When you master your narrative, you control your pitch
I have a framework I use with my clients designed to help them make good decisions on how to promote and pitch their agencies to ideal clients to win new business and generate revenue.
It’s called the New Business Ecosystem™ and the simple premise is this:
You start with the PROMISE you make to your prospects. This is a short statement that says you get results by doing certain things to solve certain kinds of problems. Aka a positioning statement. However I think we can get so hung up on making a positioning statement “perfect”, overburdening it with responsibility, that it gets drained of meaning. Asking an agency what they promise to do for a client is more straightforward (at least to me).
But talk is cheap, so you must show PROOF that this promise is legitimate. For an agency, that proof is in the form of things like the work in its portfolio, the steps it takes to produce that work, and the team it relies on (and how the agency hires and nurtures that team). This is the stuff of the new business toolkit. When it’s tethered to a clear promise, it’s effective; when it’s not, it’s less potent and an agency might have to work harder to convince a prospect that they’re the right choice for the job.
What you promise and how you prove it will only take you so far. You’ll want to AMPLIFY that message to your target audience. That means making smart decisions around the marketing, selling, and closing tactics your agency uses. There’s a lot an agency could do to promote itself. The fact is time, money and resources are limited so use them wisely.
You are in control of what you PROMISE, how you PROVE it’s legitimate, and the actions you’ll take to AMPLIFY the message in the marketplace.
Ideally, it all works together to create a healthy ecosystem that promotes sustainable growth. In other words –
– You’re not forever reinventing the wheel each time you want to pitch a new prospect
– The right prospects are just as likely to find you as you are to find them
– You’re more confident in sales and marketing tactics you use to promote your agency because they suit your environment
That’s the good news.
The challenge is that all this creates a NARRATIVE in the marketplace and you have little control over that.
I think sometimes this gets forgotten by agency leaders in their earnest efforts to be seen and liked by their prospects.
Here are some examples of how a poor narrative might undermine an agency’s credibility with an audience of ideal clients:
An agency professes to be an expert in marketing for challenger brands yet shows a preponderance of category leaders on their client list
An agency claims “our difference is our people”, but its website doesn’t make clear who is on the team and what their expertise is
Big agency refugees open a small creative shop because they believe marketers deserve an agile, nimble approach to problem-solving but the work process described in their proposal is lengthy and front-loaded with discovery-related tasks
Or, the message is overly general and vague, which makes it hard to understand.
It’s not rocket science. It’s brain science
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow tells us we rely on two systems to make decisions:
System 1: This is fast, intuitive, automatic, and emotional. It handles everyday decisions effortlessly but is prone to biases and errors.
System 2: This is slower, more deliberate, logical, and analytical. It takes over when tasks require more focus or complex reasoning but is often lazy and lets System 1 take the lead.
You should just assume that your prospects are going to default to System 1 when forming an impression of you and your agency, especially in the earlier stages of the buying cycle.
Think about it—we create mental shortcuts for ourselves all the time based on the information we’re given. Time is short and most of us believe our intuitions are going to serve us well. Your prospects have literally thousands of options when it comes to selecting an agency partner. And most agencies don’t do themselves any favors when they decide to describe themselves in broad or even contradictory terms.
“Our agency is known for ____________”
Here’s an illustration plucked from the real world.
A few years ago, I was given a peek inside the agency selection process used by one of the better known search consultants.
It starts when the consultant builds a “long, long-list” of potential agencies for the marketer to consider.
By the way, this is before any agencies are contacted so the agencies on the long, long list are unaware they’re being considered.
It’s long because they want to give their client the benefit of reviewing a generous pool of qualified options. And because it’s long, the consultant limits the information they provide on each agency to a 1-page snapshot.
Here’s the kicker-it concludes with this sentence:
“Agency is known for _____________.”
My question to any agency leader reading this: What would you want filled in the blank to ensure you’re not eliminated in this early round of consideration?
And more importantly: How does that contrast with the way this statement is likely to be completed based on the outward narrative you publicly share with the world?
In a world where supply exceeds demand, your prospects aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they will take control of your narrative and eliminate those options for you.
What can you do to take back that control?
Be known for something (almost anything). Dare to have a differentiated positioning in the marketplace–at least when it comes to proactively seeking new business. You have options beyond wedding your agency to a business category. You might consider things like a service in which you excel, a demographic you know well, or even a professional point of view that separates you from the crowd.
Stop being so generous! Providing twelve case studies is not four times better than providing three really good ones. You’ll lose your audience because they simply don’t have the bandwidth to take it all in and extract the message you want them to walk away with. (Besides, the Power of Three is a well accepted psychological principle that suggests we process and remember information better when it is presented in groups of three.)
Review your sales and marketing materials regularly, especially the content that your prospects are exposed to early on in the sales process. If you were to take a random stroll through the information that’s publicly available about you and your agency (your website, LinkedIn profile and posts, your Instagram, mentions in the trade press, the presentation you made at a conference 6 years ago that still lives on YouTube…), what impression are you making?
As the saying goes, you don’t get a second chance to make that first impression. You know this firsthand if you’ve ever tried to shoehorn your agency into a process-driven review once the process has already begun.
Think about the people on the receiving end of your pitch.
They’re flawed human beings—just like me and you. They simply want to find the right agency partner and they want to do it with the least disruption to their day job. And, to assist them, their brains are going to instinctively look for a narrative to make sense of the overabundance of choices before them. Don’t make their job harder. Or, worse, don’t hand the opportunity to a competitor who makes it easier.