A Well-Rounded Outbound and Inbound Strategy is More Important Than Ever

Brands Are Hungry For an Expert to Help Them Navigate This Environment

What’s Your Right to Win?

Here’s how using Right to Win can get your 2022 really booming in the 2nd half of the year:

1. Right to Win clients close faster

2. Pitch when you are the front runner

3. The right clients maximize all areas of your business

Brands Are Hungry For an Expert to Help Them Stand Out

We heard a lot of things this year at the Mirren New Business Conference. Aside from all of the excitement and thankful words about being at a conference in person, there were some very consistent (and important!) messages being sent from the myriad of expert speakers about new business strategies to grow your revenue this year. 

Here were some of the key new business strategies we enjoyed this year:

Pacing outbound sales efforts

Outbound sales takes time. If you want to build a proactive pipeline of opportunities that you have the highest likelihood to win you’ll need to treat this like a marathon, not a sprint. If you are looking at new business in 3-month segments, you aren’t ready for a new business program. You should be viewing new business in 18-month plans. Agencies that have been really successful have built their process and plans around this 18-month timeframe. Remember, planting a garden on Monday doesn’t feed your family on Tuesday, so continue to tend your garden, expand it, and in time you will reap the rewards.

Recruiting top talent

New Business is key to retaining and recruiting talent. During the Great Resignation, what could be more important than finding great talent to work at your firm?  Driving positive, exciting new business will not only help your revenue and bottom line, but it will help ensure that people actually want to build their careers with your team.

Diversifying your client base

Q1 and Q2 have been slower for many, and you are not alone in feeling like inbound pitches have slowed from what we all saw in 2021. While we have seen reports that brands continue to plan to spend more in the 2nd half of 2022, many have felt the crunch of stalled projects and reduced scopes. It’s time to further diversify your client base to protect against these forces.

Expanding work with your current client base

Organic growth can be proactive as well. You don’t have to wait until a client tells you they need more, you can help them find new solutions that expand on your scope of work. The agencies that really separate themselves from the pack are the ones that not only win a piece of business, but they consistently grow that piece of business throughout the years.

Staying in front of your prospects

“Brands are always looking, but you never know when they are actually looking”. A confusing sentence to be sure, but the point is, you always have to be there if you want a brand to find you. There are no days off when it comes to new business and keeping your agency in front of the brands that you most want to connect with.

Building your lead gen engine

There are a lot of channels for growth, outbound does not work alone. Inbound can define who you are because in order to have an effective inbound program you have to create specific, valuable, expert content that will attract the exact types of prospects that you want to work with.

Acing the discovery call

The objective of your new business call is not to sell your prospects, but simply to learn enough to get to the next meeting. People want to work with people they like, and what people like are people who listen to them and understand their problems.  Two ears – one mouth…use that ratio when deciding whether you talk or listen at that first new business call.

Taking on project work

Be willing to earn the right to the retainer…many agencies want to jump right into the marriage, they want the Agency of Record (AOR) and retainer relationships, but there are many brands that just don’t have those needs immediately. Allow yourself to be open to projects that can organically grow into those retainers in the future.

 

These are just some of the highlights from Mirren Live in Kansas City this year. While Catapult has always been at the forefront of proactive new business strategies, it was exciting to hear agency experts of all sizes continue to reinforce the value that proactive sales can offer to agencies. Want to continue learning more about proactive new business development? Join Catapult’s email subscription Insights with Catapult to receive monthly content like this one. 

Many times when a brand releases a Request For Proposal (RFP) to the public, they already know who will win their business. This often-overlooked fact will keep you from getting on their shortlist. 

Brands come up with an RFP after conversations are started around problems they’ve experienced internally. They’ve already talked to agencies, and these conversations are much less formal than a pitch, giving those agencies who started these talks early a winning chance before you even see the RFP. 

So how can you get on the brand’s shortlist before an RFP is released? It takes months of build-up to get in front of the RFP process, but with a proactive and consistent approach, you can save resources and turn out a higher win rate for your RFPs. 

Before going into another pitch, it’s a worthy exercise to answer these three questions first:

• Which RFPs do I have a right to win?
• What can I do to get in front of brands before the RFP goes to bid?
• Is there a way to win the bid before the RFP is out?

You can watch the webinar here or keep reading to learn more. 

Which RFPs do I have a right to win?

The first question you need to ask is whether you fit the profile the brand is looking for. Many RFPs include specific employee numbers to gauge size or capabilities along with questions around vertical or industry expertise. Before jumping in and dedicating the time and resources it takes to submit an RFP, make sure there is a real problem you can solve first.

Brands are doing their own research:

• 85% are conducting their own research before contacting a potential agency partner.
• 85% seek industry experience.
• 78% investigate 5-10 agencies before compiling a shortlist.
• 67% look at case studies.

You have a Right to Win when you can meet the capabilities, staffing needs, and expertise in a given area. Draw those boundaries firmly and stick to them. You will improve your win rate just by doing this. 

What can I do to get in front of brands before the RFP goes to bid?

To get in front of the line, you have to meet brands when they are in problem-solution mode. This is when they know there is a problem within their brand and have clearly identified this, but have not framed out a solution for it. That is when you want to start conversations so when the brand does go to RFP, you’re in the room to pitch or you’ve been hand-picked and the RFP is simply a formality to winning the business. 

Think of the day brand marketers have – jumping from one meeting to another while balancing their day-to-day workload and addressing problems the company is facing across all departments, from digital transformations to the next TikTok trend. In between all of this, wouldn’t you want to talk to an agency that is proactively coming up with solutions to your problems?

A proactive approach to new business development will look different from the response-based approach. In an RFP pitch, you can expect the solution to be clearly articulated, but when you’re proactively having conversations your first meetings are intended to uncover problems the marketing team is facing. From here, you can begin to create the outline of a solution and share this with them when the timing is right.

Is there a way to win the bid before the RFP is out?

The short answer is yes, absolutely! But it will not happen overnight. A successful new business development director will understand how to navigate the sales process while maintaining a positive relationship. Because ultimately, they will know that timing is the biggest factor in closing a new deal than any other metric.

How many times have you lost a pitch and heard the client share that they liked your ideas but had to go with someone else? Many people would call this a loss, but it’s an opportunity to keep a door open. Whether that door is opened because you lost an initial pitch or through other avenues, there is always a chance to win another deal when the timing is more suited. So how do you keep up with the brand over time?

A sales leader should keep in touch with the brand in an authentic way, and continue to learn about the problems they are facing. This consistency will keep you in the loop when the next RFP goes to bid, and when it does, they will have you in mind when creating the specific criteria needed to win. 

Get more insights like this from Catapult and Winmo in this webinar where we share Secrets to Beating the RFP Process.

 

Many times when a brand releases a Request For Proposal (RFP) to the public, they already know who will win their business. Brands come up with an RFP after conversations are already started around problems they’re experiencing internally, and have talked to agencies about that problem. These initial conversations are much less formal than a pitch but can lead to the RFP process. So how can you get on the brand’s shortlist before an RFP is released?

It takes months of build-up to get in front of the RFP process, but with a proactive and consistent approach, you can save resources and turn out a higher win rate for your RFPs.

In this webinar, Catapult and Winmo share strategies and tactics to beat the RFP process.
The following questions are discussed:

Which RFPs do I have a right to win?
What can I do to get in front of brands before the RFP goes to bid?
Is there a way to win the bid before the RFP is out?

These questions are answered during the recording, but you can submit your questions through the chat and the Catapult team will be able to respond in real-time.

 

A discovery call is the first of many conversations and can be defined as a time to uncover where your prospect is in their buying journey. Before guiding the conversation toward services or capabilities, you need to first meet them where they are.

On a successful discovery call, the prospect asks 8-10 questions on average. With about 30 minutes scheduled, what do you do with the rest of the time to make sure the call is successful?

What Makes a Discovery Call Successful?

A great discovery call will allow the prospect to do most of the talking, provide you with insights needed to navigate the deal further down your pipeline, and open the conversation up for those opportunities. In the end, you want the prospect to ask for a follow-up conversation. Getting that meeting scheduled before hanging up the call is the best scenario you could have. The whole goal is to get to that next meeting, but the first objective is to figure out if this is a fit, not just for the prospect, but for you as well. If it’s not, don’t be afraid to be honest about that.

Before going into your next discovery call, prepare yourself for the questions that you want to ask, but more importantly, be prepared to answer their questions. It’s hard to know exactly what will get asked, but you can anticipate these through preparation.

These are the top questions Catapult receives from agencies who are scheduling a discovery call for the first time:

• What is the difference between meetings with inbound vs outbound leads?
• How do I prepare the team before meeting with a prospect?
• How can I use Winmo to prepare for these calls?

Eric Brown
VP Client Engagement at Catapult

“These are important foundational questions because not only does it make you think about your overall strategy for the call, it’s also giving your team a method to assess what kind of information you want to pull out of your prospect. Prioritizing what you need from this first call and helping the team prepare will really ensure you ace it.”

What is the difference between meetings with inbound vs outbound leads?

There is a big difference between inbound and outbound leads. Think of it as warm vs cold. Inbound is coming in through a relationship referral, your website, or they’ve reached out and connected with you because they want to hear more regarding your capabilities. There is already a specific need or project in place, and the conversation revolves around that.

An outbound lead is a conversation that you asked for, and the client likely won’t have a specific project or criteria defined. That presents a challenge when you’re wanting to win new business because it’s not as simple as sharing your capabilities deck. You have to uncover a problem that they have not yet acted on. So the main difference is that there isn’t a project or Agency of Record need to be scoped out yet.

How do I prepare the team before meeting with a prospect?

The first rule of a discovery call: don’t share your capabilities deck. If you’re in the habit of jumping on a discovery call and immediately sharing your screen and walking through all your capabilities and background on your agency, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Is this the best way to connect with the person on the other side and understand the pain points they’re experiencing?

The short answer is no. So how do you prepare for the unknown? You do this by researching the brand and prospect. This will allow you to uncover their pain points slowly without hard selling your services. These are a few places to start your research:

• LinkedIn connections and posts.
• News articles and industry updates.
• Data around media spend, revenue, ad targeting, etc.

Knowing what is impacting the company and what they’re doing in the market now will help you anticipate some of those questions you’ll get asked. Oftentimes you are not the only one on the call though from your agency.

Preparing team members for the call takes some extra time, but it always pays off. In these cases, creating a meeting brief with the information above organized and call details added will help everyone get on the same page. In the brief, you should try answering these kinds of questions:

• Has the brand launched a new product or service recently?
• Is there new funding or shifts in their marketing budgets?
• What kind of influence will the attendees on the call have?
• Does the agency experience match the brands’ niche?

How can I use Winmo to prepare for these calls?

Winmo is an incredibly powerful tool, there are a ton of insights and a wealth of data that will help prepare the team before a discovery call. These are some of the key features Catapult uses to prepare a brief for its clients.

Carolina Gastley
VP of Client Services

“I look at the company page pretty regularly. The information here shows me where the company stands, and I make sure that I know what additional products or brands the company might have under its portfolio. I also look at who their current agency partners are and what services they might already offer to the brand. The most important place I look at though is revenue and media spend to make sure their spending level aligns with my goals. Making sure this relationship is the right prospect fit based on what kind of revenue they’re working with is just as important.”

Andrew Orlando
Director of Client Engagement

“WindmoEdge is a really nice tool. This is company news that focuses on marketing spend, CMO shifts, and campaigns. This tells me what’s going on, whether they got a round of funding or they acquired a brand. You never want to get caught on a prospect call and hear them share the news that’s already happened. You might hear something like ‘I’m not sure if you saw that in the news’ and that shows you were not prepared, so don’t be that person. You want to be on top of it and know what’s going on with the brand that you’re speaking with.”

 

You never want to be surprised. You want to be a leader, guiding the conversation. Ask questions that you already know the answers to because you’ve done that research ahead of time. It’s an informed question that shows your competency and really brings value to that conversation in their mind.

Hear more from Catapult in this webinar where we share best practices on not just knowing when the call was successful for you and the prospect, but how to keep the conversation going long after the call has ended.

 

A discovery call is the first of many conversations and can be defined as a time to uncover where they are in their buying journey. Before guiding the conversation toward services or capabilities, you need to first meet them where they are.

On a successful discovery call, the prospect asks 8-10 questions on average. With about 30 minutes scheduled, what do you do with the rest of the time to make sure the call is successful?

A great discovery call will allow the prospect to do most of the talking, provide you with insights needed to navigate the deal further down your pipeline, and open the conversation up for those opportunities. In the end, you want the prospect to ask for a follow-up conversation. 

In this webinar, Catapult shares best practices on not just knowing when the call was successful for you and the prospect, but how to keep the conversation going long after the call has ended.

 

Join this webinar to learn:

What is the difference between meetings with inbound vs outbound leads?
How do I prepare the team before meeting with a prospect?
How can I use Winmo to prepare for these calls?

These questions are answered during the recording, but you can submit your questions through the chat and the Catapult team will be able to respond in real-time.

 

Research shows that brands are looking at not only capabilities but industry expertise and case studies before compiling a shortlist of agencies to work with. To be in the best position to win new clients, agencies need to find their Right to Win. Before pulling your next prospecting list, identify who will put you on their shortlist and set yourself up for better opportunities to win.

By answering these three questions, you will see more success from your new business development efforts:

• What is your Right to Win?
• How do you qualify your Right to Win?
• How do I find my Right to Win in Winmo?

What is your Right to Win?

Right to Win really means that you can easily prove to a prospect why they would choose you over a competitor. That you can easily prove your value to them. This may come from the capabilities of your agency or the talent and backgrounds on your team. Identifying your right to win is important before pulling a prospect list because you want to make sure that you’re making the most of your business development efforts, as well as making sure that you’re putting yourself and your business in the best possible position to succeed when you’re going into a meeting.

It comes down to making the most of your time and putting your efforts into the right place. If you don’t start with that foundation, you can meet and pitch your business to clients who won’t see the value in working with you. And ultimately, you won’t be able to win that business. Hence the term “Right to Win”.

How do you qualify your Right to Win?

When brands are looking for a partner, a lot look at case studies, which ties into your industry experience and the work that you’ve done. Those are two big factors. Brands are doing the research before even meeting with you. So if you put yourself in the shoes of the prospect and you go to your website, would you want to meet with yourself? You have to ask those kinds of questions.

Research shows that brands are looking at information like this when considering whether or not to work with you:

• 85% of prospects are conducting their own research before contacting a potential agency partner.
• 85% seek industry experience.
• 78% investigate 5-10 agencies before compiling a shortlist.
• 67% look at case studies.

How do I find my Right to Win?

Using a sales prospecting tool is the best way to efficiently and effectively identify those Right to Win accounts. Not all data is created equal though. When evaluating sales prospecting tools, you will want to know how they are sourcing their data, what types of industries and companies you will find, and what other data points you will have access to.

Some teams choose to take an account-based approach, and that will affect which contact data provider you choose. For this, you’ll want a data provider that connects the dots between brands, agencies, and executives – knowing the entire buying committee is key. Supplementing this data with insights will also help narrow down the right target accounts to include.

Winmo allows you to do this, and there are a few favorite features the Catapult team uses regularly for prospecting.

Megan Gehrich, Business Development Director

“In Winmo, each contact page has their profile, but when you download a list you can find each contact’s LinkedIn URL. This makes it really easy to write a personalized email. It’s a feature you can use every day to save time and make targeted outreach a lot easier.”

 

Andrew Orlando, Director of Client Engagement

“Looking at prospect indicators is another Winmo-favorite. Insights including planning and buying periods, accounts that are getting funded, and more give peaks behind the curtain that are so valuable for targeted prospecting.”

 

 

In this webinar, Catapult and Winmo share the first steps to take before prospecting and pitching your capabilities to brands. You will walk away from this webinar with a strategy and an action plan. Winmo demonstrates how to pull a prospecting list using the steps outlined in order to have the best chance at winning your next client.

 

Research shows that brands are not only looking at capabilities but industry expertise and case studies before compiling a shortlist of agencies to work with. To be in the best position to win new clients, agencies need to find their Right to Win. 

In this webinar, Catapult and Winmo share the first steps to take before prospecting and pitching your capabilities to brands. You will walk away from this webinar with a strategy and an action plan. Winmo demonstrates how to pull a prospecting list using the steps outlined in order to have the best chance at winning your next client. 

These questions are answered during the recording, but you can submit your questions through the chat and the Catapult team will be able to respond in real-time. 

Questions answered in this webinar include:

What is your Right to Win?
How do you qualify your Right to Win?
How do I find my Right to Win in Winmo?

 

It’s no secret; the business development process is grueling.  Even Digiday reported in an article earlier this year, “‘Never not on a pitch’: Staffers feel burnout amid agency pressure to pitch new business with fewer resources.” Staffers are, now more than ever, constantly pressured to pitch new business with fewer resources. All of this pitching is leading to one inevitable place… burnout. Agency new business has never been more competitive and things won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

How can agencies avoid this burnout and grow?

The answer in many cases is simple: be more selective. Easier said than done, right? To be more selective, you first need to clearly define who you want to work with. This means being very strict about who you absolutely do not want to work with.

Prioritize your pitchable brands by:

• Choosing those within your agency’s Right to Win.*
• Ensuring there is a passion for the brand (vertical, consumer type, etc).
• Knowing which services and scopes are actually profitable.
• Finding scopes that matches your expertise.

*What do I mean by Right to Win?
If you can say that there is a “right to win” then you can prove it through case studies and past work examples. When you show prospects this, they will want to work with you just as much as you want to work with them.

Stay Out of the Waiting-On-The-RFP Game

If an RFP comes across your desk that doesn’t fit within these parameters, leave it alone. I know it’s hard to turn away from a potential payday, especially when a feeling of uncertainty surrounds your new business pipeline, but you can be risking profitability or employee churn by putting your teams on projects they aren’t passionate about. Once you have set these parameters, do not stray! Agency new business is a lot like dating. If you know what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it, so stay out of the waiting-on-the-RFP game and get into the proactive biz dev game.

Just like in your personal life, being proactive vs. reactive will always lead to better results. Get out there and start hunting for new prospects that fit your agency’s Right to Win. Utilize email, social, and resurgence of in-person events to connect with those brands that you are most passionate about and focus on planting the right seeds of growth with them. 

They may not be a quick fix for cash that some of these ill-fitting RFPs may inject, but what they will do is set your team up for long-term business development success. Happy employees lead to happy clients, and eventually more rewarding work for your agency.

 

So there you have it. A few tips to avoid pitch burnout and set your agency up for new business success. Agency new business is a process, but if you’re strategic about it, the right clients will partner with you when you need them most.

We’re rounding out 2022 new business trends with a focus on Experimental Budgets. Those elusive and magical dollars are set aside to try new things and open new channels for brands.

We know that marketers’ budgets for testing are continually increasing, but now more than ever is a time when these budgets are no longer afterthoughts. The Pandemic’s disruption colliding with a huge diversification of media and an acceleration of new consumer behaviors means that marketers are having to try new things and look for new creative avenues and media channels to put their budgets. They are doing this too with full knowledge that a large portion of these budgets may not get them a Return on Investment (ROI) immediately.  

Skip the Procurement Approval Process

The ROI conversation is a big one because when you are in a testing mindset, as these brands are, you are willing to look at ROI differently in order to evaluate a campaign more holistically. Rather than just “did sales increase?”, marketers are exploring how else these campaigns may affect the brand image/recognition as a whole. This open-mindedness opens new opportunities for an agency to get their foot in the door.

We have seen this play out over the past 12 months in a number of ways. Recently, one of Catapult’s clients was speaking with a direct-to-consumer mattress company about their 2022 growth goals. They had already set their performance marketing budgets for the year, but what they set aside was $150k/month to try new channels. Because they already have these dollars budgeted, the marketers themselves can sign off on new partners without having to go through the typical CMO/procurement approval process, saving a massive amount of time and energy for our agencies. While $80k may not be a huge initial project, that is a monthly budget, so the calculus is that the program you are running is going to be fantastic and you are going to be able to continue all year – totaling closer to an overall $1 million client.

What the Data Tells Us

If these budgets are easier to get signoff, how do we know they are out there happening at an increased rate? We looked at the data. In 2021, we looked at the number of new agency relationships added to the Winmo database vs agency relationships ended in the database. You would expect these to be close to a 1:1 ratio if you assume these are retainer relationships, one agency wins a new piece of business, and as such another loses. 1 new win, 1 new loss. What we actually saw though was that new relationships happened at double the pace of ending relationships. Essentially, brands are hiring more agencies for projects and experimental work at an increasingly fast pace.

Further evidence to this was looking at our select group of over 50 agencies within the Catapult group and we found that 72% of our agencies’ new work started last year was in the form of an initial project, not a retainer. There are certainly retainers out there to be had and won (and increasing RFPs back that up), but the quicker decisions being made by marketers right now in mass are those with a project background.

We aren’t saying that you only consider project work moving forward. What we are saying is that when you go into an initial fact-finding call with a new brand, be aware of these experimental budgets and keep it in the back of your mind as they talk about opportunities that do or do not exist currently. While they may not be out there searching for a new Agency of Record, we are sure they are looking to find a new way to break through to different audiences and there is money to be spent.