brand Positioning Statement that all internal stakeholders have embraced, marketing materials and sales tools in place and you have designated new business hunter(s) who are ready and raring to go. (If your agency does not have any of these assets, forget about what I said about this being simple and easy. Your agency hasn't done the work necessary to help win new clients and you will face an uphill battle. It might be time to talk with your boss about what is realistic.) 

Assuming you have a designated hunter or hunters who are prepped and ready and your company has a clear brand positioning strategy and marketing tools in place, following the 5 steps listed below  can get the ball rolling fairly quickly, without killing yourself or your agency team.  

Step 1: Choose a specific new business growth goal for the New Year. Here are a few examples:

• Increased revenue from total new business by X percent
• X number of new clients from X industry
• X number of closed proposals
• X number of retainer clients
• Other? 

Step 2: Confirm the following:

• Average size of the businesses you want to target (revenue, number of employees - Fortune 1000, Local businesses etc.)
• Industry category  (choose one or two at most)
• Geographic target 

Step 3: Based on your new business growth goals identified in Step 1:

• Estimate how many proposals/estimates it will take to win enough new business to achieve your growth goals. (Use past data to help you figure this out. If you have not been keeping track of this give it your best guess. IE "On average we win 1 out of 4 proposals we pitch.")
• Estimate how many meetings with new qualified prospects your agency will need to schedule per week or month order to generate the number of proposals/estimates you will need to achieve your average win. Set that as a goal.
• Estimate how many initial and repeated calls/emails/ per prospect it will take a day to get your number of meetings goal. Set that as a goal.
• Develop a prospect list that has enough qualified contacts on it to reach the goals above.

Step 4: Review your prospect list to make sure that you have eliminated prospects that are not qualified and added those that are. Make sure the list has the decision-maker contact information in it (email and direct phone number).  If you do not have a qualified prospect list – you need to make one right away. If you have the budget for it, you can subscribe to list sources to do this quickly. If you don't have the budget for this, it will take longer to get the information you will need to avoid gate-keepers. You might want to get an intern to help here.

Step 5: DO IT! Using a combination of your agency’s positioning and your target industry/category hot buttons in prospect communications, your hunter can start making those calls and sending emails now to set up meetings. They should use a CRM program like Salesforce to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Is that all ????

Is this all there is to new business development? Certainly not. I wrote this article to provide an easy action plan for procrastinators with good intentions. Executing these tactics ASAP could help your business win new client projects as soon as in the first quarter. If your agency's average sales cycle is longer, making new connections now can work to begin new relationships and build rapport with these decision-makers to help generate future new business opportunities.

So, stop rationalizing that client work always comes first as a reason for not putting together a new business plan for the New Year. If you wait until things slow down and your company is desperate to win new business, you will be behind the game. You will have a much better chance of reaching your growth goals sooner if you actually take action to make them happen now.

Whatever your goals are, if you want to see a busy first quarter, don’t wait, go for it now. You have nothing to lose.

By Laureen Peck

Interested in learning about more new business development strategies for ad agencies?  Check out any of the following articles:

• FOUR GROWTH STRATEGIES SMART AD AGENCIES FOLLOW DESPITE A BAD ECONOMY
• BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OR SALES; IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?
• HOW MANY HOOPS SHOULD YOUR AD AGENCY JUMP THROUGH TO WIN A PITCH?

Four Growth Strategies Smart Ad Agencies Follow Despite a Bad Economy

Most advertising executives from partners/owners to account managers are well aware that during a recession, one of the first places many businesses cut budgets is in marketing, advertising and programs focused on promoting long-term business growth. This is why advertising agencies and marketing services companies have been seeing continuing lay-offs and many have gone out of business over the past few years. Their clients have cut budgets or have simply left to find other agencies that they think might get better results for them on a smaller budget.

Probably, the most frustrating part of this for ad agency professionals is the common knowledge that companies and brands that continue to invest in marketing and future growth will keep and/or gain market share once the recession ends, and those that do not, often stagnate or fall behind.

Ironically, the same ad agency professionals who express annoyance at clients for being so wrong-headed about marketing investment are doing exactly the same thing to themselves. Agency professionals, particularly at smaller agencies will say that client work comes first to explain why their own marketing and business development programs are poor or non existent. The sad news is, that if they do not continue investment in their own marketing and business development outreach, “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes” could just as well turn into, “The shoemaker has no business.”

The good news is there are ad agencies with leaders who want to be around a long time and practice what they preach to their clients. They continue their marketing and business development programs in good times and bad. Here are four strategies growing agencies employ to help them stay on top, sustain growth and win new business despite a bad economy.

 
1 - They continue to pursue new business and new relationships.
Pursue is the key word here. Agencies that are proactive about new business and do not wait for referrals, RFPs or incoming calls to win new clients will be better positioned for continued growth than their competitors once the recession ends. Having a large, qualified pipeline of leads that may not have an immediate return on investment but will pay off in the long term is possible if the right person(s) are in place to build and nurture new relationships and to direct/develop agency promotion and marketing to attract and engage targeted prospects. I know from personal experience this can yield large rewards.

Case in point; My team and I doubled the size of one agency I worked for by acquiring clients in a particular industry category where we had little experience, but the industry itself was booming and the agency principals really wanted to get a piece of that pie. I knew however, that it was smart to make and keep connections with decision-makers in other industries as well. I kept these relationships alive through systematic and continuing personal communications and through agency communications like case studies and e-newsletters.

When the bubble burst for the"boom" industry I had been pursuing and many of the accounts we won started to disappear, I and my peers at the agency did not panic because I had built up relationships for us with marketing decision-makers in other categories. We soon won more accounts in other categories, while agencies that had focused only on the “boom” category and did not have someone working other leads, suffered.

2- They make sure their marketing communications will engage and attract the decision makers in the industries they are targeting.
This may seem like a no-brainer but there are tons of examples of ad agencies with really cool looking websites that seem to be designed to impress other agencies or creative personnel, rather than the CMOs at the companies they are trying to build credibility with.

A CMO’s tenure today on average is between 2-3 years primarily because they are under increasing pressure to produce measurable results for the company that employs them. A recent article from Ad Age, Why It’s So Hard for CMOs to Keep Their Jobs , sums up their dilemma beautifully.

CMOs today are unlikely to choose to work with agencies that do not appear to have experience in their category. Right or wrong, they are wary of working with an agency they perceive will have a long learning curve. So, if they go to an agency’s blog, LinkedIn profile or website and see nothing that pertains to their industry or industry’s business challenges, they are much less likely to answer that cold call, respond to a letter or return the email of the person at the agency who is trying to get that first capabilities meeting or introduction.

When working for one agency, I had conversations with numerous CMOs and Marketing Directors who told me that they had not responded to my calls at first because when they went to my agency’s website, they did not see anything there that pertained to their industry, an industry I was tasked with penetrating. Fortunately, in most cases, if I was lucky enough to get them to talk with me anyway, I was able to persuade them to meet.

I would then spend the next few days scrambling to develop case studies that would be relevant for my prospect. Or - I would work with my team to develop a top line marketing strategy or some ideas that would address a challenge they were having based on pain discovered. All of this took a good deal of time and effort. Reinventing the wheel for each new prospect often ended up with an eventual win, but the up front investment required to win the new account meant that account would not yield a strong return on investment for the agency as quickly as desired.

Ad agencies that do not have or are not willing to develop the marketing materials necessary to support new business development teams’ efforts are setting themselves up for failure. Business developers are usually fairly independent, self-motivated, persistent and smart. Some make excellent marketing strategists as well. Without the right marketing tools however, agency hunters may not have the edge they need to compete effectively against agencies that have made it a priority to give their new business team the support required.

3- Their case studies are substantive not fluffy.
Case studies with real results are a must-have for any agency that wants to be taken seriously by the decision-makers they target for new business. Assuming the agency’s leaders know that CMOs are under pressure to produce strong ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) they should also realize that having a case study in their target audience’s industry is not enough if the case study does not include tangible results. I cannot tell you how many case studies I have seen that end with something like, “The marketing collateral and brand advertising we produced made our client stand out in a competitive market.”

This leaves the CMO thinking, “Really? And how many new inquiries, web hits, etc did the campaign generate? How were the results tracked? How do you know that the campaign made your client stand out? Did they stand out in a good way or a bad way?”

I can hear some ad agency professionals saying, “But we signed a client confidentiality agreement. We cannot share anything like that.” Yes you can. If your client gives you permission to talk about or show work from their campaign, but you cannot give specific results, ask them if you can talk in percentages instead. If your client will not allow you to mention them at all, create a case study that describes the client, the challenge, the solution and the results without actually using the client’s name.

If your case studies do not include the kind of results that prove you did your job well, you would be better off not having them at all. Ad agencies that win new business understand the importance of ROMI to Marketing decision-makers and respect their audience.

4 - They are up to date on all of the new marketing trends, tactics and technologies.
Not much needs to be said about this. Full-service ad agencies that claim to deliver integrated marketing communications but have not developed capabilities or expertise beyond traditional advertising and/or have not developed partnerships with companies that do offer that expertise, are unlikely to achieve sustained growth. When the “next new big marketing thing” arrives, the agencies that have kept an eye on the future will continue to prosper.
 

So, will following these strategies guarantee an agency will thrive and grow during and after a recession?

Of course not. But the ad agencies that have a strong new business development team and/or leader as well as a marketing team that believes in the importance of developing and providing the tools and strategies that will support new business development, will certainly have increased the odds that they will grow and prosper for years to come. 

By Laureen Peck

Business Development or Sales; Is There a Difference?

I came across an online discussion recently where someone asked, “What is the difference between a Sales Executive and Business Development Executive?” One of the replies was, “Business development is just a fancy word for sales that corporations use to make sales executives feel more important and salespeople use to fool prospects into thinking they aren’t trying to sell them anything.”

The funny thing is, as a seasoned business development and marketing professional you would think that I would be offended by that remark, but I was not. The fact is there is a lot of confusion regarding business development activities versus sales activities and many people still get the two confused – especially if their company sells marketing services or other intangibles.The confusion comes from the fact that both business development and sales activities include the act of selling. Alternatively, unless a business is very small, sales roles rarely include business development activities.

That is not to say that one role is more valuable than the other. However, there are some differences in the function and purpose of each. If agency principals do not understand the differences, they could end up with disappointing results from having set unrealistic expectations. To achieve the best results, company principals need to be clear about what they want to achieve in both the short and long-term.

Sales activities are tactical.

If an agency’s end product is more commodity-like and the company is supported by project work and principals wish to maintain that model, a sales approach makes the most sense. Project work can provide a steady revenue flow that will keep an agency busy and financially viable. The negative side of this approach is that agency teams will find they are often competing for new business on price and are unlikely to win accounts with high profit margins. They are also likely to have to pitch or bid on new projects continually, even with current clients which can become frustrating.

Certainly if the agency principals want to maintain or grow revenue in a category or practice area where the agency is already recognized, a sales executive or account services person who is responsible for measurable, on-going and immediate revenue growth can do that job since both are more tactical roles. The executive is usually given the sales leads to exploit or accounts to manage and has all the sales tools they need in place. Their job is to sell a given product or service to an already identified target audience or client within an agency’s established area of specialization or specialized industry category. In this case the act of selling is mainly transactional in nature and is focused on winning new projects or a “book of business” and meeting specific goals or quotas usually within a tight time frame. An experienced sales person who is accustomed to high volume, commodity-based sales and/or short sales cycles will likely do very well.

Sales executives generally earn large commissions based on actual sales or revenue growth achieved – unless they also run the accounts they bring in, in which case compensation structure can be based on a combination of factors since they not only sell, but also project manage.

Business development activities are strategic.

If an agency is more strategically-focused and targets large accounts that are likely to produce sustained growth, a business development approach is going to work better than a straight sales approach. Business developers excel at creating completely new opportunities by opening previously closed doors with the expectation a newly opened door will eventually lead to high profit margin, long-term contracts or Agency-of-Record engagements. Agencies looking to break into a new category, penetrate a new region, open up a new market, promote a new service, or address some other new growth challenge are better off using a business developer to do that job than someone with sales experience alone.

A business developer has a more strategic position and usually has experience creating business development, marketing and/or sales plans, creating new lists of qualified prospects that have been thoroughly researched, managing pitches and writing and/or managing major proposals. Often a business developer is also tasked with spearheading the development of a marketing strategy; sales tools and promotional activities that will help open those new doors and opportunities.

They not only hunt for new opportunities but promote the agency through networking and speaking at events. They are experts at building and nurturing relationships with qualified prospects over time. They generally work on salary and are paid bonuses based on meeting sometimes subjective milestones since a business developer’s success is generally measured by the quality and growth potential of the opportunities they bring to the agency rather than on sales volume alone.

On the negative side, business development usually requires more up front investment then straight sales, so an immediate return on investment is not as likely. However, assuming the agency has all the right tools in place, the right pitch team to help win the business and a top notch account management team that will grow the account once it is in the door, the financial rewards can be very large and produce sustainable profitability.

Can a Business Developer be a good Salesperson?

A person with a background in business development can do well selling projects and/or products too, but only if they are also experienced and confident closers. Generally in business development, since a substantial amount of up front work is required by the developer, a team or another person often does the actual closing. However, some business developers (like me for example) are very comfortable asking for the sale and make excellent closers.

It should be noted that if principals decide to have their business developer act more like a salesperson, they need to make sure that person is a hunter/closer and not just a hunter. They also need to make sure the business developer understands that they are to follow a business development strategy that is likely already in place and that their value will be measured primarily by sales volume achieved within a given time period. Most business developers can fulfill this need for an agency as long as they are fearless closers and sales goals are clearly defined.

Summary List of Sales versus Business Development Activities

Ad agency blogger Neil Kielar does an excellent job of outlining the characteristics and differences of sales vs. business development roles. I liked it so much I copied it here:

Some typical characteristics of sales activities:

• Tactical
• Transactional
• Immediate outcomes expected
• Revenue growth is primary success measure
• Probable lower cost to achieve outcomes
• Sustainability of sales is more uncertain
• Valued personal characteristics: high emphasis on short-term objectives, unencumbered by larger organizational objectives, money motivation is paramount (within the constraints of ethical behavior, you’d hope)

Some typical characteristics of business development:

• More strategic, ideally
• Consultative in approach
• Longer term outcomes, although not to exclude near-term performance
• Requires more flexible measurement of value
• Probable higher costs over the long term
• When managed well, higher value outcomes sustained over time
• Success measurements anchored in strategy, which is more subjective
• Valued personal characteristics: strategic thinking, larger organizational objectives are a priority, service orientation, money motivation is healthy but not overwhelming

By Laureen Peck