Catapult New Business, the leading fractional new business development firm for agencies, today announced a new partnership with Wripple, a top on-demand talent platform where brands are matched in real-time with agencies and freelancers for project-based work. Using a combination of technology and a human touch, the platform offers greater speed, flexibility, and transparency to its clients and talent members.

Catapult and Wripple plan to connect more agencies with brands in need of their services using the on-demand talent platform. This platform allows agencies to create a profile within the portal to attract companies actively searching for a specialized partner.

Catapult has two decades of experience proactively winning new business for agencies, and has seen the current shift away from traditional AOR relationships and pitches take place slowly over the years.

“We see more and more agencies winning new business through non-traditional methods like project-based work, and it’s exciting to partner with Wripple, which frees agencies up to find these opportunities easily,” said Matt Chollet, President of Catapult New Business. “The basis for new business is and always will be relationship-driven, and what we’ve seen is that the traditional pitching and review process is not supportive of ongoing relationships with potential and current clients.”

Brands are leaning more toward project-based work compared to traditional AOR relationships and expensive pitching processes. Winning new clients using a project structure – from resourcing on the agency side to building a relationship with the client for a long term partnership – changes how agencies source new business and grow accounts. This is going to be especially true for those agencies that have dedicated resources primarily to these hefty pitching processes.

Brands are “ditching the pitch”

According to recent market research from firms including the 4As and Forrester, the cost to pitch is now upwards of $1M with brands footing most of the bill. This is not an ideal scenario for either party involved.

AdAge reported earlier this year that agency pitches brought in thirty-five percent less revenue as compared to the year prior. In other words, the new business pool shrunk almost in half after the pandemic.

This is not a surprising statistic knowing that Forrester released a report to brand marketing leaders in 2022 declaring that brands need to “ditch the pitch for paid projects instead”. The cost savings for brands to nix the pitch puts hundreds of thousands of dollars back in their pocket.

Small to mid-size agency advantage

The cost to pitch on average runs an agency $200,000, according to 4As. This cost pushes small to midsize agencies out of the process, and with more brands looking at project based work to bring on new partners, the opportunity for agencies to compete for business against major agency holding companies is rising.

“Wripple was founded by agency veterans who understand the challenges of the traditional pitch process. We built our platform to level the playing field and significantly reduce friction in the end-to-end BD process,” said Ray Samuels, Wripple’s COO. “Our partnership with Catapult provides agencies with an additional innovative new business channel that is free for agencies to access, surfaces only qualified opportunities with top brands, and greatly extends the reach of smaller agencies beyond their existing geo and networks.”

 

About Wripple

Wripple is a pioneering on-demand talent platform that transforms how companies build a modern marketing workforce with greater speed, flexibility, and efficiency. With advanced proprietary software, Wripple’s private talent marketplace matches brands with vetted freelancers and small to mid-sized agencies, in real time. Clients can hire individual experts for short and long-term staffing needs as well as cross-discipline teams for deliverable-based projects. Wripple’s freelancer management software handles operations (contracting, compliance, payment) and enables companies to manage ongoing freelancer relationships all in one place. Learn how Wripple is reshaping the future of work at www.wripple.com.

 

About Catapult New Business

With over $1 Billion in new business opportunities uncovered, Catapult has been successfully growing agencies and delivering exceptional results for our clients for 20 years and counting. We provide the market with an outsourced solution for agency growth. Our team of expert advisors works alongside you to implement a results-driven sales and marketing strategy that identifies and generates consistent new revenue.  Learn how Catapult proactively win new business for its clients at www.catapultnewbusiness.com.

Catapult’s mission is to identify, engage and help win new business with the brands that can most benefit from your solutions. Marketing agencies and AdTech companies partner with us when they’ve made the commitment to grow and need a proven, viable and scalable way to do so – with a resource that is focused on proactively creating new opportunities on your behalf. 

Reactive new business teams are always one step behind. Simply responding to a situation – whether an inbound inquiry or a Request for Proposal – without a strategy to arrive at a desired outcome will never propel the business forward. If the team is only prepared to respond to situations rather than create their own opportunities, they may get easily discouraged when a prospect takes too long to respond or make a decision. 

Even worse, waiting for the perfect client can lead to wasted time and effort by responding to prospects who aren’t a great fit. When taking a proactive approach, the team is able to guide the pace of the sales process and better serve the potential client. This also allows the team to ensure they’re meeting with the decision makers who care about the outcomes from the work, resulting in more closed-won business. 

Unlike other lead generation and business development companies, Catapult is backed by two decades of experience serving the entire spectrum of the marketing communications industry from advertising, media, branding, and digital to market research and technology agencies. 

Why Catapult?

Catapult is powered by the most recognized sales intelligence platform in the industry, Winmo. And partners with the premier agency search consulting firm, AAR Partners. These in-house teams of ours provide reliable, accurate sales intelligence and play a pivotal role in our ability to deliver qualified opportunities for our clients

When working with clients we take a prescriptive approach to launching a successful sales development program. Catapult ensures in the first 90-days of activating your new business sales team, you have:

• Established a resourcing plan to prioritize a proactive sales approach.
• Activated a Go-To Market strategy with competitive insights and positioning. 
• Launched a fully operational business development tech stack. 
• Opened access to sales intelligence through Winmo, which is now used to create targeted prospect lists, track new business triggers, and more.

The benefit of being in-market with messaging within 90-days is that you’ll discover your Right to Win faster. A place where your positioning perfectly matches the needs of your target market and you’ll win more business. 

Having takeaways like this to steer the business development team in the right direction is crucial, especially if timing is a factor in the GTM. 

Are you ready to take the next step in catapulting your sales pipeline growth? Contact Us. 

There’s a sea of software vendors to choose from, but to get started, there are five core types needed in a new business tech stack no matter the size of the team.

Sales Engagement

A sales engagement platform is a tool that allows the new business team to engage directly with prospects and keep them engaged. As any business development professional will tell you, prospects can be slippery creatures – fully engaged in one moment and complete radio silence the next. 

A tool that helps manage this supports reconnecting and meeting prospects wherever they are in their buyer journey. The tool should be able to seamlessly re-engage and respond to prospects through coordinated outbound activities like email, LinkedIn, phone calls and even web chat. Many are able to automate aspects of this outreach too. The advantage of having one in your tech stack is that sales engagement tools will streamline your sales process, making the team more effective.

Marketing Engagement

More commonly referred to as marketing automation, a marketing engagement tool enables inbound lead generation and supports proactive sales outreach. The core feature of a marketing automation tool should include email marketing, social media marketing, and managing ads. 

When evaluating different technologies keep in mind some platforms are great at activating marketing content through content management and even campaign management features. Having one in your tech stack will allow the team to manage and nurture leads through their buying journey. Tracking engagement through emails, website visits, ads, content downloads and social media gives you a more holistic view into the prospect’s business needs and what led them to a sales conversation.

Research Insights

Getting critical insights and updates about your industry is important. The new business development team needs to make decisions that are informed and measured, and having this information will be able to guide them down the right path. There are several platforms that can provide insights, but first, find out what would be most useful for the team. These are the types of insights most new business development teams use: 

• Advertising Spend 
• Advertising Placements 
• Buyer Intent Demographics 
• Industry News Personnel
• CMO Shifts 

Contact Data

Not all data is created equal, and it can be hard to find contact and company information that is accurate. When evaluating these tools find out the method they are sourcing their data from and whether this will give you the right types of contacts. 

Some teams choose to take an account-based approach, and that will affect which contact data provider you choose. For Account Based Selling (ABS), 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. 

On the flip side, if you’re taking a more traditional approach, you will want to identify as many contacts in your Right to Win zone as possible. Having a data provider with a large volume of accurate contact data is a must. 

Have you considered Winmo to power your sales pipeline? Marketing agencies, ad tech companies, and media and sponsorship sales teams partner with Catapult when they’ve made the commitment to grow and need a proven, viable and scalable way to do so – with a resource that is focused on proactively creating new opportunities on your behalf.

CRM

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform will serve as the team’s one source of truth. When all the technology is connected to the CRM, nothing falls through the cracks and all touchpoints are tracked here. 

Many business development teams agree to a process around lead management inside of a CRM, using features like workflows and lead routing, customizable dashboards and reports, and updating contact data based on the sales qualification and closing process. A good CRM will fit your team’s needs, but should at minimum allow for lead routing, lead tracking and reporting. 

The framework of a successful program is built on industry-leading technology and accurate contacts to communicate with. Catapult is powered by Winmo to help win more business on your behalf. All clients receive a custom technology stack to enable their team to catapult their sales pipeline. Ready to get started? Contact Us. 

Once there is a resource plan in place, creating a strategy to activate the new business development plan is crucial. Building out a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy will guide the team to success and reduce common pitfalls like misuse of budget and missed revenue or profit projections. So what is a GTM? It’s a comprehensive action plan that outlines the approach and steps to attract and win new clients, enter new markets, increase market share, and achieve projected sales targets and revenue. Five questions that should get answered in a GTM include:

1. What are we hoping to achieve? 
2. How will we track progress? 
3. What does success look like? 
4. Who are we selling to and why? 
5. What tools do we need to enable the team? 

Thinking through these “why” and “how” questions will force the team to delve into the details. A GTM will clearly define positioning, analyze the competitive landscape, and establish an initial offering that will gain credibility with the marketers you intend to sell to.

Right to Win 

Starting with the end in mind, bringing new clients onboard that the business is well suited to solve problems for is the main goal when designing a new business development strategy. 

Imagine you’re at a business conference. You get into an elevator along with two senior marketing decision-makers from a company that you would love to do business with. You overhear their conversation about one challenge that they are experiencing and you happen to be uniquely positioned to solve it. What is their challenge? And try to keep this answer to less than 50 words. This will force you to zoom in on your Right to Win. 

Your Right to Win should be firmly rooted in your ability to articulate value to the types of prospects you want to pursue. Questions around the problems you’re capable of solving or how you structure your fees all play a role into the type of clients the business is positioned to win. Once this is outlined, the most important question to end on is whether these answers will hold up to a prospect that doesn’t know you. 

Gathering enough information to tell a compelling story and arm this newly established business development team will be the first step before creating a list of dream accounts you’d love to work with.

Positioning 

The reality is, your position cannot speak to all people. It needs to be narrow enough to demonstrate your expertise, while also being broad enough to gain market share. Examples of narrow, yet broad positioning revolve around:

• Service/Capabilities
• Category Expertise
• Demographic Solutions
• Intellectual Property

Competitive Landscape 

Everyone has competition. It’s important to keep track of where your clients are going when they leave or why you lose a deal. It’s painful, but it will allow you to better understand your position and why you win the type of work you do. 

In a GTM, you’ll want to look at your competitors’ positioning and what you’re offering that they can’t. When comparing, think about who they are trying to sell to and why, and what kind of technology is used to enable their business development efforts. An effective competitive analysis should have two primary outcomes:

1. What are the market barriers?
2. What are the market opportunities?

Initial Offer 

The initial offer is a compelling insight that can convey to a prospect that you understand their business and can provide solutions to the challenges they are evaluating. The initial offer is most compelling when you raise awareness to a business need or opportunity. Examples of this include proprietary, vertical specific research, a creative lab intended to provide a brainstorm around a specific need, or presentations that frame their problem and offer guidance. 

With a GTM strategy to guide your team, you will be able to put them into action.

Ready to catapult your sales pipeline? Contact Us.

Marketing team’s are strapped with projects and plans from digital transformations to staying ahead of the evolving marketing shifts, and on top of this do their day-job. There’s more than $100 Billion in marketing spend every year. That’s a lot of money and not a lot of time. 

After a full day of being asked to prepare, present, and solve business problems, corporate and brand marketers rely heavily on partners coming to them with solutions. Awarding business to proactive and thoughtful partners is a marketing professional’s favorite part of their job. So how do you get in front of them in a way that feels authentic?

The activities needed to attract, attain, nurture and win new clients can vary, but every successful new business development plan has one thing in common: It takes a team to make it work. A team based model to business development focuses everyone’s activities around increasing the visibility of your expertise. The first step in resourcing a new business development plan is identifying who will be responsible for the following types of activities: 

Research

Which markets should you pursue? Who should you reach out to? And when would it be most effective? These are the types of questions researchers should be finding answers to. This team member will support prospecting efforts and provide critical information to others when a qualified business lead wants a meeting. 

Strategize

Analyzing where you have a Right to Win and what gives you a competitive advantage whether through positioning or your offer is key. Even better, document your strategy and have it vetted by team members with experience in Go-To Market strategy. 

Promote

With a digital-first economy, it is important to have someone with specific digital expertise such as search engine optimization, website management, marketing automation and analytics to support inbound marketing activities. Depending on your business, this activity can play a crucial role or it could play a supportive role in the overall program. 

Enable

Creating a sales process that uses a tech stack, content, email assets, call scripts, and capabilities deck will enable your new business team to produce qualified business opportunities. These activities fuel sales and help prospects easily understand what you can do for them.

Expertise

Becoming a member or sponsoring organizations where other subject matter experts in your domain share ideas is a first step toward this. Then, you can move onto submitting work for awards, pitching subject matter experts for interviews or byline articles, and participating in speaking opportunities. All of which will help validate your credibility as an expert. 

Write

Compelling content that demonstrates expertise will get used by almost every team member and will most definitely have reached your prospects before anyone else has. This activity is the fuel for enabling sales and promoting your business to prospects. 

Guide

New business development is a journey, and on every great journey you have a guide. Having a clear understanding of the strategy and the ability to navigate day-to-day organizational challenges will be important to steer the team in the right direction. 

Respond

The MVP on the team plays this role. Closers will typically excel in presentations, thinking on the fly and have deep knowledge of your business. A team approach to closing business can be very successful, especially when paired with a networker and subject matter expert.

Win

Taking a team approach to close a deal is a winning strategy. Creating a capabilities deck and customizing it to the prospective client’s problems will get you into negotiations.

Network

This is an age-old activity required for new business development. In-person or on social channels, this is something that will help expand your circle of influence.

Connect

Creating new opportunities for the business proactively requires dedication. Prospecting, qualifying potential clients, preparing the closing team to win, and facilitating conversations with the team in order to keep everyone on task – growing the business – takes dedication to drive everyone toward that winning opportunity. 

When you’re building out a resource plan for outbound sales efforts, it’s important to focus on the activities around researching, strategizing, and connecting. Hiring a 3-5 person team with these skill sets will open doors for you proactively. 

Ready to catapult your sales pipeline? Contact Us.

In the beginning of 2022, brands struggled with their supply chains and what was thought (at the time) to be temporary inflationary pressures stemming from the war in Ukraine. Now we know that inflation and consumer spending changes will continue to be a challenge going into 2023. So where will the opportunities shift in an economic slowdown?

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands are not slowing down in terms of growth, but inflation and consumer spending shifts are still major challenges. This combination leaves the industry primed for opportunities to double down on their marketing efforts by leveraging digital, branding, packaging and creative, media and more.

Fear of Downtrading

While headlines have been mixed on where the economy is headed, the softness in the market that people feel is starting to become etched in hard numbers. Noteworthy CPG retailers like Target, Walmart, and Amazon missed their earnings. The fear earlier in the year that consumer behavior would be impacted by inflation is starting to take shape and show in financial reports.

CPG giants like Nestle, Unilever, and Campbells all experienced market share losses to private label brands in consumer staple categories. Strategies to protect against trading down were all prevalent in their reports. Price increases have been steady all year and most reported an additional 5% increase in the last quarter. Balancing price increases with the decline in spending is a top initiative for 2023.

CPG Opportunities

CPG is gaining back most of the lost margins through eCommerce. Digital sales continued to rise another 5% in Q3 bringing the YTD increase to just shy of 40%. This is partially fueled by the consumer behavior shift from in-person shopping to online, due to COVID. This convenience is one that many consumers still enjoy even with the upcharge.

Of all the categories to go after during an expected recession, CPG has the best outlook during the downturn and has fared better than many sectors. While most CPG companies are still down for the year, they continue to see organic growth gains and are not experiencing the declines that other sectors are seeing.

Key Takeaways

As inflation is here to stay, CPG brands are looking to make a two-pronged approach: Increase prices to adjust overall margin rates while deterring consumers from downtrading.

Increasing prices comes with a risk, and it’s that coveted phrase investors are asking every CPG brand about: Downtrading. Brand equity becomes highly important because brands won’t be able to compete on pricing given inflation challenges. Because of this, marketing and innovation will continue to see investments, skewing toward heavier investments in digital strategies and campaigns as brands aim to increase brand equity or premiumize their brands to offset the consumer perception of increased pricing. If the economy does dip into a recession, then brands will need to combat downtrading even with steady overall growth to their portfolios.

Find more opportunities with CPG brands. Download the full report. 

There are two revenue streams that sales and growth leaders build out: reactive and proactive. When creating a revenue generating process for your business, these two approaches should be monitored.

Response-Based Activities: This type of activity includes inbound inquiries and RFP responses. If RFPs are part of the team’s Go-To Market (GTM) plans, having an update on each stage of the RFP process will help the team win more frequently. Three main points to monitor regularly around RFPs include:

• New RFPs and which ones to pursue. 
• Deadlines and due dates throughout the RFP process. 
• RFP win rate dashboard with budgets allocated to each submission. 

Inbound is likely part of the GTM too, and many teams will have two processes – one for those who want to talk to sales and one for those who are not ready for sales. The three main points to monitor for Inbound leads include: 

• Response time to new sales inquiries. 
• Outcomes from initial conversations from inbound leads. 
• Engagement from leads that are still being nurtured by marketing. 

These response-based activities are considered reactive and will only take your sales pipeline so far. It’s often the case that simply responding to a situation – whether an inbound inquiry or a Request for Proposal – without a strategy to arrive at a desired outcome won’t grow the business. 

Waiting for the perfect client can lead to wasted time and effort by responding to prospects who aren’t a great fit. When taking a proactive approach, your team is able to guide the pace of the sales process and better serve the potential client. This also allows the team to ensure they’re meeting with the decision makers who care about the outcomes from the work, resulting in more closed-won business.

What is proactive selling?

Proactive selling is a sales approach that allows a sales rep to take control of the sales process instead of waiting on a lead to take some kind of action. This puts the sales person in a position to grow their sales pipeline instead of waiting for the right client to show up.

When engaging with potential customers, taking a proactive approach can help build trust and close more deals. Proactive strategies will require the sales rep to anticipate customer needs, show empathy, and solve problems before the customer is aware of them.

Proactive Approach: A proactive approach to new business development will look different from the response-based approach. The team members responsible for this should actively seek out new prospecting lists, adjust messaging based on who they’re interacting with, and focus on the responses received from their efforts. The four main points to monitor for outbound leads include:

• Prospecting lists and attributes of those prospects. 
• Sales cadences, including messaging for emails, social, phone calls and voicemail. 
• Messaging and content to get prospects engaged. 
• Response rates and engagement to outbound outreach. 

When is the right time to find a partner for proactive selling?

Taking a proactive approach to selling requires a dedicated resource with surrounding support. When your team does not have the ability to dedicate resources to this, partnering with Catapult can be a great option. Outsourcing proactive selling can aid your team and ensure success from all new business approaches. It supplements already over-taxed in-house growth leaders and allows your team to stay focused on its core strengths.

Ready to catapult your sales pipeline? Contact Us.

Time kills deals.

Every new business person feels this statement in their bones. They all walk a fine line of pushing to get a new client on board while remaining patient. Most hate to be considered pushy. Given the current state and trajectory of the market though, prospects are going to ask for and take extra time to think and decide before taking action on signing a new agency. In fact, what we have seen in the past and are already seeing this summer is a change in how buyers make decisions.

Slower decision-making does not need to slow down your sales process

With budgets being reconsidered, revenue projections changing, and more scrutiny around every dollar spent, it’s no surprise why the buying process for services is slowing down. In a recent study by Forrester, they found that 43% of business buyers said they would “reduce the number of suppliers they use.” This stat should give any salesperson a bit of a pause, both anxiety over churn and excitement for opportunity. So what does this mean for you and your agency?

It means that you must be thoughtful in engaging prospects and clients. The process will take longer, so you need to be prepared for that mentally and with your own processes. It also means that you can’t just rely on one key touchpoint or interaction. You need to create a process and system that will keep you in front of your prospects, even if they aren’t ready to buy today.

Supporting their buying journey

The best way to do this is by helping and providing value in every interaction. Whether that’s sending them an article you think they would find interesting, or sending them a point-of-view (POV) on an industry trend, make sure that your interactions are about them and not just about trying to make a sale.

New Business people also need to be ready to ask the tough questions about their prospect’s buying process. It can sometimes be an awkward conversation, but the way people have signed an agreement in the past with a small group or single decision-maker is probably not going to be the case in the current market.

Here are some questions all should ask before you get too deep in the sales process:

• How has your buying process changed over the last 60 days?
• Who should we include in a review of these proposals?
• Is there any customization I can provide on your Statement of Work (SOW) or Proposal that will better help you sell this to your team?

The key behind these questions is to make sure you are coming along the same side of the table as them to help them better understand, represent, and sell your service to the rest of their team. You don’t want to give the impression that you are bypassing them as the decision-maker. Instead, you want to help them come prepared to sell this to the collective buying group. By being prepared for a longer sales process, better understanding their decision process, and by being helpful and consultative at every interaction, you will be in a much better position to win new business…even in an uncertain market.

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.