Agencies

• Taproot Creative, integrated marketing, Tallahassee, FL, USA
• BBDO, Advertising agency, Russia
• Beckerman PR, creative public relations, NJ, USA
• The Bounce Agency, creative solutions for the right answer, South Carolina, USA
• Intermark Group, Top 100 advertising agency, Birmingham AL, USA

Brands

• Equifax - credit scoring financial services, Atlanta GA, USA
• Houses of Parliament, Government, London UK
• Tallinin Science Park, Business location and offices, Tallinin, Estonia
• Riverside Graphics, printing company, Reading UK
• Cheshire County Council, Government, Chester, UK
• Barnes Aerospace, manufacture and repair of turbines, Cincinnati, OH, USA
• SOLA, corporate recruitment agency, London UK
• Computer Concepts Ltd, network expertise and disaster recovery, New Zealand
• Wandering Wifi, wireless internet services, USA
• Forestry Commission, Government, UK
• The American Game Factory, software games, Denmark
• Kelkoo, retail comparison website, UK
• TED Co, entrepreneur business incubator, Tyneside, UK
• B&Q plc, DIY retailer, Southampton, UK
• Yapi Kredi Bank, retail banking services, Turkey

Brands seeking agencies

• Worldwide telecoms and data service “business development for advertising agencies”, USA
• Global insurance company wants “creative agency Koln”, Germany/Austria
• National newspaper group needs “cold calling digital media”, USA
• Network design and management “How to write a campaign proposal”, South Africa
• Web security agency “marketing agency pitch brief”, London UK
• Magazine for retailers “sample brief pitch creative agency” Romania
• Regional Development agency “new business development creative agency”, Regions UK
• Mobile telephony, “Brief pitching agency”, Jakarta, Indonesia
• City council, “Creative agencies in Indiana”, USA

It’s time to stop treating your agency as its most neglected client and promote it to your most important client. It’s time to give the cobbler’s children some new shoes!

How?

Empower your new business director. Give them the clout and resources to get what they need from the agency as if they are the primary contact person for your most important client. Their projects are not put on the back burner when the agency gets busy. Allow them the time, resources and realistic expectations to build a consistent new business pipeline.

Choose your best target audience. Who is your agency’s target audience? That is the first question that needs to be answered. Without it there is no direction for your agency. It’s time to take a rifled approach to your agency’s new business. You can’t stay focused if you don’t have a target identified.

Practice what you preach. Use the tools that you recommend your clients use. Demonstrate their success for your agency. This is especially true when participating in social media. Walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Create a new business program using social media to generate inbound leads for your agency. This doesn’t replace traditional methods for agency new business but refines, enhances and integrates them into a powerful agency new business machine.

Be transparent. The transparency that social media mandates is changing the way agency’s do business, and it is a much needed change. It compels us to lead with benefits instead of capabilities. Everything is now laid out bare on the table, including agency compensation. Perhaps even more performance based agreements. On the client side perhaps replacing our current broken system of pitches and RFPs with something new. Long term relationships should be a mutual goal because it benefits both the client and agency. For that to happen there must be the “win-win” for both and that can’t be done without being transparent.

Be a Leader not a vendor. If you want to stop clients from treating your agency as a vendor you must lead. To be in a position leadership means to have a genuine expertise, a point of differentiation. Your agency can no longer afford to be everything to everybody. So the next question you need to answer, “what is our expertise?” When you answer this question, plant that flag in the ground, this is what we do best, it will command respect, higher premiums and give clients outside your market a reason to do business with your agency. A small agency was recently included in a pitch for a national account because they were willing to say this is who we are, this is how we are different than other agencies, this is our expertise.

This article was originally published here.

Rebecca has been asked to speak at a Cambridge University Careers service recruitment evening about our industry.

I’d like to give them a decent informational talk with a bit of humour thrown in.

Here’s the brief.

You may remember we met back in the Spring and amongst other things I mentioned that I may run a Careers Evening of talks around the Advertising and Marketing sector. Unfortunately, this hasn’t come to fruition. However, the Advertising and Marketing Communications Careers Fair is happening on Thursday 29 October and I am putting on some talks during that event.

We talked about the possibility of your doing 20 minutes on understanding the family tree of the sector, what job titles really mean with some jargon busting. Would you still be willing to come along and do this?

Questions:

1. List all the different types of Advertising and Marketing Communications agency specialisms
2. Create a ‘family tree’ of the sector
3. List all the main job titles found in agencies
4. List all the main job titles found in client-side marketing departments
5. What does each title REALLY mean?

Sounds like an A-level exam….. but can you help me out?

I’ll get going with some of the lists.  More tomorrow.

Please post your suggestions below.

How does biz dev work at Grey and what is your role?

I imagine biz dev is in two halves there’s the organic side from existing clients and the new business side.  They are basically totally different.
New business I envisage is like a massive funnel at the top there is a mass of people who have no idea who we are and what we do and at the bottom we win the business.
Maybe a colander is a better analogy – new biz is about that journey but it isn’t one thing it is loads of different things – discrete events all of which it’s possible to be good or bad at.  For example, prospecting / chemistry / pitch meetings.

This is an important insight.  IMO it’s obvious when you say it but actually many people don’t talk about it in that way.
The challenge is a bit like a F1 race the race lasts 1.5 hours but the different between winning and coming second is hundredths of a second. In new biz this is worse than coming second.
You have to be brilliant at every stage in order to win.

You have got to break down the process yourself and be brutal and frank about how good are we at each stage.  Where do we begin.  How to play to strengths and minimise weaknesses is the strategy.

As MD where do you get involved?
The closer we get towards actually having a meeting with someone (which can be along way down the process) the more involved I am.

We wouldn’t have a new biz meeting with a client without heavy representation by senior management of the agency – planning / creative directors.  Earlier on it is hard to be definite about where and how I appear.  I often get involved with consultants which is a ‘familiar route’.  But for prospecting I can be quite a long way away especially if it’s speculative…..

I think about the meeting as business you have to be quite short termist about how you manage the meeting.  You have to ‘win that meeting -  there ain’t no future unless you win that meeting.  Deploy effort and resources to win the meeting.  If you don’t get another meeting there it’s academic.

Employ the best people you can as often as you can in order to get through.  In any business growth is critical to the success of the business and so the senior team must be involved.  Becoming a growing business solves problems more than bottom line, reputation, career management, personal development, morale, confidence or sense of fulfilment.

Sometimes there’s an undercurrent that biz dev is seen as bit “they are acquisitive” and move onto the next client and this is grasping or wrong.  Maybe they should be truer to the client s they have and do well for them.   Any business without an active and aggressive strategy for growth is ridiculous to suggest otherwise, particularly as these days the vast majority of marketing companies are publicly listed.

Which bit do you enjoy the most?
I enjoy the meetings where you are physically there in front of the clients.  It’s the most distilled bit of the job.  Everything that happens in our job happens in those meetings.  Pitch chemistry or progress – living on your wits and the highest and lowest points of the job.  When they go well how fansastic that is, it’s absolutely brilliant.  Nothing gives an agency more than a sense of excitement, joy and pleasure as winning a piece of business.  Also it can be the worst bit.  Not winning can be absolutely horrible.

What’s your most recent new business win  and why do you think you won it?

888.com is the most recent client win.  I think we won it for the reasons that everyone always wins – I think we had a combination of  ‘the right answer’ that the client felt most appropriate and a team of people who the client felt were the right-est for them.

The perennial debate is which comes first?  the client falls in love with the people and that makes them more likely to like the idea that is put in front of them or the other way round.   A whole group of consultants and experts will tell you this is the case.  The opposite is when someone cracks the idea and how much they love the poeople won’t overcome the wrong idea.

To win you have to do being both very well.  Be at the top of the pile of both scores.

You are an advertising agency – do you use advertising for biz dev?
We are sort of working on this one.  A lot but by no means all of business that comes to us comes via consultants or intermediaries.  Creative Brief, Agency Assessments, AAR, ISBA are the main ones.  There is a relative small group of people who control the majority of the briefs and the majority of the briefs come to us from those people.
What is key is the marketing of ourselves towards those people.  We do all sorts of stuff.
Crucially personal relationships affect this.  Do they look you in the eye and believe you, do they like the team, do they know what you’ve done, won quite a bit of business recently?  On a wider scale agencies aren’t very good at using their own skill [advertising in our case] in prospecting.

Cold prospecting is a difficult thing to do for us and our peers.  I don’t think anyone is particualrly good about it.  So much of it is about finding ways for allowing prospective clients to understand and meet you as people;  networking is a really important part of it.

Overall, if I knew the answer i probably wouldn’t tell you!

And I don’t know the answer.