How to Win New Business by Playing to Your Strengths

Agency owners will tell me that new business is the life blood of their firm. 

I can’t disagree. Beyond the basic function of bringing in revenue, pursuing new business has the power to shape an agency’s destiny. 

It allows an agency leader to think strategically about the kind of work they want to do and the types of clients they want to serve.

And yet… sometimes agency business development is the victim of competing priorities (client management, employee management or even just doing the work you get paid to do) and it gets neglected or gets done haphazardly.

But even if these competing priorities didn’t exist, I still think a healthy number of agency leaders would find a way to avoid business development, especially the proactive stuff that requires you to get out there and sell. 

Why is this such a challenge? 

I think it has as much to do with psychological obstacles as it does with logistical ones. 

First, rejection sucks. The fact is, new business is a numbers game and while you can do a great deal to put the numbers in your favor, you’re still probably going to lose more than you’ll win.

But there are other mind games we play. Perhaps during those moments when you know you must do more, you’ve thought to yourself,

“Where do I even start? And how do I keep it going?”

Listen, there’s a lot you could be doing. Email marketing, paid media, webinars, podcasts, SEO, outbound selling, referral programs… The options seem endless. And even if you did carve out the time and attention to get started with a few good tactics, you fear those competing priorities will find a way to derail you as they’ve done before.

Or, you may ask yourself:

“What’s really going to pay off?”

Here’s a conversation I’ve had more than once with an agency owner:

“We’ve tried (insert a new business tactic here). It doesn’t work! We didn’t see any results.”
“Really?” I say, “How long did you keep it going?”
“Oh,” says the agency owner, “we were at it for at least (insert an insufficient amount of time here).”

The conversation continues and often I will discover that not only did the agency not invest a realistic amount of time to see results, they didn’t consider how that tactic could support a bigger business development strategy. Or they simply neglected to include a clear call-to-action. 

Back to the internal monologue, which may continue with:

“I just can’t relate this to my own talents.”

At smaller agencies, it’s not unusual to find that the people responsible for business development are not business development professionals. They’re account managers or strategists. They get tapped for the new business role because some of their skills intersect with the skill set associated with business development. For example, account managers tend to have strong interpersonal skills; strategists are, as the name implies, strong strategic thinkers. 

But they lack other important skills or aren’t given the support, structure or training to develop themselves into confident and effective business developers.

It’s no fun doing stuff that we don’t think we’re good at. 

It’s easier to convince ourselves to stay in our safe place and keep doing whatever it is we’ve been doing (or not doing), no matter how unsatisfying or unproductive it is. The devil you know…

But we only get results through action. 

And so, if you’ve ever struggled with some of those questions above, here’s one approach that might make agency business development easier:

Play to your strengths

When I work with my clients we design business development programs that are built around their strengths, not in conflict with them. 

You can too. The first step is to identify your strengths profile–and you probably fit into one of these four: the Connector, the Communicator, the Thinker or the Promoter.

Connectors

Of the four profiles, Connectors are the ones with the greatest instinct for selling. They’re energized by making connections with other people and feel at ease when interacting with strangers, whether on the phone or in person. They’re good at improvising and feel comfortable in a wide variety of situations.

Most agencies are not filled with Connectors. That’s why when they try to sustain a new business strategy built around traditional sales activities like outbound prospecting, it usually fails. 

However, it’s also not uncommon for an agency owner to be a Connector. Sometimes it's an innate part of their personality but often they’ve honed these skills out of necessity–they had no choice but to get out there and sell if they were going to make payroll. Over time and after a few successes, selling felt less foreign and they accepted it as part of their job.

Communicators

Communicators have two special geniuses. The first is their ability to take complex ideas and boil them down into concepts that everyone can understand. The other is their ability to captivate a crowd.

Communicators are your TED Talk-ers and keynote speakers. They’re the charismatic ones who are perennially tapped to lead the pitch presentation. They’re big-picture people who love to share their ideas.

They don’t have the Connector’s zeal for building one-on-one relationships so you may find them making excuses not to go out and prospect for new business. It just feels foreign and distasteful to them. 

But Communicators are perfect candidates for a business development strategy that leads with content marketing. Encourage them to create their oeuvre of expert content. Then get them on the speaker circuit and back them up with a good PR strategy. 

Thinkers

Thinkers are the introverts of the bunch. Like Communicators, they often share a talent for explaining complex ideas in simple ways, but they’re more interested in teasing out the details.

Where a Communicator is at ease speaking in front of a crowd, a Thinker is more comfortable one-on-one or working solo doing what they do best – thinking! When it comes to lead-generating activities, their introverted energy can be tapped to produce longer-form content like a book (or series of books) or a research study. If your first reaction to this is, “Yikes! It’s going to take a long time before any lead is actually generated!”, you wouldn’t be altogether wrong. However, you Thinkers out there might ask yourselves how much time you’ve wasted avoiding new business tactics that aren’t designed for strengths and whether an investment in something that might actually work will in the long run get you better results.

And, by the way, because Thinkers are better one-on-one, they’re often surprisingly good salespeople. The trick? Give them a clear direction, a strong story to tell, and a sense of purpose (you won’t get far giving them a wimpy agency positioning or a vague brief). 

Promoters

Promoters are leaders with big personalities (and sometimes big egos too) who’ve got something to say and aren’t afraid to say it. They’re candid, opinionated, and fearless. 

Often their business is their life and their life is their business. Or rather, everyone’s business because we’re probably going to learn about it on Instagram. 

A great example of a Promoter is Gary Vaynerchuk. Vaynerchuk is the ultimate ambassador for Vayner Media, the company that bears his name. He practices what his agency preaches. He’s out there e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y spreading his message through his podcast, blog, Instagram and Twitter feeds, or hanging out with 10,000 of his closest friends at his very own event, VeeCon.

Promoters are not always the most eloquent ones in the bunch and you may need to work extra hard to keep their focus on fewer than a dozen things at once. But they are unstoppable bundles of energy you can harness for building your agency’s brand. 

Did you recognize yourself in one?

You may have recognized yourself or others on your leadership team in these four strengths profiles (plus you can take this short quiz). More likely, you recognized most of the traits of one with a little of another mixed in. 

When you play to your strengths you make the right decisions about which business development tactics are best for your agency. It matters less if they’re unconventional and more that they make up a plan that you can sustain and be successful with for the long term.