Agency new business is everyone’s business. Manifest believes that there needs to be a very real involvement by everyone in the firm in the agency new business programme. Everyone from Receptionist through to the CEO and Chairperson.
I was astonished the other day when I had an email exchange with the MD of a pretty large agency who was 100% adamant that he had ‘absolutely nothing’ to do with new business. He didn’t sully his hands with it. It was someone else’s problem.
I am sure if you are reading this you will also agree that his view on his role was somewhat, er, how shall I say, unique? And I’m not at all sure that his shareholders would hold with it either, but there you go.
Anyway, getting back to my point about how agency new business is everyone’s business. How can we, as the people with principal responsibility for the business development department within an agency, get everyone involved, without taking them away from their own key responsibilities?
Here are a couple of tips:
1 – Social Media.
How many of the agency team have a LinkedIn account? And a Twitter account they use in a businesslike manner? How many contacts is that that could be useful for your agency new business? Probably thousands, if not tens of thousands. How many of those do you think have a budget for your service? Probably a good number if they do what most agency people do and connect with all their clients and potential clients after the first meeting. So get them to agree to share your agency updates via their LinkedIn updates and Twitter feeds.
You can do this in three ways:
- Casually – you ask them and leave it with them to do.
- With their own review – set the agency up with a Hootsuite Team and when you post agency updates it will ask them if they want to re-post to their own feeds and they choose to do so or not.
- Automatically – you could post all your updates to all the social feeds of all your staff at the same time. Or maybe just those who have agreed for you to do so. Your and their call.
2 – Wish List Clients.
Ask everyone who, being realistic, are their top three all time wish-list clients and why. They will most likely choose brands they are passionate about and probably know a lot about as well – so you have a brand evangelist at your disposal to help you tailor an approach that will probably be spot on or at least more informed than most.
When you get new business meetings, take this person along and explain to the clients why they are there. They LOVE your brand and asked us to try to get you as a client.
A bit of flattery never did any agency new business team any harm when agency new business is everyone’s business. DOWNLOAD OUR ONE-PAGER
