Creativity in business is a good thing.
The idea is brought home to us every day: creativity will benefit our careers and personal goals. We all have to think outside that box. Those of us who are not ˜creative by trade, whether visually or in the written word, will all see and recognise this, wherever we personally think we may be on the creative spectrum.
So, why is it that within the creative agency world, there is little similar reflection about deploying business techniques and processes?
Of course, agencies grow from small seeds and acorns into flourishing shrubs or trees, not by sheer creativity alone. We all know that tending to our own internal business needs is important “ that stimulating and measuring effectiveness within any organisation, especially within the service industry, requires this.
But why is it that, in 2012, so many smaller concerns, which predominate in the creative industry landscape, which want and need to grow, are not employing the proper business sales techniques in order to do so?
Note, no use of the term ˜business development’ a sanitised phrase for the agency world. In fact, this I believe is the root cause of the problem (as well as a serious lack of sales skills).
For if you truly believe that your agency will standout purely on the face of your work alone, you are mistaken. And ˜business development and ˜new business? They wont get you there without you fundamentally embracing what ˜sales means first.
Lets face it, sales,is still a dirty word
To admit that, in life, we are all selling something to someone else is hard. But we do sell, each of us, in every communication we make. Whether the stakes be conveying a particular point in a meeting to gain a desired response or negotiating your next trip away with your loved ones, we are each selling.
Selling is about need and fulfilment.
Selling and buying are fundamental to gaining food, a roof over our heads and warmth in the home.
The stereotype of a sales person is a used car salesman, or a double glazing cold caller. The negative associations of these images still exist within the agency environment. Often large agencies will employ a ˜business development and marketing team but wont understand how to measure effectiveness or set realistic targets in the first place. All too often this is because the process is little understood and is simplified into sending out mass mailshots and slamming out phone calls, which is a fundamental mistake.
The whole dirty sales process is misunderstood, seen as necessity, somewhat sordid, beneath the agencys shiny creative output.
The effects of denying selling for an agency
Sadly, what this does is remove the knowledge-gathering, in the form of empowering the whole business with sales techniques, and just engenders an ˜us and them feeling within an agency: ˜me creative, me accounts person, you sales monkey.
Until the murky mystery of ˜how to sell is unravelled and embraced within a business, that business is not going to effectively sell itself. In fact, most creative concerns can benefit from as many client-facing roles being fully versed in sales techniques as possible.
Key truths about selling
Here are some skills to acquire and engender throughout the business:
- Selling is about building trust. So it is not a one-off push for a meeting, it is about relationship building. To sell, you pull, you dont push. You build up a dialogue to get into the privileged position of listening, then diagnosing the problem and then suggesting a solution.
- Research, planning and preparation are key to developing a true sales pipeline because whilst you are selling services not widgets, understanding your marketplace rather than selling your own talents will provide more new quick wins.
- Selling is intrinsically connected to marketing and the two teams should be as versed in PR and creating marketing tools as they are using those tools across all new and traditional platforms.
So, what does this all mean for your agency?
Most important of all:
Showing off your work is not enough.
Whether a stunning show-reel, something funky on Facebook or worthy on LinkedIn or beautiful in print, or with gravitas in a brochure¦ it is not enough.
You need to join it up.
Its the SO WHAT? factor. It ultimately comes down to effectively understanding that your offer is brimming with ˜features but your clients will buy benefits.
To discover the benefits your clients truly want, you need to apply the above methodology “ research, listening and planning, in order to sell. With your head held high, you will have uncovered the benefits that your clients truly need, indeed desire.
To learn more about making the above a reality within your business, contact The Hand, we offer bespoke business development services and training workshops for sales and account management teams.
This is a Guest Post from The Hand – a tailor made business development and marketing service.
Related articles
- Improper sales techniques (practicebetterbusiness.wordpress.com)
- Top B2B Franchise Shares Best Techniques for Turning Cold Calling into Warm Calling (prweb.com)
Awesome, lovely superb…. just finding which social media sites exist today is hard but having to chase round and research available ‘names’ on each one for a new client – time consuming.
Thank heavens for the wonderful people at NameChk.com
They do the grunt for you.
Now all I need is to go register the name…. there’s a handy text download file option that gives you the URL you could get for each one.
Just don’t expect me to know what they all do!
NameCheck social media name availability
Our new client is Contegro, a content management system (CMS) for business websites – we are working with them on social media, PR and blogging.
Delighted that within two weeks of starting work, we got their story picked up by the leading magazine about New Zealand creative business, Idealog. Read the article about Contegro hitting the Top 30 CMS list in the world!
There’s a nice wrapper around the B2B marketing magazine this month and I sat down for a quiet lunchtime read today. Nicely constructed to resemble a normal front page with the magazine logo in corporate green, the headline is “Brand Augmentation – experience it with us” and a Gravity Global apple image.
What a great message. Seemed like a good new business tool for a creative agency.
The copy invites readers to download the app from the Itunes store and ‘point your iPhone at this cover”. So I did.
Sad failure
The app instructs you to point your iPhone at the black marker on our business card (or the magazine cover).
What is a ‘marker’?
I think they mean the black frame around their name with the apple picture. A further description says that a globe is supposed to appear and you can point at any one of the offices and see a video about them and get in touch.
I pointed, I waited, I moved my finger across the screen. It went pink for a bit and then back to showing the photo it was pointed at.
What a shame.
Why the campaign doesn’t work
There are several reasons why this is a failed campaign. You need to know where your dollars are being spent and how successfully they are returning enquring prospects to your agency. And this campaign fails on several levels:
- The “lowest common denominator” factor was not considered. I used to call this the “David Baker Test” [ask me why]. What about the prospect who either can’t or won’t take the action you request? How to deal with her.
- Consider the customer who doesn’t own Apple products – can she see your message?
- Alternative browsing methods weren’t offered – iPad, iPod, web page, pdf document. All possible alternatives.
- Android and BlackBerry versions not offered – an insult to those businesses who didn’t choose Apple phones for their staff
- Wait and see….. I downloaded it but is there any follow-up or tracking to see if I also visit their site?
So although it’s a great idea to use the tools of expertise you have to sell to clients in your own creative agency promotion, consider your audience and offer a solution that any person with a web browser can use to get to your company information.
You try it… Apple App Store search for Gravity Global World 
Any B2B marketer and any creative agency who works with business to business clients must be using email as part of the marketing plan. Business needs to add new customers to mailing lists and drive outbound messages for new products and services on a regular basis. We listened to a great seminar hosted by the UK’s B2B Marketing magazine and have written up the notes for you to download.
Listen again using this link (you have to register with BrightTalk)
Read the slide notes below and if you like them; share with colleagues:
I do like Linked In – the service it offers is really helpful and its ability to hoover up all the contacts that I know and put them in a helpful place where I can find contact details of business people I know.
BUT its marketing as a major B2B organisation is lacking in clear focus and tactical integrity.
Remember our post about Reid Hoffman’s excitable communication?
Clearly ramping up for an IPO means more revenues will be needed…. but to send out two emails within a day to subscribers with pretty much the same offer is just muddled thinking.
I am happy to get the “try our professional upgrade free for a month” service. [you do have to input payment details... but it's a good offer]. But I got the next email even beore I’d commpleted the action from the first one. Talent Finder.
Also free for a month….
C’mon guys. I think I’m smarter than that – you might have gotten two upgrades from me if you’d spaced out your offerings over a couple of weeks.
Linked In free trial offer email
When new staffers and interns begin work here at Creative Agency towers we have two problems
- New staff is nice – new energies and ideas and enthusiasms.
- New staff is not nice – lost knowledge, experience and expertise in that client.
So how to make the best of the staff-handover process?
The best way to start is to make a LIST. I love lists – they are fabulous for grabbing quick ideas, capturing them fast so that you can review the whole lot later but get on with your job right now.
[check out digital list-making tools plus Stickies and ListPro for iPhone]
From my list, I went over the core sections of the job including
- basic office processes – timesheet, email, filing, document name conventions, phone
- marketing collateral – where it is, what’s there, finding logos
- website and blog content [this is HUGE] – how to search, which key posts to read
- procedures for social media – answering enquiries, help questions,
- client documentation – contract, updates, meeting records
And what was interesting was that once we had the heading categories thought out – the rest of the task of debriefing one staff member (sad to see you go Mohit – but he got a great job) and re-briefing a new one (welcome Eliana, Chrissie, Matt and Mikaela) was simplified.
If you are doing content marketing for your clients – having this as part of your staff training or quarterly update meetings can be invaluable.
Content Audits
These are the big, grown up version of what we did briefing a new team member.
Knowing what information you have in your marketing collateral and how they can be used by the sales team is an important part of ensuring the two teams work well together and that content collateral actually gets used.
Emily Mayfield has written a great piece about how she first aligned the buyer persona and the steps in the buying process so that when she came to categorise the marketing materials they each lined up with clear sales methodologies already in use at her organisation. Smart.
Jeffrey Veen has a screen grab from his audit spreadsheet template plus some helpful definitions.
Hilary Marsh has added some really helpful tips like get a second screen, block out distractions, use keyboard shortcuts and have a programmable mouse.
Is automation possible?
There are some automatic tools like Sitemap Generator or iGooMap you can use to create an XML site map of your website. Use this to populate your spreadsheet for the audit. But remember, some of your content may not be online or accessible so it’s not a perfect list of everything.
The sort answer is No. You can’t automate because the expert human eye for categorisation and analysis is indispensible. But as JeffreyVeen says
]]>The best we’ve been able to do is enlist the help of a programmer to write us a script that will crawl a Web site and spit out the URLs it finds. And that merely ensures that we don’t miss any pages.The best we’ve been able to do is enlist the help of a programmer to write us a script that will crawl a Web site and spit out the URLs it finds. And that merely ensures that we don’t miss any pages.
Nick Burcher is a super star… but I didn’t know that when I first met him. We had coffee together and he gave me very early advice on setting up this blog and since then I’ve followed his work.
Nick’s latest views are about the integration of advertising, marketing and social media in the context of the internet being the central plank of a brand’s marketing, recommendations and opinion-formation with audiences.
This is a really important part of comprehending how the “Old” marketing techniques are migrating to the “New”. For example, do you know how to change your communication methods so that your “old” customers are not alienated by the “New” tools and so that the “New” tools can sit comfortably alongside “Old” styles?
Nick Burcher's Paid:Owned:Earned
Take a look at the image here. This is Nick’s thesis.
There are websites whose purpose is based on payment (brands pay to advertise on them); there are others where brands own the information up there (mainly content-led) and lastly there are others where brands have earned the right to be listed.
Note that some sites (Facebook, Twitter) are listed in all three categories…. this is a really important part of the paradigm.
Your Brand needs to have communication strategies that work in all three contexts, and uses the feedback arrows at the top and bottom as well as in the ones middle of the diagram.
Here is the strategy we use for a client, Rowperfect. They sell rowing sports equipment.
Paid: Google adwords and other sports sites who carry banner adverts.
Owned: Blog content, You Tube videos, forum discussions, Twitter feed, Facebook page.
Earned: followers on FB, Twitter, YouTube and others linking back to the Owned
I was delighted to watch this video where Nick sets out the lessons behind the simple headline “Paid-Owned-Earned”.
Does this have resonance for your brand strategy? Where do you think there may be issues or conflicts with traditional brand-led marketing?
New Trends in Digital Advertising [exclusive video] from Hayko on Vimeo.
Related articles
- Paid Owned Earned – how it works [image and video] (nickburcher.com)
- Paid Owned Earned: Paid Owned Earned on Star Wars Day – VW The Force and Blackberry (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Advertising’s Future Is 3 Simple Words: Paid. Owned. Earned. | Story Worldwide (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Separate content from platforms (beingpeterkim.com)
So you’ve written an e-book and are wondering why people haven’t tracked you down, overloaded your inbox with emails and the news of your book hasn’t spread the online world like wildfire. Well, the internet is a vast place, and you’ve got to make it easy to be found. We recently did the marketing for our client, Norman Evans, who created a great e-book titled ‘Becoming an Entrepreneur’. Below we share the secrets of marketing that we use for our own clients.
- Become a force to be reckoned with. AKA, get found. Hopefully, you have a website and you can add a blog section to it. If not, start a blog to develop a reader-base. Start writing about your area of expertise, and get the word out that you know what you’re talking about. The power of the internet lies in getting found. If you create a reader-base first, your e-book is going to sell much better. It’s all based on generating high quality content on your website, and helping people find you. You can also start a newsletter to keep track of any followers. Give them an incentive to join, by offering them special tips over time, or discounts on your products.
- Get in on the conversation. During your morning coffee, make it a habit to do a daily search on relevant content being published on other’s blogs. Read what other people have to say and contribute to the conversation. If you have something good to offer people will start searching for your name, and your own blog will come up. This is not blatant marketing, mind you. Don’t scrawl your blog site all over everyone else’s blogs in flashing letters—nobody likes that. Simply contribute to other people’s conversations in the areas of your expertise, and traffic will come to you.
- Tweet about it. Number 2 flows right into number 3 here. You already know who has good blogs out there and you’ve joined in on the conversations, now, share the gold! Tweet about those great blogs you’ve found and show that you know what great content is, even if it isn’t your own. The authors of these blogs will see that you’re linking to them, and then take a look at your blog. If they see you know your stuff, they’ll link back to you too. Do the same with Facebook, LinkedIn and any other relevant social media sites.
- Listing the book. Selling your book through a variety of websites is key. It’s this simple: the more hooks in the water, the easier it is to catch a fish. Using sites such as Amazon, Fishpond and Barnes and Noble will open you up to a bigger audience. It will also create links to a highly ranked website. In addition you can sell directly from your own website (now that you have one!).
- A discount for the loyal followers. By this time you have established a following that you are hopefully able to track, perhaps you have Facebook fans, Twitter followers, newsletter subscribers, etc. Just before your book is released offer your loyal followers a limited time ‘buy early’ discount, to get the ball rolling on sales. This also encourages more people to become your fan, or subscribe to your newsletter, etc. They get special offers from it, and honestly, who doesn’t love a discount.
Remember, like most things, persistence pays off… it may take weeks or months to get the audience and the traction that your book deserves, but keep going and little-and-often will definitely get you noticed.
We have 5 free E-books by Norman Evans to give away. Please contact us if you would like to be one of the lucky recipients! This is actually true, so hurry and send us your details and see if you get to read ‘Becoming an Entrepreneur’ for free!
Now, get out there and market your e-book and let us know how it goes!
How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?
For brands who are growing and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing. Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.
Why you need better marketing
The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing. These are good signs.
You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.
Hire versus buy: the dilemma
There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.
Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.
Costs are usually the determining factor
It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.
Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice. Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.
A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer. You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates. Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com. I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.
Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work. They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance. Could this work for you? Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.
In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do
- Advertising – do it yourself or hire
- Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
- Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
- Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
- Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
- SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
- Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
- Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
- DIY or hire a market research company?
