new business

Pitch Consultants Advice For Advertising Agencies

Peter · April 9, 2018 · 1 Comment

Advice For Advertising Agencies That Want to Win

A chunk of my book on how to win more advertising agency pitches included interviews with industry playas. These folks were agency owners, 4A’s execs, search and pitch consultants, procurement decision makers and legal experts. Many readers found these interviews to be invaluable in helping to craft pitches that did not make any of the big mistakes that lead to coming in “second.” By the way, have you ever noticed that all of the not-chosen come in “second”?

More advice. I just came across the 4A’s “One Piece of Advice” for Agencies. Agency Search Consultants Advice for Agencies. (January 2018.) Since this advice is, in many cases similar to the advice in my book (and includes some of the same interviewees), I am forwarding the long PDF to you as continuing confirmation that some agencies do things right and, according to the consultants, many are still getting it wrong.

A link to the full document is below. There is so much truth here that I’ve highlighted one major point from each consultant’s advice.

Agency Search Consultants Advice for Agencies

“One Piece of Advice” for Agencies January 2018

4A’s asked industry leading agency search consultants to provide “One Piece of Advice” that the association could share with members as they begin thinking about their 2018 new business plans.

The 4A’s consultant request noted, “Based on your knowledge of client marketer needs/wants and industry dynamics, what is the one thing that you would recommend that an agency either do or not do that can help the effectiveness of their new business efforts? We welcome your advice in any area of the agency search and selection process (prospecting, RFI/RFP submissions, creds, chemistry, presentations, etc.)”

Opportunity Assessment

Joanne Davis Consulting: “It’s not about you; it’s never been about you; it’s never going to be about you. It’s about the client.”

Do you really need to hear this again? It is always about the client and her goals, opportunities and issues.

Mercer Island Group: “Something the consultants understand better than most agencies is that you can’t offer a prospect relevant value until you have identified the prospect’s true business needs. The basic idea of the elevator speech is inherently flawed — as are most agency pitches; if you’re talking about things the prospect has no interest in, they will stop listening.”

Why do you think that pitch consulatants keep saying… that it is always about the client’s goals and issues?

Drexler/Fajen & Partners: “Agencies could spend more time really understanding as much as possible about the prospect’s business and their people and be prepared to demonstrate that in a natural way.”

Study big time: the client, its industry and the macro and micro business opportunities.

Frozen Emails And Business Development

Peter · April 4, 2018 · Leave a Comment

How Not To Freeze Your Business Development Emails

I’m not a big fan of cold calls, cold emails, or cold anything (a key reason I live in Mexico.)

However, in the land of lead generation, there are times when a cold “Hi There” email might simply be the only option. Or, better yet, a smart element of a master plan.

A cold email, a smart cold email, can, if done well, create awareness of your advertising, design or PR agency and, more importantly, begin to seed the idea that you are an insightful marketer that is worth paying attention to. In the best of all possible worlds, the smart “intro” email becomes a much warmer email because it delivers a relevant and hopefully “must read” business insight. If part of a strategic sales plan, the email will become just one element in a longer, more consistent, business development campaign.

Who Gets The “Warm” Email?

I’ll discuss email techniques in a bit. But first, who are you targeting? If your plan is to reach the right people, then you need to figure out who the right people are. Yup a duh. But, you’d be surprised, and competitively delighted, to know that many agencies don’t really know who (is it whom?) they want to reach.

Get your lists right first

Direct to prospect Email is an outbound tool. I recommend using it to reach two target buckets. These groups come from understanding your agency’s brand positioning, its sales proposition, what potential clients will truly be interested in your message and your ability to stand out and be Unignorable.

The Big List

I’m thinking about targeting your agency’s master lead gen list. The longer one. This might sound insane, but my agency had a 1,000-decision maker mailing list. This was our ‘reminder’ list. Our objective was to create awareness of our chops just in case the client needed us that day or month. Note: our strategic list rarely had unsubs since we were slavish to delivering value. This large list is hard to personalize (beyond customizing the right fields). But, you can segment it so you don’t send useless emails that will make you look and sound lame. The key, as usual, is to deliver relevant marketing insights.

The Small List

In this case, I’m referring to a hot list of say 25 to 50 client candidates. These folks, who should without question be your client (example: you are a baby boomer specialist agency and your client target group sell laxatives – LOL). For this must-get group, you’ll need a much more direct, human and, again, highly relevant, super-sharp insight-driven program.

Your List Building

Buy a list. Yes, just drop the coin on this one.

Build a hand-built list using a low-cost intern.

Use email finder tools like Hunter.io, Skrapp, and Anymail. There are more. Just ask Google.

Get the event list from that industry event you just attended.

OK, The Cold Email

This is a well covered subject area, so I suggest that you take a couple of hours and do a Google search to better understand best practices. However, here are some thought starters and a bit of guidance.

Understand that your target market is inundated with emails. Many marketing people get over 100 a day. You have to break through. Within milliseconds. Subject Line is KEY!
Testing a range of email options to get to the most opens is critical. Examples: test subject lines; who From; copy length; graphics; timing (as in the day of the week and time of day); the timing of follow-up emails; your call to action and even the ‘hooks’ you use like what micro cases or research you use to get people’s attention.

For your very personalized emails (the ones sent to your hot list) do the following.

Spend the time researching the person. Get into their head.
Understand their key pain points and figure out how to address them. No, not every pain point, but one or two key ones.
Make the subject line personal. Let’s say you are that baby boomer specialist and you want to target Schwab’s marketing director. Use a line like this: “New Research For Schwab: Baby Boomer to Millennial Inheritance”.

……. Want to hear other ways to grow your agency? Have you called me yet?

Does Your Ad Agency Get Its Marketing Right?

Peter · January 8, 2018 · Leave a Comment

Getting It Right

Here’s a look at some agencies that get their business development marketing right care of a request from Todd Foutz of Virgina’s NDP agency.He asked me if I could point to advertising agencies that looked like they had their business development act together. This post attempts to answer Todd’s question via some smart examples and asks you… “Does your ad agency get its marketing right?”

I told Todd that I could take a good look at and report on what is visible to the world, but could not comment on marketing that is not visible – read that as being 1:1 agency to client prospect direct marketing.

A quick bit of biz dev history.

When I returned from Saatchi & Saatchi London to New York, I was tasked with running business development across our North American offices. Early on, I happened to meet with Jon Bond of the hot agency Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners. KB had some small accounts like BMW, Citi and Victoria’s Secret. I asked him what the agency did for new business marketing. He said, “I never know what works so, we do everything.” I got it. But, that was in 1994 before time chewing digital marketing and its tracking capabilities. Today’s advertising agency cannot do everything. There is simply too much everything. So, I’ll lead with one point: focus. Work on doing just one or two marketing programs right. If they don’t work (after you’ve given them time), adjust or move on.

Not Visible

As you might expect, I cannot see agency to client direct communications (except for what my clients do and I’ll keep that confidential). It is unfortunate that I can’t see what everyone is doing since direct contact should be a key element of any agency’s outbound marketing and it would be very cool to be able to have a look.

That said, this is what I do know:

I’ve discussed that there are three primary ways that agencies drive leads. These include the all-mighty referral (an unmanaged default for way too many agencies), inbound searches (i.e. SEO and content marketing) and via direct outbound.

Outbound, which used to be called sales (OK, still is), has been revved up in recent years via the “new” idea of Account-Based Marketing. This means that an agency utilizes a very strategic managed approach to capture the attention of a prospective client.

Most agencies do direct outreach (possibly too much, too often or much worse, very poorly done). As I am sure you know, there is a great deal of client marketing research that supports the fact that all sorts of agencies hammer prospective clients all day long. It is a barrage that makes it difficult for most agencies to get noticed. To this point, Atlanta’s digital agency Cardinal has a very smart / strategic video on their website where they show one of their clients talking about how many times they get hit up by Cardinal’s competitive agencies – and are not interested in switching.

So, to hammer my point… outbound marketing is critical to agency success. However, poorly delivered outbound does not work, full stop. Super compelling well-targeted insights will break through the clutter to get the attention of the clients you want.

Good news for agencies: most of their agency competitors do not have a clue about how to look and sound trully attractive.

Bad news: these unattractive agencies that hammer clients without any productive, interesting sales pitch or all-important relevant insights help ruin communications for the agencies that actually have their marketing shit together.

Some Agency Biz Dev Research [Read more…] about Does Your Ad Agency Get Its Marketing Right?

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star Advertising Agency

Peter · January 1, 2018 · 1 Comment

Want To Be A Rock Star? (I Hope)

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star is a 1967 song by California’s The Byrds. Never heard it? You should. But more to the point, it could act as an anthem for you becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star advertising agency.

By the way, you are an advertising agency even if you are a digital or experiential agency because “advertising agency” remains the number one search term that clients use even if they want a content agency. Just see what Google Trends says.

OK, back to Rock.

Below are some thoughts on how you can channel the Byrd’s song’s opening lyrics:

“So you want to be a rock and roll star? Then listen now to what I say. Just get an electric guitar. Then take some time and learn how to play.”

Some Rock ‘n’ Roll Agency Thoughts for 2018

I had specific goals for my agency Citrus. We met these with clients like Nike, LegalZoom, Harrah’s and the Montana Lottery.

Our Big Goal: Make us money. Grow every agency employee’s income.

How we got there. We wanted to work with clients that met at least three of these criteria: They wanted great marketing (as in respected what the agency could do for their business); do great work; be famous (working with famous clients gets the attention of other clients); be long-term (screw short low-income projects that ate up our time and talent unless the work would clearly lead to more business) and of course, back to profitability. OK, one more… we wanted to work with clients that were nice people.

Here You Go

Trump, whether you dislike or like him, just handed lots of cash to American companies care of his large corporate tax break. Since many of these companies also compete internationally, I think that advertising budgets could move higher this year. Economic optimism breeds larger budgets – across the globe.
Finding a unique, differentiating, clear agency positioning, remains the biggest hurdle for most agencies. As I have written many times… figure out what you do well, what clients want and then go sell it in a nicely designed package.
Make business development a priority. Have a process, have a budget and be consistent.
Study up on Agile Marketing and think about employing its tenets for your sales program. Here’s a definition: “Agile marketing is an organizational effectiveness strategy that drives growth through focusing team efforts on those that deliver value to the end-customer.“ While you are at it, use a bit of start-up thinking and energy to drive growth.
Use the right KPI’s (key performance indicators) to hone your sales program. The right KPI’s are not the number of emails sent; your average open rate; clicks and shares; or even conversion rates. (Jargon coming) … You need to understand the difference between MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQL (sales qualified leads or, better, actual vetted prospects that want to hire you.) Clicks on your blog are meaningless unless they convert to high-profit sales.
Emotion sells. Do you have agency stories to help sell who you are? Not just facts (all agencies have facts) but real stories?
Personalize your agency. I cannot believe how many agency websites are human-free zones. People buy people and who you are, how you look, how you sound, could be a major agency differentiator.
Use video to sell. But, do not be boring. Note: short, interesting videos. Sell me by being entertaining. This is a bit on the crazy side. A few years ago when my Portland agency wanted to get way noticed in San Francisco, we did a VLOG about San Franciscans. Here is an interview with a pimp. Yup, a bit, um, edgy. Here are the video, awareness strategy and my very honest assessment of the MosaicSF program. Hey, we tried to stand out.
Be cool. Since my first day in the advertising business, clients told me that they dig cool. You are cooler than them. Make your brilliance fun… too.
Content and thought leadership is a good thing – it is how I grow my business. Prospective clients want pertinent information. Business-building information and insights that the clients you want cannot ignore. Cannot ignore is the critical element. Read some agency blogs. Too many are not well-positioned and are just downright boring. Maybe its time to kill your blog.
Pick your battles. Unless you are large, it is very difficult to run a blog, write white papers, broadcast a weekly podcast, produce videos, Tweet 5 times a day, hammer LinkedIn. Do one or two things correctly.
Study up on and commit to running Account Based Marketing. Figure out what categories to target, specific clients and build programs that dazzle over time (and can’t be ignored.)
Know what, make being Unignorable a critical agency goal. Me-too sucks and if you just act me-too, you will not succeed. If a client thinks you are me-too, they will think that you will do me-too work – for them.
Look smart. Write a book or create a zine. Try something different that proves you are really smart. My friends Beau Fraser (Death to All Sacred Cows: How Successful Business People Put the Old Rules Out to Pasture) and Russ Stoddard (Rise Up: How to Build a Socially Conscious Business) did it. They look and sound smart and different. I did it too. You can.
Win awards. Clients need third-party help. London Advertising and San Diego’s Basic (like 17 Webby’s) do this every year. Winning isn’t an accident. In addition to deciding to do only standout work, these agencies have awards strategies.
Spend a few minutes on your end game. Want to sell someday? Well, you better build an agency that someone else will want to buy. This exercise is also a smart way to build an agency that clients will want to work with.
Have a smart referrals strategy. Your friends want to help you. Be active.

Be Bold.

Passive agencies lose. Ask for the order. OK, here you go… last year I worked with advertising, experiential, digital, PR agencies on five continents. Want to fill your new client pipeline? Go here.

The Byrds Lyrics

So you want to be a rock and roll star?
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
Then take some time and learn how to play

And with your hair swung right
And your pants too tight, it’s gonna be all right
Then it’s time to go downtown
Where the agent man won’t let you down

Sell your soul to the company
Who are waiting there to sell plastic ware
And in a week or two if you make the charts
The girls’ll tear you apart

The price you paid for your riches and fame
Was it all a strange game? You’re a little insane
The money, the fame, and the public acclaim
Don’t forget who you are, you’re a rock and roll star

Songwriters: Chris Hillman / Roger Mc Guinn