From figuring out this whole AI thing, keeping up with the ever-growing demand for integrated tools and strategies, and the big one, consistently adding value to our client relationships– there are a variety of areas sellers need to navigate in the new year to remain competitive.  

That’s where this blog comes in – think of it as your friendly guide to help you prepare to navigate what’s on the horizon in 2024. We’ll dive into the trends that are reshaping our industry, like understanding why brands might be breaking up with agencies more often, and how the rise of AI in marketing is changing the game. 

What to Expect from Brand Marketers in 2024

1. Brands Will Be Replacing More Agency Partners 

A new marketing relationship survey indicates that a rising number of brands are unsatisfied with their existing agency partners.The report indicates that 55% of brand marketers who responded are considering a change of agency within the next six months. Why? According the the survey, top reasons including:

• Dissatisfaction with value: Brands are increasingly dissatisfied with the value provided by their current agencies. This dissatisfaction is a primary factor driving brands to consider changing their agency partners.
  
• Issues with delivery: Brands are also unhappy with the delivery of services by their agencies. This includes aspects like the timeliness, quality, and effectiveness of the services provided.

• Agency-client disparities: There is a significant disparity between the perceptions of brands and agencies regarding the reasons for ending agency-client relationships. While brands cite dissatisfaction with value and delivery as top reasons, agencies underestimate these factors.

• Changes in strategic needs: While agencies are recognized for bringing strong strategies, they are perceived as overcharging for their services. Brands are seeking partners who can offer both strategic excellence and cost-effectiveness.

• Chemistry and professionalism: For brands looking to select a new agency partner, chemistry and professionalism have emerged as important aspects. This indicates a need for agencies to align more closely with the culture and values of their clients.

• Demand for specific services: There is an increased demand for specific services like content creation and video production, suggesting that brands are looking for agencies with particular capabilities in these areas.

2. Acquisitions and Consolidation Will Increase Pressure

Boutique and niche service offerings might run into a bit of more competition going into the new year as agency holding companies continue their acquisition spending sprees. This gobbling up of the market share has been inspired by a multitude of factors, including:

• Client demand for integrated services: The consolidation trend is largely driven by client demands for integrated, simplified service offerings. Agencies are responding by creating larger, more comprehensive entities that can offer a range of services under one roof, making them more attractive and efficient partners for brands.

• AI and tech integration: Agencies are heavily investing in AI and technology, focusing on measurement and insights. This trend is driven by advertisers’ demands for more robust analytics and validation of their campaigns’ effectiveness. Major acquisitions, such as Omnicom’s purchase of Flywheel and Stagwell’s acquisition of Left Field Labs, emphasize the growing importance of digital commerce solutions and AI in marketing.

• Influencer and social marketing emphasis: There’s a notable shift towards integrating influencer and social marketing capabilities. With the influencer market and social media spending growing rapidly, major holding companies are acquiring specialized agencies in this area. These acquisitions, such as WPP’s purchase of Goat and Stagwell’s acquisition of Movers+Shakers, show that a strong social and influencer presence is essential for modern advertising campaigns.

• Streamlined financials and full-service models: Brands are demanding more streamlined, integrated agency models. This has led to mergers aimed at simplifying structures and offering comprehensive services. Examples include WPP combining VML, Y&R, and Wunderman Thompson into VML, and M&C Saatchi’s restructure to combine multiple subsidiaries. This consolidation aims to make agencies more appealing and easier to work with for large clients.

• Increased focus on detailed reporting and campaign measurement: Recent acquisitions indicate a future trend where advertisers will demand more detailed reporting and precise campaign measurement. The emphasis is shifting from creative novelty to data-driven insights and analytics.

• Adaptation to the creator economy: The integration of influencer and social marketing arms within agencies reflects an adaptation to the creator economy. This approach allows brands to engage with audiences in more authentic and creative ways, leveraging the influence of social media personalities and platforms.
  

3. More Project Work, Less Traditional Pitches 

In 2024, we anticipate that more and more brands will be leaning toward more project-based work and run fewer traditional agency searches. We have several reasons for this prediction:

• The cost of a pitch is upwards of $1M with brands footing most of the bill 
• In 2023, agency pitches brought in 35% less revenue Y/Y
• Continued economic uncertainty 

Going into 2024, brand marketers are being asked to do more with less spend. These stats coupled with the increasing amount of resources like Wripple, that make it easy for them to get matched with agencies who can quickly start executing on projects, makes us believe that in the new year, many brands will ditch the traditional pitch and look for faster means of completing project-based initiatives. 

4. The AI Revolution Will Continue to Grow

Marketers will continue to focus on leveraging AI in 2024 due to its transformative impact on various aspects of marketing. Primary areas of focus will include hyper-personalization, content creation, and predictive analytics. This will enable marketers to create highly targeted and personalized campaigns by analyzing vast amounts of data, thus offering customer experiences at an unprecedented scale.

The challenge will be balancing this personalization with consumer privacy concerns. AI’s integration into marketing and technology software will impact all facets of marketing, offering both opportunities and challenges. Marketers will search for solutions that help them maintain content authenticity and originality. 

AI’s role in predictive analytics will also be significant, aiding marketers in foreseeing market trends and consumer behavior. Overall, the integration of AI is expected to drive marketing towards more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric approaches.

What These Trends Mean For Sellers in 2024

With these expected trends, ad tech sellers, sponsorship sellers, and ad agencies need to focus on aligning closely with client needs, specializing in high-demand services, adapting to market consolidation, leveraging AI and technology, and being flexible and responsive to project-based work demands. This presents several areas for new business leaders to focus on in the new year:

1. Consistently Add Maximum Value

Acquiring a new client costs 5x more than retaining an existing one. To ensure you’re not one of the agencies on the chopping block, take a look at your existing accounts to ensure your team is offering as much value as possible to secure the relationship for the long-haul. A few ways to do this include:

• Develop customized solutions: Move beyond generic service offerings. Tailor your strategies and solutions specifically to each client’s unique needs and business goals. Show that you understand their specific market challenges and opportunities.

• Have a results-driven approach: Focus on delivering measurable results. Utilize data analytics to track campaign performance and make data-driven decisions. This approach will demonstrate your commitment to achieving tangible outcomes for your clients.

• Have regular communication and transparency: Establish a clear and consistent line of communication. Regularly update clients on progress, challenges, and successes. Transparency in your operations builds trust and shows your commitment to their success.

• Always educate and inform: Build a culture that prides themselves on going the extra mile. Always strive to provide clients with insights and knowledge about the latest marketing trends and how they can be leveraged for their benefit.

• Strategic partnerships and network utilization: Always remember that there’s enough success for everyone to go around. As agency conglomerates continue to expand, boutique shops need to find creative ways to offer omnichannel solutions that drive results. If you can’t execute a capability, leverage your network to offer clients additional value through strategic partnerships, expanding their reach and resources.

2. Now’s the Time to Start Proactively Reaching Out to Marketers: 

With this many brands suggesting they are looking for new partners, now is a great time to start building relationships with brand marketers. Getting started can be challenging if you don’t already have an outreach strategy. But here’s our best tips to get going:

• Research and identify prospects: Success always starts with your list. You have to be contacting the right people. Conduct thorough research to identify brands that are the best fit for your agency’s expertise. Look for brands that may be experiencing challenges your agency is uniquely qualified to solve. Not sure what kind of brands to go after? Start by looking at your agency roster and identify right to win clients.

• Personalized communication: No, we don’t mean adding their first name to a mass email. After conducting thorough research, reach out with personalized messages that demonstrate your knowledge of their brand and industry. Avoid generic sales pitches. Instead, focus on how your agency can address their specific challenges or goals.

• Develop a must-try offer: Whether you’re providing a service or a software, provide something complimentary to get your foot in the door. This could be a free trial or a free brand audits or consultation. This can be an effective way to demonstrate the value you can bring to their business while also building trust with the potential client.

• Get comfortable with following up: Email cadences are your friend. If you think you’re being annoying by sending 7 emails over a few months– you’re not. It takes an average of 8 touches to get an initial meeting with a decision maker. So strap in… and get comfortable with following up regularly until they book the call or tell you to go away.

3. AI Won’t Replace You. But It Can Help You Sell More & Should Be Used Correctly.

AI isn’t going to steal anyone’s job in 2024. It is still very much in its beginning stages and is merely a tool that needs to be utilized in your toolkit. But it’s an incredibly powerful tool that should be leveraged both as a selling proposition, and internally to improve your sales processes. 

Using AI as a unique selling point:

Brands are going to continue looking for partners who can use AI to reduce costs and streamline processes and help solve problems quickly. AI innovation will be a unique selling point in 2024 and something partners will get public recognition for. For example, this year Adweek announced the first-ever AI award to MediaMonks for their use of AI in both internal operations and client work. There will be an increased focus on how partners can use AI in meaningful and creative ways for clients.

A few ways you can utilize AI as a unique selling proposition to brand marketers include:

• Predictive analytics for targeted campaigns
• Personalized customer experiences
• Automated content creation and optimization
• Streamlined production 
• Enhanced ROI measurement and analytics
• Combating social injustices and stereotypes through brand messaging 
• Voice and visual search optimization 
• Programmatic advertising
• Interactive and immersive experiences
• Inclusive and purpose driven advertising

AI is still a new territory– and in many cases, it isn’t quite living up to where marketers are hoping it can be.  So it’s important that whatever you are providing brands delivers on the promise you sold. 

Using AI to enhance your internal sales process

At Catapult, AI has been a major topic among our clients and how they can leverage it to enhance their internal sales processes.

Dixie Gilbert, Director of Partnerships at Catapult  commented, “I was just having a discussion about AI prompts and how AI is messing up good content because everybody’s using the same AI cadence.” She goes on to explain that the most important thing to know about AI is that you really have to learn how to prompt AI and then craft your messages around it. It should be a creative assistant. Prompting really holds a key for creative collaboration.” 

Remember, AI is a tool, not a replacement. So when crafting scripts, decks, email cadences using it– remember to proofread and add a human element to everything it produces. 

Conclusion: Close More Deals in 2024

One thing brands, agencies, sponsorship sellers and adtech providers alike share– the economic state of 2024 is unpredictable, yet we are being asked to hit higher and higher quotas.

Right now, expanding your sales budget for tools and adding to overhead may not be an option. But you need senior level sellers out there getting your products and services in front of brand marketers.

If this resonates with you, outsourcing your sales operations may be a great solution. 

Catapult is the industry’s leading fractional new business development firm for agencies, sponsorship sellers and adtech providers. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you close more deals in 2024 and beyond.

By Jody Sutter

New business is one of those responsibilities that should be fully integrated into your daily schedule—some days in a more active and focused way, other days more passively and opportunistically.

But for a lot of agency leaders, it’s not.

New business is an activity for times when the pipeline dries up. Or it’s what you do when you’re in a competitive pitch. When it’s not a daily habit, consistent action is hard to sustain—because it means starting over again and again and again…

You’ll reach points when you conclude you can’t go on like this any longer. You’ll pause, gather your team, and brainstorm ideas for a better business development strategy. 

There’s satisfaction in developing new ideas. It’s inherently optimistic and creative! You remove yourself from the daily grind and whisk your team off to an inspirational spot to think big strategic thoughts and reshape your agency’s destiny. And I encourage this! In fact, I conduct these kinds of workshops. They’re energizing and I get satisfaction from watching an agency team walk away excited about the plans they’re going to implement.

What I don’t enjoy is watching them neglect those plans as soon as the daily grind takes over again.

Good Habits are Helped by Strong Frameworks

Acting on new ideas requires us to form new productive habits, which is a challenge in and of itself. I’m not an expert on how humans form habits, but I can speak from personal and professional experience that good habits around business development are aided by strong frameworks.

I created such a framework a few years ago after I’d had an epiphany: if money, time, and resources were no object, an agency would do it all—blogs, Instagram Lives, webinars, proprietary research, PR, prospecting outreach… Anything that you didn’t like to do or have time to do, you’d hire someone else for or you’d outsource it. 

But time and money is always an issue. And agency leaders are rarely going to do stuff they don’t like to do. 

What I realized was that to make a business development strategy stick, it must be based on tactics that are right for that agency.

This inspired me to create the New Business Ecosystem™ framework.  

A New Business Ecosystem includes anything your agency uses to support business development, from a pricing proposal to a website to social media strategy. Like a natural ecosystem, it promotes growth when the interconnected parts are suitable for the environment. 

When I’m building a New Business Ecosystem with my clients, we look at all they’re doing and all the tools they’re using and we assess their utility against goals, resources, and strategic positioning. We ask:

• Are the tools and activities right for the culture and environment?
• Do they encourage and nurture growth?
• Do they support the agency’s goals?
• Are there too many tactics to easily sustain?
• Do they all interact in a healthy way? 

Usually, the outcome of this exercise results in a sort of kanban board for new business. From there we can create a plan and define the activities required to get to the goals

Filling the Void between What You Want and How to Get There 

This plan helps fill in the void between stating a goal, such as increasing revenue by 25%, and taking the right steps to achieve it.

A New Business Ecosystem offers you not only a bird’s-eye view of the activities that are most likely to get you closer to your goals, but a roadmap for what you must be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. 

When you know exactly what actions to take, and those actions nudge you out of your comfort zone, you start to see progress. You can apply this to any goal you have in life, whether it’s to retire at age 50, learn how to juggle, or grow your agency’s total revenue by 25%.

Your New Business Ecosystem will be custom to your agency, but here’s my advice on the actions you should take on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

Annually 

Your New Business Ecosystem is essentially your new business plan and you should evaluate it annually. Look for opportunities to systematize and scale what you’re already doing if it’s producing good results. And explore what can be added or taken out of your ecosystem to keep it at an optimal level of health.

Here are four areas to consider:

1. Recommit to your core tactics. Analyze the core business-generating activities you’ve chosen based on your new business strengths. (Here’s a quick and fun quiz you can take to find out your new business strengths profile.) Are they working? Do they need improvement or optimization? Can they be delegated to others or are they still dependent on your involvement?
2. Add complementary tactics. If you’ve got the core activities running on autopilot, consider adding complementary activities that support them. For example, if you’ve got momentum behind a speaker strategy and it’s starting to generate leads consistently, complementary activities might include nurturing those leads with a webinar series, getting a better CRM tool in place to manage those leads, or adding functionality to your agency’s website to better engage leads.
3. Assess the health of intellectual property. Review IP workhorses like case studies, team bios, and credentials documents to see if they need updates. These don’t change frequently, they do require care and attention if they are going to work effectively. Be proactive instead of being forced to make last-minute and hasty updates to fulfill an immediate need. 
4. Review and recalibrate new business policies and procedures. Are they still working smoothly? Do they help you make the right decisions about what new business to pursue?

Quarterly 

I’ve become a big fan of quarterly working sprints to accomplish goals (I think they can be so effective I’ve re-engineered most of my programs to include them).

Quarterly sprints can be a great way to tackle both necessary projects, like a website redesign, that easily get pushed aside by daily emergencies and distractions as well as “always improving” projects—projects that push you into new areas and have a positive effect on your new business operations over time. These are often the complementary activities I mentioned in bullet #2 above—initiatives you’ve been wanting to start but never seem to have the bandwidth for.

For your first foray into quarterly sprints, choose one or two goals and make them manageable. Outline a plan for what must get done on a daily, weekly or ongoing basis and use that plan to assign yourself and your team weekly actions that, if taken, will lead you to successful completion. 

This approach works because it deconstructs big, amorphous statements like, “we’ll improve how our agency generates leads” which can be hard for teams to convert into action, into a tactical road map that everyone understands and follows. Seeing progress being made instills a priceless sense of satisfaction.

Daily, weekly, and monthly

I lump these together because they’re all related to frequent and consistent action required to keep your new business ecosystem humming.

Plus, they tend to vary by goal, individual, and agency.  For example, if your core activity is outbound sales, your activities will include things like daily list-building and sales calls. If your activity is content marketing, your weekly and monthly activities will be related to keeping the content engine running: writing, shooting, editing, formatting, distribution, and promotion.

And, of course, always include:

• A regularly scheduled new business status meeting. Many agencies have these weekly (a few neglect to have them at all, which astounds me). I like a biweekly cadence, which frees up time on the schedule and allows you a wider perspective to see progress over time.
• Pipeline report updates and distribution. I’m all for a wider distribution of the pipeline report, especially if you expect most people at your agency to be involved in new business. Consider having a modified report that omits sensitive financial information that you can share with your larger team. I bet you’ll find they feel more invested and willing to participate.

And, finally, document ongoing activities that won’t be going away any time soon in an operations manual so that you can grow and scale them as your agency grows.

I was recently a guest on Marcel Petitpas’s The Agency Profit podcast and Marcel and I talked in-depth about how to operationalize a new business strategy, including many of the points I make here (if you want to take a listen, click this link). He asked me how an agency owner can stay accountable to goals and objectives when it’s so easy to get pulled off track by client needs.

My answer: lean on your New Business Ecosystem. 

Having a plan and supporting structure in place makes it much easier to regain the momentum you’ve lost. It eliminates that common and demotivating feeling of “starting from scratch”. 

Because the fact is you will get derailed (I haven’t figured out how to crack that case yet but when I do, you’ll all be the first to know)—you just want to minimize its impact by going back to the actions that are right for you. 

About The Author:

Jody Sutter, is the owner of The Sutter Company, a business development consultancy that specializes in working with leadership at small ad agencies who are underperforming when it comes to winning new business and would like to win the right clients consistently but also make the process less chaotic and exhausting for their teams. To learn more about how she can help your agency, schedule a free 45-minute consultation here. For more information about The Sutter Company’s programs for optimizing new business at small agencies, go to www.thesuttercompany.com.

The average agency-client relationship lasts 36 months, which means at any given moment one of your competitors is about to lose a client. But what if you were the one that is losing the client? Do you have the resources in place to make sure you can protect your agency from the inevitable turnover of clients? 

The first resource your team needs to be investing in to protect against churn is a proactive Business Development Director.  It should come as no surprise that experienced business development professionals capture a bigger slice of the new business pie than those just getting started. The tough part is identifying those directors with the right type of experience to best grow your firm.

In order to help you identify those Business Development Directors with the right type of proactive experience, we’ve listed out 6 interview questions for your next internal or outsourced partner.  Being smart with these questions can make a massive difference in the amount of growth your team experiences this year.

6 Interview Questions For Agency Business Development Directors

How much “hunting” have you done?

New business—indeed, any sale—is about experience in the field.  Isn’t it amazing how the best new business people always seem a bit lucky?  A lot of “right place at the right time”. Well it isn’t luck, it’s hours and hours of experience working through what prospects want and need so that their message is the one bubbling to the top over all the other agencies out there pursuing new business.

How comfortable are you with approaching a prospect cold?

Cold calling or cold emailing is a complicated business. Even with tools to increase your chances of setting appointments, you have to be able to handle rejection (or worse…the cold loneliness of no response) every day without letting it affect the next conversation. If you find someone that thrives on making conversations out of nothing, then you’ve found a keeper.

What role did you play in helping to win a new client?

There are many stages to a new business win. Your potential new employee may have been involved in the first outreach call, set the appointment, gave the presentation or closed the business.  It’s vital that they can recognize the value of their contribution—without over-valuing it. New business acquisition is often a team sport and we want to make sure that their expertise fits in the current team’s mix and brings value to any new business engagement.

Were you involved in face to face meetings with clients or teeing up initial conversations? What has been your involvement with client new business presentations?

While closing and prospecting are both important, they are two totally different skill sets. Many agency new business people come from a background of receiving RFPs and responding to them.  That’s a very different task than going out and creating opportunities out of nothing. If you’re moving into a more proactive new business approach, your new business person needs to reflect this move.

How do you go about building strong relationships?

Business development is all about maintaining and improving relationships. Transparency, honesty, mutual respect and shared interests are as vital in a sales engagement as they are in any other relationship, and sales professionals who excel at managing their relationships are more likely to be viewed as trustworthy by their clients.

What would clients you closed say about you?

No candidate is going to lead with a negative, but the reason you ask this question is to gauge their willingness to be candid and honest about their weaknesses.  We also want to find out what do they really value? Do they put emphasis on their ability to connect, to persuade, find a problem, or identify a solution? Their answers will open many new questions about their personal style and how they might go about helping potential prospects learn more about your agency.

Finally, if your reaction to a candidate isn’t an emphatic “yes,” it’s a “no.” If they can’t sell themselves then they certainly can’t sell your agency.  Time to keep looking!

When embarking on a proactive prospecting program, there are some core steps that can’t be skipped over on the road to success. And the foundation is developing a solid, well researched target list.  Below are the steps we recommend to clients to set that foundation.

1. Focus On A Vertical

Catapult programs are designed around core verticals or segments. Most often we build out lists with our agency clients by selecting target verticals they are best suited for, where they have subject matter expertise and case studies to provide credibility to prospects. A narrow focus enables you to curate and create outbound messaging to all companies within each selected vertical with a high level of relevance, leading to stronger engagement faster than a general message across verticals typically does.

2. Identify Your Right-To-Win Brands

…and research them well. For each vertical selected, the company list can be narrowed by such criteria as revenue, media spend and location. By targeting the companies that you can build credibility with, you’re able to laser-focus sales efforts around their unique needs. Don’t just rely on lists pulled from your criteria. Review top business rankings lists within specific verticals we are targeting to ensure we have all relevant companies included on the lists for our agency clients.

When researching each company to determine if it fits note challenges the company and/or industry is facing. These insights are later converted into talking points for email and phone outreach. 

3. Uncover Key Decision Makers

When the list is narrowed down to the top companies in a vertical, find the key decision makers within each based on job function and rank. Who the right contacts are will vary depending on your agency’s services. For example, a social media agency surely will want to connect with a social media director. However a branding agency likely would not.

Focus on C-suite, VP and director-level marketing professionals; depending on your agency, you may also want to target manager-level contacts. What’s important is that you’re only targeting decision-makers or influencers. Pro Tip: try to find at least 5 – 7 contacts per company/brand. Experience tells us that there is rarely just one decision maker, and it’s not always the obvious one that will respond and champion engagement with your agency.

It’s also helpful to scour the web for financial statements, press releases and trade articles for mentions of other relevant contacts at the company.

And, once you’ve completed the list, make sure to import it to a CRM database so you can effectively track your outreach. A few that our clients have used Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Hubspot to name a few.

4. Dig Deeper for 1:one or 1:few personalization

Uncovering information on your contact list through LinkedIn helps confirm the employee is still with the company and remains in the appropriate role. LinkedIn is also useful for mining additional contacts in the company – you may find additional relevant prospects you have not found previously.

During this process make sure to take notes of mutual contacts, past employers, links to presentations, schools attended or other points of connection that you can use in your outreach to that contact. You will need the email address information for these contacts found outside of the database. Try looking at the email naming conventions of the other contacts in the company; 90 percent of the time the naming convention will hold for the missing emails. If all else fails, there are a number of online tools available to help find alternative email address suggestions like Clearbit, Hunter.io, or RocketReach.

At this point, you may be asking yourself how to do all this with the resources you have.

At Catapult, we’ve heard, and done, it all to try to crack the code on list building. Calling the company’s main line, filling out a web form, or hoping you have a mutual connection in your core network are not efficient or effective ways to connect with senior decision makers.

And getting the decision maker information is not an easy task. All too often, agencies rely on new business people or account people to track down prospect contact information on their own. If the contact data is even found, it’s often inaccurate and incomplete. This process eats up your team’s time and takes them away from more important business activities.  

To solve this dilemma, many agencies subscribe to database services that provide accurate, direct contact information on prospects. And they supplement this data with their own due diligence to gain information that is relevant, current and provides insights for smarter prospecting messages.

There are a number of database providers available online, such as Winmo, our sister company, which offers vetted and current prospect contact information for relevant to ad agencies, marketing firms and creative agencies. A sophisticated database and intelligence service provides much more than contact information. It also can offer company financial data, existing agency relationships and recent news articles to help you better identify your best prospects.

When selecting a database provider, look for one that employs teams of researchers to validate and refresh the data on a regular basis, at least every 3-6 months. It’s also important that company specializes in advertising and marketing contacts so the prospects align with your target audience. 

 

Your prospect data list is the most important part in agency new business outreach. If you don’t have a relevant and accurate list of prospects and an efficient way to get this data, even the best messaging will fall on deaf ears. Using the steps outlined above, supported by a database platform for efficiency and speed, makes this scalable so business development folks can spend more time on outreach, engagement and conversion to new business…and less time trying to track down contact information!

Can you believe we’re approaching an entirely new decade? As you begin planning for 2020 new business, remember to plan the resources required to support that growth in the new year. While those resources will be unique to your agency’s specific growth plan, it never hurts to follow a proven formula to calculate what you need. To help with this forecasting, we’ve built an Agency Growth Calculator which evaluates your objectives and realistic requirements from each of the following steps of the agency growth funnel.

Understand Your Growth Requirements

Your KPIs are a direct reflection of your overall growth requirements. While this may seem obvious, some agencies find it extremely difficult to clearly identify their metrics for success. Here are some questions to answer during your initial planning meetings to ensure you set the right metrics:

What’s your overall revenue goal?
While there are many approaches for setting your revenue goal for the year, make sure it’s nailed down and clearly communicated prior to the new year so all parties can set operational KPIs off of that plan.

How much have you grown organically?
This gives you a good idea of the outbound effort you need after organic growth.

What’s your typical churn rate (loss of clients)?
You can only put so much on top of the funnel if you’re losing all of it at the bottom. This is why it’s important to understand how much revenue is falling off each month.

How big is this goal in comparison to new business amounts you’ve produced in years past?
Knowing how much you’re planning to grow new business Y/Y is important, particularly so you can understand the resources required to achieve that growth.

What’s your overall pitch win percentage and what’s the win percentage when they are inbound warm leads vs. cold opportunities you have generated?
Be honest when answering this question; the higher pitch win percentage you have, the less outbound effort will be required. Keep in mind that warm opportunities close at a higher rate than cold opportunities.

Have you ever generated a cold pitch opportunity before?
Many agencies rely on referrals for 100% of their pitch opportunities. While those are warm and close at a higher rate, they are not reliable or sustainable. Evaluating this gives you a better understanding for how long it can take to produce cold opportunities in the future.

Define Warm New Business Opportunities

It’s important to understand the amount of new business opportunities your agency brings in. These opportunities typically come from referrals, networking, and word of mouth. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love these lead sources? They are seen by most agency principals as the most attractive type of lead as it’s free business that came directly to you.

To help generate more of these we recommend activating your core 100 network. We define this as the core network of decision-makers with budget or marketing decision power that you have a 1st-degree relationship with. By connecting with this group at least once per month, whether a simple hello or providing them with relevant thought leadership, the likelihood of getting more referral leads increases significantly.

Lastly, while warm opportunities are nice it’s important you aren’t solely relying on them. Here’s why:

1. They are unpredictable and you never know when your next project will be coming in.
2. You have no control of how your portfolio expands.
3. Losing one major client could drastically impact your revenue.

Now let’s talk about how you can warm opportunities with cold prospecting for ultimate success!

Add Proactive Prospecting For New Opportunities

Since you can’t solely rely on your referral network, you must find a way to incorporate cold prospecting into your mix. Often new business directors will wonder how much outreach is enough? How many phone calls and emails will result in a qualified meeting? We recommend tracking your success rate at each touchpoint. This allows you to know if you are consistently reaching out to enough prospects in your outreach cadence. Proper measurements typically include:

• How many people typically reply to a cold email or call?
• Of those replies, how many of them turn into a discovery meeting/call?
• What number of discovery meetings turn into qualified leads?
• How many qualified leads convert to RFI/RFP opportunities? 
• What’s the win percentage of RFI/RFPs for your agency?

If you’ve never kept track of these numbers before, you can use benchmarks.

Our clients typically see conversion rates of:

• 12% – 15% opens to cold emails (above industry average of 5% – 7%).
• 7% – 10% conversion on call volume to live conversations.
• Approximately 25% of leads moving to discovery and qualifying.
• And 60% or more qualified leads moving to an RFI or RFP.   

Agencies that are just getting started on proactive outreach can see numbers a bit lower than these. Keep in mind many agencies underestimate how many prospects they actually need in their pool and keeping steady pipeline is a full-time job in itself. Make sure you have the resources and bandwidth necessary to fuel the fire.

Estimate The Investment: Time and Money

If you’re an agency executive responsible for driving new business and running the entire agency, be aware of what that double duty is costing you.

If you’re juggling too many tasks, it’s likely you are completing projects, but not doing them exceptionally well. As an agency executive, your time is best served strategically looking at ways to grow the overall business, not just through the lens of new business. If you’re worried about the time and investment it would take to hire someone in-house, we can manage this function for you at Catapult. There’s huge potential in having someone solely focused on bringing in both cold and warm opportunities for your agency.  

 

Now that you have a better understanding the agency growth funnel, what goes into forecasting your new business goals, and the resources required to hit them, check out our Agency Growth Calculator to see how the numbers line up for your business!

Websites are revenue generators; in fact, I’ve written about it before.  If you’re like most agencies, you want to represent your business in the best light which often means refreshing your website once a year, or possibly create an entirely new one.  When undergoing changes it’s critical to not sacrifice your business development efforts.

Often times I hear from clients that they’d prefer to put their prospecting on hold until their website is just the way they like it. Their fear is: I talk to a prospect, they visit my site, they don’t like our old site, and we have now burned that prospect forever. Because of that fear, outreach efforts are put on hold, and new business takes a back seat to web design.  If it’s like most website redesigns, timelines get dragged out and that one month projection somehow turns into three.

Don’t fall into this trap. A four-month hiatus is something your new business outreach can’t afford. Business development is a process that should happen consistently throughout the year, regardless of your website redesign. There are options however to keep your new business machine up and running through situations like this.

Play to your strengths, and drive conversations to those areas with these workarounds:

Landing Pages – I find these are grossly underused in the agency new business world, which is crazy.  They are the easiest way to create specific content attached to your site that is directly relatable to your new business conversation.  Need a page highlighting a particular service, vertical, or expertise?  Create a single new page and link to that while your new site is being build.  This allows you to drive people to something relevant and there is less distraction to some of the weaker parts of your site.

Hosted content – Every good marketing automation platform at this point has the ability to host media content.  That means we can utilize the hosted media links to not only send people to a safe space for content, but we can track every one of those clicks and reads in order to follow up with them at the right time.  For those of you trying to avoid your website completely, there is the added benefit that it is entirely away from your site.
Trying to perfect the imperfect can be a long, daunting task.  Losing sight of your new business goals while obsessing over a website redesign can put you behind your revenue goals by 4-6 months in the blink of an eye.  So if you are starting that site redesign, I’d encourage you to build a few new landing pages, get yourself a few pieces of content hosted, and keep selling!

Agencies win more business when they can better connect to the marketing decision makers they are pitching.  We want to arm our agencies with as much information as possible, so your new business approach is flawless.

We co-hosted this webinar with Chris Martin from Advertiser Perceptions, an expert on making decision makers pick your agency.  Chris will take you deep into the minds and decision processes of marketers so that you can feel confident in your new business approach.

We will cover specific topics like:

• What drives the decisions during the agency selection process for marketers?
• How do they compare your agency competitors during a pitch?
• Which areas of your agency are marketers analyzing before/during a pitch?
• What aren’t marketers telling you about their decision process?

 

So you want to take your new business development game to the next level? Well, you better be more than just a smooth voice on the phone. The right technology can allow you to collect targeted prospecting data, broadcast your message to more prospects, accelerate the sale funnel, organize more effective meetings, – ultimately refining your entire sales process.

Here’s a tech stack we use in-house that maximizes our efficiency and helps us win more business:

• Organize: Salesforce – Every new business tech stack should start with a good CRM. We use Salesforce because it’s truly best-in-class, and allows for integrations with basically every single add-on functionality for email or social. This doesn’t mean that every agency has to choose Salesforce (some Marketing Automation suites have great and simple CRM options), but we feel that it does give our agency team what they need to best track and understand their prospect funnels.

 

• Amplify: SharpSpring/Hubspot – It still amazes me every day how many agencies do not currently take advantage of a full marketing automation (MA) suite. We encourage our agencies to check out Hubspot or SharpSpring for your MA needs. We use both systems depending on our in-house efforts or client efforts and what each need. SharpSpring gives our clients that have more straightforward email and CRM needs a low-cost approach to getting this setup. For more enterprise level teams, we would look more at Hubspot’s market leading solution as the complexity in new business rises.

 

• Accelerate: Cirrus/Salesloft – When you get passed mass email communications, there still needs to be tools to help a new business person accelerate their one to one communications. This is where Cirrus and Salesloft Cadence come into play. Cirrus is a great Gmail extension that allows for better one off email tracking of clicks and opens, that syncs all communications with Salesforce, and even allows for some minor automation. Salesloft Cadence is great for small to medium groups of one to one contact engagement where we want to schedule a series of emails, but keep them at a relatively manual and bespoke messaging cadence. These tools give you acceleration of those personal emails without plugging them into the larger mass drip campaigns handled by your Marketing Automation platform.

 

• Inform: Winmo/DailyVista/Mintel/Kantar – Lots of options here for data on prospects. At CNB, we utilize Winmo for individual contact details and company level information on agency relationships and more. Mintel gives us some great insights into certain industries we are prospecting into, and Kantar is there to give us ideas on brands that are spending in ways that are attractive to our clients. The biggest driver of new business is DailyVista, which gives us predictive insights into brands that are going into review in the next 3-18 months. An insanely important piece of information as we do any outbound prospecting. (disclaimer: Catapult is sister companies with Winmo and DailyVista, so we really like what they do!)

 

• Share: Join.me/GoToMeeting – Again, this is an instance where we use two different technologies. Join.me is our go to screen share for anyone off quick meeting or screen sharing that we may need to do on a prospect or initial fact finding call. GoToMeeting is used when we have more scheduled ahead and larger group meetings that need to be shared across locations.

These are just some of the tools our new business team utilizes every day for proactive sales outreach. Keep in mind there are tons of resources out there. Aside from those listed above, we also leverage platforms like Crystal Knows, Slack, Rapportive, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and SponsorPitch. Everyone has different needs, so your stack may look a little different than ours. What are you using to drive your agency forward?

Every well-run agency is consistently looking at their mix of clients and where their revenue is coming from.  The better understanding you have of your current revenue forecast, the better prepared you will be for any bump or turn on the road ahead.  During our last webinar (Driving Agency Growth and Building Value Before the Sale) we discussed navigating this winding road by making sure your agency is following the 40% rule.  The rule is simple:  No more than 40% of your agency’s revenue can come from one client.

Now I know there are a lot of small agencies out there that got their start by landing one big client that contributes most of the revenue to your overall agency, and naturally, we all want more clients.  While it’s easy for me here to say “diversify!” I fully understand that it is entirely something else to put into practice.  There are so many reasons why you need to live by this 40% Rule and do everything you can to make sure your agency isn’t in this typical position, but here’s a few:

A wide building is sturdier than a tall one.

• I would much rather have 10 equal size clients, rather than 2 super clients because turnover happens.  It does not matter how great your service is, how good your ROI is for your client, or how much the client loves you as a person, they are going to turnover at some point.  It’s a lot easier to manage turnover from a revenue and employee standpoint if we have 10 clients, rather than 2.

Having to cut employees because of a lack of work is simply the worst.

• It breeds resentment and negativity in those employees that get to stay, and it’s an all around un-fun part of business.  If we can mitigate that need by having 10 smaller clients rather than 2 large, we can not only give our employees peace of mind, but we can show them that we are doing everything we can to give them stability and room to grow.

We aren’t beholden to bad deals.

• I’m sure we have all at some point left an initial fee negotiation, in the beginning, feeling like we made a good deal, only to find out that this client is way more work than we bargained for.  We then either need to change the scope of the work or raise the fee.  This normally goes over like a lead balloon, so we need to be able to walk away from a bad deal, and by having the account only represent 10% of your revenue verse 60%, you give yourself the ability to actually walk away if necessary.

It makes our agency more valuable.

• Charles Fallon of SI Partners talked specifically how when acquirers are evaluating agencies and looking at their value multiplier, that number goes up if client diversity exists.  This means that any acquirer is willing to pay you more money for your agency if they can see a larger range of clients by revenue and type.  More money is a good thing, right?

If you find yourself in a position of being over that 40% threshold, it’s probably time to begin thinking about your new business development plans.  Waiting for referrals will get you killed, so putting a new business process in place that can consistently generate new clients for your team should be an absolute priority for any agency that wants to be more stable, more predictable, and more valuable.

As an agency executive, it’s important to always have options for the future. If 2017 is the year you’re looking to increase the value of your agency, either for agency growth or a potential sale, this webinar will show you just how to do that. We’ll be co-hosting with Charles Fallon at SI Partners, a worldwide expert on all things Agency M&A. Whether you are looking to sell your agency now, or simply want to understand the options available, Charles will break down the steps required to strategically grow your agency and attract premium value.

We’ll cover specific topics like:

• What the acquirer landscape looks like, and how it’s evolving.
• Investors types and new market entrants.
• The different types of acquisition deals available today.
• What you need to do to attract a premium offer.
• How to find a strategic growth partner.

Driving Agency Growth and Building Value Before the Sale from Catapult New Business on Vimeo.