How to Win New Business in a Recession

We all deserve to start a new year filled with hope, ambition, and a solid plan for reaching new business goals. But as we head into 2023, there’s a palpable feeling of caution, not to mention mixed signals.

A recession is looming? A recession is here? A recession is likely to be avoided?

Google is cutting costs, Facebook has cut staff, but the labor market is still tight.

Businesses don’t like uncertainty, so we may be in for a tough year in the advertising sector. But businesses will still spend in a recession, especially the smart ones. It’s not just a convenient argument that brands that invest in marketing during a recession usually come out the other end in stronger shape than their peers who didn’t.

This may all be reassuring news, and yet it doesn’t diminish the possibility that agency business development may be facing headwinds. What do you do? 

1. Sell solutions, not credentials.

People crave guidance in uncertain times. Think back to almost three years ago when COVID effectively shut down industries on March 17, 2020. Most of us would be lying if we didn’t say we were freaking out a bit. But what I saw was that agencies that stepped into their role as an expert despite the fear and uncertainty and proactively offered solutions and ideas to their clients were the agencies that got through with minimal damage–some even thrived. This included one of my clients, a PR firm that specializes in working with restaurant chains. Even though the dining and hospitality industry was one of the most negatively impacted, this agency was a beacon for its clients. It led with solutions, ideas, and a point-of-view that clients responded to. As a result, after a rocky two weeks in March, their agency came roaring back and had a great year.   

The moral of the story: Even in uncertain times, marketers still have problems that agencies like yours can solve. That’s good news for you, but you might need to change how you pitch.

Many agencies like to give their prospective clients a lot to choose from. It feels both generous as well as smart—if a client can use one of your services, maybe it can use another! But most of us don't like having too much choice. It’s confusing and paralyzing. We appreciate having options, but we also seek experts who can advise us on what the best options are. 

In the best of times, marketers find it hard to choose the best agency out of a pool of candidates who all say they’re good at everything. 

In uncertain times, when their own resources are being cut back, marketers still have marketing problems to solve. Problems need solutions and clients will pay for solutions. Your job is to be clear about which problems you can solve.

2. Don’t underestimate what you know about your clients

A solutions-oriented approach is less about you and more about your prospective client. Or, to clarify, it’s about you presented through the context of the client and its challenges.

It requires you to tap deeply into what you know about them–their challenges, their obstacles, their goals and their ambitions. And, if my experience with small agencies like yours is any indication, I know two things: 1. You’re probably not fully leveraging all you know about your clients and 2. It’s easier to do than you might think.

When I do a positioning workshop with agency leaders, I conduct two very simple exercises. One is to explore differentiating characteristics. This exercise is deceptively hard because it asks you to be objective, which is almost impossible when you are, in fact, the subject. It’s a familiar struggle. Agencies work and rework their marketing language and often still end up sounding like everyone else.

The second exercise asks you to make a simple shift away from what you know about yourselves to what you know about your clients. This magical combination of your objectivity and your experience results in a clear articulation of the challenges your clients face every day. And when your pitch is geared toward what your client is thinking and feeling, it is guaranteed to connect.

As you start to implement your new business plan for 2023, are you underestimating what you know about your clients? How would your messaging improve if it was more about them and less about you?

3. Be an extension of the client team 

Apparently this labor market is a mystery even to the experts. Hiring good people remains challenging for many. And not just for agencies. If you ask Lyndsey Slaby, a consultant to CMO’s, she’ll tell you maintaining headcount hasn’t been easy for marketers. That’s a huge problem, especially in the short-term. Can your agency alleviate it?

And, yes, some marketers are cutting budgets, but that affects their internal head count and yet they still need to get the work done. The cause may be different but the problem is still the same–your clients are short on resources. Again, can your agency alleviate it?

4. Reduce their risk

Hiring an agency is risky. There’s no guarantee of success and much that can go wrong. And it’s not just how qualified you are to solve a client’s marketing problems, but how you will work with their team: how you will present to their board; how your team will get the most out of their team; how much the client can count on you to be an extension of their capabilities.

Watch for opportunities to help make the case for the investment of working with you. Your clients, especially if they are part of large enterprises or institutions, must often navigate complex buying processes of competing needs, priorities and stakeholders. It can be exhausting. Help them overcome the inertia by going beyond your standard discovery questions to uncover how buying decisions are made.

This may ask you to manage the buying process differently, relying less on a one-way process dictated by the client and more on a collaborative dance. While the client may lead, you are an active partner, exerting control when appropriate, offering alternative approaches that will benefit all involved, and seeking answers to the right questions like, 

• Who are the influencers as well as the decision makers and what’s important to them? 

• What will make them vulnerable if they don’t make the right decision? 

• Who’s feeling the most pain? 

As a partner in this dance, how can you help your client sell in your solution? Understand not only what information different stakeholders need but how they take in info. Some may need highly-detailed documentation, others will want top-line summaries, and most will benefit from a highly productive conversation rather than a lengthy email. Don’t be afraid to ask for a  20-minute call.

5. Check on the health of your pipeline

All this so far has been about how you can better serve your clients and prospects. Let’s turn to you and talk about a little self-care. How can your agency better weather the ups and downs that are inevitable in times of uncertainty? 

Sometimes uncertainty takes the form of erratic schedules and clients greenlighting projects only to put them on hold. This leaves you vulnerable if you don’t have a healthy pipeline to fall back on.

It’s generally acknowledged that a healthy pipeline shows two-to-three times your annual revenue goal. (This is a pretty broad characterization of a pipeline and admittedly doesn’t take into account the unique nature of agency sales nor the finer points of the sales cycle, but it’ll do for our purposes.) For example, if your revenue goal is $1 million, you want to see $3 million in potential opportunities. In uncertain times, you’ll be better off with five times your revenue goal.

How do you build a healthy pipeline if you don’t have one? 

In the short term, this might mean some metaphorical searching in the sofa cushions. What recent opportunities have languished that you might re-energize? Who are the allies you’ve been neglecting? How can you apply the first four principles to amend the pipeline?

In the longer term, it may mean getting out there in a bigger way and that might feel uncomfortable to you, especially if you’re one of those agency leaders who has always avoided proactive business development whenever possible. 

Most importantly, resist the temptation of going back to business development practices that have never yielded great results to begin with. Times of crisis can force us into making productive changes. And while I don’t wish a crisis on anyone, I do encourage agencies to consider their options as if they were facing a crisis. After all, this just may not be the year to rely on great pitch opportunities magically turning up.

6. Seek support

I’ll leave you with this final thought: surviving (or even thriving) in uncertain economic times is best done as a group activity.  

For your agency, that may mean taking advantage of the strengths of your team and even recruiting others who are not typically involved in business development, asking them to stretch themselves and participate. Or it may be seeking a coach or mentor, or even the support of your peers. 

If this sounds compelling, you may be interested in a new mastermind group I’m launching at the end of this month. As it’s a brand-new program, for a limited time I’ll be offering a charter member rate.

Want more information? Contact me at jody@thesuttercompany.com.