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The New Business of Advertising

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Ad Agency New Business – How To Win The Client

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wantYou Can’t Win At Ad Agency New BusinessWithout Understanding What Clients Want – Not As Easy As It Sounds.

What is the second sweetest sound in ad agency new business?

Its the sound of prospective client on the other side of an email or phone call (remember those?) that tells you that you are on the short (or most shortest list) for a sexy project, or better yet, their AOR assignment.

You put the phone or Mac down and you say your equivalent for ‘sweeeeet!.”

By the way, the first sweetest sound is… You’ve won.

Back to reality. OK, now what?

(FYI: This blog post is an excerpt from my new book on pitching and presenting, see the ** below.)

After you have covered the basics with your team, it’s time to start to begin to craft the presentation outline (hopefully you are past a go-fishing RFP) via a deep dive into this client’s head.

From a pure sales perspective, this is the hottest type of new business lead your ad agency will ever get. This client is motivated and has been thinking about their needs for a while. They have put in the time to launch their process. They are very serious. They asked you to participate and want to like you.

Empathy please. Agency selection is hard work for clients. They know that poor decisions at the beginning of the pitch process will lead to selecting the wrong agency and will therefore cost time, money and possibly delay the market share gains they need. CMOs want to look like they are making the right decisions. New CMO’s need to look sharp fast.

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How To Predict An Advertising Agency Search

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Can You Predict When A Client Will Search For A New Advertising Agency?

Can You Predict When a Client Will Start the Search for a New Agency InterviewA 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.

A Twitter Tool For Advertising Agencies

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I love Twitter Tools

download broCheck out the Twitter tool SocialBro (and, don’t thank me for naming this company). Here is what they say about themselves:

SocialBro’s advanced solutions for Twitter marketing are built around what you need. From Enterprise scale organisations coordinating multi channel strategies across multiple teams to individual influencers building a personal brand, our clever tools work with your preferred Twitter client (e.g. Hootsuite or Tweetdeck) to help you achieve your goals on Twitter.

Here is just one of the detailed traffic reports I get from them about my Twitter account. Now, make sure you think about the following detail about me when you look at these numbers:

I post on west coast time. Therefore, my east coast audience is getting up earlier than me.

When see what my Followers talk about in their feeds, consider that I write about advertising, social media and marketing. I am not so sure about the “love” thing.

My audience works 24/7 across the globe. I don’t have best days or seriously best times.

For more, many more, insights on SocialBro, head over to Razor Social. If you haven’t been to this fab website… Go there!

SocialBro Browse your Twitter Community

Want More Twitter Tools?

Here is a link to my post about 11 must have social media tools for advertising agency business development — and agency clients.

Apparently Australian Ad Agencies Have More Fun Hiring

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It Is OK To Laugh and Have Fun Whilst Hiring

How to hire a bright, super insightful, savvy strategist in a highly competitive market?

Video sells.

The Australian ad agency Holer sure looks like a fun place to work. Australian culture rocks.

 

http://vimeo.com/91259491

Inside Look: An Advertising Agency Search Consultant

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An Inside Look At The World Of An Advertising Agency Search Consultant

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-8-48-13-amThis interview is all about the world of an advertising agency search consultant and how your firm might get on their radar. To understand this world, I interviewed leading consultant Russel Wholwerth of External View Consulting Group. The interview is in my book, The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. Sales message coming… buy the book at the top of this page. I’ve sold lots to your competitors. By the way, I know for a fact that everyone that has read this book is now much better looking, smarter, richer and thinner.

Go Forth

If you think that your agency isn’t ready for the primetime of being vetted by an agency search consultant, here are a couple of Russel’s insights that are s applicable to even a two-person shop – tone-deaf is not a good thing:

PL: Conversely, are there any standard presentation blunders that agencies make — over and over?

Russel: Agencies can often appear tone-deaf to the client’s needs. These agencies tend to be intoxicated with their own attributes like the number of offices they have around the world.

Here is one more BIG insight:

Russel: We get at least 20 to 30 inquiries from agencies every week. Most agencies act as if they have no clue how we operate or that they will need to really stand out to generate interest.

Imagine, this is how some agencies run their business. Read on… [Read more…] about Inside Look: An Advertising Agency Search Consultant