Creative Agency Secrets

Reading about another marketer’s top tips on how to provoke a response from a prospect from your first contact (also called Cold Calling).

I have generally foudn this to be really helpful in my own business development work.  I am one of hte (probably sad) people who enjoys making cold calls.  One of the reasons I like it is that I am reasonably successful. 

My cold approaches may be by phone or email or letter.  But what makes them distinctive is that I always follow up and my messaging is designed to be short and very memorable.  And occasionally cheeky(!)

• Plan the method of your approach what step follows
• Write all the collateral and script guides
• Work out a clear record keeping system (database, spreadsheet, paper trail)
• Be diligent and persistent

I will post up some of my cold letters for you to have a look at.

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"

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

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.

Forrester surveyed US agencies and clients and found divergent views of influence and success.

1.  Agency executives 93 percent thought their efforts "drive their clients’ marketing success," while just 63 percent of the marketing executives contacted agreed
2. About 95 percent of agencies thought that they were well positioned to adapt to changes in Internet advertising while only 45 percent of clients agreed.
3. Of the survey participants, only 15 percent said their agency compensation was tied to business results. When those who did not have such an arrangement were asked why, 43 percent said they never considered it while 36 percent reported it would be too difficult to truly measure the results.

Yikes.  If we are hired because of the results we drive for our clients - this sort of perception mismatch has only one ending.  It would be interesting to know how long the agency:client relationship had been in existence at the point of the survey.  Do these things tire after a couple of years "familiarity breeding contempt"?

Tripped the light fantastic over to Earl’s Court (blimey this is the ‘best’ showground we have in Central London and it’s AWFUL - space dull, facilities basic, noisy, nylon carpet, no decent entrance).

Anyway, the organisers have merged the Direct Marketing and Internet World shows into one…. this was hard to work out as I had come for IW but found myself wandering around Post Office and TNT stands… until I realised that the critical divider was the CARPET… red for DM; blue for internet.  Obvious, really!

The conference schedule had one paid for event (Brands Reignited) and loads of short freebies in small booths around the floor.  BRILLIANT.  Love the concept.

Found the Web 2.0 stand and caught a Barclays guy put forward by his web consultant both waxing lyrical about his wonderfulness and how banking might move forward (catch-phrase city…. long tail… monetise…community….) nothing new.

Trexy - a new approach to search where instead of the content producers using SEO to dominate search, the user sets a ‘trail’ and others can follow it.  Trying to mimic the way we use tasks (brain recall, ask your friends, go find) to get stuff offline.  Neat.  Need to test it for myself.  Can’t see what’s in it for the average business site, nor how they make money.

Loic le Meur keynoted on the future of blogging.  Good to see the man in action.  He’s started using the one-word-per-slide crap that Tom Peters did years ago.  It works with a highly vibrant delivery style that does not require you to refer back to your notes / screen.  Not for you, Loic.

Message: The Future of Blogging
Trend 1 Escape your friends.  Get away from the huge numbers of readers Loic has on his blog by creating private spaces to meet the real people you want to converse with.  (Second LIfe, WOW etc).

Trend 2 Stay with your best friends.  Use clever sites to let people you wnat to meet know where you are and what you are doing.  (Twitter, Dopplr).  Rationale, you get closeness from your real friends and you pay attention to them, plus speed is of the essence - immediacy rules.

Trend 3.  Video blogs.  TV sucks and watching it alone proves you have no friends.  Make it a community past time (Joost, Sling Box, blinkx).

Trend 4. A culture.  Move to no office, borderless world with no race, no religion, no email, no country, no tie etc etc etc.  Decentralised, unheirarchial, no mass media, instant access and no costs (!).  NO secrets - everything is shared and aways in beta therefore there are no failures.

That was it… 120 slides in 28 minutes. 

My views - Trend 1… great for the famous. Hardly real for the masses.
Trend 2.  yes…. but…. I looked at Twitter and it just isn’t me.  Maybe I don;t have enough friends who are techie or online all the time but I really don’t want everyone interrupting me with messages through the day on what they are doing.  Easy and fast way to hear the ‘news’ e.g. French election results on Twitter before the newswires’ embargo was over.
Trend 3.  Probably.  Nice idea to make communities out of everything.
Trend 4.  Maybe.  It would be fantastic for me.  And I am really drawn to the online marketing and sales model by product development / community / buzz rather than advertising and push marketing.  Whether we can make it work for real for enough non-IT brands remains to be seen.

I am undecided about whether this is the ultimate send-up or just crass arrogance. Agency.com put a video up on YouTube showing themselves doing a 3 day preparation for a pitch to the sandwich chain, Subway. 

This purports to be the 5 minute video about themselves that the client requested as stage one of the pitch selection process. I do hope that is is not what they submitted. The results

Now, in the UK we lead the world in creative advertising and we try to be deeply professional about how we approach new business and maybe Agency.com is not riding the peak of the creative wave at the moment and this is lost in a transatlantic mis-translation. 

BUT
10 Reasons why this is creatively poorly executed, deeply embarrassing to watch and cringingly arrogant

1.  Put yourself in the client’s shoes… how will they respect your agency’s creativity when the unauthorised ‘viral’ campaign you create gets deeply criticised worldwide, in no time at all?
2.  The pitch process is virtually non-existant - there is no plan, no over-riding simple message about the brand.  It’s all about the agency.
3.  It shows advertising people at their most show-off arrogant.  Great for the industry.  NOT.
4.  It proves that bad viral works really well particularly when posted to key gossip websites and blogs.
5.  Didn’t they think through the implications of what they were doing in the context of trying to win a new client? 
6.  Anyone know if Subway threw them out on their ear or hired them?