"I'd like to thank my Creative Director!"

Well they are a brilliant agency. Some of their work was incredibly impressive. They’d taken more than one brand from local obscurity to national listings in supermarkets. They could demonstrate a decent return on investment from several of their clients’ campaigns. Their reputation was great – when we called people, they would often recognise the agency name and some would even know some of their work. The thing that nobody wanted to know about was their awards.

Most awards are something you have to pay to enter into. A small band of companies put their name in a big hat and pretty much guarantee they’ll walk away with something. Don’t imagine there aren’t some awards we like – who doesn’t enjoy the Chip Shop Awards?  Our client’s reliance on these awards diluted the impact of their frankly awesome offering hugely. When we started working for them, we told them we wouldn’t talk about their awards. They appreciated this input, then ignored it.

In the end, their work with us yielded a couple of new clients. We parted company on good terms (we have a new client on the horizon who heard of us from the awards-loving ex-client) and we have a lot of time for their work. It’s just that if they stopped worrying about awards (and shouting about them), they could have so much more. Awards are “nice”, but they’re not compelling, remarkable or even relevant to most prospects. A long time ago I won a nice piece of business from Lotus for a client. It won Cannes Lions and all sorts of awards but apparently didn’t sell any cars. Your clients and prospective clients know what Lotus knows – awards don’t necessarily mean success.

If you’ve won some awards, then congratulations. The ceremonies are often a great night out. They can help when recruiting. They can boost morale in a team. What they don’t do is win you clients. You do that by being remarkable and then knowing how to tell people.

Planning for 2012 should be happening now. Your new business plan should be in place and new data, target areas, credentials, web content and case studies compiled and ready. Those things take time of course and the constant we see across dozens of agencies is that there’s never enough time for new business. Some agencies even say that they are too busy and don’t want new clients (I hope they don’t take that approach with their own clients: “You’ve sold a lot of Walkmans there Sony – perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about the next product and how to sell it and just hope that Walkmans will be the personal music player of choice for the foreseeable future”).

That’s where we come in. Don’t wait though – mid-January is a brilliant time to kick off a new business campaign. Get us in now and get planning. We’ll have plenty of time to properly learn your agency’s proposition, soak up its culture and profile your prospects. We’ll spend a productive briefing day with you and your team so that you all know how to get the most out of us. Then, in January, we’ll get on with it.

Yep, this is a bit salesy – not my usual style. The thing is, we’re better and more effective now than we’ve ever been. That’s down to our team and our clients. We want clients in 2012 who also want clients in 2012. That’s you, isn’t it?

When we meet agencies who want to use our service, we’re often presented with a host of reasons why their own new business efforts have slowed. These explanations are usually offered with a look of slight embarrassment (and in one case, red-faced shame!). I thought I’d collate a few of them. Agency people – you’re not alone. Here’s how agencies drop the new business ball:

The boss does (did) it quite well. For a while.

Small startup agencies have little choice other than getting on the phone themselves. Granted, many of you will manage to tease a client from your former employer and have a decent cashflow from day one, but hiring someone who will solely make new business calls, craft emails and deliver amazing pitches is naturally a big expense. So you do it yourself. At first, that’s fine – after all you’re the most enthusiastic person when making your new business calls and they go okay. You get a few companies interested and you go and meet them. At some point though, one of a few things happens:

-         You get a few dozen people who simply say “no” and it makes the calls seem like an onerous task. Subdued, your new business efforts fall away. You make some calls when you think you might lose a client and these bursts keep you on an even keel. Ambitious growth plans are ditched and survival becomes the norm. Okay, this is a slightly “worst-case” example but many of you will recognise this scenario.

-         You win a few clients and you’re suddenly really busy. This is common enough but it leaves you bereft of time to make those new business calls you’re clearly quite good at. That’s okay though, you’re making money, right? A few months, or even a year passes and you find yourself repeating an exciting rollercoaster of new business wins followed by working frantically for those new clients. You survive, but have the nagging feeling that a more sustained effort could see you growing and thriving.

-         You’re useless at it and it becomes a numbers game. You bang out 140 calls a day and your soul slowly gets eaten away by the rejection. You have become a telesales person. Your emails are ignored. You’re making so many calls and writing so many emails that none of them are tailored. Once in a while you trip over a win. Hooray!

You hired someone and they left (why do they do that?!)

There are some cracking new business people out there. They share some traits that make them extremely effective. One of those traits can be a problem for agencies: boredom. They are not telesales people, they’re creative, inspirational people who rival the best agency creatives when it comes to ideas that sell. They need constantly differing challenges and quite often one agency simply isn’t enough. They’re restless, social creatures and keeping them is as tough as finding them. What’s even tougher? Replacing them.

You hired a new business agency and they were not good

Some of them aren’t. Some of them are brilliant. We’re biased, but we’re one of the amazing ones. There are some sins that some of our competitors commit, including:

-         Sending you to meetings with someone who isn’t actually interested in you

-         Charging for data/setup/briefing. That’s just a scam.

-         Insisting on a long contract. Why do they do that?

We don’t do any of those. Or any of the other devious, misleading tricks that just keep you paying expensive invoices.

You’ve relied on referrals

They’re great, aren’t they? And if anything, you need to get better at generating more of them. There’s a lack of control over them though and one day, they peter out. What now?

You’re hideously disorganised

I’ve seen various alternatives to a well-maintained and refreshed new business database. Post-it notes, backs of receipts, Word documents and names scribbled on hands. I’ve seen databases with contacts left un-contacted for 4 years. I’ve reassured agency bosses when they’ve shown me an Excel file with no set fields and we’ve rescued data from archaic database formats.

I should probably finish this with a little pitch about how we’re the only answer to these problems. The thing is, we’re not the only answer, we’re one of many. We’re very good though and we have a team that trumps any we’ve had before. Give us a call.

There are two things that can truly differentiate: people and stories. They’re inextricably linked of course but without them you’re just a bunch of claims, case studies and hopes. The problem with differentiating using these things is that everybody can do it. Luckily, they don’t.

We speak to a fair number of agencies of different types and there are a few recurring themes in the things they claim about themselves:

-         We really get involved with our clients’ business!

-         We’ll only work on business we believe in.

-         Our unique experience in the _________ sector means we’re blah blah blah….

-         We’re never afraid to challenge a brief!

They all sound admirable and they’re all easy to claim. They all suffer from one thing – the opposite of each is unthinkable. Making claims the opposite of which are ludicrous doesn’t tell anybody anything. The opposite of those claims include “We don’t get involved in our clients’ business!” and the remarkable “we’ll work with business we truly don’t have any belief in!”. Saying them is a waste of the valuable attention a potential client will give you.

Find a story and tell it. You may need to get your team drunk to find the story in the first place, especially if you’re the boss. If you’re the boss, your ego is going to screw this whole process up, so get out the company card and buy a few bottles of Malbec. Encourage the team to tell their best/worst client stories and make notes. We’ve got loads, gathered over 7 years. I’m not going to write them all out here – I tend to bust them out when we meet agencies. They have some themes though – they’re these:

-         Finding a story for a viral agency about a £100 project they did and winning three major clients off the back of it after dumping the proposition they wanted about a £100k project they did. It’s worth meeting us just to hear this.

-         Figuring out how to predict furniture trends in advance by talking to technology brokers in Eastern Europe…

-         At a Christmas party a nervous and drunk staff member selling in one of our clients to an equally drunk American tourist, barefoot in the Porterhouse, Covent Garden. She claimed to have “booked the meeting”!

-         Our ever-changing recruitment process leading to the angriest, most insulting (I was described as “Mr. Baldy No-hair”) response to a rejection email I’ve ever seen.

Clearly they’re not all suitable for selling but we’re keen to help our clients understand that we’re not like the other guys. We’re exciting, intelligent, eager, fallible, friendly, intuitive, driven and above all else, good. Y’know, like every new business agency says they are.

"Yes...........oh yes..............and yes again! I'll take one!"

There’s an old sales truism – WIIFM – it’s when you consider the idea that the “prospect” is “tuned” into a “radio station” (I’m using loads of quotations because some of these phrases make me cringe outwardly) and that station is WIIFM (the “FM” bit makes it a radio station, so hopefully DAB will render this particular semi-acronym obsolete, replaced by something better like “think before you sell, you cretin”). The initials stand for “What’s in it for me?”. Now, it’s convenient to imagine that everybody is so self-absorbed that you simply have to find out what they want and offer them it. I want lots of things I can’t/shouldn’t have for reasons that a salesman who bought a book from Amazon and now thinks she knows how to “hook” me (see how I mixed “salesman” with “she” to trip up your sensibilities?) can’t possibly decode. Especially given that the nature of cold calls is that we can’t know everything before the phone is lifted (with all the hope a marketer can have that this isn’t another dull sales call) so we’ll be making some assumptions to sit alongside the research we did. So what can you do?

It seems obvious, but something that many so-called salespeople fail miserably to do is ask questions. Well, they don’t fail to do it – they just ask irrelevancies. This is extra-true if they’ve been on a sales course that taught them to climb the “yes” ladder. This particular piece of convincing-enough drivel suggests that the more times you can “get” the “prospect” to say “yes”, the more likely they are to agree to your every demand. Does that sound like something you’d do? Would you agree to use a supplier, or even meet them to work out if you can use them just because you said “yes” a lot? I like to think our “prospects” (can’t we find a better word for them, or just agree that I’m saying it with a look of disdain for the very word?) are smart enough to listen, interact and explain things.

The 9th identical sales call.....

You might need to contact a prospect several times before the relationship becomes permissive, open and develops a degree of trust (hopefully you read the word “prospect” with a little irony in your heart). You can’t talk solely about what you imagine is “in it for them”, nor can you just ask “yes” questions. You’re not an idiot (we did a survey and idiots don’t read this blog) and nor is your (aargh) prospect.

Think about what you need to know to offer the person you’re contacting something useful. Understand their end game. It’s what the person in a marketing/PR/digital/promotions/events/procurement department wants to have after they’ve worked with you that is important. If it’s more sales, then think about their product or service and the consumer or customer’s decision-making process. If it’s something less tangible – say, brand awareness – then there’s a reason for that. Finding a way to create an environment or atmosphere where you can discover that reason first hand is uniquely powerful. Don’t hide from your own questions – lay your cards on the table. Nobody is expecting altruism. Nobody is hoping for your call. Most of all, nobody wants to be sold at.

You’ll notice by now that I haven’t offered any answers to questions like “how do I do this exactly?” and I won’t be doing so either. I want you to understand at the end of this that we don’t “do sales” and nor should you.

January loomed scarily as we closed the doors to celebrate Christmas (though as a company owner, I spent the entire break wanting to be back in the office getting on with it) and I admit to wondering how 2011 would go. We’re a small company, so cashflow is king – two of our clients are awfully late payers and it can really cause problems – and growth is hampered by the fact that we don’t work for directly conflicting agencies. It’s often a tight-rope walk and a year where a new government are creating situations that are tough to predict the full effect of means a few more tough months. Or so you’d think.

As December hit us, a few of our clients’ new business projects hit a wall. It was really very frustrating. We were constantly adapting to the different issues we faced and trying with all our might to ensure we didn’t miss a trick, but it just died. My worry lines encroached another millimetre across my otherwise smiling face. It worked though. A huge amount of our December work was simply preparation work that made sure we were ready for the first couple of months of 2011.

February seems to have arrived early, at least my body-clock thinks so. We’re a few business wins (for our clients) in already and every one of our clients’ campaigns is looking really good. Not a claim we can make every month (and nor should our competitors, but hey – if claiming perfection is as good as actual communication with real-life humility then who am I to argue?) and we’re enjoying life here.

A number of agencies and marketing services from around the world are talking to us about working with us. Our database is looking better and better, so reliance on data subscriptions and outside sources  is reduced. Our team is unequivocally the best it has ever been. The influence of Sponge NB stalwarts like Kim and Nikki (if you’re a regular blog reader you might remember mentions of them) have left us smarter and wittier while the current team is genuinely superb. They won’t have read this far so there’s no danger of egos getting out of hand.

I suppose this is a really long and self-indulgent way of saying that your new business activity should at least be yielding some great introductions. Wins are there for the taking. Reviews are happening. Budgets are being tentatively released and the April flurry looks like it could be even better.

We’re urging our clients to maintain their standards – just because more people are around to meet doesn’t mean you should meet them all. Finding the prospects who are going to buy your services is still crucial. Qualifying meetings as actual opportunities is still incredibly important, yet so easy to forget when a big brand shows a little interest. Granted, ignoring an opportunity is wrong, but inventing one where there’s no chance at all of actually winning business is worse. When one of our team unceremoniously cancelled a clients’ alleged pitch this week after finding that it was little more than a ruse – the prospect in fact wanted to sell their services to our client – I was over the moon!

If you’re not already making significant progress in covering every new business base then get on with it. So many agencies will be convincing themselves that they “have too many clients already”, or “have tons of incoming new business” that there’s a lot of space for the truly keen, the innovative and the bold.