While it’s exciting to win an award within your industry, most people question whether applying for awards is worth the expense and hard work it takes to submit them. Awards help boost your agency’s reputation, earn credibility, and differentiate your agency from the competition. 

At Catapult, we believe today’s agencies are creating incredible work that needs to be seen. How will your agency benefit from winning a prestigious award?

According to Forbes, here are five ways your agency benefits from entering awards competitions.

1. Winning an award boosts your credibility.
2. Awards distinguish you from your competition.
3. Award recognition raises your organization’s spirits.
4. Award ceremonies allow you to network with fellow honorees.
5. Awards prompt you to take a closer look at what makes you qualified for an award and identify areas for improvement.

Big brands are looking for innovative outside partners. By highlighting your agency’s specific design, social, creative or activation capabilities, you can demonstrate your work to a large audience and stand out in the competitive landscape. Yes, it’s a lot of work. And you’re worth it (to borrow a famous advertising line). Here are five tips to keep in mind when you apply for agency awards:

1. Follow all instructions. Many entrants fail because they miss the award entry deadline.
2. Label everything carefully. Proper labeling can give your entry the edge it needs to win.
3. Speak with someone who knows what the judges are looking for – nuances can make all the difference. 
4. Keep things clear and concise.
5. Be sure to answer every question exactly as asked. Coloring outside the lines is fine, but add content only if word counts allow after you’ve answered the question.

Similar to our Q2 list, here’s a quick glance at award shows with an application deadline starting in July of 2019. These awards have high standards, are widely recognized by the industry, and if won, are guaranteed to enhance your credibility among clients and prospects. Apply for these agency awards in Q3:

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Believing that summer is the wrong time to proactively prospect could be detrimental to the growth of your agency. We hear it all the time, “everyone is on vacation; budgets are locked down; no-one picks up the phone.” Our experience is just the opposite. Brand marketers are “on” 12 months a year, and when summer approaches, many of them are either getting a head start on 2023 planning, or better yet, figuring out how to spend any remaining budget this year. Summer is their time to try that one tactic they’ve been putting off, double down on a program, or invest in a targeted campaign.  Yet many agencies slow down or stop their prospecting entirely over the summer months.

In fact, summer is a prime opportunity for you to break away from your competitors. Growth driven agencies who continue a steady pace of proactive business development into Q2 find significant success in overall revenue goals by creating conversations and opportunities with their prospects.

Here are three reasons to continue prospecting through the summer:

1. Consistency drives results.

The Q1 emphasis on business development – emails, phone calls, events, blogs –  burns everyone out, and agency after agency will put their new business efforts aside as Q2 approaches. We typically see 50% of agencies stop their proactive outreach for new business completely after the first quarter.  There are two reasons this is alarming. As we’ve already mentioned, summer is still a rich time for prospecting, but being in front of your right to win clients over and over again is the key to getting and keeping their attention on you and the problems you can solve for them. The other reason to stay consistent is your competitor’s lack of momentum will leave a gap you can fill.

Of course, sometimes you just need a break.  But don’t shut down all your proactive efforts. Here are two ways to keep the momentum going:

1. Build content 2-3 months out.  Work ahead to have as much content planned, created, and scheduled as possible so your prospects won’t forget about you in months where you are less proactive.
2. Utilize technology as much as possible. Marketing Automation is key to ensuring that even when you aren’t proactively contacting prospects yourself, your new business efforts aren’t affected.

2. Brands still have money to spend in 2022.

We see a significant number of brands still planning Q3 and Q4 projects in June. This is a huge opportunity for your agency to take advantage of available funds in your prospect’s budget and impact your 2022 revenue goals. According to our sister company, Winmo, 3,065 brands are currently planning for Q3 and Q4.

We tell our clients not to leave money on the table – be there in front of your ideal prospects to help them spend it!

3. Brands are planning for 2023.

They say the early bird gets the worm, and the phrase couldn’t be truer in proactive prospecting. How can a brand marketer choose your agency as their partner in 2023 if you aren’t on their radar? As you approach the end of Q3, the focus of your outreach should be on creating relationships that ensure you are in consideration as brands plan for 2023. This approach will impact your own 2022 revenue early in the year.

Are you still thinking summer is a bad time for proactive prospecting? I’d love to chat and share some stories that illustrate why it is a myth!

At Catapult, we believe today’s agencies are creating incredible work and are always looking for ways to ensure that your prospects see it. Awards are a great way for an agency to gain exposure and recognition. Although entering award competitions takes time and money, it’s one of the best ways to showcase your work, energize your team and grow your brand. Winning an award adds prestige, builds the agency’s reputation, and helps you stand out among your competitors.

According to AMI, more than a third of companies are looking for an agency with specialized experience. Awards that highlight specific capabilities – design, social, creative, activation and so forth, are an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the other 25K+ agencies out there. Not to mention it adds third-party credibility behind your work.

Winning awards also helps your agency attract top talent. Britt Fero of Publicis Seattle speaks to the importance of awards in attracting quality employees and energizing an agency:

“Our success at shows has helped us recruit and retain top creative talent from around the country. In addition, creative awards can be energizing for the entire agency. Competing against the best advertising in the world keeps us focused, informed and sharp for our clients.”

In the first of a series, we’ve compiled a list of award shows that have an application deadline in Q2 of 2019. These awards have high standards, are widely recognized by the industry, and if won, are guaranteed to enhance your credibility among clients.

Pro Awards
BMA NYC Global ACE Awards (formerly B2's)
Beverage Dynamics Advertising & Promotion Awards
Global EFFIE Awards
Webby Awards
Interactive Media Awards (IMA)
D&AD Awards
Communicator Awards
EFFIE Global Best of the Best
IAC Awards (Internet Advertising Competition)
American Package Design Awards
Shop! Awards
Reggies
SHORTY Awards
MUSE Creative Awards
Telly's
FAB Food & Beverage Awards
ADC (Art Directors Club) Annual Awards
One Show
The DRUM Marketing Awards (several awards throughout the year - see awards calendar link)
OMNI Intermedia Award

 

Agency new business development is at its peak of importance for several reasons. To start, clients understand the significance of marketing more than ever, and with there being over 77,500 agencies in the US alone, there is more competition today than there ever has been before.  

To stand out among the heavy competition and get your agency in front of the brands you want to work with, old business development practices need to be put away, and new ones need to be implemented. Optimizing these efforts begin with five areas to focus on.

If you are ready to take the plunge towards a predictable and sustainable pipeline of new clients, read on:

Hire a New Business Director

It may sound obvious to say that you need someone concentrating on new business, but building demand for your agency is a full-time role. It’s not OK anymore to have five entry-level employees spending 10% of their time on new biz.  At minimum, one person needs to spend 100% of their time owning the proactive outbound process and as the agency owner, you have to supply them with the tools they will need to be successful.  

When searching for this person, there are three qualities you will want to seek in your new hire:

1. High Energy– Your agency needs someone who can sustain a high touch point outreach plan.  No one and done emails, but an intelligent multi-touch outreach program. This takes someone willing to put in the time and energy (and hear a couple “no’s” along the way).

2. Strong Communicator– A strong communicator in any situation. This isn’t selling a subscription. There is no one size fits all for agency new business so you need someone who can change up the pitch at any given notice to fit the prospects needs and pain points.

3. Process Driven– You want someone who will build a repeatable and scalable process over time that will allow your new business engine to be running, regardless of turnover.

Time is a leading agency growth challenge, so if taking the time to hire and onboard an additional employee is a problem for you, check out outsourced options that may be a better, more convenient fit for your agency’s needs.

Positioning Your Agency

With the increasing amount of competition, positioning your agency to be different than the competition has never been more critical. Simply saying you “can do it all” tells clients that you haven’t quite figured out your niche, and if you have, why hide it under a cloak of vagueness?

Many agencies fear that narrowing down their focus will make them seem small or may result in missed business opportunities. The reality is, highlighting the services you thrive in will position you as a leader in that space and lead you to more desirable, better fitting opportunities.

A few questions to ask yourself when building your agency’s positioning include:

• Why does your agency exist? (less about what and how)
• How are you different for every other firm?  
• What are you an expert in?
• Why do you get hired?  
• Which brands do you have an absolute right to win?  
• What DON’T you do?
• What problems do you solve better than anyone else?

If you can’t answer these questions clearly, succinctly, and in an interesting way, then you aren’t quite ready to proactively reach out to new business prospects.

Know Your Audience

Regardless if you’re going to be driving new business in a vertical that you’ve been servicing for 10 years, or if this is your first foray into a new vertical…you need to know everything possible about the audience group you want to attract.

A couple of questions you may want to ask when researching your audiences include:

• What problems are keeping them up at night?  
• How do you solve those problems for them?  
• What’s happening within their industry?
• What’s your POV on their industry changes?

After answering these questions, you will want to segment your audience so that you can create messaging that appropriately fits each ideal customer’s needs. These three groups serve as a good starting point segmenting your lists:

1. Right To Win
   Your right to win clients are those that are a perfect fit for your services. To identify them, set parameters for what a perfect client for your agency looks like. What issues do they have? Where are they? What do they specialize in? If a prospect fits all your criteria, you need to be working with them. Keep in mind a “perfect” client is hard to come by – so this list most likely will be smaller than others.
   
   
2. Great Fit
   This will be a much larger list, probably the largest you have. These prospects have problems you can solve, but may not be a “perfect” fit. Maybe they are outside of your geographic region, have slightly lower revenue ranges, or they’re in an industry you have limited experience in. But if they reach 90-95% of your criteria and you can recognize/solve their problems, you should be highly considering approaching them.
   
   
3. Stretch
   These are those whale clients your team dreams of working with. While chasing them isn’t where you should spend the majority of your new business time, landing one could be a game changer for morale and/or revenue. Keep these prospects in your drip campaigns to get them warm and keep your agency top of mind, but put most of your focus on those potential clients that will build a stable base of revenue in the future.  
   

Other ways to segment your audiences may be by industry vertical or even by job title. These are just some examples that will help you get started. Take the time to really think about who you want to work with, and more importantly, what your prospects care about. This will help you determine just how your agency should be dividing your prospecting lists.

Content That Supports Your Positioning With Your Audiences

Many business development pros give a prospect a call, send one follow-up email and move on. Why doesn’t this work? Well, on average, it takes 7-12 touchpoints to generate the first meeting. Decision makers are busy people and if you aren’t sending content that is eye-catching or relevant to them, you’ll be lucky if they even skim your emails.

The content you are sending can come in a variety of forms including:

• Website
  Your prospects are not looking for you when they visit your website, they are searching for themselves. If your website doesn’t immediately indicate that you understand their needs, they will find someone else who’s website does.

• Emails
  There are marketing emails and sales emails, and there is definitely a difference between the two. Marketing emails are about awareness while sales emails are about stirring up a conversation. Any content you create on your website should be able to be used as a call to action within your marketing or sales emails.

• Blog
  Blogs, again, are not supposed to highlight your agency and it’s culture. Your blog should show that you are an expert. Share your knowledge, experience, and expertise to be a teacher. Don’t hide your knowledge from competitors, but educate your prospects on how you solve those problems for them.

• Case Studies
  Keep these simple. Make sure your case studies are easily digestible and that they show real results. Three main things to focus on in your case studies is the problem your client had, the solution you provided, and the results you drove for your client. If it is any more than one page, you will begin to lose people’s attention so be sure to keep it simple and to the point.  Highlight the results, not the solution!

• White Papers
  White papers are all about educating your prospects, showing that you understand their problems but remember, you are not writing a novel. It just needs to be interesting and add value to your prospects. This is an education tool, not a sales pitch- write them solely to provide extended insights and value to your audiences. On that note, write white papers for specific audiences so it really hits home with your readers. If you are writing a white paper for everyone, it will most likely resonate with no one.

• Webinars
  Webinars are a great way to drive third-party advocacy to your audience. You are interacting with your audience in a very personalized way, that can eventually lead to a lot more word of mouth referrals, something we all want more of.  They can be key to getting social credibility and are a fantastic way to educate your audience.

At the beginning of a sales strategy, your prospects are likely not familiar with your agency, and they don’t care about your awards or your culture- they care whether or not you can solve their problems. Your content should serve to effectively answer that question to assist your sales process.

Here are some key ways to position your content in a way that will provide your audiences value while also demonstrating what your agency brings to the table:

• Triggers
  This is arguably the most important, as a trigger is defined as the problem that is keeping your prospect up at night. Your prospects are actively seeking solutions for these problems (triggers), so you better be speaking their language. These are great for capturing the interest of your prospects when they visit your website or even through a prospecting email.
  
  
• Wedge
  The Wedge in your content is the proprietary solution to fix a prospect’s triggers. This content provides insights on how your prospect should go about solving their problems.  The Wedge is the least important as it is about you and your agency, mention it in order to get to the proof!
• Proof Point
  Exactly what it sounds like, proof points are content pieces that show how your agency has solved these problems before with dramatic results. This might be demonstrated through webinars, case studies or even white papers, but the point is that they are firm numbers and results that speak to your expertise and ability to solve your prospect’s problems.

It’s important to hold your team accountable for producing content that will be of interest to your prospects. A good way to do this to have a mix of both junior and senior level members of your team responsible for writing one blog per week. You can rotate the responsibility in order to prevent burn out on writing posts and also to ensure that fresh perspectives are bubbled to the top.

Invest In Technology

You are investing a lot of time and money in a new business person, strategy for the business, and content to back up that positioning…don’t forget to invest in your new business lead’s success by providing them the correct technology to actually get the job done in an efficient and effective way.  

This means they will need a Sales Automation technology CRM, a research database, and possibly a marketing automation tool.  Check out our webinar on top technology, but the point is, don’t send a hitter to the plate without a bat!

Setting up a sustainable and scalable new business development program takes strategy, dedication, and patience, but once it’s up and running, there is nothing keeping you from hitting those aggressive revenue goals you’ve set for the agency.

Growth is not optional. It’s essential to the survival of your agency. As the landscape continues to change and become more competitive for agencies of all sizes and stripes, the challenges to growth are increasing at a rapid pace.

With 15+ years of agency business development experience, I can safely say that most if not all of the challenges faced today are much the same as in years past. Whether your agency is struggling with where to focus your business development efforts, whether or not to do proactive outreach, or how to position your agency for accelerated growth, you’re not alone. The good news is that there are solutions you can implement to impact 2019 growth.

Here are the top 4 agency growth challenges with actionable solutions:

1. Lack of Bandwidth

Hubspot’s 2018 Agency Growth Report found that the number one barrier to agency growth was lack of time/money to spend on their own sales and marketing efforts. It’s a fact that as the agency space grows more and more competitive, sales and marketing are an essential element to standing out. And yet, most agencies are working on extremely thin margins and have their employees doing twice the amount of work they were doing a few years ago. This leaves agencies with very few resources to market or proactively sell the agency itself.

The report also indicated that agencies have limited time to focus on tasks such as staffing plans, new business investments and finding top talent. Without these resources, leadership is busy putting out internal fires and scrambling to find employees. The old adage of a disproportionate amount of time spent “working in the business vs. working on the business” rings true.

The solution? If time is the biggest challenge, invest in the right tools and hire the proper people to handle growth channels such as marketing and business development. If hiring is a problem, consider outsourcing the tasks to a qualified and trusted company. That way these areas aren’t getting pushed the backburner and you can begin creating an inbound and outbound strategy that will drive leads and eventually revenue into your pipeline.

If budget is the challenge, make the time (and consider an outside perspective) to develop a strong strategy that clearly identifies the optimal allocation of the budget you have to the tactics that will net the best return.

• A strong, differentiated positioning that will resonate with your prospective clients.
• An investment in technologies and/or training that will streamline effort and investment.
• A communications plan across multiple channels (ex: email, social media, cold calling, etc.) with clear KPI’s and budget allocation.
• A resource plan to execute on all of the above, whether internal assignments or external resources.

2. Challenges Maintaining Consistent Lead Generation

One of the keys to successful lead generation is a sustainable, repeatable and scalable effort over the course of many months, especially if you’re are using inbound marketing tactics. In Hubspot’s 2018 State of Inbound Global Report, 40% of respondents said getting a response from leads was more difficult today than it was just a few years ago. While outbound efforts should also be included in your business development program, inbound is crucial to staying top of mind at the beginning of the buyer journey as well as in the final stages of decision making, when prospects are looking for confirmation that they’re making the right decision.

And yet creating a consistent pipeline is difficult without a structured process. The solution that works best is when the agency aligns both marketing and sales tactics as core elements of the business development strategy. Marketing content attracts the prospects considering or ready to make a purchase. Sales tactics convert and nurture by providing more customized content to demonstrate your value.

As you build your strategy, create an account based marketing approach that builds campaigns around your right-to-win clients, or clients where your services best provide an answer to their problems. For example, if your agency has a portfolio that primarily consists of successful retail work, retail brands might be right-to-win clients for your agency.

Here are a few tips for attracting your right-to-win clients and fuel your pipeline with more leads:

• Create targeted landing pages around long tail keywords
• Offer content based on search intent (side banners on certain pages of your website, pop-ups, etc.)
• Update heavily visited web pages to increase search traffic
• Offer value through free tools and consultations to get prospects on the phone
• Automate your outbound efforts by building email and cold call templates and investing in technologies that will make research more efficient and identify prospects at scale.

3. Working With Clients That Don’t Excite The Team

Every agency has a “bucket list” of clients they dream of working with, and agency leaders know that winning these kinds of projects will energize their creative and account teams. But when agency leadership stops pushing to win those dream accounts and begins responding to any and every RFP, top talent tends to lose morale and walk away.

Most agencies have experienced this at some point or another. They take on clients for the sake of a check and soon realize that they aren’t a great fit for your agency. Maybe these clients constantly made changes, had roadblocking projects, or even poor communication. Either way, working with even one of these clients can make someone not want to go to work on any given day, so it’s crucial you try your best to keep your employees from dealing with these types of clients.

So how do you attract the kind of clients you actually want to work with?

1. Be clear about your culture and values
Only choose to work with clients whose values align with yours. As Buffer said, “Your values tell the world what you’re about. They give your employees a reason for what they do—and your customers a reason to cheer for you.”

2. Create personas that clearly identify your ideal clients.
Some questions to consider while creating these personas include:

• What type of business is my client in?
• How big is their business?
• What is my client’s role there?
• Where is my client located?
• What are my client’s pain points and how do I solve those problems?

3. Get comfortable with the term “no”
Saying no the wrong clients is as important as saying yes to the right ones. Develop a robust onboarding process so that you and the client can get to know one another and determine whether the relationship is a good fit. Sort through the terms of any agreements so that you have a full understanding of what the client expects while outlining the scope of work.If they turn out not to be a good fit, advise them that it’s in their best interest to find an agency partner who can better fit their needs. And help them find that partner with introductions and referrals.

4. New Business Resources Continue To Be Overlooked & Limited

In 2016 Hubspot reported that only 66% of SMB agencies did not have a full-time new business executive. For many smaller agencies, the CEO takes on the responsibilities of driving new business. When C-level officers are asked, many admit they do not have enough time to properly be dedicated to new business efforts.

At Catapult, we can’t stress how important it is to set yourself up for new business success. We’ve seen it many times where an agency only relies on referrals and when their largest client leaves, they are desperate to quickly crank out a new business plan. Unfortunately, this is a one-way street to failure. Setting up your new business resources is a lot like trying to get in shape. It takes consistent work over the course of many months before you have the engine up and running.

Stay out of this cycle by setting up your new business process sooner rather than later. Start by hiring or promoting a dedicated new business person or an outside resource to help you set the correct strategy. And make sure you have the proper resources in place that will enable proactive business development to be successful.

Setting up a new business process is a journey that takes a great amount of time, resources and dedication. Your agency’s growth is dependent on it so it’s not really an issue of if, but rather when and how. Hopefully, the above tips are helpful.

My very first day at my very first job was as a holiday sales associate at Best Buy.

The 16-year-old me was nervous to say the least. It was my responsibility to persuade customers to buy a $2,000 computer. That seemed like a massive among of money to convince someone to spend. And if by some miracle, I succeeded, my job wasn’t over. Best Buy then wanted me to upsell them a $200 product insurance plan.

I felt unprepared and had no sales training. I dreaded people telling me no.

Even if a customer came in knowing the computer they wanted, I was still supposed to upsell them the insurance plan.

After hearing excuse after excuse — “No,” “I’m not interested,” or “I’ll think about”— I stopped trying to sell the insurance plans for fear of rejection.

When the season was over, Best Buy politely told me that they would not need me any longer. Rejected again.

Facing Rejections

We’ve all experienced rejection in relationships, school, and work. If you’re a sales professional, you think you experience rejection multiple times a day, every day.

But what many of us perceive as rejection is really an objection. And an objection is not rejection.

Objections are familiar, tried-and-true phrases we hear frequently:

• I don’t have time right now
• We’re not interested
• We don’t have the budget for that

Whereas some examples of rejection are:

• Take me off your list and don’t ever call me again!
• You and your agency suck

Objections are signs of concern, confusion, risk aversion, stalling or a fear of change. They are a natural part of the human condition and our decision-making process. In many cases, they are instinctive responses. But objections actually can be a sign of engagement.

Rejection is very different. It’s an outright refusal to accept an idea or request—a firm no. At times, it’s delivered with a harsh and deliberate tone. Sometimes it comes off as a personal insult.

While rejection and objection can and often do feel the same, it’s important to be able to tell the difference and know how to respond. If not, your sales work will suffer, and you’ll lose the opportunity to close more deals.

Successful sales people understand the reasons behind the kinds of responses to prospecting. Follow these 3 rules of overcoming objections and you’ll be adding more wins.

Rule #1 – Sales Objections Are Emotional

The human decision-making process is emotional first and then logical. The challenge is to not respond emotionally to your prospect’s rejection. Prospect objections are among the most difficult. That’s why so many salespeople avoid prospecting like the plague, fearing the rejection and the impact on their careers and income.

Average salespeople respond by either fighting back or giving up. The fight becomes an argument with prospects trying to persuade them that their concerns about change are unfounded. It’s an emotional response to those objections.

Remember: In a sales conversation, the person with greater emotional control has the highest likelihood of getting their desired outcome.

High-performing salespeople understand this fact, don’t take it personally and exert emotional control.

Rule #2 – Not All Objections Are the Same

Sales trainer Jeb Blount, in his book aptly titled, Objections, breaks down objections into three categories he calls RBOs:

R Reflex Responses
B Brush-Offs
O True Objections

These are your prospect’s rote reactions. It’s not an intentional slight or attempt to deceive, but they are an automatic response to your pitch and probably those of any other salespeople.

Here are some examples:

• We’re not interested.
• I’m busy.
• We’re all set.
• We’re good.

The prospect is not responding. They are running on autopilot.

Brush-Offs

A brush-off is your prospect’s way of telling you to bug off nicely. It’s about avoiding conflict. Examples:

• Call me later.
• Why don’t you send me some information?
• Send me an email in a month.

Salespeople often misinterpret brush-offs as a sign of accomplishment. “She must be interested because she told me to call in a month,” the deluded salesperson thinks. “I’ll put that in my calendar right now.”

While the prospect might indeed be interested, they have not really given you any real indication of interest.

True Objections

True objections on prospecting calls tend to be more transparent and logical. They typically come with a reason and seem genuine. Here are a few:

• We just signed a new contract with your competitor, so there’s no reason for us to meet right now.
• I can’t meet next week because I’m going to be at our industry’s tradeshow in Chicago.

Do you hear the difference between the reflex responses, brush-offs, and the true objections? Knowing the distinctions between the three leads to a better sense of where your prospect mindset and how to respond.

Rule #3 – Objections Follow the 80/20 Rule

When I ask salespeople to tell me how many types of objections they hear, the answer is usually the same: an infinite, never-ending number of objections.

They’re wrong.

Too many salespeople think each RBO is unique, special and one of a kind. They end up winging it when it comes to a response. In reality, each industry has a rather common set of RBOs. Usually, there are 3-5 RBOs that make up 80% or more of prospecting objections.

What are the most common RBOs you face in your agency?

• “We’re all set.”
• “Just send me some information.”
• “We handle that in-house.”
• “I’m not the right person.”
• “We have an agency.”

The key to overcoming objections is to identify what the most common objections are that you and your team hear. Create great answers that get prospects past the RBO. Then practice and refine your responses.

Here is what high-performing salespeople do:

• List common RBOs encountered in their prospecting and script answers to each, often working with sales colleagues to get the best possible answers drafted.
• Practice those scripts. Role-play the answers with a colleague and refine your answers. Memorize them until they become natural.
• Use the scripted answers on some prospects and continue to modify your answers.

Having scripts prepared in advance helps you stay in your logical brain, rise above disruptive reactionary emotions and regain control of the conversation.

Back to Best Buy

In the months after I was let go by Best Buy, I stopped looking at what happened as a rejection, but rather as an objection that could be overcome. The next summer I asked my former manager if they needed help. It turned out they were short-staffed.

I began to listen to customer objections in the computer department carefully and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was going to succeed no matter what.

The other sales associates and I began to compare the objections we heard and created responses that we role-played with each other. Here is one that I heard regularly and a reply that worked great.

Customer: I don’t think the computer will break. There’s no need for the insurance plan.

Me: Did you drive to the store today?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Do you have a spare tire in the trunk?

Customer: Yes.

Me: I drove to work today, and I don’t think I will get a flat tire on my way home. But, like you, I have a spare tire in my trunk just in case. It’s better to be safe than sorry. How about we take another look at that insurance plan?

It worked incredibly well.

I went on to lead not only our Best Buy store but the entire Midwest in insurance plan sales that year. At the next holiday season, I didn’t get fired. I got a raise.

As a sales professional, remember that objection is not rejection. Work with your colleagues to create a list of the most common objections you hear and categorize them as Rs, Bs or Os. Get to work on scripting and spend the next three months testing and refining your answers. You’ll retain better emotional control, learn more and find a dramatic uptick in your prospecting work.

For years there has been an ongoing race to obtain the most recent and advanced technologies among the large agency holdings. However, as technology has become obsolete and less expensive, it is having increasing less of a differentiating impact.

Sometimes the odds of forecasting accurately is about as successful as flipping a coin. Aside from forecasting what your agency will generate in new business for the year, you also need to properly forecast what resources are required to support that growth.

While those resources might be slightly different from one agency to the next, it never hurts to follow or get started with a formula. To help, our team recently built an Agency Growth Calculator to help our clients get a more accurate view of how they can obtain success in the year ahead.  

The calculator was built with four primary parts of the new business funnel in mind:

Understand Your Growth Requirements

Here’s where it all starts!  Every KPI your agency should be monitoring throughout the year starts with your overall growth requirements.

While I dare to say this should be a no brainer, some agencies do get caught up in the hustle and find themselves struggling to clearly identify what numbers they need to hit in the year ahead of them. Here are some essential questions that you should ask yourself before moving onto any

• What’s your overall revenue goal?
  While there are many approaches for setting your revenue goal for the year, make sure it’s nailed down and clearly communicated prior to the new year so all parties can set operational KPIs off of that plan.
• How much have you historically grown organically?
  This will give you a good idea of the outbound effort you will need after organic growth.
• What is your typical churn rate (loss of clients)?
  You can only put so much on top of the funnel if you’re losing it all at the bottom. It’s important to clearly understand how much revenue is falling out each month.
• How big is this goal in comparison to new business amounts you’ve produced in years past?
  Knowing how much you’re planning to grow new business Y/Y is important, particularly so you can understand the resources required to achieve that growth.
• What’s your overall pitch win percentage and what’s the win percentage when they are inbound warm leads vs. cold opportunities you have generated?
  Be honest when answering this question; the higher pitch win percentage you have, the less outbound effort will be required. Keep in mind that warm opportunities close at a higher rate than cold opportunities.
• Have you ever generated a cold pitch opportunity before?
  Many agencies rely on referrals for 100% of their pitch opportunities and while those are warm and close at a higher rate, they are not reliable or sustainable. Evaluating this can give you a better understanding for how long it can take to produce cold opportunities in the future.

Warm New Business Opportunities

Next, it’s important to understand the amount of warm new business opportunities your agency brings in.

Warm new business opportunities typically come in the form of referrals, networking, and word of mouth. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t absolutely love these types of leads? These are seen by most agency principals as the most attractive type of lead as it’s free business that came directly to you.

To help generate more of these we recommend activating your core 100 network. We define this as the core network of decision-makers with budget or marketing decision power that you have a 1st-degree relationship with. By connecting with this group at least once per month, whether a simple hello or providing them with relevant thought leadership, the likelihood of getting more referral leads increases significantly.

Lastly, while warm opportunities are nice it’s important to not solely rely on them, and here’s why:

• They are unpredictable and you never know when your next project will be coming in
• You have no control of how your portfolio expands
• Losing one major client could drastically hurt your agency’s revenue

The next section will discuss how to couple with cold prospecting for ultimate success!

Cold Prospecting For New Opportunities

Since you can’t solely rely on warm opportunities, you must find a way to incorporate cold prospecting into your mix. Often new business directors will wonder how much outreach is enough? How many phone calls and emails will result in a qualified meeting?

We recommend tracking your success rate at each touchpoint. This will allow you to know if you are consistently reaching out to enough prospects in your outreach cadence.

Proper measurements typically include:

• How many people typically reply to a cold email or call?
• Of those replies, how many of them turn into a meeting?
• How many people move from the first meeting to a pitch opportunity?
• How many cold pitches your agency typically wins (win percentage)?

If you’ve never kept track of these numbers before, don’t worry! Just understand that for someone starting out, these numbers are typically a bit lower and grow with time.

Keep in mind that many agencies underestimate how many prospects they actually need in their pool and keeping that pipeline full is a full-time job in itself. Make sure you have the resources and bandwidth necessary to fuel the fire.

Estimating Your Costs: Time and Money

If you’re an agency CEO who is responsible for driving new business in addition to running the entire agency, be aware of what that double duty is costing you.

If you’re juggling too many tasks it’s likely that things are getting completed, but most of it is probably not being done exceptionally well. As an agency head, your time is best served strategically looking at ways to grow the overall business, not just through the lens of new business. If you’re worried about the time and investment it would take to hire someone in-house, there are alternatives like Catapult who can manage this function for you. There is huge potential in having someone solely focused on bringing in both cold and warm opportunities for your agency.  

Now that you have a better understanding of what goes into forecasting your new business goals, and the resources required to hit them…check out our Agency Growth Calculator to see how the numbers line up for your business!

What happens in your agency after the new business call ends?

For too many agencies, it goes something like this. Everyone is pleased with the call, how nice the prospect seems and leave hopeful for future possibilities. But, too many agency new business calls end without a clear idea of what was learned about the prospect or the company. What’s worse, often there’s no clear sense of the timeline, next steps or who’s responsible.

That’s why it makes sense to follow the same approach that legendary NFL coach Paul Brown did when he started reviewing game film to evaluate opponents and his team. Brown, who was the first to use film study, took the time to dig into each contest, understand what happened, and use the information to plan for the future.Your agency should do the same.

Poor follow-up is a chronic issue at many agencies. It creates stress, uncertainty, and disappointment for all involved. It’s an emotionally draining experience, whether you win the business or not. You know the firm could do better with a different approach.

Finding a Solution: The New Business Call Debrief

A post-call debrief is a structured conversation that revolves around the sharing and examining of information after a prospect new business call or meeting. The conversation enables a team to discuss what went well, identify opportunities for improvement, and define next steps.

It also brings a team together, strengthens relationships, and fosters team learning.

Coach Brown of the Cleveland Browns knew the importance of using information to strengthen his team. Brown climbed from high school coaching to become a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

His approach to film study created a blueprint for the modern NFL. He was the first coach to scout opponents through game films, leading to finesse and insight that led the Browns to three NFL championships and four AAFC titles.

Football coaches and players spend hours each week poring over film of a 60-minute game, yet in the business world, such a review of a much-shorter new business call is extremely rare. That’s unfortunate because studying the “game film” yields valuable insights.

In sales, the post-call debrief is an opportunity to “review the game film.” It helps us assess what we did well, what we did not so well and what areas we need to improve. Unfortunately, we are often so busy that we do not give the proper amount of time and attention to this debrief.

A football coach watches game film to gain insights on how the team can improve and how to prepare for the next game. As a salesperson, you should use the post-call debrief for the very same reason, gaining valuable insights into your improvement and preparation.

The Post-Call Debrief: Know What’s Been SAID

The post-call debrief is a four-step process – SAID – Schedule, Assess, Interpret, and Document. Each step is important and gets your team’s ideas and recommendations to the forefront.

Here’s a closer look.

Schedule

With a formal debrief process, your team will treat the time and topic more seriously. Making the team aware of the post-call process will help them gather useful insights during the call and come prepared.

You need to schedule 15 or 30 minutes on everyone’s calendars immediately after the new business call. If not possible, it should be scheduled within a few days. The details of the call will be freshest, and you can begin to take action.

Eventually, the more you debrief, the more effective and efficient the process becomes.

Assess

This stage calls for a candid evaluation of the call. The expectation, set by the most senior leaders in the room, should be for people to learn and that one’s position on the org chart is not relevant. If those leaders make themselves vulnerable and admit to errors, it permits everyone else to do so too.

Leaders need to set guidelines for the assessment. There should be no pointing of fingers. The results, both good and bad, should be considered team results, recognizing that everyone had a hand in creating them.

The U.S. Army refers to this approach as “leaving your stripes at the door.”

Be prepared with the questions you and the team need to answer to understand the call. Here are some examples:

• Did we accomplish the goal we outlined in our pre-call plan?
• What did we do right?
• What could we have done better?
• What should we do next time?

Interpret

The crux of the debrief is asking additional questions about each stage of the call and its outcomes. Ask all participants to come to the meeting with thoughts on the following two sets of questions:

Opportunities

• Does the prospect fit our ideal client profile?>/li>
• What are the compelling reasons for the prospect to make a change?
• What did we find out about our competition or the incumbent’s relationship with the prospect?
• What is the prospect’s sense of urgency to act?
• Do we understand their decision-making process?
• Is there truly an opportunity?

Options

• What is the next step with this prospect?
• What assets do we need to create or provide?
• What is the timeline?
• Who will own the process?

Document

It’s important to record the answers to those questions, especially any lessons learned, in a format that can be used for later reference and use. Using a template can be a helpful way to create uniformity across the agency and familiarity for employees.

Be sure to take notes and distribute them to all those present and other key stakeholders. Save those notes in your CRM.

It bears repeating that documentation needs to be done as soon as possible after the meeting or new business call. Memories fade fast! If the debrief is not happening immediately after the call, instruct each participant to scribble down or dictate their key impressions, thoughts, and answers to the questions above. It’ll save you hours of trying to remember details in the long run.

Conclusion

The biggest hurdle to debriefing is starting to do it, especially if you have a culture where this sort of open communication isn’t the norm. If you do so, your teams will be stronger, more confident and clear.

Using the SAID framework and a template for your post-call debriefs gives everyone a voice and has longer-term advantages, too. Analyzing the results of these calls gives your agency more data that can reveal patterns of behavior that can be changed. The “teachable moments” help everyone improve their approach to initial sales calls. Over time, everyone will get better and more new business will come your way.

Paul Brown made his teams champions by carefully analyzing what happened and using that information to play better. It’s a winning plan for agencies to adopt for their new business strategy.