Creative Agency Secrets

I've said it… the "R" word.  There is one going on right now.  If you aren't yet feeling the early symptoms - be grateful. 

Here are some early plans you can put in place to ensure that your business does its best to survive.  I am starting with Lead Generation.  This is the earliest part of the business development cycle where your marketing communications have attracted a prospect to begin a conversation with your company.

1. Eliminate prospects who won't buy from your pipeline
2. Qualify your leads very carefully - ask golden questions, listen twice as much as you speak
3. Get the remaining prospects to acknowledge that they have a need
4. Nurture these prospects.  One response is not enough. 
5. Build a relationship with the prospects - it will take at least 3 "touches" to convert
6. Plan for a longer lead cycle
7. Manage the hand-off between sales and marketing carefully.  Writ large this means a weekly discussion with all parties involved in Biz Dev planning exactly what to do with every lead and understanding who will do what, when to whom. Micro-manage this in a recession.
8. Track your metrics - the % of opportunities that become clients.  This number will change and you need to be on top of what is influencing that change.

Let me know how you get on.

P.S. Just to be brutally honest, I'll be trying to take my own 'medicine' too and so here is the state of my personal business development pipeline October 2008.

STATUS UPDATE: In my pipeline now I have 

20 at Prospecting Stage

6 leads at Qualification Stage

1 lead at Proposal Stage

1 lead at Closed - project won (this morning - Celebrate!)

I wrote a piece back in May about an event hosted by Channel 4 and Sport England on how to use social media for grass roots sport communication. 

The Image by Leo Reynolds via Flickr and so I am re-linking to the article in case you want an update.

I found this fascinating quote today:

Media Camp London is happening again! If you are interested in workshops about different aspects of social media and are OK to spear a Saturday in December to do so, see below:Sylwiapresley, Sylwia Presley, Oct 2008

You should read the whole article.

I have just had a conversation with a prospective client, Clive Robinson from Experiential Agency, The Factory Live .

During our chat, I tried hard to check that Clive had established a solid process for business development for his organisation.  It was clear that he has really strong sales skills, the collateral was all in place - but a huge gap was apparent.

The Factory Live team has a great opportunity creation campaign that works well for them producing up to a dozen new leads each week.  But the gap became clear when I asked how many companies they had on their database.  The answer was 25.

For a company that has been trading for two years, producing a dozen leads a week, that's a remarkably low figure.  

We had a short conversation to clarify our terminology and it became clear that all these organisations were being contacted once. 

What a great sales-led opportunity development programme - to get pitches, proposals and new clients all from cold or nearly-cold calling.

This business has a great opportunity to improve its hit rate by setting up three steps of the business development cycle:

• Relationship development
• Creating Opportunities
• Analysis and Feedback 

They do not yet have a database in which to record all the companies with whom they make contact, and to record the conversation and subsequent actions.

Here are my previous posts on database selection for agencies .and the databases summary document

Once this is in place a programme for relationship development can be put in place to keep in touch with these organisations which will lead to improved opportunity creation and hopefully some stunning conversion figures as the database builds up and repeat contact is made and the relationship and company profile built up.

Clive has kindly given me permission to write about our conversation.

I have been mulling for a while about a post on the business networks that I belong to online and what they actually seem to"do" for me and my biz dev search for new customers.

Here's what I can tell you:

I belong to eCademy (31), Linked In (158), Plaxo Pulse (1,489)

The number of contacts I have on each is the number in brackets. I think this tells a story in itself!

Groups

I found the eCademy groups useful when promoting a client's business for them.  And I do like Nikki Pilkington's WDYKW group (who do you know who).   But neither has brought any new business directly to me. 

A couple have started 'conversations' but none were anything like the quality that would make me recommend them to you. [it is possible I haven't found a good group that matches my needs].  But people who choose to start and actively manage an online group, do tell me that it grows their profile enormously.

The LinkedIn groups are much more akin to the right type of people for me, including one called Social Media Mafia which I love!

Streaming content from other sources

I must confess that the Plaxo Pluse stream is really nice - good UI and lots of easily integrated data from other sources like Twitter, Flickr and blogs.

Ecademy has nothing like this and Linked In has 'network updates" but these are just activities among people I know on their platform.

Forums

I have a prejudice against people who spend a lot of time in forums
just answering questions, maybe clouded by the actions of a former
colleague, who could answer questions all day but never did any work!

I have successfully started conversations with companies who are looking for my type of skills which I have found in forums on these type of sites.

Connecting with others

All platforms make it easy to connect, I know Katy Howell has done well with Ecademy in the past when setting up her PR firm.  And let's face it, that is the reason these websites exist.  I suppose that I find more people I know on Plaxo and LinkedIn than Ecademy.  

I have made a business decision not to connect to people I don't know.  There are some hugely aggressive 'connectors' out there who claim to know thousands of others.  I never get anythign positive from them because they cannot know me properly and if they don't push useful stuff out (note T. Power Esq) I just ignore all their activities.  

The borderline is where people do know people that I do know.  Generally I still don't accept unless in their invitation email they say specifically why they want to connect with me.

But what do you think?  Are these useful Business Development tools? 

I Twittered this, but thought it so important that I have put it up here as well.

Chris Brogan linked to this Constructing Social site.

Constructing Social is a project begun by Colin Browning to provide a resource to those that are constructing and architecting social media sites.

There is a list of categories under which you can register including

• Agency
• Architects
• Community
• Consultant
• Facebook
• Moderation
• Planning
• ROI
• Social Media
• White Papers

And the resources page for social media ROI info is worth a visit in its own right.

There are 32 listings and 39 members at the time of writing.

I received this email on Monday.

 
Hiya! Can I pick your brain? A charity I am a trustee of has been advised by a [web design] company that (viz redeveloping the website) "social networking / web based community is a passing vogue" therefore relatively unimportant for new web capability. This for a very dispersed, defined community, where I see real potential for increased volunteer mobilization, with peer and expert support online.  What would u say?

What a great question! 

Whether you are an agency or a brand looking for an agency, selecting the right one to work with is difficult.  And it seems that the trustee and the charity may have some issues with what this digital web design agency is suggesting because it won't support their strategy of building up an online community with a view to mobilising volunteers and getting expert and peer advice available online.

I have long advocated using "golden questions" as a filtering device to shorten the list of candidates.  But it is also useful in this situation.  

Here is my reply.

A golden question I frequently use when selecting an agency to work with: Look at their website and speak to them. 

Ask them what tools, techniques and tricks are they using for their own sales and marketing. Check all these categories.

• marketing
• e-marketing
• digital marketing
• internal intranet
• website

Which are working and proving effective at the moment?

If they don't do it themselves, chances are they aren't as knowledgeable about it as they should.  And that may be why they aren't recommending it for you.

There are some exceptions to this e.g. mass email marketing is rarely appropriate for a B2B business (but I'd still expect the agency to do some email marketing for their own account). 

Analysis: There is a mis-match between the charity and agency at this time.  Either they force the agency to do what they ask (build a community site) or they find someone else to do it alongside the website build as an add-in or they fire the agency and find one that will do the whole piece.  Tough but most likely to get the outcome you want, if the latter.

Definition of a Golden Question and examples

Past post on Golden Questions here.

Reading Marketing magazine last month, I spotted a former client of mine, Crayon, had won the website marketing work from BT.com

And so I've decided to run an occasional feature on marketing agencies and how they have won their client instructions.  If you have something you'd like to Shout! about on this blog.  Please get in touch.

Why we won BT.com - an interview with Simone Sulsh, Client Services Director, Crayon

We worked with BT.com previously on a project basis and they worked out what their needs were across the whole bt.com business. The remit changed and became a new pitch.

Two pitches were arranged, one for marketing communications and one for back-end techhy work. We pitched for the marcomms work.

We won it because of our flexibility - BT.com had been used to working with much bigger agencies - we were doing just as good a job if not better than them. 

We have pitched against their other agencies on other occasions and always won.  We believe that Crayon offered all they could get from a bigger agencies but better and quicker.  For example during the project work earlier in the year, we did a strategic piece on broadband.  It took us 6 weeks and would have taken others 3 months to deliver.

The key to winning this pitch were our relationships, our flexibility.  And we blew their socks off at the pitch! 

We gave a rigorous response - the whole agency got behind the pitch.  It took about 6 weeks from start to finish.  We weren't doing anyting else, in fact we turned down other pitches to concentrate on this.  The pitch was led by Richard French, our MD. 

Advice to another agency facing a similar pitch against larger firms - belive you can get it.  Show this by your passion and energy.

For examples of Crayon's work go to BT.com - everything there is stuff we have worked on.   

I just wrote this for a conference organiser.

I am going to need to practice the content delivery. Anyone want me to come to their offices and give a 20 minutes plus questions on this subject, please ask! [you pay my travel expenses]

Synopsis of the company
Creative Agency Secrets is a business to business sales and marketing consultancy, specialising in New Business Development - finding new customers for your products and services.

Speaker details
Rebecca is a business development specialist - someone who doesn't give you marketing jargon, but comes straight to the point with a good analysis of your situation and then positive things you can do to win more customers.
Title of presentation
How to use social media to find more customers and win new business.
Synopsis of your presentation
Social media tools are mostly free, easy to use and perfect for low cost, recessionary marketing techniques.
Rebecca will outline four social media tools that any business can start using to find and win more customers.  These will save you money, launch you into new markets and recruit new audiences for your business.

4 benefits for attendees

• Which tools are appropriate for business development
• How to integrate them into existing marketing and sales campaigns
• Proof that they can work for B2B and B2C businesses
• Take-home summaries / tip sheets / how-to manuals on how to set them up for yourself

Target audience
Any business that wants to win more customers, wants to reduce its marketing spend, find new audiences using low cost media
Case study content

• Using Facebook to build profile and create an expert user group
• How to use Twitter for business development
• Tracking your brand name online and influencing perceptions
• Writing expert content and how to recruit prospective customers and get them to read it

 

A former client asked me last week what my advice would be with regard to driving traffic to an article on a website.  Articles are a great business development tool because you can write (without being edited) about things you know a lot about, show off your insights and try to prove that you are skilled at what you do.

This is a situation I frequently encounter - companies and individuals write great stuff that shows off their expertise and knowledge but nobody seems to want to read it! 

Now, until you have a regular blog readership (if your blog is your main publicity vehicle, as it is mine), there are some strategies that you can follow to try and get a wider audience and broader reach for your work.  

Before you start

1 - MOST IMPORTANT: You have to write good material. No arguments.  Write trash and you'll never win an audience.

2 - Don't do all the things listed below at once - try a couple out and find which are the most effective.  Build up your audience and linked sites gradually.

Now get going

1 – Link to the article from every website that you have control over with the same link text.  Use words that are strongly SEO oriented and will show up in any search for your type of expertise

2 – Using those same search terms, see what websites come up in a search.  Check out each one looking for

• a)    Aggregation sites
• b)    Competitor sites
• c)    Industry experts’ sites

For the Aggregation sites, join as a member and post up a comment about the article and link to it.  [NB It's more subtle if you get someone other than you to do this, although it is acceptable for an author to link to his own work, but it looks less spontaneous].

For the competitor and industry experts websites – write privately to them asking their ‘advice’ on one aspect of your article.  Include a couple of paragraphs extracted from the article.  When they write back [because all experts love to have their advice sought], reply with profuse thanks and get permission to quote them in your work.  

3 - Then go and write a comment on the original article as yourself, and include the comment from the named expert, linking back to their site (returning the favour).  OR, write a second article with all the comments you get from the experts and link back to the original article from that one. This is what I did with my recent series on how to Twitter for Business Development, Part 4 has all the links and extra material that I found during the writing / researching process.

4 – If you keep a blog or a Twitter or Jaiku account, link to the article from the blog/tweet.  [if you haven’t got a Twitter account, read my recent posts on how to use Twitter to find more customers and biz dev]

5 – Go through your professional networking sites (Linked In, Plaxo, Ecademy) and send the link to your contacts (or ask them a question).  Find groups or forums within those sites for industry professionals and approach them as in 2/3 above or just send them the link.

6 – Using your customers and prospects database, send direct mail (email or written) telling them about the article.  For those you know well, ask them directly to help you by linking to the article in public from their website / blog / Twitter or Jaiku. Many will re-Tweet or link from a blog post if you ask.  I use this tool sparingly and only for my most brilliant and insightful articles.  I try not to exhaust their goodwill.  Remember, you will probably be asked to return the favour by linking back for them as well in the future.  Don't neglect to do this in a timely fashion when they ask.

And lastly, here is more from ProBlogger about driving search engine traffic to your blog - many of the themes Darren Rowse pulls out are similar to those I have written. 

P.S. By frequenly linking to Darren's work, I am building up goodwill that I may be able to call on in future for my "big moment"