You’ve written a great introduction email and have prepared an inspiring cold-call pitch, but how do you actually get in touch with and make contact with the prospect? Calling the company’s switchboard or filling out their website “contact us” form are not efficient or effective ways to connect with senior marketing decision-makers for new business for your agency.

All too often, companies require sales reps to try to track down their prospect’s contact information on their own. If the contact data is ever even found, it is often inaccurate and incomplete. This process eats up the seller’s time and limits their sales potential. But there’s a better way.

Top agencies subscribe to database services that provide accurate, direct contact information on prospects. They build targeted lists and supplement this data with their own due diligence. This process results in richer information that is relevant, current and provides insights that can be used in prospecting email and call messaging.

Below are five important steps to build a scalable, repeatable and efficient prospecting process. Following each step of these steps on a consistent basis will result in thorough and targeted prospect lists:

1. Get A Good Database Provider

There are number of database providers available online, such as Winmo, that offer vetted and current prospect contact information for ad agencies, marketing firms and creative agencies. These sophisticated database and intelligence services often provide much more than contact information. They also can offer company financial data, agency relationships and recent news articles to help you better identify your best prospects.

When selecting a database provider, it is important to find one that employs teams of researchers to validate and refresh the data on a regular basis, at least every 3-6 months. It’s also important that the company specializes in advertising and marketing agencies so the prospects align with your target audience.

2. Focus On A Vertical

As a consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business, I pull prospect data lists on behalf of agencies multiple times each week. I typically begin by selecting a target business vertical, such as insurance companies. By being narrowly focused, the outbound messaging can be similar across all companies within the vertical, leading to more efficiency in your outreach program. Top sellers will focus on 1-3 verticals per quarter, depending on the final size of the prospect lists.

3. Identify the Best-Fit Companies

Once the vertical is selected, the company list can be narrowed by such criteria as revenue, media spend and location. By targeting only the companies that fit your buyer persona, you’re able to laser-focus sales efforts to the best-suited companies. Although the database provider I use has extensive lists of companies, I also review top business rankings lists within that vertical to ensure that I have all relevant companies included on my list.

When researching each company to determine if it fits our buyer persona, I take notes on the challenges the company is facing. These insights are later converted into talking points for email and phone outreach. If I am unable to identify challenges that we can realistically solve, I believe I have no valid reason to reach out to the prospect and remove them from the company list.

4. Identify the Best-Fit Contacts

Once I have narrowed the list down to the top 10-20 companies, I use the database to find the most relevant contacts within the companies, based on job function and rank.

Who the right contacts are will vary depending on your agency’s services. For example, a social media agency surely will want to connect with a social media director. However a branding agency likely would not.

I like to focus on C-suite, VP and director-level marketing professionals, but depending on your agency, you may also target manager-level contacts. What’s important is that you’re only targeting decision-makers or influencers. I focus on finding about 10 contacts per company, depending on the size of the prospect company and your agency’s specialty.

At this point, I download the information from the database provider into an Excel or CSV file to upload to a CRM program such as Salesforce.

But the work is not over.

5. Uncover Even More Best-Fit Contacts

Unearthing information on LinkedIn is a powerful way to gain even more contacts. By reviewing the LinkedIn profile of each contact, you can confirm that the employee is still with the company and remains in the appropriate role.

LinkedIn is also useful for mining additional contacts in the company. By reviewing the “People Also Viewed” box on a contact’s LinkedIn profile, you may find additional relevant prospects you have not found previously.

During this process I also make notes of mutual contacts, past employers, links to presentations, schools attended or other points of connection that I will use in my outreach to that contact.

You will need the email address information for these contacts found outside of the database. You can solve this by looking at the email naming conventions of the other contacts in the company; 90 percent of the time the naming convention will hold for the missing prospects. If all else fails, there are a number of online tools available to help find alternative email suggestions.

Lastly I will scour Google reading financial statements, press releases and trade articles for mentions of other relevant contacts at the companies.

Key Takeaways

Your prospect data list is the most important part in agency new business outreach. If you do not have a relevant and accurate list of prospects and an efficient way to get this data, even the best messaging will fail. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really fall? Using a database platform makes this scalable so business development reps can spend more time on outreach and less time trying to track down contact information. Following each step on a consistent basis will lay the critical foundation for an effective outreach program.

---

Author Bio

Christian Banach is an advertising agency new business consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Prospecting is time-consuming and often messy – but also vital for young companies ready to develop strong customer bases. If you aren’t finding enough leads, it’s time to invest more heavily in high-quality prospecting. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Be Organic, But Also Focus on Data

Let’s unpack this tip a bit: Prospecting is about acquiring contact information and profile data for potential leads. Because it can be time-consuming and doesn’t actually lead to revenue until leads have been turned into customers, many new companies are tempted to cheat – to buy lists of customer contact information or use contact lists from other portions of the business. Avoid this temptation – prospect data needs to be organic, gathered in the wild from real sources. This is the only way to guarantee high-quality leads with the right contact information. At the same time, these organic prospects need to be as data rich as possible so that you can start forming accurate customer personas, predict the needs of your leads, and start putting together powerful sales strategies.

2. Establish Useful Conversions

Prospecting is not too early for conversion efforts: We’re talking about basic, early conversions designed to test the efficacy of your process and gather important data. Conversions like responses to emails, fill-out forms on your website, successful referrals, and similar actions should all be fueling your prospect list. Ideally, they should also give you enough information so that you can rank your prospects based on their profitability and chances of success. Conversions this early in the process also allow you to note which channels are the most effective in picking up prospects.

3. Use All Available Channels

Speaking of channels, how many are you using? You should tap into all channels possible for your industry and target audience: Social media, blogs, forums, email, trade shows, calls to past clients, buddies at the local pub, old friends now working for another business…cast a wide net when first building your customer base. Not only will this help you find more prospects, but it will also help you sharpen up your sales pitches and marketing content before you start dealing more directly with your leads.

4. Specialize in the Right People and Tools

When we say “specialize” we are talking about two important steps in the prospecting process. First, specialize in demographics that are indeed interested in what you are selling. Don’t waste your energy gathering prospect information for people that have no interest in your products (people who live in apartments don’t buy lawnmowers, etc.). Second, specialize on prospecting within your company. There are several reasons to avoid having your salespeople find prospects. A better solution is to assign someone temporarily or permanently to dig up prospects and do nothing else: Follow up by giving these people the right sales tools to maximize productivity and narrow down/rank prospects efficiently.

5. Stay in Communication and Predict Needs

If you have followed our other tips and have a roster of high-quality leads to pursue, don’t give up on them. Keep trying different approaches, offer different solutions, seek out new decision-makers, try for different meeting times, send more emails, and so on. Prospects that may seem dead on arrival today could be a new client tomorrow. One of the most important steps in turning prospects into successful leads is to correctly forecast their needs before anyone else (including the prospects themselves). Keep a finger on the pulse of your industry, watch trends, and start making predictions about what your target audience is going to need before anyone else is thinking about it.

One of the greatest challenges in the agency world is entering a growth phase…when you aren’t seeing much growth. In a perfect world, business growth would happen naturally in easy-to-predict stages, but that isn’t this world – chances are good that instead you need to grow, but aren’t seeing it happen. Here are the three top reasons it happens to agencies like yours, and what you need to make real growth happen.

1. Financial Management Issues

This sounds like a broad topic, because it really is – financial management stretches from day-to-day profits all the way to major capital and investment decisions. However, financial planning and consistent new business growth play integral roles when it comes to company growth.

This can take many forms. Perhaps poor cash flow management is holding your company back – you may struggle with accounting for where your cash comes from and where it goes at the proper time, a problem many new businesses encounter. As a result, agencies like yours quickly find themselves without cash on hand to cover supplies and overhead, and emergencies quickly dig into valuable reserves so there really isn’t much time to think about expansion at all.

Another common financial management deals with revenue and credit. If your credit policies and accounts receivable turnover are poor, you will probably never have enough capital to expand. Creating purchase strategies that get revenue into your hands in a timely manner can be a challenge for many companies. You want customers to have the ability to purchase your goods, but you can’t give them too much credit leeway or too many discounts, which will dig into your profits.

What do these problems add up to? A business without cash reserves that simply does not look very impressive on paper. And this is where we reach the investor problem: Business growth requires money, typically via business loans or perhaps a capital group. Banks and investors alike pay a lot of attention to financial statements, which means poor financial management – even in the small things – can keep you from getting the capital that you need.

2. Adaptation to Market Changes

This point is a bit more intangible, but still just as important when looking for reasons why your business isn’t seeing the growth you want: You aren’t watching the market closely enough, and you aren’t responding to it properly.

Part of this is an entrepreneurial issue: New business leaders tend to have a lot of energy and willpower focused in one direction, which means it can be difficult for these leaders to see related issues – and to change. Stubbornness has kept many a business from expanding properly.

Part of this problem is also simple business evolution: If your target demographic, preferred purchasing method, or the communication tools in your industry have changed, you absolutely have to change with them to find new growth.

3. Client Creep and Time Management

This is a subtler problem related to agencies that interact a lot with their customers and typically take on large client projects. Clients are your lifeblood…but they can also choke your own vision for your business. If you and your employees are spending too much time attending to client needs and tackling their complex projects, you may not have any time left to think about your own business and growth strategies. Pay attention to time management, and be sure to make time for nurturing and developing new business opportunities outside of your referral network.

Your success or failure in closing a deal with a new client hinges on whether your sales pitch is a homerun or a flop. There are a number of common mistakes that agency folks just like you make everyday and should be avoided at all costs when pitching new business deals.

1. Beginning with an Apology

“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Apologies that this presentation is a bit lengthy,”
“I’m sorry I didn’t have time to update some of the slides.”  

Opening with an apology of any kind sets a negative tone for the rest of your presentation before you’ve even finished the opening slide.  Not only that, you have also undermined your expertise and planted seeds of doubt with your audience.

2. Avoiding Eye Contact

Not making eye contact with your audience or reading directly off of your presentation will not only bore the audience, but also make you look unprepared. The audience wants to see that you have the confidence and knowledge to speak directly to their concerns and needs without constant reassurance from the slides in your sales deck.  If you avoid making eye contact with your audience — intentionally or unintentionally —  they may think you are being standoffish or that you don’t have the confidence in yourself or your product to effectively close the deal.

3. Dancing Around Tough Questions

If you can’t provide honest and accurate answers about your product, you probably don’t have sufficient information to be making the pitch on your own. Furthermore, how can you expect anyone else to trust you enough to buy what you’re selling if you don’t seem to believe in it? Believing in your product or service is integral to a successful pitch and new client acquisition.

4. Lack of Transparency on Cost & Pricing

This is one of those “tough questions” referenced above. Potential clients will grow suspicious if you dance around the question of cost or pricing. Although it is important to lead with the value of your solution, especially when it comes to that client’s specific needs, you should always be straightforward on the price tag.

Be honest and up front about how much your services are, and back it up with all of the reasons why you and your agency can offer the best solution for their company. Doing so will show them that you aren’t hiding anything when it comes to their investment.

5. Making Excuses

Your clients or potential clients aren’t concerned with why you look disheveled or why you can’t properly organize your thoughts. They also aren’t sitting in your presentation eager to hear all about you, they are there to hear what you can do for them.  Keep to the matter at hand, make your case and confidently answer any questions that your clients have for you.

Key Takeaways

The next time you pitch a prospective client, keep these tips in mind.  Also, don’t be afraid to get advice from other sales professionals who have built a successful new business machine. Do these things and you will be in a much better position to increase new business and drive revenue growth for your agency!

Hunting for scalable email marketing solutions for your agency can be a daunting task, especially when you have limited time and resources to work with. Fortunately, there are a number of budget-friendly and free tools that can effectively solve your agency’s business development problems right now. 

If you have been struggling to find the right tool for your team, here are our recommendations on the best free and low cost email marketing tools for growing agencies.

Cyfe

In the interest of efficiency, check out Cyfe to track data and analytics from various sources. The Forever Free Plan can solve many of your issues. 

Cyte is a convenient all-in-one business dashboard solution that gives you the ability to bring your website and/or blog analytics, SEO metrics, and social media analytics, into one shared and easy-to-read dashboard. It can help you analyze data covering year-to-date revenue from Salesforce, Google Analytics website visitor locations, keyword rankings and funnel paths, Twitter tweets, and email marketing analytics from MailChimp. We know you are interested in email marketing, but you get all the other information as well. Pretty cool!

MailChimp

If you have less than 2,000 email contacts, you should explore MailChimp’s Forever Free Plan. The plan doesn’t expire, and you can send up to 12,000 emails a month using the majority of their tools.

VerticalResponse 

VerticalResponse is a great tool because it enables you to send up to 4,000 emails a month, create unlimited sign up forms, a connection to one Facebook and one Twitter account, and test out their auto-responder tool for free.  

Thunderbird From Mozilla

Thunderbird is a dynamic free application developed by Mozilla, and it may be just what you need. This email application is easy to set up, easy to customize, and it’s loaded with fantastic features.  

It combines privacy, speed, and the very latest technology. Thunderbird also includes many innovative extra features including mail redirect.

99design

There is a new email design category from 99design. It’s a perfect source whether you’re running a SMB or a larger firm. Remember several years ago when the buzz was that email was going to disappear? Well, not happening. 

With 99design, the demand for services and free templates is growing. They also offer free design consultation.  

Despite all the attention around inbound marketing, outbound sales emails remain one of the most effective tools for complex business transactions, including selling marketing services.

A report from The Radicati Group, Inc. finds that the average business professional receives 88 emails per day. So how does an agency new business person break through and get noticed in a crowded inbox?

I send hundreds of cold sales emails each week as a consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business, and I’ve developed a format that will make your messages stand out and get more responses from senior marketing decision makers.

Paragraph 1 — Entice With a Question

The first line of the cold sales email is the most important. With many email programs including a preview of the message, it’s imperative that the first line pique the prospect’s interest. It needs to be relevant and personal.

An effective way to gain attention is to open your message by asking one or two questions about the challenges the prospect’s business faces. These questions should center on problems that your agency is uniquely qualified to solve.

Research the company, their industry and the prospect to identify these pain points. Then ask yourself: What changes are affecting their business? What is the impact of these issues are on their business? Why are they important to solve?

Always personalize the salutation with the prospect’s name and reference the company’s name. Although the entire message should not read like a generic copy-and-pasted template, this is especially true of the first paragraph.

Example:

Rick,

Considering your acquisition of Zeus Financial, is First Primary Bank facing challenges integrating customer experiences or looking to build even more profitable relationships with customers?

Paragraph 2 — Demonstrate Value

You’ve identified key problems. Now offer to solve them.

Be clear that you are not sending them an email looking to set up a generic capabilities call. Senior decision makers are too busy. Instead, inform them specifically of what you can offer and how you might be able to help. Compel them to get to know your agency better by offering solutions to problems that you already understand.

Remember this is about them, not you.

Agency business development consultant and author Peter Levitan says, “Give them something of value in return. In most cases, this might be a serious insight or a creative solution.”

While you may not yet have a full grasp of the nuances of their business, you’ve demonstrated that you’ve done your homework and understand the likely issues your prospect faces. You have a point of view and a viable answer to the questions you’ve already posed.

Example:

If you’re struggling with either one, or both, I’d like to share two insights that we’ve uncovered about the banking industry and how they might be impacting you.

Paragraph 3 — Demonstrate Capability

You’ve asked the right question and hinted at the answers you have. But who are you, anyway?

The third paragraph will demonstrate your bona fides. This is where you show what you’ve done.

Show the prospect the proof that you’ve done this before. To build trust and credibility, mention clients that you’ve worked with that are within the same business category or faced similar challenges.

This is not about name-dropping. You need to create the wedge. Illustrate the compelling outcomes achieved by other clients using the solutions you provide and can provide for the prospect too.

Instead of saying how awesome you are, make your point by having your clients talk about you. If someone else is saying something about you, it’s a third-party endorsement, which is much more credible.

Example:

Mid-sized financial services clients like Second Eastern Bank have told us that we’ve helped them to provide dramatically better online customer experiences that improved market share by 17% in less than 12 months.

Paragraph 4 — Disarm

Next, is your opportunity to disarm the prospect. Make it clear that you’re not trying to sell them per se but rather to see if your agency might be a good fit.

Since there will be objections, select one and prevent it before it’s had a chance to plant in your prospect’s mind.

Example:

We respect that you may have other agency relationships and that there might not be a fit right now, but we would like for you to know us better because a need could arise down the road.

Paragraph 5 — Call To Action

Complex sales, such as for marketing services, are likely to take months or even years before there’s real movement. You will not make the sale with this first email and your call to action should be to advance the relationship forward.

For ad agencies, the typical next step is to secure a scheduled phone call with the prospect. Should there be an expert or other relevant member of your team that can add value to the call, mention them.

Make this call to action very clear. Limit it to one call to action per message, and one possible link, and propose a timeframe for the call.

Example:

Might a brief chat the week of June 2nd with our Insights Director, John Smith, and I, be of interest?

Full sample

Below is the full example, based on the points described above.

Rick,

Considering your acquisition of Zeus Financial, is First Primary Bank facing challenges integrating customer experiences or looking to build even more profitable relationships with customers?

If you’re struggling with either one, or both, I’d like to share two insights that we’ve uncovered about the banking industry and how they might be impacting you.

Mid-sized financial services clients like Second Eastern Bank have told us that we’ve helped them to provide dramatically better online customer experiences that improved market share by 17% in less than 12 months.

We respect that you may have other agency relationships and that there might not be a fit right now, but we would like for you to know us better because a need could arise down the road.

Might a brief chat the week of June 2nd with our insights director, John Smith, and I, be of interest?

Cheers,

Christian

Conclusion

Writing an effective agency new business cold email requires careful planning and research. If you keep it personal, outline the prospect’s needs, offer potential solutions, demonstrate capability, overcome objections and make a straightforward call to action, your messages will have a greater chance of cutting through the clutter, getting more responses, and paving the way for more new business wins.

---

Author Bio

Christian Banach is an advertising agency new business consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Let me guess, during your agency’s annual planning meeting the decision was made to increase your business development efforts? You all decided that this is the year that you grow 15 percent and win four new AOR clients.

Now, you are all going to chip in a certain percentage of your time every day to reach out to new prospects and begin working those networks. And for the first month there’s momentum. Conversations are had and then Jim from Account Management has a breakthrough with a college buddy who runs marketing for a big brand and they want you to pitch.

Awesome! All of your team’s focus switches to pitch-mode 100 percent of the time. You stop that new business momentum that you were beginning to build because you don’t have time to pitch, manage clients and try to win new business. Clients take precedent.

Two months later, that momentum for new business still hasn’t caught back up because all your time as has been focused on current clients. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Marketing automation is a huge part of being able to create a repeatable process that keeps business development efforts running regardless of what’s going on within the agency.

Our goal with agencies we work with is to change the business development process from hills of high activity and valleys of low activity to a constant rising line of proactive business development.

So how does marketing automation ensure that constant activity in your business development process?

1. Automates time intensive processes

When you sit down to begin creating a process, immediately look for areas in your agency’s current process that are impersonal and take a large amount of time.

With a good automation system, things like introduction emails to large groups, social media posts and web visitor follow-up are items that you can still give a personal feel to, while doing mass outreach at the same time.

2. Creates a standard process

Having a true process that essentially runs itself allows multiple people to work on new business development at any given time. This means that even when the Biz Dev Director is out, the system can keep running and driving profitable conversations to your agency principals.

No matter who is posting or emailing, you can be sure that the agency’s preferred voice and message is consistently being delivered to your prospects.

3. Gives a clearer picture of a prospect’s total activity

When you are evaluating a prospect’s activity, marketing automation programs allow you to go beyond the typical “Did they open and click on an email?”

Instead, you can really dig in and start tracking all of their activity across multiple campaigns and on your website. This allows your program to intelligently customize what messaging prospects should be receiving, while saving you time throughout the process.

4. Allows you to broaden your reach to more prospects, while staying hyper-targeted

We often see agencies fall into the trap of trying to work off of ultra-targeted lists. This really reduces the pool of total prospects. It also reduces their ability to reach more prospects while increasing awareness for the agency.

Marketing automation allows you to retain these very targeted prospect lists and serve custom messaging, while still reaching out to a broader audience.

At the end of the day, your agency’s goal is to win more business. Marketing automation can help make your new business process more effective and efficient when it comes to reaching larger audiences.

This means that you can have more intelligent conversations with more prospects in order to win more!

After producing thousands of email campaigns for various agencies, we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Today we will explore those bad email campaigns and what mistakes we see most often.

 1. All you talk about is your agency

This is probably the mistake we see most often. Someone writes an email and spends four paragraphs explaining why they are the greatest social media agency ever.

The problem is, never once in those four paragraphs did they talk about prospect or a problem the prospect is looking to solve. So basically, the prospect just immediately tuned them out.

Solution: Open your emails with a startling stat or acknowledgement of a pain point that prospect is struggling with.

2. Your email is too good looking

We get it, you’re a creative shop with amazing design people. You want to create an email that looks amazing and really jumps off the page with fantastic images.

However, the problem is that all those images immediately tell a reader that this a marketing email and they are prone to delete it without ever even opening it up. Or, even worse, those images may not immediately download due to certain email settings and you just sent a blank email that they have to approve.

FACT: No brand has ever chosen to work with an agency because your email really really ridiculously good looking.

Solution: Keep it text only and simple. Your emails will feel more personal and less likely to get immediately deleted.

3. Your target list huge

It’s tough to narrow down and focus your prospect list when there are so many awesome companies out there to work with.

The last thing you want to do is overlook someone that could use your services, so you add everyone to one big list and send to them. The problem with this? It’s way too general, which makes it tough to really speak to any one prospect’s specific pain points.

4. Your target list is tiny

You don’t want to spam random people, so you make a list with one specific target per company, and then the list becomes really, really small. The problem here is that you don’t give yourself much room for error if a person has left the company or if the organization has multiple decision makers.

Solution: Channel your inner Goldilocks. We have our agency clients use a process called hyper targeting. This is basically where we can grab multiple people in similar roles within companies that we want to go after, while keeping lists separated by industry or company size.

For instance, List #1 is your primary target list of companies within Retail and Apparel with a very specific title. And List #2 is a secondary group where you target companies in other industries that you have less experience with and then expand job titles to anyone in marketing.

5. There’s no Call To Action

I’ve seen so many emails that spend so much time talking about how great the agency is, and then finish with something like “We would love to hear from you if you’re interested.” Ugh.

With every email there has to be a purpose to what you are doing; so make sure that every email lives up to that purpose with a CTA that asks them to do something.

Solution: Be aggressive. Not like crazy aggressive, but if you’re going to reach out to these folks, actually ask for something. You can ask for them to click a link to a case study, visit your website, or even just ask for the meeting outright, but be specific and clear. An email with no call to action will almost always ensure that no action is taken.

6. Your subject line is terrible

Subject lines are tricky and can immediately affect the open rates of the emails you send.

A lot of time we see agencies creating subject lines that are long and detailed so the reader knows exactly what is in the email. The trouble with this? The subject line becomes way too long and doesn’t feel natural.

Solution: Short and simple. Be straightforward and concise. You want this to grab a prospect’s attention. Think of it as a headline, and perhaps even throw in a dash of mystery with a word like “Opportunity” or “Idea.”

A/B test your subject lines and see what your particular audience responds to best. This isn’t a perfect science so do not be afraid to try new things.

7. Trying too hard to be witty or cheeky

There is nothing worse than reading an email that includes a mildly politically incorrect comment, and then 30 minutes later receiving an email from a CEO apologizing for their Marketing Director’s “innocent mistake.”

It’s never fun to read these emails – much less write them. Plus, it sends a bad message to your prospects about your organization.

Solution: Leave the social satire to Jon Stewart and John Oliver. You can always show your wit later in more one-to-one communications when you know the person, but for now, let’s attract them the old fashioned way…by talking about them and their problems.

Generally speaking, agencies fall woefully short when it comes to prospecting for new business.

And although there are always certain case-by-case factors at work, in our experience, agencies’ inadequacies with new business largely come down to two things: limited resources and ad hoc sales strategies.

Sound familiar? If so, we highly recommend reassessing your entire business development strategy. Also, if you are not already doing this, start supplementing reactive prospecting with proactive business development as soon as possible. Of course, this is always easier said than done, especially if you don’t have expert guidance on where to start.

We know firsthand how overwhelming this process can be for agencies. For that reason, we’ve provided a list of strategic elements our own business development advisors and agency clients have used with great success.

Make sure your agency has clearly defined and compelling positioning

Many prospects and clients operate under the perception that all agencies are alike; the only real difference being the people they will work with.

Because of this, it’s important for you to communicate differentiated value in order to position your agency as the stand out candidate in the minds of prospective customers. Also, make sure that your “elevator speech” clearly speaks to the agency’s core competencies in a few simple sentences.

Develop a consistent, ongoing prospect outreach program and stick to it

If you do this right the first time, this strategy will be a sustainable and scalable framework for proactive business development in the long-term. Many agencies don’t have anything like this, choosing instead to be reactive and wait for new business opportunities to come knocking on their door.

An effective prospect outreach program should be consistent and involve multiple strategies and a variety of touch points – i.e. e-mail marketing, event marketing, telemarketing, attending conferences and events, etc.

Only present relevant case studies to prospects

Want to know the quickest way to undermine or discount your agency’s results? Send a random case study that is completely irrelevant to a prospective client’s industry or business objectives.

Be sure that every case study presented in a sales pitch or RFP response showcases results that are relevant to that prospect’s industry, pain points and marketing goals. This will enhance your ability to engage the prospect.

Use the sales funnel as a road map for your prospecting strategy

In order to build an effective new business pipeline you have to reach out to enough prospects on the front end to give you the best chance to “win” on the back end. That way, as you nurture leads down the funnel you have a solid base of prospects to pull from at all times.

Your outreach strategy should be targeted to top prospects in priority vertical categories. Remember, only a small percentage of the prospects you reach out to will turn into meetings and clients.

Befriend the Admin!

Administrative assistants can be your best friends. If you cannot reach the top decision maker in your outreach efforts, make it a priority to reach out to the admin to develop a relationship and ask for their help in scheduling a call or meeting. Befriending the admin can lead to enhanced new business success!