It’s Q4, and many agencies are strategically trying to plan out their new business efforts for 2019 while brands are thinking about their marketing plans. This year, like every year before, we have seen massive changes across the entire marcom industry. From rapid technology advancements shaping the digital landscape to consumers taking more and more control over user experience, we all stuck asking “what’s next?”
Are you finding lead generation to be a frustrating part of your work as an agency principal? If so, you’re not alone. Many agencies are struggling to find enough leads to fill their pipelines. What’s more, many of those leads – especially from inbound marketing efforts – are unqualified. Agency new business is critical to success, yet without strategic approaches, your bottom line suffers.
For you and your business development team, the lack of leads and the poor quality of those leads can result in desperation and frustration. If there’s no consistent methodology and strategy in place for outbound sales leads, your agency will flounder.
However, agencies can take a cue from a time-honored activity to develop a new, balanced and strategic tack when it comes to outbound: fishing.
For centuries, fishermen have understood that you need different types of approaches to be successful. Each method has its advantages and challenges. There’s no one best method for landing a catch. In some cases, hand-to-hand spearfishing is the smart choice. At other times, trawling – casting a big net – will get you the best results.
To be a successful fisherman, you need to identify the types of fish, quantities of fish, and approaches that are going to secure the haul you’re seeking. You need to know which method works best and create a plan for the fish you want to bring in. The same is true in your approach to agency new business.
Your sales reps are likely struggling to find the balance between scale and personalization in their outbound approaches. Do they spend their time crafting highly personalized emails or should they rely on more general templated emails that can reach more prospects?
Account-Based Sales (ABS) takes a strategic approach to how your team spends their time. It’s a sophisticated, strategic approach to agency new business that uses a combination of outbound activities that include personalized, multi-channel, and multi-threaded messages.
ABS creates a layered approach to your fishing activities that results in reps spending their time on activities that are designed to target different types of accounts.
At its heart, ABS uses tiers that each have their own outreach strategy. Not all accounts are the same. Organizing them into tiers, based on how valuable and viable they are to your firm, helps determine how much research to do and how much personalization each account gets.
When fishing, you need to understand the type of catch you’re after, how long you’ll be out on the water and how much gear you have to get the job done. You’ll also need to base your decisions on how successful you’ve been in catching a particular kind of fish in the past and, finally, how much attention and commitment you have to the type of fishing you’ve decided to take on.
Ranking your accounts is very similar. To determine how many accounts you want to target for each tier within your ABS strategy, you need to have a clear understanding of the following:
Here is a closer look at the tiers you should be using for your agency business development.
Your most ideal target prospects belong in this tier. These are the accounts where the opportunity is greatest, and you have a strong right to win the business.
Think of tackling these accounts like spearfishing, which uses sophisticated diving equipment and is often favored for fishermen wanting to zero in on a particular species. Spearfishing is usually most effective in clear water that makes the targets easy to see and follow. It also takes patience, specialized training and equipment, and deep knowledge of the species you’re after.
In ABS, Tier 1 accounts are often considered a “market of one,” and require deep research and planning. With clear insights about the target’s business and needs, your interactions can be personalized and customized for the account and, ideally, the person being approached.
While requiring a lighter approach to research than Tier 1 accounts, the goal is still to ensure that each outreach is personalized or customized. This is the tier where most of your prospects will fall, where you have a right to win the account.
With a Tier 2 approach, sales reps spend time researching ‘3 things in 3 minutes,’ where they find facts or insights about the industry, company, persona or contact. Sales reps then use those data points in a 10/80/10 approach to emails (10 percent personalization in opening, 80 percent templated content, and 10 percent closing personalization).
Rod-and-reel fishing, known as angling, uses the same approach. Sports fishermen try to find the hook that can be attached to a line and baited in an attempt to lure fish. All these tools are controlled by the fishing rod and reel (akin to the lightly personalized research and emails) that add more line as necessary. While you may not know what kind of fish you’ll catch, you’ll catch more of them than spearfishing with less personalization.
When fishermen want to cast the widest net, they call it trawling. Boats pull large nets (trawls) through the water. Dragging these nets lets a fishing vessel catch a large number of fish quickly. However, there’s not as much art as in rod-and-reel or spearfishing. You don’t know what you’re going to get and you’re likely to entangle some sea turtles and spare tires along the way.
In Tier 3, the messaging is templated and targeted to the industry or persona. It’s a catch-all approach to see what’s out there. These may be possible clients in the same or similar category as your ideal prospects, but you have less of a right to win the business.
Cast a wide net and see what gets caught. While this may unearth some potentially good clients, it is not typically where you will catch a prize fish and thus not an area where you want to spend much time.
ABS is all about optimization. You’ll be applying an appropriate level of personalization to the accounts that will have the most impact on your agency. Your sales reps will be able to spend the right time on the right accounts at an appropriate level of engagement.
Your fishing for new business requires the use of multiple techniques to find the right range of accounts, discover what works best, and make adjustments accordingly. Doing so will give you a healthy balance of the types and quality of new accounts.
ABS is a strategic approach that will lead to more clarity of the work that needs to be done, better systems and processes for approaching outbound work, and more confidence and success throughout the agency.
The next step is to plan for your next outbound round. Rank your target prospects and place them into the right tiers. That work will help guide what messages are personalized and customized for each potential account. Decide what fish you’re going for and use the right gear to haul ’em in.
Did you know that almost 50% of all new business efforts fail within the first six months of the year? That is a pretty terrifying statistic, and the truth is, the agencies who make up this number have typically never dedicated the time to create a new business development strategy.
As a marketing agency, you understand how marketing and sales work, but why don’t you apply the same techniques you are using for your clients to fuel your own agency’s growth? Until recently, business development has never received much attention from the agency world. Without a dedicated focus comes a lack of investment in the time and resources needed to build a scalable new business process. Today, we find that many agencies are relying on referrals and are unable to predict revenue growth accurately.
So, if you are like most agencies and have found yourself here, how can you start moving forward and avoid falling back into the statistic above? Having a successful business development strategy starts with having a strong culture that makes new business, everyone’s business.
Here are 5 factors that are crucial for building a culture that promotes new business growth on all fronts.
Embedding new business into the culture and DNA of your agency is crucial to your success, and it can only happen if you hire a dedicated person who can make it their sole focus. But as mentioned, you cannot allow this enormous task to fall on this one person’s shoulders alone. As an agency executive, you must hold your entire agency accountable for generating new business, starting with yourself.
From hiring a New Business Director who fits your culture to actually sitting down and thrashing out your business development strategy, there is a lot of work to be done. At Catapult, we understand the incredible impact an agency’s culture can have on the organization as a whole. That’s why when you partner with us, our first step is to explore your exact requirements and provide you with a Sales Director who replicates your ideal characteristics. From there, we build a new business plan for your agency and are in market within just a few weeks.
If you are ready to embed new business into the fundamental core of your agency, give us a call today to see how we can help get you on the right track.
Any agency owner that has gone through the task of hiring a New Business Director has surely come across the new business pro that touts their “huge” network of opportunities. They claim to have worked with everyone and can easily get your agency in the door with the brands you want just through their sheer charm and extensive array of friends and ex-colleagues.
If you want to use a network to win new business, every agency should start by actually mining their own network first. Most agencies I speak with have a huge cache of network connections that they have not even begun to take advantage of.
Stop scratching the surface of your contacts, stop depending on an outside rainmaker, and start mining away at the connections that have been sitting in front of you the whole time. Here are a few tips to get started
1. Create your Core 100 Network- Sit down and go through a list of every past client, every current client, vendors, industry colleagues, and people from school. It only takes a few minutes to build up to 100 people that can absolutely begin making a difference in the number of referrals you receive over the coming months. Those 100 people need to be put into a personalized communication cadence where you reach out to each person at least once a month, even if just to say “hi”. Sound like a lot? 100 people in 20 days, that’s 5 emails a day…or 15 minutes if it takes 3 minutes per email. Not a lot of time at all.
2. Don’t only track your prospects, track your clients- Set alerts in LinkedIn, Google, and Winmo for all of your current clients. In Winmo’s database, they see one-third of their data points change every 6 months. This means that your current client’s teams are constantly turning over, especially in the lower ranks. Get to know those people and track them. They will eventually leave your current client and land somewhere else, and that’s a much easy intro to that new brand when they have already worked with you.
3. Have a real conversation with your network- This means you don’t just send a monthly newsletter telling everyone about what has happened at your agency. Take the time to reach out to each contact in your Core 100 with a personalized message. It may be as simple as a “hello, how are things”, to a more involved request of an introduction to someone that they know. The idea is though that we are producing real conversations with these contacts by talking to them, rather than talking at them.
To keep your pipeline full of qualified, referral-driven leads, continually stay top of mind with your tightest contacts that have seen and been beneficiaries of your great work.
When it comes to cold calling, the most significant aspect is to be unique. Decision makers get spammed all day with calls and emails. To effectively break through the monotony, you can’t sound like a robot, and you must sound unconventional from the competition. When I write and edit sales scripts these are five steps I begin with to help ensure success:
1. Thank them for picking up.
This step goes a long way to separate you from the pack. People like to feel in control, and when you thank someone, you make them feel the illusion of control without actually giving it up; like pumping their ego. The key with cold calling is you need to be in control. You have very little time, so you need to be steering the direction of the conversation.
In addition, you want to respect or honor their time, so get directly down to business. Regardless of the buying style of your target prospect, you want to prime them to be more open to your request. Thanking them, saying respect/honor or words like that can cause them to want to be more polite and accessible to you on the phone.
2. Avoid hesitation and get to the point.
Decision makers are busy people. Getting to the point keeps you looking professional and once again, indicates that you are respectful of their time. You’re asking for time on their calendar, NOT a sale. That’s key. The first step is to sell the meeting, not your product or services. To do this effectively, avoiding using filler words such as “um” or “like”. These words will only hurt your credibility and show a lack of confidence.
You also have to control your body language. I know what you’re thinking, “this is a phone call, how are they going to see my body language?” The posture you choose while talking on the phone influences the tone of voice that you use while talking on it. Sit up, smile, and act like that person is right in front of you.
3. I always provide a response to their objection.
More times than not, the decision maker will always have some sort of objection, and this is where you have to be on your toes. The key is to fully agree with them. Do NOT say “I understand.” That will spell D-E-A-T-H for your sale.
In this day and age of sales, decision-makers are waiting for you to “understand and deflect.” Agreeing with what they are saying (and if they ask about your competitor, even bring out some of the good parts of their product) shakes everything up and helps to bring the prospect’s guard down by making you look more human and trustworthy. They will not be expecting you to agree with what they are saying.
4. I relate their current problem to one we are solving for an existing client.
Ensure your prospect that they are not the only one facing their current challenge; it will bring them a sigh of relief. Imagine you are struggling with a huge problem, and you don’t know who to talk to, then you talk to a rep, and you are reassured that you’re not the first to have that same issue. There’s a weight that is lifted off your shoulder as you not only realize that your concern is valid, but it is solvable.
Furthermore, you play into their incidental similarities, and they begin to see that they are similar to your clients. These similarities build a solid rapport and can lead your prospect to feel much more comfortable with you.
5. I directly ask for the meeting.
Again, you want control of the situation. Directly asking for a second meeting is a great way to take control of the phone call. It’s also the hardest part for a lot of reps.
Directly asking for the meeting is also a great way to get the prospect to engage with you on further objections they might have. And let me be clear: objections are a good thing. Objections mean that the prospect is engaged and they are thinking about what you are saying; further separating you from the rest of the pack.
Before I end, I want to make one thing clear: When it comes to cold calling, especially the first conversation with a prospect, you are selling the meeting, not the product. Answer the objections and don’t be rude, but always continue to try and move the prospect down the funnel toward a second meeting. Here you will have more time to dive deeper into their objections and how you differentiate yourself from the competition.
Of course, cold calling is just the beginning of the sales process. From the initial call, follow up meetings and the final pitch, many steps go into closing the deal. At Catapult New Business, we manage the entire new business development process on behalf of marketing agencies. If your agency is ready to build a sustainable business development process and see aggressive revenue growth, contact us today.
“We’ve recruited agency new business people for years with limited degrees of success.”
Here at Catapult, we hear this statement more times than not. As the agency owner, naturally you are determined to ensure your business reaches revenue goals and brings in new clients consistently but do you have the right person overseeing your new business efforts? We often find that this critical role is passed to whoever has the extra bandwidth at the time, often your creatives.
Personally, I speak from experience. Straight out of college and having just landed my first job at a full-service marketing firm, I was deemed with the enormous responsibility of handling the marketing for the agency, assisting with the marketing for clients, and managing all of the agency’s new business. Can you see where a problem or two may have occurred with this model?
What I realized first-hand, and what many agency principals are starting to recognize more, is that you can’t put the job of three different roles on one person. If you want to grow your agency’s revenue and enable a successful new business process, don’t let your creatives get overwhelmed with trying to be someone they’re not- a salesperson.
Here are 3 key reasons why you shouldn’t make a creative responsible for new business:
While creatives shouldn’t be running your new business program, they can absolutely contribute in their own way. Creatives are on the front lines of your agency work every day; let them help explain the value. Pull them in on prospect calls occasionally to help win over prospects farther in the funnel. Aside from the occasional tag-team, understand that creative work is what they know and love. Keep them in their lane – creating phenomenal campaigns for your clients.
Are you throwing new business work on the shoulders of your creatives? Learn more about how you can put your creatives back to doing what they do best while Catapult New Business builds and maintain a consistent new business program for your agency.
Your agency’s new business program needs a repeatable, scalable, and importantly, personalized, prospecting process to keep the pipeline full of meetings with dream clients. Without the right sales tools, your outbound efforts will not reach their full potential.
One new sales tool to emerge over the last few years is the sales engagement platform. While SaaS companies have been early adopters of these platforms, agencies have been laggards. If your agency is serious about its business development, it will invest in this tool. I believe it is the third leg of the tech stack stool along with a CRM and list provider.
What is a sales engagement platform? Think of it as a marketing automation program built for sales, designed to reach prospects more efficiently, while gathering data that can be used to optimize outreach. It allows you to create workflows and sync with your CRM and email. When used correctly, it makes you faster and your cold emails more effective at making connections with prospects.
Sales engagement platforms replace the tired strategy of mass email, which is largely ineffective in reaching senior-level decision-makers.
Why?
Firewalls and spam blockers make it difficult to even get a mass email into the inbox of a prospect. The sheer volume of email that most senior leaders receive compounds the issue. Marketers can spot a mass marketing email in their inbox and often delete without even opening. To get their attention, you need highly personalized messages that are sent on a one-on-one basis to a targeted prospect list, not through a mass email provider.
Without a sales engagement platform, you’re apt to use multiple sales tools: email, a spreadsheet program, your CRM, calendar program and tracking plugins. There are complicated and error-prone data pulls and merges.
The process is cumbersome and difficult to scale, track and follow-up on leads. The lack of integration means that you have few insights, if any, including basics such as whether your prospect even opened your mail.
If you’re going to get more meetings with dream clients, you need a better solution.
At Catapult New Business, I was skeptical when the sales engagement platform was introduced. “Great. Another sales tool to learn,” I thought. “Is this really going to help me?’
I had been in a slump and was juggling multiple agency clients. I gave it a shot.
From Day One, I was a believer. I immediately saw my outreach volume increase. Email opens, clicks and replies skyrocketed and I had better insights into what was working and what wasn’t. The platform helped me develop good prospecting habits that led to consistent and predictable results.
These are the top 7 features in a sales development platform that I find most useful and impactful.
SalesLoft, Outreach, and Inside Sales Box are among the top three sales engagement platforms on the market. Ask for a demo and experiment with each provider, being sure to zero in on each platform’s capabilities from the list above.
Once you secure and implement a sales engagement platform, you’re apt to feel more control, which will lead to a more predictable pipeline. The sales tool will increase your outreach volume while making it more efficient and effective. Prospecting activity will be better organized and will generate more meetings with your dream clients, leading to more agency revenue
Just because your Group Account Director excelled in helping win the pitch, doesn’t mean they want, nor will be a willing participant in going out and finding the next one as your newly crowned Director of Business Development.
When you choose to pay attention to agency growth, and I do mean choose, it’s often at an inflection point created by an event of some kind, rather than one planned. In my experience this type of ‘who’s the best person we have today syndrome’ causes some unusual behavior and decisions to be made within the walls of agencies. Decisions that almost always end badly for all involved.
Inflection point or not, when you choose to address an opportunity or issue within your agency your goal is to identify the requirements and to then deploy the right resources and people against it, not just what or who happens to be perceived to be lying around idle – even partially.
So why do agencies pivot this thinking when it comes to creating a new business role for the agency? Why look around and say, “Hey Account Director, you’ve built solid relationships with clients and it looks like you have some spare billable time, how about being our Director of New Business?”
Like any mission critical function, new business has specific requirements, and levels of expertise to design and implement a successful growth strategy. These skills, experience and training are not typical of a Group Account Director, nor are they desired to be learned by such a team member of your agency.
A roller-coaster of emotion in the new business world of hunting, cold shoulders and rejection sprinkled with moments of pure joy, pride and illation is not what they signed up for – no matter how well you think you can ‘sell’ it to them on it.
This skill set gap between a Group Account Director and a professional New Business Director is no ordinary gap to overcome with training and incentives. It’s a canyon, one that Evil Knievel would have hesitated to soar across.
I’m a huge believer in niche expertise and focus. And in this increasingly competitive world of new business, one where your agency needs to be actively pursuing new clients rather than relying on inbound alone, you’re doing so in a market where tech and consulting companies are also playing and winning.
Get past the fact and accept that this role is one without billable hours. You need a dedicated expert. Find and hire a New Business Director who will lead the agency growth strategy and can do the implementation. Hire someone who has the proven capacity to hunt and win consistently.
You owe it to yourself, you owe it to your team and perhaps most importantly, you owe it to your Group Account Director who feels like they’re failing you because they don’t have the skill-set or the passion for the role you’ve handed them. They’re likely a phenomenal Account Director, keep it that way.
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I get asked every day by agency principals, “If I begin proactive outreach for the first time, how much time and money will I need to invest?” Of course, this is a loaded question, and the answers vary depending on the size of your agency and how you want to tackle outbound prospecting.
One of the most significant challenges agencies face is deciding who should take on the role of business development. Should it be marketing, should it be sales, or do we just pass it to an account manager with extra time?
To develop a proactive prospecting outreach that delivers results and proves ROI, there are several things you need to consider.
Who will handle the role of business development:
Depending on the size of the agency, this task has typically fallen on the shoulders of a creative or account manager within the agency. The problem with this model is that a creative or account manager doesn’t usually have the traits or characteristics required for a new business development role. Besides, they are a million other tasks to handle throughout their day, making it impossible for them to be 100% focused on generating qualified leads.
For a truly successful proactive new business process, you should have at least one person dedicated full-time to outbound prospecting. It is a crucial component of your agency’s success to have someone consistently communicating with your target market and enticing those audiences to interact with your organization. Even if they aren’t ready to close the deal today, the correct prospect nurturing program will keep your company top of mind when the time is right.
The hard costs of a dedicated new business professional:
Proactive new business development is not an easy job. These individuals are reaching out to the market each day, and while they have some big wins, they also have some significant losses. The constant up and down nature of the business can be difficult, and the right compensation is necessary to keep them motivated.
List Partner’s CEO, Dave Currie, suggests, “Pay your new business people early and pay them often.” With over 23 years of experience in the new business space, Dave shares that instant gratification is the key to your new business developer’s motivation. This means your new business person should get base pay followed by compensation. Depending on the size and geographic location of your agency, your business developer should be making a base of $65-165K per year with 8-12% commision on each client won for the agency.
Hiring the right person for the job:
I think we can all agree that some jobs just require particular personality traits and in business development, it is no different. When hiring for this role within your agency, look for high energy, highly organized and time efficient individuals. More importantly, seek people who are inquisitive and naturally curious as they will be extremely valuable in finding new ways to reach your prospects. Of course, these traits may require a few interviews and examinations before being exposed, but this individual is an investment; spend the extra time finding the right fit.
While you’re searching for the perfect candidate, don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because they have never worked for an agency before that they aren’t qualified or can’t be a good fit. Dave Currie explains, “Actually, it’s not important at all for the new business hire to have previous agency experience.” Of course, they need to have an understanding of the marketing ecosystem, but overall, studies indicate that the most successful people in prospecting roles come out of higher volume transaction based roles in AdTech, MarTech, media sales and other like-industries.
The costs of prospecting tools and resources:
Once you find the right person for the job, you need to supply them with the tools to be successful. This will be another crucial investment to come along with your agency’s new business journey. In addition to the free resources such as email and Google Drive, there are three key technologies you will need for success: a prospecting tool, a CRM and marketing automation.
“Inbound only” comes with a price:
Every marketing agency in the history of marketing agencies would prefer for their clients to come knocking on the door. Unfortunately, that’s not always how it works. Sure, your agency could have prospects come from word of mouth referrals, and your phone may ring throughout the day, but having a consistent outbound process will jet fuel your inbound interactions.
An “inbound only” prospecting model comes with a massive loss in opportunity cost. Waiting for qualified opportunities to seek your firm out prevents you from controlling the destiny of the agency’s growth. It also prevents you from managing the agency’s strategic direction as you can’t measure when an opportunity will come along or the value and profitability that will come with it. This will eventually snowball into other problems such as a hindering growth rate, lack of retention and difficulty recruiting talent.
To align your outbound and inbound efforts, I’d recommend having someone on the marketing side dedicated to handling all inbound queries. This way you are covered from each end as you have one person dedicated to your outbound process and one person committed to the inbound.
From salary, technology stacks and opportunity costs, the annual price of hiring someone in-house to develop proactive new business is quite expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some kind of outsourced proactive new business service? Well, your dreams have come true.
Catapult New Business can have a person in market, actively prospecting for your agency within 30 days. Coming fully equipt with years of agency new business experience, an aggressive technology stack and free of opportunity cost, we offer a more affordable and effective option than hiring in-house.. Ready to streamline your new business process? Contact us here or give us a call at 404-574-1974.
As an agency executive, you need to know what is happening in the industry from an M&A perspective and how it can affect your agency. Luckily, Catapult has an amazing partner in Charles Fallon from SI Partners who provides first-hand industry insights throughout this on-demand webinar.
Regardless of whether you are looking to sell your agency now, 10 years from now, or simply attract a growth partner, Charles will walk you through this complex world step by step.
