You’ve grown through business relationships and referrals, but they’re just not enough anymore.
Networking, referrals and repeat business opportunities are great, and it might even be how you got where you are today. But there are two distinct areas of concern in solely going down this new business path.
They are not consistent.
You want consistency. You need it. You will sleep better when you look at your forecast and see engaged prospects throughout each stage of your pipeline. We support our clients in generating engaged conversations with targeted decision-makers and developing a healthy pipeline of qualified new business opportunities that leads to growth for your agency.
They are often not aligned with your capability.
That project that you’re currently pulling your hair out over, and everyone is bending over backwards for – that’s likely from a referral client that you “won.” What happened was there is no actual pipeline, so you had to take them on. Now you’re trying to figure out how to service them. Or, trying to figure out how you convinced yourself in the first place that this was going to be worth it.
Our recommendation is do what you’re good at, and what you started the agency to do in the first place. Yes, we all have to bend to meet the needs of our clients but don’t try to become a hippo for a client if you’re really an elephant.
At Catapult, we see these two hurdles all too often; agencies not having a plan outside of referrals/word of mouth, or being forced to bring on accounts that aren’t best fit by the agency due to poor pipelines.