3 Business Development Activities Your Agency Has No Excuse Not to Do
When business is good and our teams are fully engaged, we can’t imagine not being busy (perhaps we even secretly long for it just so we can catch our breath).
When things are slow and the pipeline is empty or filled only with a few anemic leads, it feels like we’re never going to win a new piece of business ever again.
I know this pattern not just because I see it at the agencies I work with but because I fall prey to it myself!
Fortunately, as a business development expert, I’ve amassed a set of tools over the course of my career that I can quickly deploy when I need to.
Plus, I know that action is rewarded with results. The results may not be immediate, but in my experience they are inevitable when you take the right consistent action.
The key is to start. Momentum is your friend in all things related to new business. But starting is hard and maybe you fall victim to the negative voice inside your head that says:
“Rejection? No, thank you.”
“Where do I even start? How am I going to keep the momentum going?”
“I have so little time. How should I invest this precious and limited resource in a way that pays off?”
“Hey,” the voice coos, “let’s procrastinate one more day and maybe some fantastic opportunity will fly in over the transom in the meantime.”
Resist that voice!
Instead, here are three business development tactics you simply have no excuse not to do and which will serve you well during those lean times when you need to fill the pipeline quickly.
Strategic partnerships
Building strategic partnerships is a great business development strategy for any agency owner who dislikes doing business development.
A strategic partner is a person or organization with whom you share clients but not services. These are complementary, noncompetitive businesses. Your strategic partners might include:
Technology providers. One of my clients, a website design firm, routinely partners with a SaaS provider to pitch Drupal projects.
Management or strategic consultants. Granted, firms like Accenture and Deloitte pose more of a competitive threat than an opportunity to some agencies, especially larger ones. However, depending on your size and area of specialty, you may find there are other professionals, from lawyers to accountants to business strategists, who would make perfectly complementary partners.
Other agencies. (This is not without risk, however, because you’re less likely to control the relationship with the end client. Make sure you establish systems and processes just as you would for any other sales effort.)
Strategic partnerships make a lot of sense for agencies that work with clients in specific business categories. For instance, a graphic designer I know who works with nonprofits often partners with capital campaign consultants to find new leads.
Likewise, a PR firm that helps regional restaurant chains move into new markets has had success partnering with franchise consultants.
In a strategic partnership the relationship is mutually beneficial. As such, it reduces the rejection factor by an order of magnitude. It’s simply easier and more rewarding to reach out to a known and trusted partner than it is to lob a cold email to a new prospect.
Testimonials
Testimonials are third-party endorsements of your agency’s skills, excellence, and effectiveness. They have the capacity to do a lot of heavy lifting for you and yet agencies often overlook them or don’t manage them well.
Why are testimonials so effective in the first place?
One reason is tied to the nature of what you sell as an agency. When you get right down to it what you sell—and what your clients value most—are:
Your ideas
How you got to those ideas
What you're going to do with those ideas
That's really abstract stuff. And even the best salesperson will tell you abstract things are much harder to sell because you're selling an expectation of success with no clear guarantee.
But you do your best. You fill your pitch materials with empty superlatives like, “we are relentless in our pursuit of results for our clients” or “we’re passionate brand storytellers”.
It’s entirely different when your clients use these words to describe your agency because, coming from them, it’s objective feedback.
Here's the thing: your prospects don't trust you. How can they? They don't know you yet. But they do trust other marketers who have faced and overcome (with your help) similar challenges.
The best advice I can give you about successfully getting testimonials from your clients is to ask early. Set the expectation that, if you do good work, you will be asking the client to share feedback. And tell them why it’s important. You might even relate it back to the process they went through and the critical role peer feedback played in selecting you.
Referrals
I’ve saved the best for last because referrals are perennially cited as the number one method marketers use to find and hire the right agencies. For example, a recent survey by Advertiser Perceptions asked marketers “what are the most important ways you use to learn about agencies?” The number one answer was:
Conversations with colleagues and friends
In other words, good old fashioned referrals from peers whom they trust.
When I bring up the benefits of referrals to agencies I work with, I’m sometimes greeted with skepticism about their effectiveness. I’m told, “I‘ve asked my clients/network to refer my agency to others but nothing ever happens.” Or, “I’ve asked my clients/network too many times. That well is running dry.”
There’s a right way and a wrong way to ask and if you're not having success you might be asking in the wrong way.
The wrong way is an open-ended request that’s all about you. It might sound something like, “Dear friend, we’ve got capacity in our shop and want to keep our team busy. Please tell your friends to send work our way.”
They’ve got problems of their own. Why should they help you?
Plus, you’re asking them to do the work to figure out who might be right to refer you to. They may be willing to help, but your request lands in their in-box in the middle of a busy day and gets brushed aside until they have more time to deal with it. And then it gets forgotten.
Instead, be specific about the kind of work or client you’re looking for and the benefits or value you can offer. You might find your contacts are more responsive and enthusiastic about helping.
Make your request noteworthy by including:
Trends or issues you’re seeing clients struggle with and how you’re equipped to handle them
New services you’ve introduced that, again, solve business problems that you know marketers are facing
Any underutilized knowledge and expertise
As to that last point, this often happens when you lose a client. And, while losing a client is not typically something to crow about, there are other companies that would love access to your valuable know-how and experienced team.
Finally, the surest way to torpedo a smart referral strategy is with bad execution. Follow through, do it quickly, take the reins with profound gratitude, and ask for a meeting.