Insights

Steve Jobs + Nancy Duarte = How To Present

Peter · January 17, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Steve Jobs Dissected

Nancy Duarte’s book on presenting, “resonate – Present visual Stories That Transform Audiences” has been my go-to book on how to create powerful presentations for the past four years. It’s a serious, almost scientific look at the art of presentation. In fact, it is science.

Nancy uses a graphical tracking system called sparklines to visually track a presentation’s flow and major points. Here is Nancy’s TEDx talk on presentations which includes her sparklines deconstruction (it starts at 8:45) of Steve Jobs and his art of presentation. Watch it. It will help your agency win more business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfQF3DXG-S4#t=541

For more on Jobs and how he can help you give better presentations head over here: Steve Jobs “Secret” Advertising Agency New Business Presentation Tips

FYI:

I interviewed Nancy about her presentation prescriptions for my book… “The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches.” Nancy is just one of a range of experts interviewed that will help make you a better pitch person – and win more business. Amazon and I would like you to buy it.

Why SlideShare Is A Smart New Business Tool

Peter · January 15, 2014 · Leave a Comment

According to SlideShare’s 2013 recap, my presentations and white papers were viewed 3,012 times and I uploaded 15 “SlideShares.”

Beyond these general stats, I can’t make a direct correlation between SlideShare and my new business leads. But, I’ll gladly take 3,012 views since I can’t imagine that my advertising industry targeted documents are being viewed casually. I’ll take the inherent branding as a positive.

Given SlideShare’s ease of use and LinkedIn relationship, why wouldn’t you want to add SlideShare to your personal or advertising agency content-based business development program? SlideShare obviously drives message reach. Here is a portion of my personal SlideShare report. You will see an uptick in October. I tested what would happen if I did a bit of promotion on my blog and Twitter feed. It worked. I love the smell of social media synergy in the morning.

Need More Reasons To Use SlideShare For Advertising Agency New Business

Slideshare is the world’s largest content-sharing community for professionals. Here is how SlideShare puts it on their SlideShare 101 page.

With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

Here is another fact. I put up my presentation “24 Advertising Agency Positions For New Business Development” about 3 months ago and it has been viewed by over 900 people. Not too shabby for an easy upload and distribution of an existing presentation. The presentation is a repurposed use of Part III of my series on how to position advertising agencies. Here are other reasons why I use (and love) SlideShare…

It’s content marketing, baby.
It has that huge audience. According to comScore, SlideShare has 5 times more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn (which now owns SlideShare).
SlideShare is primarily a business tool and has deep reach into my advertising industry target market.
Google loves SlideShare and SlideShare presentations and PDF’s get indexed immediately.
My SlideShare presentations and documents are automatically shared across LinkedIn.

So, without further ado, my “best selling” 2013 SlideShare presentation…

24 Advertising Agency Positions For New Business Development from Peter Levitan & Co.

Need some more facts? Here’s an infographic on SlideShare from Column Five Media.

Advertising Pitch Planning: Tame The Meeting Beast

Peter · January 13, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Poorly managed advertising, design and PR agency meetings waste time, kill creativity and cost money. This is a particularly nasty problem in the over-heated world of agency new business pitches.

We know from a recent research study of advertising professionals by Provoke Insights that agency employees are dissatisfied with the agency pitch process.

“Approximately half (47% of respondents) of advertising professionals surveyed by Provoke Insights say they are dissatisfied with the current internal approach to pitching.”

As a long time agency new business professional, I know that one of the worst “approach” offenders is the poorly managed pitch planning meeting. Worse, poorly managed pitch meetings could lead to losing the pitch itself by making the entire development process less efficient.

The Pitch Leader Must Lead

If you are the pitch team leader your job is to manage the pitch process so the agency will deliver the best response it can. I’ve always believed that meeting management is the first place to start.

Meeting Management Ala Northwest Airlines

In 1986 I moved from Dancer Fitzgerald Sample’s New York office to Minneapolis to manage our Northwest Airlines account. I was invited into the client’s inner circle and attended their senior management meetings as the advertising agency representative. These were the good old days when the agency’s opinion on marketing was considered critical to the client’s success.

I quickly realized that Northwest had a serious meeting problem. Most of my clients seemed to be in non-stop meetings from 8AM to 6PM. I couldn’t figure out when they had time to think let alone get their jobs done. This fact wasn’t lost on the CEO who hired a management consultant to help create an efficient and effective meeting culture. It was instructive to watch this course correction help Northwest to be the fastest growing airline in the late 1980’s.

Effective, well-managed meetings deliver three key benefits:

Effective meetings achieve the meeting’s objective.
They take up a minimum amount of time.
They leave participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed.

Meeting Rules

Here are the 10 rules I picked up at Northwest.

Every meeting must have a leader to run the meeting and manage the process.
Invite only the people that need to be in the meeting. This isn’t a numbers game. It is OK for some people to be working at their desks until they are really needed.
Make sure that everyone understands that they are required to show up on time and if they are late they will be costing the agency time and money. Keeping colleagues waiting is rude and costly. Do the math.
Have a clear agenda with meeting objectives. Share it at the start.
Have a timetable. Make sure that anyone needed in the meeting knows of the start and stop time. You should try not to have any open-ended meetings. This is critical.
Consider banning mobile phones. It may be hard to believe that there was once a time when we managed to live our lives without being constantly tethered to our smart phones.
Once a meeting objective is met move on to the next one. Stay on topic.
Watch the clock.
End the meeting when you have covered the objectives.
State any follow-up items, timing and individual responsibilities. Send out a meeting summary ASAP.

The Pitch

The pitch itself should be well stage-managed. These rules should be considered (I stress considered) in how you mange the actual client presentation. Clients will respect you when you show respect for their time and show that your agency is well-managed.

My Pitch

Call me. I’ll help you win more new business.

While you are at it… Don’t miss any of my brilliant (LOL, but I mean it) thoughts on new business.

Sign up for my weekly newsletter.

Is Your Ad Agency Loved? Use The Net Promoter Score.

Peter · January 10, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Every January I asked my agency’s senior advertising clients “How we doin?” Actually, I asked the question cloaked in a slightly more sophisticated query. Sounding like Governor Christie or the Sopranos [“How we doin?” ] might not work as well.

Our more sophisticated approach to determining if our ad agency was loved used the concept of Net Promoter Score to help us dig into the heads of our clients. We wanted to know if they were truly satisfied with the agency and our services.

We managed our request with the understanding that clients are very busy and that having a long questionnaire would add more work to their already busy day. We found that the concept of Net Promoter Score helped us meet our annual survey needs and showed our clients that we were smart. There was one more fabulous business-building benefit as you will see.

Net Promoter Score

The concept of the Net Promoter Score (NPS℠) was developed in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company. The objective of the NPS is to determine how well an organization generates relationships worthy of loyalty. As Bain says:

Net Promoter System℠ is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories. “Promoters” are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from a company and urge their friends to do the same. “Passives” are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition. And “detractors” are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship. Customers can be categorized based on their answer to the ultimate question.

The best way to gauge the efficiency of a company’s growth engine is to take the percentage of customers who are promoters and subtract the percentage who are detractors. This equation is how we calculate a Net Promoter Score for a company:

Our Technique

We sent the NPS questionnaire, which asked the simple question along with the opportunity for the client to elaborate on why they gave us a particular score, with the following letter. It worked for us and might for you. Oh, it also subtly told clients that is was cool if they in fact referred us. We liked referrals… Referrals delivered motivated new business prospects that came with a higher degree of motivation, shorter sales cycles and a higher close rate.

Here is how my agency Citrus delivered the questionnaire:

Ms. Cynthia Johnson

SVP Cheif Marketing Director

Widgets R U, Inc.

Re: 2004 Citrus Client Survey

Dear Cynthia,

Every year Citrus asks its clients if they would fill out a multi-question agency evaluation form. This evaluation process helps us to know if we are providing the level of service our clients expect and need. The survey also asks if there are any additional agency services that Widgets might want us to provide in the future. We have used the input of our clients in the past to modify our service offering, when required.

This year, we are going to take a different approach from the multi-question survey we have used in years past. In 2004 we are only going to ask one question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend Citrus to a friend or colleague?”

We are basing this question on research findings reported in the Harvard Business Review article “The One Number You Need to grow.” This very interesting article suggests that there is one simple question that can provide much of what a company needs to know about how its customers perceive its services. As the article states, “You simply need to know what your customers tell their friends about you.” The HBR article is attached for your information.

Please take a couple of minutes and help us help you by completing the enclosed survey. Our goal is to keep building a better agency for all of our clients.

If you have any questions give me a call. As always, your answers are considered confidential and will only be shared with agency management.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Peter

It Worked

The letter and Net Promotor question told our clients that we were interested in knowing how they rate our services; that we are smart enough to know about things like Net Promoter Scores and that we, as I stated earlier, like to be referred.

Give me a call if you need more business building insights for your agency. As you can see, smart business development tactics include how you talk with your current clients. There is gold in them thar relationships.