Creative Agency Secrets

One of my clients just got their very first email newsletter from a supplier. 

Oh my goodness, it is so DULL.  Here's the opening paragraphs

Welcome to the first edition of XYZ's Connections e-Newsletter, designed to provide timely information and tools to help your business run more efficiently.

The cornerstone of our first issue is exciting news about the global alignment of our organisation and the development of our powerful international processing platform, designed to help your business efficiently accommodate industry regulations and technological advancements.

 I have changed their name to protect the innocent and deadly communications advisor who must be surely about to lose his job for sending out such twaffle. 

Apart from being rather far behind the curve for newsletters (albeit sending it by email is vaguely 21st Century) This communication sucks. 

It's full of corproate-speak, management consultant catchphrases and has a TOTAL LACK of orientation around the customer.

Why would my client be interested in the "global alignment" of their organisation.  WIIFM? 

PS here's the text from the rest just to make you cringe further. The first sentence reminds me of a ghastly corporate mission statement written by Peter Jenner for Erdman Lewis while I worked there "Anticipating the needs our our clients, we bla bla bla…."

As we continue to add value to your business, we will provide you with industry-leading support and service. That is why each issue of Connections will connect you with valuable information about security, compliance and innovative solutions to help maximise your operational and financial efficiencies. We hope Connections helps you stay connected to your payments processing operations and the robust solutions XYZ offers.

Doing ongoing research into less well-known places where agencies can go for help finding leads for new business pitches

Creative Brief - £300 bare minimum and £2,500 for the 2 Case Study package up to £4,500 for 10 case studies …. and when I searched on copywriters in London and South East there were none listed!  [but over 30 for the UK listed and so some work needed on sub-categorisation, IMO]

Skillfair - free to clients to advertise briefs and £200 for everyone else …. I have used this twice to post projects and got great responses and placed one job with an agency that applied.  A good service with excellent customer service back-up.

Agency Finder -a 'new' service.  Well it's Reardon Smith Whittaker getting the license to be the European arm of an already-successful US business.  Pay £295 per year and then up this to £3,000 p.a. if you accept the offer to go to a pitch… whether you win or lose.  One of my clients is testing it right now.  Will let you know if they turn up anything useful.

I have been “lurking” on Skillfair for a year or so now. It’s a website that matches small businesses and freelance consultants to projects.

[Backstory: I first found Skillfair.com about a year ago because they advertised a job creating a micro-site for the River and Rowing Museum. And my sport is rowing, so I picked it up on an alert service for key words. I watched the site from a visitor registration for a while and found jobs that suited some of my clients listed there. My interest built and so I emailed Gill asking if she’d be available for an interview which I could publish. Here it is.]
So how did you start the website?
The Skillfair story began was I went freelance 7-8 years ago when children were young. My background is in IT and I got a contract from former employer, and then another from a mate…. I do specialist work and was on an internet directory and got a third contract from an enquiry off the directory. This led me to the thought that we needed one of those directories for everyone.
Sounds logical.

So how do you get consultants and work opportunities onto Skillfair?
It is hard work doing marketing and sales, when you are a freelancer or independent consultant. And it isn’t most people’s core specialism and so it gets put aside and you end up with the ‘feast or famine’ problem of work. So I created a marketplace for independent consultants in a range of disciplines. To give them a feed into the marketing system that keeps going in the background while they are working with clients.
Skillfair went live early 2002 which was an interesting time then. I had had no work for 6-8 months and got a job shortly after the site went live. The business ticked along for a couple of years. I discovered when you build a website if you don’t spend a lot of money on it you get what you pay for. We needed more behind the scenes in admin – and decided to systemise everything.
This was a key finding. You have to be systematic for all stuff, if you find yourself doing something manually more than 3 times…. like sending customer service emails and enquiry replies ask yourself how can I make it happen without me doing it?
Building a scalable business requires a system to do this for you. This is key to Skillfair’s success to date.
And so what’s happened since then?
We have experienced gradual and organic growth since then. We have not had massive financial investment. The UK economy is at the point where lots of people are going freelance and seeing this as a career option and a positive step. Some of the reasons are work:life balance and not wanting to commute.
And also companies and government want highly skilled people but don’t want to commit to employing them permanently because of financial and legal aspects of permanent employment. The coming together of these two movements is making a wave that didn’t exist before.
How do consultants and freelancers find Skillfair?
Consultants find us though search engines. We use Google ads and have found that placement is important. We do telemarketing as well. We call up people who we think are consultants and ask if they want to be registered for new work. We do the initial work to register them and then leave it up to them to decide to participate further by sending them weekly information.
We also buy lists for the telemarketing. And referrals from other consultants are another very key source of new registrants. Of course, that is how you passed Skillfair’s details onto your clients.
We have worked hard to make it easier to get people to refer their contacts through the website, as they trust what Skillfair is doing. We get about 100 – 200 referrals per week. And 30-40% of paying new joiners come from referrals.
So where do you find the work opportunities?
We use a public sector tender alert service for a lot of client work and we search 6-700 websites per week and OJEU to find the lower value tenders. We have a system for this (of course) to make it less time consuming. (Gill wrote some of the code herself and sourced some of it elsewhere). Skillfair also pays for some services to support this.
The private sector projects come from Google adverts in the main. Search engines are very accurate ‘help with marketing’ means that’s what clients are looking for and / or are a marketing consultant. We find that we get clients precisely when they are looking for advise and support and not at other times.
We now have a database of past clients and we send them newsletters and details of new consultants joining the system and we can send them a regular feed of consultant names for specific skills if they want that.
It is more of a challenge getting clients to say what they want… it is the interim management agencies who are interested in this and more able to say what they want. And we serve them too.

So what are your future plans for Skillfair?
We have worked hard to make a successful business and as I said before, we want it to be scalable. We’ve been working on offering Skillfair as a white label service for professional bodies and trade associations whose membership includes independent consultants. Our service will allow them to provide opportunities to these members without getting involved in admin or commission arrangements and will boost their revenue at relatively low risk. Our goal is to have at least one of these organisations operational by the end of 2008.
Thank you very much for your time, Gill.

And anyone wanting to know more should take a look at Skillfair.com (and please mention that you found it from a link at Creative Agency Secrets!

Reading John Hagel way way back in 2003, he advocates a FAST strategy for B2B

Long term strategy is dead in the water (who knows what markets will be doing in 5 years?)

Here’s what he suggests around three key themes (Accelerate, Strengthen, Tie it all Together)

On the six to twelve month horizon, Accelerate and Strengthen are the key requirements. By Accelerate, I mean identifying a few key operating initiatives that have the potential to significantly accelerate the movement of the company towards the long-term Focus.

On the same time horizon, Strengthen also comes into play. Here, management needs to ask, what are the major organizational obstacles that are preventing us from moving even faster to achieve our operational objectives? Then the question becomes, what can be done over the next six to twelve months to “de-bottleneck” the organization and strengthen our organizational capabilities so that we can move even faster in the next six to twelve month cycle?

Tie it all together integrates these three streams of activities.

And I can really see applications for this approach in some work I’ve been doing this week.  This is tied in with  Anthony Mayfield’s comments

John Seely Brown’s ideas about FAST strategy and how loose coalitions of small teams can be the most effective way to organise.

And so yesterday I belatedly edited some copy for an advert, adapting from Australian English to UK (hillarious…… tag line was  “Australian made for the world”.  Really see that going down well in UK and US!).  And I sent it off….But started thinking about an exhibition / conference that the brand is visiting and whether I could do a competition to encourage stand visitors.  When I came across some old notes about good things to do at exhibitions and conference.  Make a door hanger tag that you can put on visitors doors overnight…. cool.  Integrate with visiting stand idea.  So I mentioned this to Di with whom we did a pre-Christmas campaign.  And she was kind enough to tell me I was bonkers, but suggested some collaboration on selling her stuff on the exhibition stand to bring more people in….. and offering a great prize for the competition.  And so I drafted a brief and sent it out to Alan and Leo.  And Rachel .

She suggested a couple of improvements, specifically voting… and then I remembered Liz had run a funny campaign on comments last year.   Maybe we could collaborate?  But the need to get it done quickly [conference date is 25 Jan] drove me back to Skillfair, whose MD, Gill Hunt, I interviewed back end of last year…  and I posted it up there for good measure too.

Small team.  Collaborating.  Moving quickly towards the mid-term objective.

Loved it.  Cheers everyone!

[Aside….I did a Skype con call introducing Leo and Rachel last week.  Interesting - they were both rather too polite to be free-thinking about their ideas.   Like shy and rather too agreeing with me as opposed to debating and sparking objections and suggestions.  Maybe too early to expect them to behave together as they do individually with me.]

A “Golden Question” is one in which the answer tells you more than the question itself would imply.

Useful for research, discovery and us biz dev types who need to quickly assess new prospects and whether they will buy from us.

I learnt about it from Don Peppers who integrated it into his CRM method (Identify:Differentiate:Interact and learn: Customise).  His classic was to find out whether a customer had a high propensity to buy premium brand pet food.  The question was “Do you buy your pet a christmas present?”.  Neat, isn’t it?  Those who do, are more likely to lavish spend on their animals than those who don’t.  Simple.
And so how have I used it with my clients?  They are mainly working in B2B areas and so the question set needs revising depending on your particular positioning and needs.

#1 Digital Agency selling high end technology back-end services

Julian wanted to be able to find out whether a prospect wanted a simple web site or one with higher functionality.  Working with him, I developed two questions to help him quickly filter people:

Question 1: What was the date of your first website?

Question 2: How many times since then have you re-launched or substantially revised it?

Why does this work? With the first quesiton, he can tell if your company is an early adopter or late arrival for the new web technologies.   And with the second, he can assess your likely sophistication as a web user for marketing.  Each time you re-launch a website the functionality is improved. Relaunching every 2 years means you are more likley to be interested in moving to leading edge features.

So, how does your company stack up against his questions?

#2 Agency working with start-up web businesses

These lads want to be able to find out how far down the road you are to getting your website functional.  THey also need to find out the degree of technological sophistication of the person they are talking to.  Pitching yourself too “techy” and you’ll quickly lose the interest of a punter but being too simplistic has the same effect.  Similarly their services vary depending on the stage of the business and how close to launch the start-up business is.

Question 1: Have you got your requirements document written?

Question 2: Are you happy with your user numbers?

The first establishes business stage and sophistication and the second devines the success of the marketing support put into an already functioning site.

Now what golden questions are right for your business?  Can you use them to shorten your prospecting time frame and more quickly find prospects who have the potential to become customers?