New Business

How NOT To Build A Winning Advertising Agency New Business Program

Peter · June 10, 2016 · Leave a Comment

How Not To Win While Losing

A friend in advertising sent me the following email. I’ll follow it with some thoughts. I removed names to protect the innocent (actually, not so innocent).

“I read your long blog post, “How to Build A Winning Advertising Agency New Business Program“. Every sentence is worthwhile.

I did new business at Big NYC and Big L.A. agencies, and then at BlahBlah/SF, where it was my sole responsibility for 3 years. The biggest thing I noticed at BlahBlah was that they lost their biggest client every year. If they had shut down the new business operation and had me, or someone like me, be the client retention and client delight manager, the agency would’ve doubled in size just by not losing the biggest account.

What a piece of insight! But, being digital geeks, the principals didn’t like to leave their desks, screenss and their HQ meetings. Instead of wandering the halls of their biggest clients, cementing the relationship and pulling in even more business, they stayed in the office talking about getting new clients, which, as we know, is a low-odds practice.”

My Unpack

Business Development Is A Must Do

I tell all of my agency clients that they must have a business development plan that runs 24/7 because they will lose large clients every year. This inevitable loss has accelerated over the past few years because an ever increasing number of client assignments are now ‘projects.’ Larger, longer Agency Of Record accounts are becoming scarce. Is the need for a BD plan a secret? No. But, half of all agencies don’t have a sustained sales effort that will replace those lost clients.

Grow Your Current Clients

The Unignorable Advertising Agency

Peter · May 23, 2016 · 1 Comment

The Unignorable Advertising Agency Wins New Clients

There are lots of ways to win a new account for your advertising agency. You get a referral (the default for many agencies); you have unique expertise (let’s say e-commerce); you are known as a specialist in a category or geography; you have a kick-ass thought leadership program that gets read and passed along; you are an SEO genius and are listed on page one for your Google keywords.

I’ll show you one more approach below.

An Unignorable List

But first, here’s a list of ways to avoid getting a prospective client’s positive attention. Even worse, some profound ways for you to be very very ignored.

Send them a one-off copy-heavy email and hope they respond.
Send them a series of emails about how wonderful your agency is (not them or their issues), and then hope they respond.
Find other special ways to bug the hell out of them. Multiple voicemail messages anyone?
Ensure that your agency sounds exactly like the other agencies trying to get the client’s attention. Here’s a list of me-too advertising agency positionings. Where are you on this list?
Make sure your agency’s website looks just like your competitor’s website. Similar jargon? WordPress templates, anyone?
Hope that the prospects will go on and on to find your position on Google that’s on page 4 of the listings for your competitive agency set.
Start, stop, start, stop, start your inbound and outbound business development program.
Make new business an “oh, we’ll get to that” proposition.

And on and on. I’ll stop so I won’t bore you. Or worse, scare you.

Maybe smarter… here is a way out.

Why Not Try Being Unignorably Creative?

Clients are smart. Clients get social media. Clients can produce their own content these days. Clients understand marketing (sort of). Even worse, many clients think they can bring all of that in-house.

But what they can’t do is be unignorably creative thinkers. Just can’t do that. Not in their DNA. Nope. But it’s in yours, and it is a major reason for your existence (unless you are just data marketing or apps geeks, etc.) and, if used intelligently — your creative secret sauce.

One of the ways that the leading (and famous) agencies get incoming new business inquiries is by being ‘unignorable‘ and you know the usual agency suspects because you hear about them every award season and read about them in AD AGE. The thing is that you know how to be famous too. Many in our industry are chasing technology when they should be chasing and proving their creativity. In the advertising industry, creativity breeds fame.

Chase Unignorable – Canada Style [Read more…] about The Unignorable Advertising Agency

Write Your Advertising Agency Book

Peter · May 7, 2016 · Leave a Comment

My Books Make Me Happy

This post was generated by my smiling at Powell’s Books. See why below.

I’ve written two books. Both are self-published on Amazon as a book-book and eBook. The first, Boomercide: From Woodstock To Suicide was my training-wheels book. It is about using suicide as a financial planning tool (OK, and a deep discussion of suicide itself).

The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. (yes you can learn more about it and then buy it at the top of this page) is a best seller in the narrow category of advertising agency business development books. It has worked hard as a business development tool for me and because it has sold well, it generates some cash, too.

That’s two books. I am already thinking trough book #3. Yes, folks, you can publish books too and should think hard about the value of taking the time to write a book as an agency marketing tool. It isn’t as difficult as you think and an agency is perfectly positioned to get that book out the door..

Here are links to a couple of “how-to’s”….

How to Write An Advertising Agency Book. This post includes a video of my HubSopt book writing presentation.

Yes, You Can Write And Publish A business Book In 6 Months. Yes, you can!

Happy At Powell’s Books

So I am cruising through Portland’s Powell’s City Of Books (it’s the largest used and new bookstore in the world, occupies an entire city block and sells over 1 million books.) As a lark, I typed my name into their database and… yup, my book The Levitan Pitch. was listed. This was a surprise because the book is only distributed on Amazon and must have made it to Powell’s as a used book sale. That means that someone in Portland bought the book and then sold it to Powell’s. Cool. Everyone wins.

Here’s what I saw on the screen…

How To Build A Client Prospect list

Peter · May 6, 2016 · Leave a Comment

The Ad Agency Client Prospect List

Update 28 March 2019: I am adding ContactOut to my list of tools that can help you find the work email address and phone numbers of your prospects. You know, the prospects that are on your very focussed short list of clients that want to work with you but do not know you exist. Some smart product language from ContactOut:

ContactOut is a simple browser extension that helps you find email addresses and phone numbers of anyone on LinkedIn. We’ve been around for just over three years and already have thousands of users from a third of the Fortune 500 (like Microsoft, PwC, and Symantec). ContactOut finds emails from 75% of Linkedin users (2x better than the next closest competitor) at a 97% accuracy rate. It’s earned us multiple mentions on the ahrefs blog as one of the best freemium email outreach tools available.

Inbound Marketing Is Nice, But…

I am a card-carrying inbound marketer. Most of my advertising agency clients come to me via my inbound efforts that include some decent SEO, hundreds of informative blog posts and SMM (Social Media Manipulation – take that S&M). This is most likely how you found this website.

However, if your marketing an advertising agency that knows what clients it should have based on its brand position, category experience, and skills, inbound alone won’t do the trick. You will need to employ one or more outbound marketing techniques to directly reach those clients and their decision makers. You’ll do this by creating a list. Yes, a duh. But, a critical duh. I do not agree with the idea that B2B direct marketing is dead. Only DM programs that can and should be ignored are dead.

I loved building client prospect lists for my ad agency. The act of list building focused our business development objectives and strategies and provided a very clear trajectory for our outbound and inbound marketing programs. I view the art and science of database building to be a critical element of business development.

I recommend that my advertising agency clients develop a top 25 to 50 company/owner/marketing director business development ‘A’ list. These are those special clients that will be directly and personally targeted via a customized thought-leadership sales program. You will have to go well past cold calling to warm calling to entice these marketers to listen to your message.

At the same time, build a longer list (250 – 1,000) for less intensive outreach via somewhat automated marketing tools like your email program. This list is designed to keep you top-of-mind within a much broader set. Note: My regional agency Citrus had a monthly mailing list of well over 1,500. One of the key values of this large list was that we knew that we needed to stay top-of-mind within a very large group of people who know people. Any of these might wake up needing a new agency. Be active, not too passive.

Prospect List Building Criteria – From Macro To Micro

Establish your ‘A’ list using strategic and realistic client prospect criteria. In the past, I have used the following criteria to build lists for my agency. Of course, your criteria might be different.

First, include any prospects that you already know or you know you from existing lists including your email list (a key reason to have an active blog); past events (like what you should do with all of those collected business cards) and your very own LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Followers.

Secondly, make a list of all of the clients in your target categories (specific business categories to geographic fit) that currently use competitive agencies. Obvious? Sure. But, you’d be surprised at how few agencies keep this client opportunity list fresh.

Decision-Making Criteria – You Want to get to “Yes.”

Here is a list of primary criteria questions for that ‘A’ list. If the answer is a big ‘no’ you might not want to waste your time with this client. [Read more…] about How To Build A Client Prospect list