Creativity in business is a good thing.

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)

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How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?

For brands who are growing  and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing.  Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.

Why you need better marketing

The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing.  These are good signs.

You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.

Hire versus buy: the dilemma

There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.

Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.

Costs are usually the determining factor

It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.

Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice.  Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.

A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer.  You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates.  Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com.  I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.

Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work.  They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance.  Could this work for you?  Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.

In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do

• Advertising – do it yourself or hire
• Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
• Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
• Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
• Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
• SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
• Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
• Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
• DIY or hire a market research company?

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A guest post by Jason Falls

The RFP must die.

Or at least the way the process has evolved in today’s marketing world should. On the surface, it seems innocuous. A company or organization issues an request for proposal (sometimes masked as a ‘request for quote’) to several agencies, consultants for firms. They sometimes include ridiculous assignments jammed into even more ridiculous time frames and even sometimes have the audacity for the responder to commence work on creative concepts and ideas that solve the prospective client’s communications problem.

Then the company collects the RFPs, steals the ideas and doesn’t even change the account from the agency they were working with.

If you work in advertising and this hasn’t happened to you, how’s day three on the job?

RFPs from government agencies have spiraled out of control to a level that’s beyond even discussing. I recently received an RFP from a government agency that was 58 pages in length and somewhere along page 29 mentioned they wanted ideas to activate around (and I quote), “so-called social media.”

While I resisted the urge to reply to the contact person with a loud and swift, “Go to hell,” I didn’t respond.

The Problem With RFPs

Agencies want new business. Clients know this and have learned over the years that agencies will jump through crazy hoops to get it. Clients want fresh ideas. Agencies know this and will sometimes undercut their own value by sharing some of those in an RFP or pitch for new business. Clients have learned over the years that there are more agencies in need of new business than there are great ideas, so they use the imbalance to their advantage.

The majority of RFPs, in fact all but one that I’ve ever seen, require creative concepts in order for the agency to be in consideration. The one that I saw that didn’t, I wrote for a client.

This is nothing short of extortion. Especially when the RFP stipulates (which it normally does, or the agency is dumb enough to) the ideas are transferred and owned by the client regardless of the agency’s win or loss of the business.

So clients take advantage of agencies. Agencies know if they don’t adhere to the idea giveaway, their competition gladly will, so they have little choice but to participate.

The brand is to blame for asking for work without pay. The agency is to blame for giving away work without demanding compensation.

But neither side is likely to take the high road on the ethical side of things, so we have ourselves a Catch 22.

The Only Hope

All that an agency can hope for is market share or diversification of revenue that is so overwhelming they don’t need the new business bad enough.

In early 2009, while still working with Doe-Anderson, a great full-service advertising agency in Louisville, I had the task of putting together a digital marketing dream team of partners for a major brand. I hand-picked several of the top boutique firms specializing in social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, mobile marketing and design and called them each to talk about participating in my little RFP process. I clarified that I would not ask for their creative work, that I only wanted to hear how they would approach solving the communications problem at hand and how they would fit in with a large, multiple-agency team to work on behalf of the client. From that information, I would ask them each several questions and then choose the firm in each category I felt was the best fit for our needs.

When I called one of the companies I was told, “I’m sorry, we don’t respond to RFPs.”

Half of me screamed, “WHAT? DO YOU KNOW WHICH BRAND YOU’RE PASSING ON?” And the other half screamed, “GOT ANY OPENINGS?!”

It turns out that particular firm had developed several products around its niche and had the advantageous position to only work with companies they wanted to work with. They told me they don’t respond to RFPs because if the client in question wants the best in the business, they don’t need to compare and contrast, they just hire them. They only wanted to work with people who wanted to work with them. Period.

On one hand, it reeks of arrogance. Here’s hoping they never fall off that pedestal and need clients. On the other hand, it’s where I would want my agency or consultancy to be and I admire the hell of them for taking that stand.

If only everyone did.

The Solution

Like any long-standing, traditional process that has morphed into a problem (i.e. – health care, government bureaucracy, doctor’s visits) there’s no one solution to the RFP problem. It will take a combination of a lot of things to fix:

• Companies and brands need to recognize that creative concepts are an agency’s bread and butter and shouldn’t be asked for without compensation
• Agencies need to place a better value on their work and either ask for compensation, ownership or refuse to provide creative concepts
• Agencies that undercut competitors by violating that stance should be penalized somehow

Will any of that happen? Probably not. Ad agency and PR firm creative concepts aren’t exactly earth-shattering utilities that need some sort of regulation.

But sooner or later agencies are going to realize the cost-benefit of the dog-and-pony show isn’t in their favor and stop responding. If you think the current state of marketing is bad now, just wait until the crappy firms get all the business.

In that scenario, everyone loses.

Mitch Ditkoff has some more rational ideas for improving the RFP process over at The Heart of Innovation I hope you brand-side folks will consider as well.

This article was written by Jason Falls and can be viewed in full here

About Jason Falls

Jason Falls is the founder and editor of Social Media Explorer and its companion learning community Exploring Social Media. He is a leading thinker, educator, speaker and consultant in the world of social media marketing, public relations, digital marketing and communications. Please connect with him on Twitter (@JasonFalls).

Related articles

• Negotiating the RFP Process – Advice for Communicators from Robert Udowitz (prconversations.wordpress.com)
• 6 Powerful Questions Every RFP Needs (hyperdiskmtkg.wordpress.com)
• The Art of Pitching – Preparing for a Business Pitch (creativeagencysecrets.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

Imagine you have launched your business and the brand is up and running.  You are receiving enquiries but not enough are converting to paying customers.

Even though you may be the genius behind the business idea, you have no idea how to successfully pitch your business to potential clients and convert them.

Why not hire a professional to pitch for you?

Successful Marketing agencies know how to pitch a business/ brand. Full stop. That’s what makes them successful.

So why not pitch your business/ brand to an agency in a relaxed environment where your pitch won’t matter and let them transfer it into the professional and suave format needed to win you new clients?

It’s as easy as choosing an appropriate agency and filling them in on your business/ brand, the goals of the pitch and background information on who they will be pitching to.  If they are good at what they do, they will do their own research and put a creative agency swing on things.

Choosing an agency

When choosing an agency to pitch for your business you will be faced with the choice of an agency that has previous experience in your industry sector or an agency that doesn’t. Although this seems like an obvious decision, don’t write the latter off straight away, everybody needs to start somewhere and often an agency new to your industry sector will have fresh ideas and be able to think outside the box, which is often a key trait of a successful pitch.

Shortlist and meet with a couple of agencies, keeping in mind that you will have to work with these people and rely on them to secure your business. Your aim from these meetings should be to work out if the agency is as motivated about your business as you are.

Filling them in

Provide the agency with all the information necessary to make a winning pitch including;

• Names of the clients they will be pitching to
• Background relationship between your business and the potential client
• Outcomes you hope to achieve with the pitch – remember credentials meetings and chemistry meetings should still have stated outcomes planned in advance.

Related articles

• How To Fix A Broken Pitch Process (adpulp.com)
• Winning pitches is fun! (creativeagencysecrets.com)
• The Art of Pitching (creativeagencysecrets.com)
• Cynicism, duplicity and institutional incompetence (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)
• The Unspoken Evil Of The RFP (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• RFP Hell (kula partners)

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Pitching is a very important tool for generating new business, but certain aspects of a successful pitch can sometimes be overlooked.  When approaching a pitch with a prospective client, try to imagine you are pitching yourself to someone you would like to have a long relationship with.

How can you come across as the kind of person they want in their life?

What should I always do when pitching?

Of course there are obvious things which should be commonplace every time you make a pitch:

• Dress Snappy – better to be over-dressed than underdressed; research your prospect company’s dress code to make sure
• Arrive early to the meeting and familiarise yourself with the environment – this will allow you to be more relaxed during the pitch.  If possible scout it out a week in advance.  Check power socket locations and AV equipment.
• Always be grateful for the opportunity – if the pitch doesn’t go the way you wanted it to, thank them for the chance.  Never cut ties with anyone in business.  You never know, they may recommend you to someone else or ask you back for another chance

Recently I have been a part of two creative agency pitches to two very different businesses. The first was a gas fire manufacturer and the second, a real estate agent.  Although both pitches went well, what quickly became apparent to me was that having the confidence and public speaking skills to pitch your business is only half of what is required for a successful pitch.

The first pitch

I entered the first pitch knowing very little about the gas fire manufacturer and the meeting quickly became a one-way flow of information on who the company was and what they did.  This was possibly time wasted.  They wanted to tell us about themselves and if I had prepared properly for the meeting I would have known all this and the time could have been spent on discussions on what we could do for them as a creative agency.

The second pitch

Taking this into account, I prepared for the second pitch and did deep research on the prospective client.  This not only impressed the client but it saved us time where we could get down to the nitty-gritty on how we could help his business.  This pitch went well and there was agreement on a further meeting to discuss our proposal.

What should you do

Below is a checklist on what sort of research should be done for any public relations project, which translates very well to pre-pitch research. Click here to see the full checklist and article.  Work through this checklist to ensure you have done all you can to research a prospective client before entering that all important first pitch

• See what’s being said on social media - This can be a great real-time window into what others know and think about your client and a great way to make sure that your pitch will go over well.
• Spend time with your client – Set their expectations that you want more than a one-hour meeting. You want a few hours to mine them for any and all information.
• Spend time without your client – Ask them to put you in touch with people from other areas of their company: sales, customer relations and even those on the floor (front desk personnel, those at the cash register, tour guides, etc.).
• Get on site! – If your client is a hotel, be a guest. Spend the night, try the food, and ask for suggestions of surrounding things to do.

Rob Lane

Rob is Marketing Assistant at Creative Agency Secrets.

Related articles

• Cynicism, duplicity and institutional incompetence (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)
• Knowing Your Client Inside and Out: A Checklist For Client Research (dontdrinkthekoolaidblog.com)
• How To Lose A Pitch When You Thought You Were Winning (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)

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Sometimes one thing just seems to turn into a flood of similar complaints.  This week it is website fails.  Places where statements are made, things are promised and nothing happens or the process is clearly broken.

Three examples of website failures

Careerzone

A helpful site advertising high level marketing and business development jobs.

1. Failure to provide a filter tool that aligns my profile with the information sent = FAIL1
2. Failure to give contact details on the website (except for advertising sales – and that went unanswered) = FAIL2

Careerzone - location filters FAIL

Dot Digital Group

A listed marketing agency group “the digital marketing experts”. Lists in their contact page their bankers, PR agents, solicitors, accountants and share registrars.  Not one has an email address or a hyper link.

1. Failure to list any electronic communication medium for Group-level contact = FAIL1
2. Failure to apply the corporate tag line to any of their own corporate level collateral = FAIL2
3. Failure to have clear links from the group website to the individual company websites = FAIL3

Dot Digital Corporate contact page

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If you work in a niche environment and want to do some “trend spotting” for the next year, here’s a great idea on how to engage your prospects, clients, staff and key influencers.

1. Start by finding a hot topic of the moment as the focus for your trend spotting.  You could consider using online consumer engagement or  new social media tools for your industry.
2. Decide on the period – 6 months, 1 year or more that you’ll predict .
3. Brainstorm with your internal team about the trends you think might emerge, or change over the period.
4. Draw up a list of clients, prospects and key influencers or industry thought leaders who might be persuaded to take part.
5. Write a briefing document for them explaining what you want, how they can submit their ideas and a timeframe.  I’d suggest asking for 3 to 5 bullet points of trends with a brief explanation of each plus a catchy title.  You will also need their permission to quote them in your final report.
6. You could open this up to a public collaboration as well using regular readers of your blog / FB page as well.  This could be developed into an open forum discussion.  Remember for this to be successful you probably need a large and already-engaged audience and a strong topic for the conversation.
7. Collate all the ideas into a single slide deck, e-book or pdf document and use as the basis for a campaign (email it, download from your site and public sites, create linked content from social media sites and don’t forget to send it to journalists for PR).

Here’s one done by David Armano Rudy de Waele on the future of Mobile trends to 2020 [an ambitious time horizon] with contributions from a wide range of experts.  Note he credits each contributor both in slide 2 and on each page with their ideas.

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We all need to keep an eye on what is being said online about us and our brands / companies.  The public relations industry has seen this as a 21st Century version of scanning for press cuttings and tried to claim it as their natural territory.  And yet it's just not as clearcut as that.

How to get found online and how to State your Business are the first step of business development programmes. And tracking your online mentions through linkbacks, and simple Google search alerts is a great start.

ReadWriteWeb has a great post summarising the free and paid-for monitoring tools available for online brand / key phrase monitoring.

Interestingly they say they use Friendfeed search and I also find this a cheap / easy tool plus Google alerts.

There's a bit of future-speculation around whether Facebook will allow search and monitoring as well as audio and video files using speech to text services (that'd be useful)

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There's hype and then there's the reality of a true step-change in the way we live and do business. 

The language of conversations in business are now real and happening.

Already companies that speak the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show are no longer speaking to anyone.

That was written 10, yes TEN years ago.  It's numver 17 in the Cluetrain Manifesto .

I was re-reading it (helpfully scribed into a slide show by Micheal Specht thanks!) 

And here are some of the others that resonate

27.  Public Relations does not relate to the public.  Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

 41.  Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

54.  There are two conversations going on.  One inside the company.  One with the market.

75.  We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

96.  We are waking up and linking to each other.  We are watching.  But we are not waiting.

And some with a recessionary theme

32.  Networked markets can change suppliers overnight.  Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. YOur own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

72.   Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over.  We don't recognise ourselves in your projections – maybe because we know we are already elsewhere.

77.  We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for.  Got a minute?

Nuff said, really.  But please do reappraise your own company website and other media.  How good are you at joining the conversation?  As I posted before,"If they don't do it themselves, chances are they aren't as knowledgeable about it as they should".  Would you hire an agency to do social media for you if they weren't active in social media themselves?  How about public relations, or direct marketing? 

There are new agencies being founded on this principle.  Check out We Are Social, Brando Digital and The Conversation Group.

and Flourish are using 'the art of conversation' as branding

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