With Amanda Francis taking a well earned break for 2 weeks in September I agreed to try and fill her considerable new business boots. Amanda had tried to avoid putting dates in for while she was away so it looked like I had two meetings to do in 2 weeks – easy.

I ended up attending 7 new business meetings. September has always been a big month for agencies wanting to talk to Alchemis about new business but nothing could have prepared me for this surge in people wanting to meet “this week”.

As I don’t often meet prospective clients I found the experience fascinating. No two meetings were the same (obvious really as no two people are the same) but there were some common themes.

Every person (agency) I talked to was impressive. They impressed me with their passion for their business, the people who work for them and the work they do for their clients. I met some very bright and interesting people and learned a lot.

Everyone had a medium and a long term commercial view. For some it was continued rapid growth, for others it was securing fee income and consolidation in an uncertain business climate.

Everyone invited feedback and was open to ideas. This surprised me because I was talking to successful business people; entrepreneurs and self-starters. They were certainly not lacking in self-belief and conviction but they were interested in my thoughts on their business as a whole. We would talk about how they had won new business in the past and I think it’s fair to say they felt reasonably confident once they were in front of a prospect and supremely confident they could do a great job if they secured the business – but ‘getting the ball rolling in the first place’ was the tough bit.

Several of the agencies I met had done relatively little in terms of pro-active new business; recommendations, referrals and organic growth into existing clients had got them where they were. Others had tried a few things with mixed results – the most common refrain was that they found it hard to keep the momentum going day-in-day-out because the core business of delivering to clients ‘got in the way’. More than one person told me they had an internal new business formula that had worked until they won a client and attention was switched to client service. Having stopped new business for a few months it was then difficult to get it started again.

The agencies I met were doing some great work. Whether it was PR, research, digital or creative they all had a story to tell about how they have delivered something special to help a client. There must be other agencies out there with an equally credible offer so the deciding factor between agencies that flourish and those that stand still is the number of opportunities they get to tell their story to someone that counts. If you get 20 more opportunities in front of a decision maker next year than you did this year how much business could you win?

I’m glad to say we’ve already begun work for some of the agencies I met last month and I’m looking forward to hearing about new clients we have helped them win over the next few months.

September-November is traditionally the purple patch for new business and September 2010 didn’t disappoint.

We fell just short of the record number of meetings set in August but still recorded a figure that stands as 2nd best in the past few years. More impressive is the number of quality new business meetings our clients attended, which was a year best.

October is already shaping up to be a good month and it will need to be as we have had an influx of new clients coming on board. Any client starting in October is going to get in front of some great companies before Christmas but they will find the real work starts in the New Year. With December being a ‘festive’ month finding a date that works for all parties to meet can be a bit like nailing jelly to a wall so meetings tend to back up in January. Although we try to be sensitive to our client’s need to recover after the Christmas and New Year break I’m afraid most will be returning to work in January to face a busy diary of good prospects with money to spend.

So if you are thinking of making ‘new business’ a resolution for the new year then now is a great time to get the ball rolling.

Referring back to my blog posted on 30th September 2010 here is my response to question number 2 on that list:

How do you manage conflict and confidentiality?

Inevitably, with a client base of over 50 clients, all of whom offer creative, strategic or digital marketing based solutions, we work with clients who have similar offers or who wish to target the same prospects.

This is a crowded, competitive marketplace, so there is no way we can prevent this happening, but what we do NOT do at Alchemis is share new business leads amongst our competing clients.

We have two ways of preventing this happening, a technical solution and an incentive based approach.

Firstly, the technical solution; we invested in developing our own bespoke software about 20 years ago (and this development has been ongoing ever since), which enables us to build discrete password protected databases for each of our clients, only allowing access to each client’s campaign by the New Business Manager who represents that client.

We hold updated decision maker information to benefit all of our clients in a central database which holds over 150,000 marketing decision makers, but every specific conversation, brief, pitch, opportunity or meeting on behalf of each clients is ringfenced.

Our incentive scheme is based on client retention and the quality of meetings that our clients attend, which no New Business Manager would wish to dilute by passing that lead to one of his/her colleagues.

We always encourage prospective clients of Alchemis to sit on the sales floor and see for themselves how the software works – we are justifiably very proud of how it can help us search for and develop new business on behalf of our clients.