Can You Predict When A Client Will Search For A New Advertising Agency?
A friend who ran an advertising agency in L.A. once told me that he made at least five ‘warm calls’ every week to prospective clients. This agency CEO was gregarious, had a great rap about advertising trends that clients liked to hear and he was very smart. He knew that on any given day, a few clients woke up thinking that they needed a new agency to replace their AOR or to hand out a project. He just wanted to be on the client’s radar when that day happened.
Clearly, not all agency CEO’s can or will make these calls. Though, sales pressure applied with TLC does work for some.
Another way to get ahead of the search process is to use a business development database and news tool like Access Confidential. To get a better understanding of Access Confidential and their pitch that they can help agencies know about a new business pitch before the other agencies, I interviewed Lisa Colantuono, a partner at the highly successful agency search consultancy AAR and a contributor to my book on pitching. I posted this interview on HubSpot’s Agency Post. Here is my lead-in.
Another Holy Grail (can there be more than one?) is being able to predict when a client is unhappy with their current agency and is getting ready to begin the search process. This is a tough one, so I searched to see if there was any existing advice on being able to predict when a client is about to search for a new agency. My quest led me to Access Confidential.
Access Confidential is an online new business tool from AAR Partners, a leading agency search consultancy with a history of conducting more than 1,500 searches. Access Confidential includes an up-to-date client database, business news, and a research hotline, and it is used to forecast when clients will look for a new agency.
I also asked Lisa about the current new business landscape. Here is the Q&A.
What do you think is the biggest or fastest-growing client need as we move into 2015?
Innovation with an eye toward creating purposed-based brands.
Successful agencies will help identify emotional values in their client’s brands and use them for real-time engagement and meaningful positioning. Consumers are going to continue to have influence over brands. Agencies that help marketers to embrace it will succeed. You can boil this down to the need to turn big data (and the overwhelming amount of data) into core brand insights for marketers, which will remain as an asset. Analytics and programmatic and real-time buying, as well as social command centers to keep an ear to the ground on what’s trending, are all important tools to offer a client. But the greatest tool will be the interpretation of the data.
Ah, innovation.
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