Over the past many years Sanders Consulting Group has developed important new thinking on how agencies and PR firms really grow. This new thinking is concentrated in five critical processes:

Bullseye! There are no gray areas. New business plans must be specific, actionable and written down.

THE OUTREACH PROCESS: The building of long-term relationships with a large number of prospects is now seen as the primary focus for any new business program. The ever changing social technology makes this more of an opportunity than ever.

THE OPPORTUNITY PROCESS: The success of any agency new business program can be measured in opportunities. How many visits with prospects does an agency get? How many request presentations does the agency receive? The process for developing these opportunities is a critical growth skill.

THE CHEMISTRY PROCESS: the importance of chemistry is now understood more than ever as agencies are selected primarily because “they better meet our expectations.” That’s a client’s way of describing chemistry. And the process of controlling chemistry is a vital growth skill.

THE FIRST MEETING PROCESS: The importance of the face-to-face meeting between senior-level managers on the agency side with senior-level executives from the prospect’s firm cannot be overemphasized and where the new business win really occurs. Agency search consultants report that most senior agency executives don’t understand the process and therefore fumble the opportunity.

THE FAST CLOSE PROCESS: Agencies with the skill to fast close accounts within 48-hours in some cases and 7-days in other cases are missing numerous growth opportunities. The only reason so many clients end up using formal reviews to select agencies and PR firms is that one or maybe two agencies missed the chance to close the account early because that firm had no fast close process in place and could not read the signals being flashed.

New business is a game of processes. And without proper new business processes, an agency doesn’t grow.

Final Note: If you do find your firm involved in a formal review, a pitch you really want to win, please make sure you understand the 12 keys to winning any presentation. And check out these other links to help you win:

• Winning The Pitch: Focus on Rehearsals
• Pitch Training: Or How To Win Your Next New Business Presentation
• Ad Agency: 6 Winning Presentation Reminders
• The Perfect Presentation?
• Agency Likeability: The Hidden Side of New Business
• Winning New Business: The Defining Moment
• Top 10 Mistakes That KILL New Business Presentations
• New Business: The Winning Pitch

The way to learn these important processes is to call Sanders Consulting Group.

A great relationship starts with a gentle touch.

Outreach is vital for new business, building awareness about your firm, and an important way to express your interest in your prospect’s industry. Most agencies seem to be making the same mistakes, over and over, when it comes to doing outreach. Here is a quick overview of the five most common mistakes we see, along with a check list, to help you fix your new business outreach.

1. No Plan: Failure to plan is a plan for failure. And so it goes with outreach, which seems to be a haphazard effort at most marketing firms. Establish a clear plan, roles and responsibilities, and resources for effective outreach. An effective outreach plan must outline target companies, set up a calendar, create a rolling effort that builds awareness and relationships, and tracks the number of leads coming in. It’s our belief that every prospect on your list should be “touched” at least 19 times over the course of a year. If a mailer goes out, call behind it. Twice if you don’t get through the first time. Invite them to an event. Send a holiday card, a note on something your firm did for a benefit. A friendly reminder about an industry conference. And more. Then, most importantly, stick with it!
2. Too Much Interference: The number one issue we see in most marketing firms is allowing other work to interfere with regular outreach. Outreach is the single most important activity your firm can do to generate leads. And leads drive new business. If you allow day-to-day client work to interrupt your outreach then you have to look into firing your agency’s marketing firm. Wait… your firm doesn’t have a marketing firm? Exactly. Treat your firm is your number one client and don’t let other work get in the way. Or find a way to fire yourself.
3. No Nudging: It’s worthless to work hard on building awareness and establishing relationships if no one is going to follow up on a regular basis by “nudging.” Nudging is what friends do for friends, sending your warm prospects a regular stream of interesting articles, notes, birthday wishes and more. This is much more impactful than sales calls or mailings, less expensive, and more personal. Does your agency do “nudging?” What impact would this have if a competitive agency was nudging your clients?
4. Have a Attitude: Outreach without a good new business attitude is bad business. Most agencies have a negative feeling about having to do outreach. They continually tell themselves that “we too smart, too good, to have to stoop to this sort of activity.” Agencies who think positively focus on the great things their brand can do for prospects. They have a good new business attitude. Consequently, they feel powerful. They feel optimistic. They rise to challenges. Powerful thoughts make you feel potent and help you act to influence the situation for the better to make new business happen.
5. Not Picking Up The Phone: Too many firms rely on social media, email, and perhaps a little direct mail. They never ever pick up the phone and call. And if they do call, they have no idea about what to do, how to leave a message, or what questions to ask should they get someone on the line. So after a few aborted attempts, they just quit. We strongly suggest you reach out behind every touch, and never-ever leave your number, or ask for a call back. That’s sales, and very annoying. Just leave a friendly message, breezy, checking in, no need to call back. Outreach is about building relationships. Know exactly why you’re calling, what you expect to get out of the call, and have a great list of questions – just in case.

Here’s What To Check If You Aren’t Getting Enough Leads:
•        Outreach system set up? Good Plan?
•        Good list of prospects?
•        Regular outreach going out?
•        Call twice behind every touch?
•        Working hard?
•        Establishing relationships?
•        Nudging?
•        Know how to go on a first visit? Interview?
•        Brand clearly established in mailings and follow-up?

The result: A constant stream of leads into the agency.

Final Note: The best way to make a bright future for your agency is to help create it with your new business outreach. We call this Sparking. If you aren’t generating many leads, at least one a week, then chances are you aren’t doing outreach. A few links to help:

• Tap into the client churn. The New Business Pipeline
• A critical skill is building relationships. 5 Strategies To Build Relationships
• There is an art to asking questions. Why Prospects Don’t Tell You the Truth
• Winning more new business means more leads. Generating Leads Check List.
• The hidden side of new business. Winning With Chemistry
• Target recent changes or appointments. Change Marketing Is A Powerful Place To Find Prospects
• Check out our training agenda: New Business Can Be Very Profitable To An Agency

This memo outlines the steps needed to win and details what will be accomplished with Sanders Consulting Group’s first visit to your firm.

The Keys to Winning:

Two ways to fail in a pitch: not starting early enough, and not sticking your neck out far enough.

1) A strong desire to win. 2) Start early. 3) Believe in the process. 4) Set the plan early. 5) Execute the plan.

Winning The Next Stage:

Take a step back and look in the mirror!

When you’re getting your hair done and it looks like your hairdresser hasn’t tended to her own hair in weeks, it makes you a bit nervous. You might assume she’s not good at her job, right? The same goes for the business world. If the company you are discussing working with has a site that is spammy, lacks credibility, or simply doesn’t look good, you begin to question the quality of the company’s work.

So, let’s dive even deeper into that and take a look at ad agencies. Their purpose is to help share their client’s message in a specific form that’s appealing to the consumer. And for the most part, ad agencies produce really great things for their clients. But do agencies ever take a moment to look in the mirror? For the most part, they don’t. But that’s not because they don’t want to or don’t understand the importance of it — it comes down to a time issue.

As an agency, you’ve got a very specific set of skills, and you’re really good at those skills. It shows in the work you produce for your clients. But it’s also important to understand how prospective clients and the industry views you. You need to show off those skills. And that’s where most agencies fail. They lack the time to focus.

That’s when you need to start looking for a partner who understands your mission, your agency’s voice, and culture. This person or company can help portray your expertise to the outside world.

We’ve heard a lot of mentions of the term “thought leadership,” but how can an agency truly become a credible, trusted thought leader in its industry? It’s crucial to know what thought leadership is and where it can get you. It’s not a pitch about your company or service offerings — it’s about sharing expert content with a specific audience and providing value for the reader.

So what do I need to know to be successful in the realm of content marketing and thought leadership? Understand what questions your customers are asking, answer them in your content, and make sure it’s relatable to the reader. Understand that you’re leading and influencing a conversation. You’re starting a dialogue with your customers in a natural, organic format. As an agency, sharing your expertise will allow you to identify a problem and showcase a solution.

Natalie Stezovsky, Vice President, Digital Talent Agents

Look for outside resources that understand the mission, vision, and voice of your agency to help you create that content. Let your internal team focus on what they do best, but partner with a resource that focuses on this for you — one that has an outside perspective. It won’t be biased, and it will serve as an editorial checkpoint, ensuring that you’re sharing true expert content that isn’t promotional. Because let’s be honest: Neither your readers nor the publications are going to find that content interesting.

Though leadership is just part of public relations, and it shouldn’t be your entire strategy. For agencies, this is a perfect avenue to continuously showcase the company in a positive light and influence a conversation.

Understanding the value of sharing your expertise — and the values of your agency — is going to pay off. It’s going to bring credibility to your agency and work.

Every business aspires to have a constant flow of new business and steady growth. So, take a step back and look in the mirror.

Anita provides 3 very simple, yet often forgotten ways that client’s can help their marketing firm be more creative and provide better ideas. She expands on these 3 critical points in her post:

1. Spend more TIME working on the brief
2. Spend more TIME briefing the agency
3. Give the agency more TIME

I suggest you go and read the whole thing. Anita goes on to close with this thought:

See a pattern emerging? Yes in this time poor world we live in, I am merely suggesting we give everything a bit more time.

Time = thought. Thought = better briefs. Better briefs = better work.

Have a think. It’s worth your time.

This is great and important points from a client perspective, but what about the marketing firm? Here at Sanders Consulting we’ve discussed the concept of time many times. How speed can help you win new business, how you can use time to improve your client service, perhaps rethink your assets, and it just so happens that we recently wrote an article in the Agency Post about how many marketing firms squander time with poor processes, lack of structure, and wasted effort. A copy of it is below the fold.  Read it and as Anita suggest, “have a think” and see about transforming your firm into a true creative powerhouse.

Are Ad Agencies Really Creative?

What percentage of time inside any marketing firm is really spent on being creative? I’ve done my share of operational consulting, and it always shocks me when I study how a so-called “creative agency” spends its time. When broken out by function, often less than 20 percent of staff time is creative. If you further divide the chunks of time into what we call value added and non-value added, the problem is even worse. Often half of the creative time is spent on non-value-added time (revisions, redos, admin, non-billable meetings and more). Most agency processes add up to more than 100 steps, with 50 percent wasted effort and unaccounted lost revenue. When you add it all up, most creative shops spend around 10 percent of their time on actually being creative. The agency is spending way too much time fighting fires and reacting to past issues.

We all have to fight fires, but clients really want us to spend more time being creative — developing business-building ideas, new strategies and new ideas. Think about it: If you have more time to be creative, you can generate new ideas and solve problems before they happen.

Think about your agency. Is it doing the right things in a timely fashion? Is your firm being as effective as it can be?

Stop. Do Not Pass Go!

It all starts at the top. Over time, changes in leadership, client demands, new staff and additional services continue to blur the organizational strategy of most agencies. New structures have to be established to serve the agency and its creative product — not just the client. In other words, what is the new mission for your agency, and what can you do about it? How can a creative agency free up more resources to be, well, more creative?

Develop a Strategic Process to Initiate Work

Most issues that crop up in any project can be traced to missing or incomplete data at the start. Every project, job or assignment must have a simple kick-off process. What staff resources are required? Are there opportunities for more business? Integrated marketing? Who is responsible for what? How can all the necessary information be collected and distributed within the agency? Following a clear project start process helps everyone downstream.

Develop a Common Approach to Execute Work

Gain more buy-in and consistency across internal operations by establishing a common approach to executing work. Create roles and responsibilities for quality control so that all staff understands what they need to do. Publish and communicate this. Differentiate work by type, and develop priorities and processes that reflect the nature of the work. Categorize and develop a process for each of the different project types so that, taken together, they focus agency resources where they can do the most good and allow the agency to make money on even the smallest of projects.

Evaluate, Motivate and Reward

Develop performance standards to measure and monitor the success of every project that is linked to your agency brand. If your brand stresses great creative, just how are you measuring that? Performance measures should be tied to creative ideas, smooth execution and effective use of time. Reward your staff for agency success by motivating people for the right reasons: for promoting and selling integrated work, on-time and on-budget projects, great creative, etc. There should be a direct path from your goals and mission to how you measure and reward each staff member.

Action Plan

• Generate understanding of the agency’s core values and objectives.
• Develop enthusiasm and commitment for a course of action over the next three to five years.
• Create a strategy that positions the firm for long-term success.
• Develop actionable and measurable plans for moving the operations strategy forward.
• Clarify the role of senior management and understand how it should evolve.

We call it an opportunity assessment. You will call it the day you were finally able to get ahead of the change curve — when everyone at the agency is finally on the same page.

I believe that successful agency change is not the result of something done to you. Change only happens when your people are actively involved in developing solutions they will own. Creating a high-performance creative organization requires top-down leadership and bottom-up participation.

Back To Basics

ACCOUNTS

• Tightly integrate client/agency operations – increase switching costs
• Dump chronic under-performer clients – free up time for more revenue
• Over-serve high potential accounts – increase switching cost, increase revenue
• Evaluate the strategic fit of each account in the portfolio – be true to your agency vision and strategic goals –don’t be afraid to say “No, that’s not what we’re about”
• Evaluate real service costs – get a truer picture of the profitability of your accounts
• Develop innovative compensation structures – create flexibility to ensure maximum profitability for all types of clients
• Create capacity for the work you want to do

SPECIALTIES

• Create something different in the market place
• Stop giving ideas, knowledge, insights away
• Identify, develop, and market specialties
• Build awareness throughout the agency, clients and prospects
• Strengthen and focus new business activities – become a destination agency
• Charge a premium for proprietary knowledge and service capabilities
• Create a focal point for investing resources

SKILLS

• Identify required skill sets
• Inventory strengths and weaknesses
• Create a knowledge repository of personnel skills
• Create and enforce mechanisms for evaluation tied to your brand mission and goals
• Evaluate, compensate and reward for skills achievement
• Focus on development of skills
• Develop the employees worth keeping – drop the underperformers

EXPERIENCE

• Capture agency history and experience in the form of stories and legends
• Create mechanisms to store and retrieve
• Use agency knowledge, not individuals, as a marketable resource
• Collect and organize new business, research, information, data, in all forms, all types, all sources
• Make it easy to find, easy to retrieve, easy to capture
• Assign librarian/archivist responsibilities

TIME

• Create a project and client cost management discipline (keep it simple!)
• Get real tools that allow people to manage time-sensitive resources
• Redesign operations and processes around time-based goals
• Identify and eliminate or simplify time hogs
• Obliterate in-transit time
• Track and manage time for non-time based compensation arrangements
• Manage time for profitability
• Provide fast service
• Stay ahead of the change curve
• Use technology to build speed into the production
• Look for ways to do things differently

When You Put It All Together, It Spells…

Success! The future belongs to the marketing firms that best utilize all of their ASSETS. Understanding how best to merge and manage each of the above will quickly separate you from the competition, help you align your processes, increase speed, focus your structure and clarify roles and responsibilities. Over time, this will transform your firm into the agency other leaders covet, thinking how did they do that? Lucky bastards! The grass sure is greener over there…

If you put good people in bad pitches you lose. Train a winning agency team!

Winning!

I recently trained a great mid-sized agency on how to present – they had won their last three pitches, but felt it was too difficult, too much upheaval, too much work. So they called us. After one day the team called it a “life changing” event. The president, a long time player in the marketing world, told me that, “I have a long ditch covered with the bodies of worthless consultants!” My training was the first time he felt not only did he get his money worth, but the ideas and concepts we presented would serve his firm well for years. A few of their comments on the highlights from our post training survey:

• Profiling
• Checklist is great
• Breaking down to various roles
• Less reliance on PowerPoint
• Change our approach to preparing for pitches
• Develop a process
• Dress rehearsal required to conduct a well-drilled presentation
• Numerous techniques to own the room
• Presentation tools
• Subliminal things

Below are the 12 keys to winning any presentation we reviewed as part of the training. Each section had more detail, and much more content!

12 Winning the Pitch Presentation Rules

1. Understand the Difference Between Advertising and New Business

The number-one reason for presentation loss by most agencies is confusing new business with the skills they need to do good marketing communications. There’s a big difference and the lack of understanding here is the reasons so many firms have trouble with growth. Too many agencies end up playing it safe and staying within the rules. New business is about winning.

2. Take the Lead Right from the Start

From the beginning be the most interested. At the RFP stage be the most tantalizing. At the agency tour stage be the best-organized agency. At the final presentation showcase the best presentation team. Do these things and you win because you’re in the lead. It’s difficult to win first place from back in the pack.

3. Quickly Decide If You Want the Account

Make sure you have a good chance to win. Check chemistry (your type of people). Successful agencies quickly decide they want the account, and then they decide what it will take to win. Are you willing to put in the time, energy required to win?

4. Know How the Agency Will Be Selected

Will it be a relationship win? Or a big idea? Will options carry the day? Scorecard? Today many prospects and search consultants use scorecards. Often the second-best agency wins the entire account on points. Think about the scorecard and make sure you achieve high marks in every category.

5. Agree Early on the Presentation Make-up

Most clients are disappointed at agency presentation time because they expect a show and they get bored instead. Focus more on the presentation: speaking skills, use of tools, ability to relate, eye contact, sentence structure, organization of thoughts, humor, and appearance. Organization of overall show, including setup, refreshments, tent cards, podiums, the presentation structure, use of time, and dramatic effects. Your agency must own the room.

6. Decide on the Agency “Hero”

New business is all about showcasing the people. Make sure you clearly identify the prospect’s hero: the one person who can stand up, carry the day and slay the prospect’s key issues. They must be the right profile, right title, right responsibility, and most importantly be great at presenting. And not the agency president!

7. Use Profiling to Win on Chemistry

When your agency profiles correctly and thereby shows versatility, you win. All members of the agency management team must understand how to identify different profiles, how to build trust with each one, and most importantly, how each will make their decision. Each profile is looking for something different in an advertising agency. Knowing the correct profile determines the presentation tactics you select.

8. Establish the Presentation Chunks Early

You must treat the entire presentation as a series of acts in one play. Introduce each act with interest. Build to key points. And end each act strongly. Write out dull sections and put the information in the leave behind. This makes the leave behind more important, which is helpful.

9. Present the Right Way

There is a power to presenting the right way, use it. Maintain eye contact, build a story, connect with the audience, and much much more. Little things like practicing “Nancy Reagan” (your team looking adoringly at whoever is speaking) to keep the audience focused and avoiding dead screen time with title slides. Don’t introduce the next speaker (agenda covers that) and practice TV time with quick cuts to the next topic.

10. Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse

A major presentation is worth 8 hours of rehearsal. If you don’t have time to do rehearsals, then don’t do the presentation.

11. Build a Team of Winners

It’s a smart agency who uses the same people time and again to win key pieces of business. The teamwork shows through, and this means a lot to prospects. Round out your team of winners with new additions each time, such as adding appropriate account handlers and designated creative team members, but have them join a core team of experienced presenters who know how to win.

12. Call Sanders Consulting Group

Remember the stress, the agony, the confusion, the money, and the disappointments you went through with your last presentation attempt? If you had only done this type of presentation the last few years, where would you be, you wonder? Don’t be so set on doing it your way. Call us and discover how winning agencies really know how to pitch.

Presenting To Win is optimized to achieve the greatest success for your firm. The course is taught on-site at your agency. Attendees are taught the basic principles of personality profiling as a core competency skill set which is built upon throughout the course. At the end of the day you will have a clear understanding of how to take advantage of all the new presentation tools and win more presentations.

More Pitch Tips!

As many of you know we help many marketing firms behind the scenes win new business pitches. One of the reasons we’ve been so successful is we have seen every mistake. In fact, we’ve written many posts on the topic of how to pitch, how to win, and what the pitch process is really about. I’ve collected a few of them below in one handy list for you to review the next time you have a pitch you really want to win.

Focus on Rehearsals
How To Win Your Next Presentation
6 Presentation Reminders
The Perfect Presentation
The Hidden Side
The Defining Moment
Top 10 Mistakes
The Winning Pitch

Most marketing firms just make excuses and keep making the same mistakes over and over. Give us a call and let us show you a better way.

Think back in the 90s, we were all buzzing about what the Internet would do. The Internet seemed like a magical place, and it would soon transform our world. Early in the 2000s, we were still talking about how it would “very soon” transform our world. And in some ways it has, industries have suffered (newspapers, booksellers) and others have grown (Facebook, Google, Amazon). But how we conduct commerce is just little sparks from the fuse. Much of what we see today is aimed at making a better website and spreading your brand though social media channels. We’re all still talking about how mobile technologies will create even more change – soon. Always “just down the road… this is the year!” The digital revolution is transforming the way we interact with brands… but really nothing transformative has happened to the world. We still live, work and travel much the same way we did 20 years ago. The marketing world is still rolling along, producing ads, in one form or another.

All the little changes, better technology, smart phones, digital boarding passes, are just signs that the fuse has been lit… soon there must be a giant kaboom.

“The Earth? Oh, the Earth will be gone in just a few seconds.” Marvin The Martian

Most people still think of digital marketing as a website linked with Twitter, Facebook and perhaps LinkedIn. But that is not accurate anymore. I pointed out few years ago: “The new market leaders in the next several years will be determined by how well firms embrace the information flow that surrounds their own brand and their customers’ lives.”

The impact of harnessing this information flow in real time has already been seen – just look at how the Obama campaign used just some of the tools emerging online. WSJ Columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote, regretfully, on how the Obama campaign used digital and information to run circles around the Romney campaign:

“I referred to a recent hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians: The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’

This struck me as “high tech and bloodless.” I didn’t quite say it, but it all struck me as inhuman, unlike any politics I’d ever seen. It was unlike any politics I’d ever seen. And it won the 2012 campaign. Those “Martians” were reinventing how national campaigns are done. They didn’t just write a new political chapter with their Internet outreach, vote-tracking data-mining and voter engagement, especially in the battleground states. They wrote a whole new book. And it was a masterpiece. “

“This makes me very angry, very angry indeed.” Marvin The Martian

I imminently realized that the Obama campaign was using the “information flow” in a way no one had before. I was gobsmacked. Here we always think of the marketing and advertising industry as the leaders in innovation, and a political campaign was running circles around most of the industry.

And I think this is just a small sign of things to come: the fuse on the the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator has been lit! What happens when all this access, all these tools, are free to use and creating new ways to interact, all to a new generation of consumer that is just starting to head out to the workplace?

Digital is no longer an add-on to a campaign. It drives all activities.

The digital revolution has created most of the changes we’ve seen todate by increasing the speed of, well, everything: from access to data, to creating content, to production, to tracking, and just about everything else. The increased speed of access combined with the ability to create timely brand messages (see Oreo’s Super Bowl power outage reaction as example #1) is has dramatically changed the marketing landscape. And it’s only the beginning. As clients continue to decrease the time to market and as competitive pressures increase, agencies must be able access that information flow and develop effective messages on the fly. When the day comes that everything is “digital” you will tap into huge reservoirs of content, consumer information, news, trends, data and producing branded messages in real time, the world as we know it will be gone. It will be gone in one giant Earth-shattering digital kaboom.

This is just the beginning – ad agencies better adapt.

What we’ve seen so far is minimal compared to the sweeping changes down the road. Today, most agency clients struggle with competitive pressures, a myriad of media options and the need to establish a more intimate conversation with consumers. They are constantly looking outside for help.  Traditional ad agenies are now competing with smaller information-driven shops that provide more timely and cost-effective solutions, and newly created or unbundled data and media firms that provide higher quality, lower cost solutions. Strategic consulting firms are providing clients with business building ideas and new ways to reach their audience. As a result, the traditional agency’s position with the advertiser is eroding – just as more and more money is being invested in marketing. Read up on the marketing chessboard to best figure out where and how to move.

The advertising industry is at a critical juncture. It’s more than just the effective utilization of digital, but how when everything is digital what that means to the entire world of marketing – from idea to execution to connecting with consumers. Marketing firms must find new ways to harness the power of information to influence the consumer, integrate its existing client base and attract new business. The alternative is to let the industry’s core business continue to erode by adding little or no value to the process. The giant KABOOM are digital technologists, the Marvin the Martians, taking over the marketing world.

Final Thought

While the point of this article was to just point out how some of the new digital tools are radically changing marketing, several people that I sent this to wondered if I had any ideas on just how transformative the digital changes really would be. They point out that I don’t outline what I think the so-called kaboom really is… So let me state clearly, I think we’re just like a bunch of farmers at start of the industrial revolution, all standing around looking at a knitting machine, and not realizing the overall impact of mechanization will be on our daily lives. Digitization will be the same. Profound epic change. The digital conversations and branding efforts are the knitting machine; good, fun, but little change on daily life and how we work.

The kaboom: Combine big data with easy to use tools to sort and find anything, on anyone, about everything, a generation of kids raised with these tools, add cheap digital manufacturing, endless bandwidth and storage, and more virtual sharing of daily lives and very soon the world will be very different then what we see now. Much like the farmer standing by the knitting machine suddenly waking up in the 50s and seeing huge factories, highways, cars, TV and more…

Will TV channels still be around after we can all access any form of entertainment at anytime, anyplace? Will big cities still be viable when people can easily live and work virtually? How will China survive when all our little cheap consumer goods can be produced on demand locally? Faster and cheaper? Combine these ideas and shake, as we truly have no idea…

A very different world… indeed.

Our approach is to work with you over the entire time the system is being installed. We bring in new skills and new approaches in an orderly fashion. We don’t want to overwhelm the agency or interfere with your efforts to provide good service to clients. We work with you to develop and then install the new business program. And then we help bring the agency together behind the effort. And we stick around long enough to be sure the new business program runs right.

Here is the agenda we followed with this firm – they wanted it all as soon as possible as they had some free time last week between client assignments:

Spark & Torch Firepower Training

Day 1: Introduction to Spark & Torch

Chemistry

• Chemistry is the New Business Secret
• Basic Premise of Profiling
• How to Profile
• Check Your Personality Profile
• How to Establish Chemistry on the Interview
• Spark Reminders
• Spark Interview Chart

The Spark System

• Where Do Interviews Come From?
• How to Open the Door
• “Door-Opener” Strategies
• Typical Spark Follow-Up
• Opening the Door and Nudging
• Building Awareness Exercise
• Supporting the Spark System

Day 2: First Visits and Presenting to Prospects

Torch Overview (First Visits)

• The Old First Visit Model
• Agency Baseball
• What Makes Up First Base
• What Makes Up Commonality
• Sparks Must Know How to Open the First Meeting
• What Makes Up Propriety
• What Makes Up First Base: Competency
• The Torch Competency Model
• What Makes Up Intent
• Handling Questions

Torch Skills

• What Makes Up Needs and Fever
• What Makes Up Process
• What Makes Up Timing
• What Makes Up Budget
• Second Base Exercises
• What Makes Up Third Base
• What Makes Up Home Base
• How to Fast Close

Day 3: Adding Fuel to the Fire

Sparking Elements

• Sparking is NOT Telemarketing
• Making the First Call
• More First Call Tips
• Ask the Right Questions
• Get Set to Listen
• How to Deliver Competency Over the Phone
• Spark’s Daily Productivity Chart
• Spark Checklist
• Spark Monitoring Questionnaire
• Presenting on the iPad

Blogging, building links: WordPress & Facebook

• Building content and creating the brand perception
• Twitter, LinkedIn, Hootsuite
• Social media outreach and establishing online relationships

Day 4: Bringing it all to life

Create a Comfort Zone, Q&A, and Closing Details

• Spark & Torch Role-playing
• First call competency pitch
• Closing the loop
• Final thoughts

How about your firm? Would learning these skills help you in your new business effort?

Another firm we trained last year had a great experience that truly demonstrates the power of setting up a strong new business system. After the training some of the staff expressed doubt if the program would work. But the president remained firm. They generated some leads, and had some success, but still had not tried the Fast Close techniques we practiced. They felt it was just too “out there” to really work.

A few months go by and just as the outreach program starts to generate results, they get a reply from one of the “dream” accounts on their list. A big blue chip client. Recognizing that they were not ready for such a large account, they decided to try the fast close techniques . . . just to practice. “Just wanted to see what would happen” the president told me.

They won. Without a review. The largest win in their history.

A Strong New Business Program Makes the Whole Agency Happier

For an agency no other activity can match the reassurance that winning new business can provide. Not keeping clients. Not winning awards. Not making more money. New business wins are what most agencies value above every other reward. If you want to buck up an agency, win some new business. There might be grumbling about the added stress and worries about the impact on existing accounts, but there’s real joy because of the win. It puts a bounce in the step. And it adds a smile to the face no matter how much it increases the workload or how much further behind the productivity curve it puts the agency. For this reason, announcing our training program at most firms is good news to the staff. But the agency staff needs to be convinced that the management team believes in the process and is committed to growth over the long haul. Agency staff is quick to spot flavors of the month, quick fixes, and half-hearted efforts. For the training to work there must be full support and total cooperation. That type of support and cooperation needs to begin on the first day of the training.

If you’re interested in learning more about our training programs that can transform your firm into a new business machine, give us a shout!

Photo by ~geory

When we first decided to work with Sanders Consulting in Europe, back in the ‘90s, we had just slipped from #10 agency in regional new biz revenue to #11. For a network that was #1 in terms of size, offices and just about every other measure, not good. It was clear that the business was changing and we could no longer rely just on a few major multinational wins to sustain the network; “feeding the bear” as some used to call it. We needed to be successful new biz hunters of local business in every local office and in a situation where managers had grown used to being fed business regularly, that was a big ask. We had to introduce a whole local support infrastructure and a central part of that would have to be new business training.

So we called in Sanders and introduced a whole range of pitching techniques, each of which was tried and found successful, even if we had to Europeanise a few. Probably the most revolutionising for us was Prospect Profiling. Until then it is fair to say we had had a “BIG AGENCY” way of pitching, which was providing diminishing returns. It soon became clear that this approach suited one profile group exactly, but our client portfolio was clogged with those clients and we could not really pitch more because of conflicts. So we had to learn to adapt our approach to suit emerging types of both local and international clients, who in most cases did not share the culture of the established multinats.

To cut a long story short, in three years we were #1 audited new biz winner in Europe and 70% was coming from local clients. The knock-on benefit of that was that by the end of the decade, we had evened up our client portfolio in most offices to a balanced international / local fit, which meant we were more attractive locally to top talent and could also provide a better level of local support for international clients when required. Our audited conversion rate in last rounds over hundreds of pitches has reached over 70% for several years at a time and has rarely dropped below double what we should win based on the odds of number of agencies pitching.

We won a massive financial account in Germany when we realised the key client was an Illustration. Until that point we were really not getting on well and about to be dropped from the competition. The local team thought the work was not good enough and had kept just throwing new work at him, but it was everything except the work. We worked over the weekend to sift all the stuff the client had rejected, repackaged it with the right kind of theatre and pitched it Monday morning in a way that helped him to see how it fitted all his needs. He was big enough to admit the work had been good all along and appointed us on the spot.

Elsewhere we pitched a beer client who was clearly a Body Copy, but had a consultant who was pure Illustration and was known to have a friend at the incumbent agency. We first decided to pitch to the Body Copy, but realised she would probably take the consultant’s advice, so decided to slant everything to the Illustration and rely on his influence. It worked, we won.

We pitched a global telecoms company that had an off the scale Illustration as Brand Director and pitch leader. We used that knowledge to get to the finals where we simply weren’t sexier than another higher profile agency. We lost. But we had noticed an influential Logo in the team and got on well with him and his colleagues. A year later the Illustration left and the account came to us without a pitch.

We were invited to pitch a very famous food brand and profiled the recently arrived Marketing Director from Australia as a heavyweight Headline. We cut the fat out of the pitch, produced a very pragmatic and effectiveness-oriented deck and won in style. Interesting thing was the relationship was so strong that we were able to do creative award winning work for that hard bitten effectiveness-led lady.

The war stories could go on forever, but it is not just in new business that the learnngs from Sanders have helped us. It was not long before managers started asking why, if profiling was so successful for winning it, why didn’t we apply the same principles to keeping it. We found that Account Execs were being taught everything except how to be a good Account Exec and that meant understanding their clients far better. Managers also asked if profiling could help sell better work to existing clients, well it could, but it became very clear that producing “Illustration” ideas and expecting a Logo client to buy them was asking for the moon. There is never just one right creative solution and profiling the client helped us to match the needs of the consumers with the constraints of the client corporate or personal culture.

I don’t believe through the application of Prospect Profiling, we have ever deceived a client, nor tried to make our people something they are not. We have used it to make a better fit between what the client needs and wants and what we provide in terms of people, product, and presentation. It is a win win for both sides. As a leading Marketing Director of a massive global food company once said to a seminar for new biz leaders: “Don’t come and pitch to us until you have done your homework and understand us and our culture”. He meant get profiling and make sure we are going to enjoy your visit.

Best regards,

Name withheld to respect the winning agency’s brand!

Working with agencies on new business, I am always amazed to find how many are missing the same key ingredient. Agencies do not trip over producing successful creative approaches or in describing the quality of their service offerings. They most often trip over failing to distinguish between new business and advertising. The key is understanding how new business is different from doing great work for clients, why good chemistry is essential, and how NOT to make yourself difficult to hire.

We consistently take calls from agencies leaders dissatisfied with their new business effort, but dedicated to breaking their losing streaks with the next presentation of their capabilities. Often these calls come to us at the eleventh hour when losing is not an option. If you’re not sure where to start our DayOne program was developed for agencies exhausted with the chaos of new business at their agency and dedicated to fixing new business once and for all. It is my hope that we can help your firm the way we have helped thousands of other agencies.