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A New Business Quiz

January 18, 2012 By Stuart Sanders
Lost In The Fog

New business can be very confusing to agency leadership. There is a fog about new business that blinds agencies on which way to go.

Agencies must become new business machines. This means agencies need to step up their new business activities substantially. It’s not good news but it’s true news. For most agencies a whole new way of looking at new business is needed. What is your New Business grade?

New Business Quiz

[ ] Know the Difference Between New Business and Advertising. The biggest mistake marketing communication firms make 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.

[ ] Develop A Good Brand. It starts with your name and what you say about yourself. Is it in step with where the market is going? Is it properly positioned so it offers real benefits that are easily differentiated from your competition? And finally, is it compelling to prospects? Nothing hurts a strong new business effort faster than a weak brand.

[ ] Invest in Solid Marketing Materials. Including a solid website that loads fast and isn’t cluttered with moving parts. Back this up with an effective send-me-something brochure that brands the firm properly. Have effective outreach tools on hand to open doors. Develop a list of good prospects and make sure it’s current.

[ ] Build A Strong Outreach Program. This usually means agency staff members focused on outreach full time. We call that winning the first opportunity which means creating a steady stream of invitations for first visits from high-quality prospects. You should target about 80-90 visits per year. With these in hand, you can walk away from RFPs, cattle calls, and agency clusters where competition is strong and your marketing ROI is low.

[ ] Know How to Achieve Great First Visits. A good first visit is where your team avoids presenting capabilities but focuses on building trust so prospects will discuss their business needs openly and honestly. It’s a learned skill set called Torch®. And it successfully moves the prospect toward a closing process.

[ ] Have the Skills to Win with Chemistry. Your likeability, which you can control with prospect profiling, is your biggest asset or your greatest hurdle. Does your team know how to use chemistry as a major competitive advantage? Or do you mistakenly just hope good chemistry happens?

[ ] Know How to Fast-Close. If you have a good first visit, then you are prepared to move for a fast close, either in 48 hours or 7-days. The alternative, often followed by most of the industry who don’t understand the fast close process, is to wait after a first visit because nothing substantial has been set up. This forces clients to move into a formal search where competition is high. And you get to present in competition with many other firms. Why let that happen after you win a good first visit?

[ ] You’re Set Up for a Tour. It’s called walking the talk and it’s built around keeping your firm propped and ready for a first visit by good prospects. Most prospects are being put on notice about the importance of visiting your communication firm before hiring them. Why not get ready for that with everything in place, properly set up to show off your capabilities in a best light?

[ ] You Can Win the Big One. Most any firm can win formal presentations month in and month out. It’s a learned process and it begins by targeting to win one out of three and then moving to win one out of two as your skills build. At this rate, new business presentations aren’t an expense but an investment in your future.

[ ] You Can Win at the End Game. This means you know how to tantalize with contract incentives. And how to keep your key players who “won” the business out of trying to get the contract approved. You should delegate that chore to a financial type who has been hard trained in best negotiation techniques, just like the clients sitting across the table.

Score_____________

Analysis. Rate your self on each of these 10 categories above with a score of 1-10 on each category with 10 being best. Total your scores. Anything lower than 75 points is failing just like in school. But growing your firm isn’t a game you want to flunk. Or even get a D in.

Sanders Consulting Group has over 15 learning programs designed to help train marketing communication firms in all of these new business areas. And we do more new business consulting on specific agency shoot-outs and new business assignments than any other firm around.

 

Photo by *behherit

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Want More Revenue? Do More Consulting!

September 21, 2011 By Stuart Sanders

It's not too late to change...The phone calls into us always begin the same way. It’s an agency owner online who has a prospect for some agency services, and the prospect’s product or service is new, untried, money is limited, or time is short. You know the drill. The typical agency owner is planning to sell in a focus group or two to get started and wants confirmation that that’s the right thing to do.

Ugh. First off that sounds so simplistic, sort of like your doctor saying take two aspirin and call me in the morning. There’s a better approach.

Start Consulting by Starting Simple:

What’s needed is a simple consulting arrangement that maximizes value for the prospect, revenue for the agency owner and a more professional approach for the agency. The strategy is to move the prospect into a consulting arrangement, not a marketing answer.

You sell in a basic short-term consulting arrangement that will allow you to do a deep dive into the product or service that needs to be marketed. You are selling in your time to talk to users, investors, bankers, and other contacts that have insight on the product or service. Figure to sell in 5 days of consulting time, and now show how the 40 hours will be spent by your team, hour by hour. It all adds up to the fee you are proposing. For the client it’s more professional, simpler to understand and easy to see where the time goes.

The key is to make the list of projects you plan to undertake sound long and exhaustive and important to know. Now use your agency team to burn the hours doing a thorough situation analysis but don’t waste any time on preparing a report or passing money on to research houses, focus group facilities, etc at this stage. You keep the full fee as revenue.

At the end of the time, present a charted out SWOT program to the prospect showing how to solve the problem, meaning how to launch the product or service, what to call it, what follow-on research you need, and all the trimmings to do a good job for the client.

Your ideas at this stage are just rough. Don’t waste any creative time on concepts or tactics at this stage.

And don’t spend more than a minute from the end of the first 40 hours of your consulting study until you present your SWOT and you don’t want to mention you will be presenting a SWOT but call it something like a Flashplan or Impact Study or whatever you name it to get it started. SWOT is the format you are following to make it understandable and easy to follow. Nothing more is needed at this stage.

To sell it in focus the prospect on the need for the first phase, not the second phase, so you can be general on what the pay off will look like because you don’t know until you get into it.

This is a much better way to get started with a new client because it lets you learn about them and you learn about the market. And the start up money available comes to you, not to a research facility down the street.

Move into Consulting. Control Your Future!

It’s called consulting and any agency with more than four people ought to be doing a half million in consulting revenue every year. This simple consulting approach will get you started toward that goal.

Many marketing firms are feeling like they’ve missed the boat. Time to change the rules and get back in the game… it’s not too late. Consulting is the lost art that agencies need to rediscover in this new world we are now living in.

 

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