Being exposed to a single large client is well-known as a fundamental mistake for agencies. I had a consulting client who spent a year executing a new corporate identity for a UK Building Society Bank. Within 4 weeks of it’s launch and roll-out nationwide, the outfit had been bought by Santander Bank and was renamed. There was no repeat business, they’d spent over 80% of their energies on one client for whom there was no prospect of any more work = end of agency. and lost jobs.

So what should a modern agency to do?

1. The best answer is to have a range of clients, none of whom are over 20% of your monthly billing. Try to create contracts that don’t all end in the same month so you have overlap and won’t be very short of work all at one period if several clients don’t renew or projects don’t lead to more work. And also try to get longer contracts – aim for a year if you can; 6 months minimum. In this way your underlying revenues don’t change much month to month and you can take some uncertainty risk out of the business.
2. The second thing is look to get new revenue streams. There are two schools of thought about whether agencies should make money selling things that are unrelated to their core expertise. Some think it’s a good way to diversify and others think it dilutes the core skills of a creative agency.

A bad example of new revenue streams

For a while in the UK TV shows were paid for by “advertiser funded programming” i.e. brands paying TV companies to make the show. This wasn’t sponsorship or advertising, it was for product placements and other benefits. Both TV production companies and advertising agencies tried to get into this game. But few succeeded. The reason is that the skills to negotiate broadcast programme contracts and assess brand ROI are rarely found in the same people with the same experience. Many agencies spent a lot of time paying staff to chase these deals which didn’t come off and so ended up costing the agency a lot for no return on their investment.

A good example of new revenue streams

There are good ways to earn revenues from ancillary associated products and services.

How to find appropriate services to resell. The best way to appraise them is to ask two questions:

“ Are these products or services very close to the agency core skill set?”

“Are we using these services to deliver campaigns for our clients?”

And thus many agencies resell software licenses for cloud services which they use themselves

• Project/campaign management (Basecamp)
• CRM (Salesforce, Highrise)
• Email sending (Aweber, Constant Contact, Feedblitz)
• Web Content Management Systems (Hubspot, Contegro)
• Website hosting / domain management (eUKHost, Network Solutions)

Read the rest of the #FutureAgency series by following the category in our sidebar

Next time we ask, Is it appropriate to mark up services sold on to clients?

What’s in the series?

• 8 steps you can do today for improved lead generation
• 5 ways to focus on your targets
• 2 improvements for a compelling offer

Short, easily digestible advice delivered to your in-box in five installments.

Interested?  

Getting to “the close” for new business and a signature on the contract requires a clear purchase decision from a brand decision maker.  If you are pitching to a brand – prepare for these questions that they should be asking you.

When you get invited to pitch there are 2 reasons you are in the room

1. Your track record indicates you should be good enough to do the job
2. Your future WILL deliver an excellent job

Chief Marketing Officer pitch questions to agency

So how can you tell what the future of this agency will be?  the same old, same old competent delivery of past campaigns or new and exciting incremental creativity that will accelerate your brand in front of consumers?

First question: Vision

What do you, the agency, think is the future of marketing/advertising?

You want to know whether they are aware of new technologies, brands moving to new social platforms and integrating mobile solutions into their campaigns.

Second question: New Hires

Tell us about the new team members who have joined this past year.

What are the characteristics of these people and why did they join the team?  Are they crazy future-ologists, or competent deliverers.  Will they bring new expertise to the team (see answer to question 1 above) and can you see your brand leveraging their knowledge to advantage?

Third question: Team Structure

What is your creative team structure and composition?

Listen hard to how many ‘traditional’ job titles are described.  Find out about the digital specialists – are they in a separate group who get brought in to assist or are they part of the core delivery group.  What about outsourcing production and expert tool creation – how honest is the agency about areas in which they are not expert and are buying in talent.

Fourth question: Modern Marketing Communications

Tell us about recent campaigns that were not advertising-led

How many message delivery tools have they used that were not print or TV advertising, direct mail/email or public relations.  Look for innovation and incorporation of ‘gamification’, apps, integration with social media (leading edge at the time of writing is Pinterest, G+), brand collaborations and joint ventures.

Fifth question: The Delivery Team

Who will be working on our account and why?

The individual attributes of the core account team matter.  This will help you get round the agency that pitches with one team and delivers with another.  Why does the agency pick each individual and what are their skills – you’ve got to work with these people.  Go and check them all out on Linked In and Facebook.

The Agency’s reply 6 questions

We found this post from W+K London in which they tried to give the reciprocal questions the agency should ask the client.

1. Who are the decision makers on the pitch and on the agency’s work?
2. What are your criteria for judging the success of your agency’s work?
3. Is your inclination to aim high and do something extraordinary, or to settle for the ordinary and avoid the risk of failure?
4. What made you consider us for this pitch?
5. How many agencies are pitching and who are they?
6. Will you pay a pitch fee?

Go forth and pitch.  But be careful!

Thanks to Edward Boches for the original inspiration for this article

Read more articles on 3 New Business Pipeline and 6 Creating Opportunities from our archive.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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)

A quick look at how to find the name of the right person at the business you want to pitch.  Using both free and paid-for resources, we illustrate good websites to use and the tools they offer new business development professionals who are trying to start conversations with prospects.

Enjoy and download your own copy here.

“My friend fancies you.”

Woo Hoo show me the money!

This second point delights us.

We can’t find the exact link because it’s behind the firewall or intranet hosting for BBH.  What it shows is that someone there has noticed us out here and linked to the site.  Curiosity has been noted.

Why would BBH do this?

Well there are many reasons – someone might have been browsing the web and found our site.  Nice and definitely possible.

The truth is probably that they also check links into their site and noticed clicks coming in from Creative Agency Secrets off a blog post in which BBH were mentioned.  [Brands Seeking Agencies on February 17th].

So what should you do?

Research your own incoming links.  And answer these questions

• Why do you get visitors from particular sites,
• Can you improve your marketing through those sites,
• What can you do to begin a relationship with visitors from those sites?

Many thanks, Steve

Times are tough for every company out there, especially those of us in the marketing and creative services business. As an agency principal who has struggled with growth issues in the past, I have written the book on stalled growth—in more ways than one. My new book, When Growth Stalls, is based on years of quantitative and qualitative research. It reveals four destructive internal dynamics that tend to wreak havoc on all struggling companies, including professional services firms. But perhaps more interesting is the genesis of the book: a two-year period of misery my own firm went through earlier this decade. Do you know what 94% turnover feels like? It’s not fun.

I learned the hard way that acting according to your natural instincts is often the worst thing you can do when times get tough. I’d like to give you five tips for business development in 2010, based not only on my research but hard-won experience.

1. Don’t lose your nerve. One of the most common characteristics struggling companies deal with is the temptation to hunker down. It’s true that depending on your situation you may have to be careful with your cash, but the steeper the hill the more fuel your firm is going need to crest it. That not only goes for short-term business development efforts, but for long term operations enhancement. You can cut your way to survival, but not to success.
2. Keep your heads together. Notice I said “heads,” plural. Unless you’re a sole proprietor, your colleagues are also taking this journey through the valley of the shadow of debt. When growth stalls at work, it stalls at home too. If your partners/management/staff have suffered losses in their retirement portfolios, if they’re having trouble paying their kids’ tuition or their home mortgage, and if they’re worried about whether they’re going to have a job next week, they’re not thinking normally. Oh, how easily doubt can creep in and sniping begin, creating a vicious internal cycle. Make sure you stay (or get) on the same page in terms of where the business is and where it’s going.
3. Focus on your sweet spot. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you must be doing something right. Find out what it is and be it. We in the agency business are notorious for not following our own advice and sticking to our knitting. In fact, we want to knit, sew, crochet, stitch, tailor, quilt and sometimes even weld. If we aim a flashlight at prospects they may or may not notice; if we aim a laser at them we’ll get their attention.
4. Think today. At the beginning of this year my partners and I projected our revenue for 2010. Then we promptly set the projection aside. Who has any idea how this crazy year is going to end up? If we make our decisions based on some fuzzy forecast of a faraway future we’re likely to make big mistakes. We’re managing month-to-month now, focusing on taking care of our clients and meeting new prospects. One good win (or one bad loss) could completely change our firm’s trajectory.
5. Think tomorrow. We just made a major strategic decision to expand our capabilities. Why? Because we could. We’ve been evaluating the decision for months, and while investing in infrastructure is not easy for anyone right now we recognize that by doing so we could leap ahead of our competition. And it gives us something new and exciting to share with our clients and prospects which will make them feel better and more secure about us.

Over the past six years I’ve studied hundreds of companies and personally interviewed dozens of CEOs about the pitfalls and potholes associated with stalled growth. When growth stalls it’s natural (and easy) to lose your nerve, forget your focus, allow internal division and shift directions too often. It’s also unproductive and destructive.

Steve McKee is president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland and a monthly columnist for BusinessWeek.com. Learn more about When Growth Stalls and take a simple, quick and confidential self-diagnosis by visiting www.WhenGrowthStalls.com.

We have been members of BIMA for a while – it’s a trade body for digital agencies.  They ran an event called “New business generation – farming style” earlier this month.  It was a panel discussion with Chris Cowpe – The Caffeine Partnership, Paul Kirkley – JWT, David Hart – Codegent and Mark Clark – @JFDI.

Here is Jane’s take on the event with her own views expanded.

Changes in Business Development

A subtle yet important shift is starting to change the way we look at business development. The change can be best described as a move from hunting to farming.
Seth Godin articulates the shift in his blog:

‘Five thousand years ago, every human was a hunter.  If you were hungry, you got a rock or a stick and you went hunting.  The problem was that all of the animals were either dead or really good at hiding.

Fortunately, we discovered/invented the idea of farming.  Plant seeds, fertilize em, water em, watch em grow and then you harvest them.   The idea spread and it led to the birth of civilization.
Everyone got the idea… except for marketers.
Marketers still like to hunt.
What we’re discovering, though, is that the good prospects are getting really good at hiding.’

Why prospects hide and how to overcome it

The shift is brought about by a realisation that it’s clients who define agencies; they’re agencies’ biggest assets.  To make the most of the opportunity client development presents, we’ve outlined some straightforward steps to winning new business.

Step 1 – re-focus

Did you know you’re five times more likely to grow existing business than win new?  What’s more, growing existing business is your only real chance of short term revenue.  Ask yourself some questions about your organisation:
★ Is winning new business viewed as sexily as winning new new business? Do you celebrate those who grow existing clients rather than viewing it as everyday?
★ Is your approach to new business as formalised and structured as your approach to new new business? Are you investing enough energy and resources?
★ Are you leveraging relationship equity by sharing responsibility for business development with senior management?
★ Have you equipped your staff with new business tools and know-how so everyone knows what to ask and how to ask it?
The usual goal of growing business by 10% if very casual and non-specific, versus someone telling you they can see a £500k opportunity with an existing client.   Make sure your culture is such that people aren’t afraid to ask for time and resources to pursue client development opportunities.

Step 2 – pick your targets

Every client represents some opportunity, but where should you invest?  The key is to identify a manageable number to pursue. If you’re finding it tricky to decide, ask yourself:
★ Which clients will most enhance our reputation?
★ Are we in danger of chasing those who already have strong agency relationships?
★ Do we have a great rapport with this client?
★ Have we defined what we want? e.g. are we good at taking clients from offline to online, or do we want sophisticated clients only?
Remember winning extra assignments is better, creds wise, than having a wide array of fragmented business.  If you’re wasting time and not getting traction, change tactics or cut your losses and switch from target A to target B.

Step 3 – winning

Too often agencies claim to do everything, when in reality they only really do two or three things exceptionally well. Clients are fed up of agencies trying to sell them everything when they just want X, so focus on your strengths.
Digital agencies are in the perfect position to assume the role of trusted adviser – armed with knowledge and insights that your clients are desperate to understand.
Yet do you find yourself trapped in a tactical, project orientated role (‘build that site’, ‘do that DM’)?  The good news is clients want more retained relationships.
★ When was the last time you asked your clients what their business plans and life plans are?
★ Have you asked what keeps them awake at night?
★ Do you understand their business objectives and individual ambitions? Just by asking you might reposition yourself in the client’s mind. Even if they’re taken aback, go with it!
★ How can we position ourselves in the wider context? Can we merchandise the work we’ve done through the lense of building brands as opposed to completing projects?
★ Can we engage clients at a higher level, by helping instead of selling? Are we investing enough time without an order book down our trousers?
★ How can we convince our client’s board they aren’t pursuing a digital fantasy?
★ How can we validate what we’ve done through measurement? Does each piece of work have measurable business objectives?
★ Are we measuring the quality of our relationships?
★ Have we made our organisational objectives clear to the client?  Can they help write our business plan? (brass neck required!)
Agencies often make the mistake of waiting until a job is done and the honeymoon over to try and expand.  Instead try to use honeymoon periods, when you’re in the thick of it, to win more work.
It’s also worthwhile doing client audits. They’re nothing short of revelatory. If you’re not scoring seven or eight out of ten you need to get your house in order.  Scoring high means you’ll get more business.
By understanding your client’s business in greater depth (through questioning with confidence) – and ensuring your client understands yours – you can avoid typecasting one-another.  Don’t assume ‘they’ll never do that’ and prevent your client falling into the same trap, leading to lost business for you.
It’s up to you to prove to your client that there’s value in moving to a closer, more strategic relationship, as opposed to buying project by project.  To be a trusted adviser you may have to offer yourself and your advice free – but very selectively; aware of to whom and why.  If you underprice you’re not leaving room for (‘free’) honest advice.
Given that it’s clients who define your next steps, be very speci!c about what your piece of success looks like, while remaining agile and a step ahead.  It’s helpful that outsourcing and freelancing are easier now than ever.
Finally, procurement are your greatest friends in growing organic business.  If they think you’re doing a good job, ask them what else you could do.  Invite them over and they’ll warm to the fact you’re helping them understand what you do.  And remember they’re trained negotiators – so dedicate at least a day’s training to your staff so it isn’t a disadvantage.

Just be sure not to offer them champagne!

Jane Young tweets (@resonanceblog) and works both with Kanbee, a digital agency and is the founder of Scramblr the creative collaboration tool.

I am working with Websters , a niche chartered accountancy practice specialising in service charge accounting.  They have worked hard on a new website and blog as well as some collateral and internal management structures to support business development.

Websters aren't yet ready for the big formal launch event for the site and while it's broadly complete, we are continuing to use it and improve some of the features.  

And so I am surprised and delighted to find that people are signing up to receive their newsletter, the RSS feed and printed brochureware about the business.

Setting up the fields

When I set up the fields for the enquiry form  I originally thought that a simple Name, Email, Company name and country would suffice. 

But I was surprised by the number of folk who want to receive information about the Websters company.

This leaves them with a choice – send electronic information or print.  But for print we need a postal address.  This gave me an idea….

Rather than change the form to include postal address information, why not just research them online and phone them up. This is good becausse

1. you can find out if they are a real person
2. you can ask them if they prefer print or emailed information (customer chooses)
3. you can do a bit of"digging research" into their organisation for your database
4. you can ask them straight out if they want to have a credentials presentation or chemistry meeting
5. you can make a fair assessment of whether they are a prospect and at what stage of the pipeline.

Hooray – i know what we'll do – a targeted phone calling session.

Image via CrunchBase

Tom and I corresponded a while back and I have been keen to get an interview with the Engago team about their LeadsExplorer service.

Have a browse around their site and if anyone's tried the service, please write back and tell us what you think.

1) What gave you the idea / inspiration to build LEADSExplorer?

Actually we were developing another B2B solution and were writing the business plan, when it became clear that the website would play an important role in the lead generation for this business.

One member of our team had had experience in his job with a web service that revealed the companies visiting the website and the pages visited providing the basic data for a lead qualification. However he indicated the solution was not good enough as it was missing several functions, features thus requiring too much work to be effective: for instance the data was not grouped by company, thus different visitors from the same company appeared separately.

Thus we came to the conclusion we would need to build it ourselves instead of using a service we wouldn't like.

At the same time it became clear to us that outbound marketing (direct mail, email campaigns, cold calling) is waste of energy as one addresses too many companies.
As people in businesses have become more educated in the use of the Internet, they will more and more prefer to search on the Internet themselves, than to be pushed by emails and cold calls.

After investigating different sources it seemed that at least 7 out of 10 business deals in B2B start with an Internet search. Thus in order to reach out to potential customers early in the buying process, you need to discover them (the company) on your website and qualify them using the visit data: pages visited, duration of visits, repeat visits, number of unique visitors by company, search terms used, direct hit to the website with repeat visit, ?

Thus we defined the requirements for a system:
- Company identification
- Real-time visit data by company

As the companies are stored in a data base for aggregating the data, the step towards a CRM was not far. A CRM that integrates seamless with the website of the company for both:
- Lead generation
- Customer retention

As we found it obvious the user-friendly CRM should collect the emails by company too, we just added two alternative methods to obtain the emails in the CRM too.

The idea is that all available electronic information should be available without any effort in the CRM for the convenience for the user.

2) Who do you think will be the principal users of the service?

The solution is intended for any business in B2B as it reveals the company names of the website visitors.

These businesses can be all kinds of companies: large and small having a website with a few hundreds of visitors a month or a several thousands of visitors.

In smaller to medium sized companies the lead generation is in many cases done by the sales team or even the salesmen, whereas in large companies lead generation is for marketing.

The customer retention is typically for the salesmen ? account managers.
As customer retention is an often overlooked aspect of CRM and it will become even more important in the current economic climate, we believe this is a major feature: timely call or contact your customer thus wasting less time of your customer and yourself.

As we are a smaller company, we don't expect a large multi national to be using our solution (yet).

3) Why should business development professionals be aware of you?

Instead of cold calling or sending out emails /direct mailings to ten thousands of companies form listings, they can limit their efforts by just contacting those companies that have visited the website and have shown sufficient interest in the products or solutions.
This will be much more effective as these are "warm" companies.

In case of customer retention, the alert received when a customer visits again is the trigger to contact your contacts with this client as this is timely.

4) What are the main things you are doing right now to find new customers for LEADSExplorer?

Making sure the right, interested people are landing on our website… after that it's all down to LEADSExplorer (yes, we eat our own dog food). Using our own tool this way also helps us find ways to improve LEADSExplorer or imagine new functionalities we would need. It's an absolute luxury to be able to enhance your own tool this way.

We aim for driving more traffic to our website by:
a. Optimizing the website to:
- increase the SEO – mainly by increasing content.
- aim for a high ranking on search results (SERP) using page titles, titles and headers

b. Blogging:
Blog posts provide high rankings on the results pages of searches. Thus we post on the blog almost everyday.

c. Commenting:
Posting interesting or relevant comments on industry specific blogs.

d. Register the website on all kinds of sales, marketing, CRM and Start-up directories

e. Register the blog feed in as many places as possible to get exposure beyond our reach.

f. Twitter micro blog posts but that doesn't seem to be very effective

g. Press releases: At least one press release every month.

Achievement: Without advertising or advertorials we managed to get a decent amount of traffic: Alexa ranking: #450,000  Compete 4500 unique visitors / month
[update 343,69 Alexa]

5) Any advice for other bootstrapped companies who need customers?

The main advice: double the time estimated in your business plan as everything takes longer than you would ever expect, especially on the Internet.
You have to be ready to sacrifice the main part of your spare time. Still make sure to get out and get away at least once a week. It is good for the spirit and brings new and better ideas or solutions.

Make sure you have a steady income stream in order not to be too worried and have the time to deliver quality solutions and services.

Have a business model as your funding is limited you will need revenue once you have users or customers.