Any successful new business strategy starts with knowing who your target audience is. As an agency you have likely already honed in on your unique value proposition and are ready to start engaging with prospective clients.

“A critical piece many agency new business professionals miss out on is making sure they have a broad enough target audience to sell and market to. We find that the key to fueling your marketing and sales efforts is an effective, targeted AND substantial audience.”

When working with our clients, we’re often asked, “How many prospect records do I need?” To get the most from your outreach, we recommend a minimum of 3,000 with the goal of having 5,000 that you can continuously engage with.

Those numbers might seem like a lot but keep in mind there are tools to help you build out your prospecting database. In fact, many of your agency peers are likely using one. According to the 2016 Mirren/RSW Mirren New Business Tools Report, 9% more agency executives are investing in list building tools (compared to 2014) to help grow their new business. Our clients typically use Winmo, however there are other resources like Hoovers, Data.com and LinkedIn to help you create hyper-targeted data sets.

The importance of audience segmentation.

As you continue to grow your prospecting audience, segmenting the data into relevant batches is very important as it keeps our content highly relevant, even when we begin to do outreach in groups of hundreds or thousands. We are not looking to spam the world with emails and phone calls, we are trying to deliver less often, but with more impact.

“By properly segmenting our audiences, we are able to ensure that the right content gets in the right hands at the right time.”

When I begin to look at a new agency list, I often segment prospects into these three groups to help us prioritize outreach and customize content:

1) Right to Win

Right to Win clients are those that are a perfect fit for our solutions. We set parameters for what a perfect client is for our agency: what issues they have, where they are and what they specialize in. If they fit those criteria, then they HAVE to be working with us and we need to talk to them in such a way that shows our perfect fit. This is likely to be a somewhat smaller group, as we are talking about perfect here. The goldilocks zone of prospects!

2) Great Fit

This will be your biggest group of prospects. They have a problem we can solve, but may fall just outside our parameters on a few criteria here or there. Maybe they are a bit outside of our typical geographic region, slightly bigger or smaller in revenue ranges, or they’re an industry adjacent to our sweet spot. If they fit 95% of our criteria and we can recognize and solve their problems, then I want to be sending them content. Too often I see agencies immediately give up on quality prospects because they put so many restrictions and criteria on who they can work with. If you want to grow, consider widening that net just a bit.

3) Stretch

This is may be the smallest group, as they are more of ‘passion projects’ from the team – or the ‘great white whales’ that would be incredible to land. They are probably not worth committing the majority of your 1 to 1 new business time to chasing, but landing one could make a huge difference in morale or revenue. Putting them in your drip content is a great way to keep them warm and fish a bit, without taking away from your time that you spend on those prospects that are going to be your stable base of revenue in the future.

Keep in mind this is just one way to segment your data. Every agency has a different strategy, and how you go about slicing your sales intelligence might be very different. Some find that the easiest way to group prospects is simply by industry vertical, while others choose to base their groupings off of job titles. Taking the time to think through who you want to be working with, and more importantly, what your prospects care about, will help you determine just how your agency should be dividing your prospect target list.

Lastly we need to remember, we are segmenting these groups because we want to get bespoke, quality content in front of the most appropriate people. Each new group you create is going to require their own set of targeted communication and targeted content, so do not break these into ten different target groups if you do not have the bandwidth to create ten different content tracks. We want to do everything we can to broaden our reach while staying highly targeted and focused in order to remain relevant. Taking the extra time to think through these audience segmentation lists and properly grouping them can save you an immense amount of time on the back-end.

At the beginning of every year we all make resolutions to change something about ourselves either personally or professionally. If you’re an agency, you’re likely vowing to be more proactive with your new business resolutions and strategy in 2017. Don’t worry, about 85% of all agencies are in the exact same boat.

For any resolution to be successful however, there must be a plan in place and accountability against it. Throughout our discussion we will cover the following problem areas and also share KPI’s to ensure you’re tracking your progress.

• Dedicate more time to solely focus on new business
• Make a more compelling first impression via email
• Leave a phone message someone might actually respond to
• Build a social referral machine
• Write better content for our website

5 Resolutions Agencies Need to Make (and Keep) in 2017! from Catapult New Business on Vimeo.

The most effective new business processes turn prospects into leads by educating those prospects on how your products and services can solve their specific problems.

But when creating a proactive new business program, many teams struggle to know where to begin. We always point to these three areas to start your plan of attack: Audience, Content and Execution.

Audience

The first and most important step you should take when deciding how to begin your proactive outreach to prospects is to determine who your audience is. You need to know who your target audience is so you ask the right questions – who, why and what – to help narrow who you are marketing to. You must clearly define who your “right to win” clients are. If your team is perfectly positioned to provide the best service possible to a prospect in your niche, that’s a right to win client, and they should be working with you.

After you create your right to win list, you can begin including additional targets you see as great fits, which are a slight reach from your perfect right to win group. Agencies will often limit themselves by “fishing in too small of a pond,” or creating lists of prospects that exclude too many winnable clients. Create a realistic and appropriately sized group of contacts to attack with your approach. A great way to start thinking about Audience is to ask the following questions:

• In what areas is the agency most profitable?
• Who are you talking to now?
• What kind of business do you walk away from?
• What brands should be clients?
• What areas are most interesting to the team? What is the team passionate about?

By asking these questions, you’ll be able to determine who your audience is in a very specific, lead-driven way.

Content

Content drives just about every aspect of what we do in our lives—professionally and personally. In new business, you need to provide content that your new, specifically targeted audience wants to consume and share online. When getting started with your content strategy, start slow and don’t overextend yourself.

We’ve found that when teams commit to too much, too soon, one of two things happens: a) they burn out quickly on the process and it becomes a chore creating unique, branded content or; b) they begin building too much around a single whitepaper/eBook. Long-form content can be beneficial to your content strategy, but be careful not to let it consume hours of labor or hinder your ability to pivot across multiple audience groups.

When deciding what content should live on your editorial calendar, ask yourself questions like:

• Why does your agency exist? (less about what and how)
• What’s the one thing you do better than anyone else?
• What are the benefits of working with your agency?
• What type of work is outside of your scope? (this will help you drive more qualified conversations)
• What business problems do you solve for the identified prospect categories?

Content plays a key role in advancing your new business strategy, and increasing your prospects both within your targeted audience and outside of it.

Execution

We all dream big about winning new business, but you can’t approach that dream in an ad hoc manner. You need to have a plan set in place that is consistently repeatable, with very defined goals, measurements and activities. Your plan should involve everyone in the new business process—from Sales and Marketing to Management. At Catapult New Business, our goal is to always set a process in place that can be seamlessly transferred when changes to the team take place. During the execution phase, these are important questions you should ask:

• Who from the in-house team will be fulfilling each role in the sales/marketing process?
• What technologies do we currently have in place?
• How do we want to approach new prospects?
• How have we approached prospects in the past? What has worked best?
• Who has typically been the most receptive to our messaging?

A critical part of execution is how you leverage the content you’ve created, and the process your sales and marketing team uses that content to drive 1-1 sales conversations. By using your content to engage more often with prospects, you’ll see more opportunities to win clients.

Need help identifying a strategic plan of attack for winning new business? Contact us to learn more about how Catapult New Business implements successful new business processes for agencies.

“2017 is the year my agency is going to stop relying on business to find us, and the year we start proactively finding new clients.”  We are only two weeks into this year and already I have heard this statement from over two dozen agency principles who are absolutely convinced this year they will finally turn that proactive corner in their agency growth. In order to make that turn, those agencies have to make investments into its processes and the people in charge of it.

Here’s a quick list of investments that, if made this year, can actually make a difference in your 2017 new business plans:

Invest in People

Finally, after all of these years, somebody will have an exclusive focus on new business development! This means you are either going to hire someone in-house to manage new business full time, dedicate an existing employee to this full time, or outsource to a new biz partner. By not selecting one of these three options you could quickly find yourself accumulating wasted resources, meaning the opportunity cost of having employees work on new business while juggling other responsibilities. Investing in the focus of a full time employee to run this important task for you can save money in the long run, and more importantly produce a better ROI.

Invest in Data

You want to find new prospects? Well then you better have a resource to help you find exactly which companies are the best fit for your team, who their main points of contacts are, and what their most recent marketing activities are. There are plenty of data resources that exist (I am partial to Winmo), but without a resource the amount of time wasted in the “research” phase of prospecting can easily drain the enthusiasm of any new business director. Being more efficient in our prospecting efforts with quality data can be the difference in talking to 5 prospects a day and talking to 20 qualified prospects a day.

Invest in Content

One of my favorite quotes from Inbound this year was from Brian Halligan in which he said, “In 2006 your website augmented your salesperson, but in 2016 your salesperson augments your website”. While your New Business Director is vital to creating and cultivating a relationship, your website and the content you put out into the world is vital to establish credibility for your New Business Director. Too often we see New Business Directors left on an island unto themselves, where they are told to produce new business, but have no resources to show the value the agency can bring to the brand. Take the time, whether through a content person in-house, or outsourced, to create multiple quality content pieces that are easily sharable for your new business team.

Invest in Technology

Yellow note pads are not a CRM. I’ve walked into multiple agencies over the last month, sat down with the principal and seen a yellow note pad on their desk that is “tracking” all of their open opportunities for new business. Occasionally, I see someone tracking sales opportunities on an excel spreadsheet, but even then, there is no real automation or process around ensuring new business is handled in consistent way no matter who begins the sales process. At this point, a CRM and Marketing Automation tool should be mandatory for any agency, no matter how small. Salesforce is the most robust CRM out there, with plenty of connections to Marketing Automation tools like Hubspot and Pardot. My personal favorite for any agency just beginning their outbound efforts and starting from scratch is SharpSpring, which includes both a CRM and Marketing Automation tool.

Invest in Networks

Let’s face it, you can do everything alone, but why would you want to? If you are an independent agency, there are tons of independent agency networks out there that can be a real benefit to your team in the form of sharing ideas, successes, and failures. The ability to learn from others can make beginning any new business effort that much easier in the upcoming year. Aside from your typical agency networks, there are plenty of executive networking groups where you can share experiences with people in similar positions across industries. Vistage is fantastic group executives that provides its members a structured environment to learn and grow in small groups.

Invest in Time

The most valuable of all resources. Where you spend your time is where your priority lies. If you are going to change your new business outcome for the better in 2017, then you better be committed to putting time aside every single day to the process. Non-negotiable. You can buy all of the technology above, but if you do not consistently set time aside to properly utilize all of these, nothing changes. The easiest way to put that time aside – put an event on your calendar immediately, make it recurring, and do not allow it to be moved because of another priority. This is the priority, and it needs to happen if anything is to change in the New Year.

Growing an agency is not cheap. There are investments that absolutely have to be made, but if done thoughtfully and with an eye on creating repeatable, scalable processes, the returns will more than make up for the cost of building the processes. If 2017 is your year to change, then make the investment in yourself, and the returns will come.

The road to agency new business Nirvana is paved with never-ending training, consulting, workshops and self-help guides. Undoubtedly, growth through a systematic business development program often eludes agencies, but there’s no reason for agency business development professionals to go at it alone.

The reality is, like anything worth doing well, its hard. Really hard. New business is work that the vast majority of those within the professional marketing services industry didn’t sign-up for, and have no inclination to be held accountable for now, or in the future. I see it and hear about it from out of work agency new business people and frustrated agency owners every day.

The good news? It is possible for your agency to have an effective new business process in the year ahead. While it can be difficult to know what your competition is doing to be so successful, we have found that the invisible trend has increasingly been to outsource your new business.

Over the past five years, for more agencies than you’d guess, the answer to solving the business development equation has come from partnering with an outside firm for proactive prospecting. More recently, the trend has evolved to include organic client development too, once the exclusive domain of the agency account and leadership team.

Why are more agencies increasingly handing the reigns of client growth over to a third-party? It’s a daunting thought for some, but for those who’ve experimented with this model, success has come quickly. “I’ve seen agencies win more business from our involvement in their organic client development efforts this year than any other,” said Dave Currie, President of List Partners Inc. “Its often the low hanging fruit that everyone can see, though rarely is there a systematic and accountable plan to harvest it,” he continued.

What value do agencies find in outsourcing?

 

A Systematic Approach.

Agencies often find that creating a new business process from scratch is difficult. It’s usually thrown together last minute at the onset of a lost account and the strategy and tools are often lacking. Outsourcing to new business professionals, like Catapult, allow agencies to implement a systematic approach to how they win new business. Teams are able to move swiftly into market because there is a proven model of success, and the tools to back it up.

Accountability

We come across agencies every day that have multiple people working on new business, but not dedicated to it with 100% of their time. Once you have this “we all chip in approach,” when it fails, who is accountable? All? Nobody? With this outsourced model, it is very clear who is accountable for success and we can put clear objectives and goals at each stage of the process. This leads to greater transparency and understanding to who the responsibility of driving new business lies with.

A Specific Focus on New Business

Similar to our Accountability point, according to Hubspot’s Agency’s Pricing & Financial Report, 66% of agencies do not employ a full-time new business person. What does this mean? Those in-house people that are working on new business do not know where to spend their time every day. If I have learned anything during my time as a new business professional, it’s that you cannot minimize the importance of focus. Focus ensures greater success by keeping all efforts dedicated to prospecting and driving conversations with those most sought after prospects.The invisible trend of outsourcing may always remain slightly hidden due to the nature of the business, but we are seeing more inquiries than ever from agency execs that are seeing the benefits of having a systematic approach that provides accountability and focus. I’m confident we will continue to see an increase in adoption of outside resources to manage new business in 2017.

When you can win more business at a lower cost, why would you not outsource?

On average, it takes 7-11 proactive touchpoints to schedule a first meeting with a prospect. In the world of agency new business, relevant persistence is key, and having a solid content distribution strategy to back it up is a requirement. Our last webinar discussed the types of content successful new business teams use in their sales outreach. In this webinar, we’ll specifically show you how to leverage certain pieces of content through targeted channels to increase engagement with top prospects and speed up sales cycles. Simply producing content will not drive results. You need to put it into action.

Watch now to learn the difference between sales and marketing content, what channels are best for amplification, and how often you should be publishing your content for new business success. Other questions we will answer throughout this webinar include:

• Should I segment my prospects to receive different types of content? 
• What types of content are best for new business prospecting?
• How do I distribute content for sales vs marketing approaches?

 

How to Amplify Your New Business Strategy with Content Distribution from AgencySquared on Vimeo.

What are best practices? It’s important to understand that there is a big difference between proscriptive company rules and guidelines that have a basis in legal compliance, and best practices which are designed to move the business forward efficiently. They’re good to have, but sticking to them no matter what can prevent good companies from getting to great.

If you got sick in the middle ages, there’s a good chance that the village doctor would prescribe a course of leeches to your skin, or just go ahead and cut you so he could bleed the troublesome humor right out of you. I could be wrong, but if your doctor tried that today, you might want to sue them for medical malpractice.

Best practices are the best way we knew to get results at a given time. But when times change, those practices need to change, too, and you should constantly be thinking next practices, alongside best practices. Here are a few things to remember:

Best practices have an expiration date

Best practices change over time, across cultures and from industry to industry. It’s not just medical advances like the one above that go out of date, other technologies change, too. You wouldn’t think of circulating important information by telegram rather than email, but 100 years ago it was standard. As recently as a decade ago, working from home was a perk few people enjoyed but now it’s viewed as a great commute alternative, and can make employees more productive and more motivated. Industry leaders see the benefits of change early and adopt practices that leverage those benefits.

Technology changes faster than best practices

Best practices get to be best practices by delivering consistent results most efficiently, but best practices are never cutting edge. To become accepted as a best practice, any process needs to be adopted widely, and earn acceptance across the industry—and that takes time to establish. As a result, best practices can lag technological advances by months or even years as technologies emerge. New technologies can be expensive, but the benefits of early adoption—from preferential pricing to being recognized as an expert when the tech goes mainstream—can often outweigh the cost.

Complacency leads to disruption

Compliance can lead to complacency, and in some industries, disruptive technologies can wreak havoc or steal market share from established players at a blistering pace. From taxicabs to vacation rentals to networking events, organizations that clung to best practices and resisted change all lost ground to more agile digital competitors that chose not to be bound by the same rigid rules. The real conundrum here whether your best practices put the customer at the center of what you hope to achieve, or whether your best practice is simply a hoop for someone to jump through, a roadblock on the way to excellence.

In the end the best, most timeless best practice you can adopt is to empower every employee to ask why—why do we need a best practice? Why do we need that specific best practice?—and to explore how the problems we face can be overcome creatively.

 

We’ve seen more than a few agencies who aren’t seeing the results they were looking for with their current new business strategy. Many new business teams are stuck with an old mindset that proactive email marketing is just spam and not worth their time. When done right, email marketing can be a terrific way to maximize your ROI of time and money for new business growth.

So why is email such an important piece of your new business strategy? Email as an outreach approach has fewer barriers to implementation and is a relatively inexpensive process to begin. It’s also a great way to deliver the tangible results you’re looking for, because you can track everything and easily attribute leads to different campaigns. There is no mystery where leads come from.

The biggest obstacle to adopting a marketing automation strategy is “not having a strategy at all,” according to Marketing Automation Trends Survey.

Email marketing—specifically email automation campaigns—offers an inexpensive approach that will not only drive growth, but build your agency a sustainable prospect database from which you can always mine new opportunities. It’s the most effective way to grow your business, relative to the amount of money you spend. In fact, your ROI should skyrocket by implementing an email automation campaign. Consider these statistics:

• B2B marketers see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads compared to non-nurtured leads after deploying a lead nurturing program.
• B2B marketers who install marketing automation increase their sales to pipeline contribution by 10%.
• 54% of companies using marketing automation capture intelligence for the sales team. This compares to only 25% of companies without marketing automation.

It all boils down to one simple fact: Agencies that adopt an email marketing and marketing automation strategy outperform those companies that do not.

Resist the stories about emails and email marketing. Not all email is spam you need to filter. If used properly, email can be your least expensive means to grow organically and gain new business.

Agencies that focus on nurtured lead programs with great content via email, will find themselves starting any new relationship with a client at a much warmer spot. Rather than viewing each other as “seller vs buyer,” good email nurture programs allows for a “teacher and student” relationship. We trust our teachers while we don’t necessarily trust someone selling something.

Our most successful agencies keep this in mind. They build a marketing automation program, implement a CRM and combine it all with a business intelligence platform such as Winmo. As you build out your new business strategy, don’t discount email’s importance, just because it’s a discounted rate to get it started.

Over the years we have seen tons of case studies used as calls to action with varying levels of effectiveness. There are many different kinds of mistakes agencies make when creating these. The top mistakes we often see are simple:

• The case study is too long
• The study only focuses on the solution

Who hasn’t been sent a case study that is a 10-page PDF on all the intricate pieces of a campaign? Next question: Who actually reads all 10 pages? My guess? None of us. Not at first anyway. That level of detail is great, if you have really interested me in taking a deep dive into your agency. But most agencies don’t take the time to develop the problem and results to effectively use their case study as an effective call to action. A case study is not a good intro piece.

Our solution to help make your agency’s case studies more effective as lead magnets is to break it into two completely separate pieces: a teaser and a deep dive.

Teaser case studies are most likely a short landing page that quickly sells the idea and value of the case study. It’s going to concentrate on the three main components of a case study, while highlighting two of them more heavily: problem and results. This is done in small bursts, a paragraph for each at max.

• Problem – Clients want to know that you understand their pain and what they’re going through. Be sure that the problem highlighted in your case study aligns carefully with that pain trigger in your marketing communications.
• Solution – You need to be able to talk about your proprietary solution while staying at a high enough level that you don’t lose their interest. Remember, at this point they care more about their problems and the results we will give them more solutions later.
• Results – You need your case study to show measurable results. Show the reader a shocking statistic. Something that shows what actually resulted from your project. Real numbers are more impactful than words.

The importance of this teaser is that your marketing CTA is driving people over to something that should be both compelling and quickly consumable. Most people are busy and cannot commit to 10 pages of a case study. But if we hit them with a teaser page that gives them compelling problems and results, we can then ask them to commit a larger amount of time to us and our solutions via a deep dive study at a later point.

Those that agree to commit time to your deep dive study are highly qualified, and more likely to engage in a real conversation following their online activities. That does not mean you don’t reach out to those that hit your teaser page. But you should focus on those deep dive prospects immediately.

Understand that case studies tend to be more focused on you and your agency. But our prospects are focused on themselves. Make your CTA all about your prospect, and the teaser study all about your prospect’s problems. Once they are truly engaged, we can tell them about us.

At the end of my last webinar, one of the overriding requests that I received from everyone was help around their positioning statement. Many times I see positioning statements on websites that are overly general, similar to their competitors, or just plain uninspiring. Our goal with any positioning is to achieve two things:

• Be unique
• Be a sales driver

I know, there’s that sales word that I like to throw around. The fact is that when someone first visits your site in their buying process, you want to make sure your positioning statements are always coming from a place that immediately lets them know what you all can do for them, in a very real way. “We produce results” is neither unique nor compelling, and it won’t help you make a sale.

Crafting something unique and compelling is a lot of work, but below are some questions to make your life a bit easier when you are first sitting down with a group (or by yourself) to craft that new positioning statement.

• Why does your agency exist? (less about what and how)
• What’s the one thing you do better than anyone else?
• What are the benefits of working with you?
• Let’s talk about what you don’t do
  • Consider us when…
  • Don’t consider us when…
• Why do you win? Why do you lose?
• Based on business challenges, where do you have the greatest opportunity?
• Is every piece of content you are producing pushing your unique selling proposition to a specific prospect type?
• Does your website properly convey exactly what you do better than any other agency?
• Is it clear to anyone who sees our content exactly who your “Right to Win” clients are?

Once you have an initial framework for that positioning statement, take a few minutes and look at your closest competitors’ websites. How similar are you to them in your positioning? Are you creating space between yourself and them with this positioning statement? Do they do a better or worse job of highlighting their uniqueness? Once you feel confident you have differentiated, test it on some folks who do not know your agency as intimately as you do. Ask people outside your agency bubble what they think about your positioning versus your closest competitors’ and see what emotions get stirred up in them.

This process is not normally a short one, and definitely not something to be taken lightly. Take the time to think, test and retest, because the content you build in the future will all hinge off this positioning