Is your agency completely overwhelmed with an insanely busy month? One where your team has two pitches coming up, and the agency’s biggest client wants a new campaign in 4 weeks? Not to mention the 6-year client that’s seen steady growth, but the account is in review, and the brand lead is your sister-in-law’s mother. You think the review is a slam dunk, but you are still a little nervous about it. Then the biz dev team walks in and has a request. He needs assets, case studies, landing pages, and revisions to the website that were created when the agency was looking to be acquired which is now most certainly not geared for business development.  That’s a frustrating ask from Biz Dev when you’re this busy, but please…

But don’t be mad at your biz dev team.

It’s easy to shove business development needs to the back burner with everything else on your plate. You think, “Why can’t they continue to use the case studies they have? Sure they’re a little “dated”, but they’re in the category.” Instead of looking at it from their angle, or from your own concern over more work, think through the lens of a prospect… 

A prospect has 40 agencies a week all claiming to be experts in their space and can help grow their business. And all of them say they understand the prospect’s audience and are passionate (or nimble, collaborative, creative, agile, innovative – whatever the overused word might be). The 2-year-old case study you sent them shows big numbers, but 2 years is ancient history in their business. This has also never been more true than now in the time of COVID. A prospect’s problem looks different today than it did two years ago. Does your team understand it? Has your agency solved it before? Prove it. Because they have 39 other business development people claiming their agency is the perfect one for them.  

So how do you handle an insanely busy month?

We know reviews are stressful. They take time and energy, which means that creating more new biz tools for your team can seem like an extra burden. Remember though, as you are defending your agency against a shortlist of other agencies with a client who has experienced successful growth with you over the last 6 years, your business development team is tasked with getting your agency an introduction into a brand that doesn’t know you at all and is up against 40 other agencies who are all “perfect” for their business. Both are unique challenges, but in order to continue to get into pitch situations, that new biz team of yours needs to continuously beat 39 other competitors, day in and day out.  They can’t go into battle with old weapons, or in their case, old case studies.  No matter how busy you get, it’s important to always allocate the right resources to continued growth for your agency, even when you feel overwhelmed with current clients.

So, don’t get mad at business development when they tell you they need that updated case study (or a landing page, or a GIF…), because they are doing the job that very few want. Think of them through the words of Jack Nicholson from “A Few Good Men”:

“You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.” 

And as you get busy with those assets, it might also be a good idea to be extra nice to your sister-in-law.

 

 

 

 

If you were a baseball manager, would you send your best hitter to the plate without a bat? Everyday I see more and more agency principal doing just that thing. They hire a Business Development Director and then send them to bat without any of the tools or strategies needed to actually win and develop new business.

If you’re an agency principal and hiring a new Business Development Director is in your near future, make sure you commit to support them in the following ways before you bring them on board:

1. Commit to financial investments beyond their salary. If you’re going to invest in new business than do it, for real. Hiring a person and then giving them zero dollars to invest in technology, data, process, or content is setting them up with failure at the very beginning. Yes, they should be able to use the phone and email, but expecting them to be able to do it at scale without a CRM, Marketing Automation, complete website, etc, is essentially tying their hands behind their back at the very beginning. This means that when you are committing to new business, you are committing to the financial cost of not only the human capital, but also the technology the profession demands.
2. Commit to have a clear and differentiated agency promise. If you as the principle of an agency can’t describe your agency, what you do, and what makes you different in 1 sentence, then how can you expect your new hire to? Take the time to go through a positioning exercise with a professional and sculpt a unique position in your niche in order to help your new hire not only communicate to new prospects, but also find them easier. The clearer your position is the easier it is to drill down to exactly the types of prospects we should be chasing and ensure that we can better communicate with them.
3. Commit to Always Be Creating. ABC. If you want them to Always Be Closing, you better Always Be Creating. This means they need thought leadership in the form of blog posts, white papers, or webinars. If you do amazing work for a client, actually track and get results so that the team can build a case study to share. There is nothing worse than having a great conversation with a prospect, the prospect is intrigued and asks the new business person for an example to see, and they have nothing tangible to put in front of them.
4. Commit to set realistic timelines and goals. History comes into play here. If your agency has literally never won a piece of business from cold outreach, don’t give your new Business Development hire a three month runway to get a deal in. Set realistic KPIs based off of activity, engagement, proposals, and revenue. We all know that Business Development in our world takes time, so setting meaningful KPIs on each of those four areas allows them the comfort to know what is expected, shows your commitment to them for the long term, while also holding them accountable to performing the proper activities in order to build momentum. Transparency breeds positive interactions between sales and management.
5. Commit to having an open mind. As an agency principal sometimes it is very difficult to defer to a new hire. A new hire often comes in with all sorts of ideas on positioning or process that may very greatly from how you initially set up the shop. My advice is that you don’t have to change anything just because they say you should, but you should be open to them being critical of how we have been positioned in the past and open to at least a discussion of how a prospect may view you. Their outside insight may be just the thing that helps you break into the minds of new prospects.

If you set out at the very beginning of the hiring process with these commitments in mind, you should have two very positive outcomes. First, the hiring process should be easier, because your position will be more attractive to any experienced new business pro. Second, that new hire will actually have every tool, process, and strategy needed in order to succeed. At this point, you have done your part, now they just need to hit the home run.