Creative Agency Secrets

A theme has been emerging from a couple of meetings I’ve had in the past days.  It’s a subject that appears dull but can be the strongest possible boost to growing your business.

Lead Management.
What is it?

The process by which prospective customers are attracted to your product or service, make themselves known to you and from which you move them towards a purchase.

Vital.  Consider it a chain of events that lead to a conclusion that in itself can become the start of a new chain.  Sometimes called "closed-loop" marketing.

Write down the chain as it happens in your company. 
Are there any breaks in the chain; anywhere that information can be ‘lost’, forgotten or drop down the cracks between one person and the next in the chain (technically called a hand-off).

I was talking to the Manager of a consulting firm who felt she couldn’t keep track of the pipeline and the current jobs the firm was handling.  They use ACT! as their sales tool. 

I made two suggestions
1 - keep a spreadsheet for two months of your prospects and clients fees and use the weekly team meeting to update it
[this is a near-manual work-round - but it should serve to keep a regular focus on prospects, invoicing and revenue streams.  When they’ve used it for a couple of months, I suggested creating a report from ACT! to subsitute and automate the process]
2 - tracking current client jobs.  Write a single page template summary for each job.  Keep them in a marked coloured folder on your desk, i.e. somewhere public, and hand-write updates on job stage, sub-contractors, payment terms, next action dates. Then each team member can access the file at any time and it’s readily at hand when you have a quick thought or something changes.
3 - Put a recurring diary note in to block out time each month to write your monthly report with a reminder to email the team 2 days earlier to send in their information for your report.

Oh, that was three suggestions…
I am out of the office now but will add the spreadsheet template later for anyone who wants to use it.

These are things I enjoy and so do well.  I’ve done most of them many times and can give you references, if you need.

In no particular order….

1 - Mentoring and coaching anyone with business development responsibility or who has to collaborate with biz dev to do their job better and get results

2 - Moving the whole company to an Enterprise 2.0 operation.  This is a more open relationship with its customers and prospects though using web 2.0 techniques (for yourselves not clients) and creating the open culture internally that enables outsiders to recognise the ‘personality’ of the agency - bypassing traditional outbound communication methods

3 - Facilitating an away day for a client or your senior team

4 - Improving your new business methods and, particularly, pitching

5 - Running a training session on "New business for non-new biz people"

Personally I just don’t do pod casting.  I have an i-pod and i have i-tunes but haven’t downloaded the latest version of I-tunes… but there must be some people and businesses that are ready to do this as Nick seems to be building a business in this area. 

the check list of items he puts up is useful… but hardly rocket science.  This is a good check for ANY marketing activity.

• Will anyone listen?
• Is there a payoff?
• Can we engage?
• Do we know our audience?
• Is the audience podcast-savvy?
• Do you have clear objectives?

But who are the agencies he’s rushing round seeing… digital agencies that don’t yet do pod casting…. seems like VERY FAR behind the curve.

Or maybe it’s a follow-through on my work about web 2 when I found that they don’t do it for themselves….. only for clients.

I have posted in the past on how to generate a pipeline of sales leads for your business. Here and here.

But reading Brian Carroll recently he added one with particular poignancy for me today.

The velocity of inquiry follow-up matters. Your
response time say’s more about you then you realize. If your
competition takes 24 hours to respond and it takes you days to respond,
you’re in big trouble. And don’t just send a canned response either.

I received a lead for Rowperfect by email…. I answered the enquiry the following day (which is later than I normally do but I had a great excuse - but it was an excuse not a reason).  And when I spoke to the chap, he’d bought elsewhere.  Darn and double darn. 

I frequently work with clients on their biz dev - as a means of growing a business it is without compare IMHO.

I know my methods and there is a reasonably straightforward base template of activities and actions which then get customised for each situation (depending on experience, cash, skills and time available).

Two of my clients, Wave Creative Communications and Gabrielle Shaw Communications have kick-started their biz dev in the past couple of months.  And, despite knowing that hte base methodology is sound, it is still really gratifying when it WORKS - and when it works fast.

Wave chose to use external resource for appointment setting and after three weeks have two live opportunities and eight future opportunities logged for the next 6-8 months. 

GSC are doing it all internally and in the month of July have WON four new pieces of business - three in one week.  What was particularly encouraging was that we worked hard at pricing the work accruately and sending the right team to pitch and for one client we sent a more junior team to reflect the value of the opportunity and they won it without senior help.  That bodes really well for creating a culture of new business through the whole organisation.

I am so proud of them.

Here’s the base methodology

1. Identify your target sectors and named organisations and research
2. Add to your database
3. Decide how you will go after them and set up the process
4. Have support documentation / literature / credentials / website / direct mail ready
5. Contact by mail / email / voice and record your conversation
6. Do what you promise to do (send stuff, email, call again)
7. Flag future contact dates and have a process to ensure this happens

It isn’t hard to understand.  But what Creative Agencies frequently find is that it is very hard to do consistently when client pressures rise.  What I do is to help set up the underlying process to ensure it happens regardless of other things….. Sometimes it works brilliantly and sometimes I am less successful.

If you want a "healthcheck" for your own processes - call.

From time to time my clients get asked to perform in an agency selectio process.  I was recently asked to research all the available organisations offering this service to brands and thought I’d publish my findings in case anyone else finds this useful.

Agency Assessments International
Agency Insight
Optimum Strategy
Haystack Group
Agency Plaza
YCP
AAR

And the professional associations offer this as a service to members. I have linked to the page where they detail their services.

PRCA
ISBA
IPA
MCCA
DMA
The Marketing Society

Anyone interested in doing Public Affairs work for the London Olympics in 2012 they have called for expressions of interest….. details below.

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How good are your questioning skills? 
When taking a brief, you need to be able to ask "open-ended" questions in order to get a deep understanding of the customer or prospective client’s decision making process when hiring.

I found a nice American sales trainer Barry Rhein’s promotional video tha you might like to try for yourself.
He sets a "sales challenge" which describes a classic sales skill set as:

• Information gathering
• Creating customised value
• Relationship building

Try the four steps on his video and see how your questioning skills match up….. it’s a good summary that works in our industry.

Interestingly, Dan Dimmock has just told me he’s left FHD and is off on his own!  Brave move.  But let’s face it, if you are good a biz dev and can generate business leads and convert them, you must be gold dust to a start-up creative team.

Will let you know where he lands…

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Redbee (formerly BBC Creative)  are looking to recruit  New Business Manager.

Salary up to £50k

If
you are interested, let Emmaclare Huntriss know and  will send you the brief or
contact Suzy Fleetwood at Longhouse directly, suzy@longhouselondon.co.uk