In the famous words of Forrest Gump, client briefings are like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get.

The shortest I have been involved in is 30 minutes and the longest 4.5 hours. The latter is nearer the mark, although on average, they take 2-3 hours.

The briefing meeting is crucial. Sometimes it surprises me that agencies are prepared to spend a significant amount of money with Alchemis but don’t take the time to brief us properly. This is rare as most agencies are as excited as we are to be starting the campaign, but these are our top 5 points in order to brief your agency properly.

1) Allocate enough time

Sounds simple, but we need to leave that meeting understanding enough about your business in order to:

a) represent you as you would like us to and

b) sell your agency effectively.

This takes time and half an hour is not enough. You know your business, but we don’t. Remember, your New Business Manager is calling as if they are in your office, so they really need to “get” the agency.

2) Be prepared to have a follow-up meeting

We know that 2-2.5 hours is the optimum for concentration. This should be enough time to give us the key background, facts and case histories.

However, if we feel that it would be useful to have a follow up meeting once all of that has been digested to develop things further or just to meet other key team members, that is what we will do.

3) Prepare in advance

Anything you can get to us in advance helps. We will always send an agenda and a list of guideline questions well in advance; it really is beneficial and helps streamline the meeting if you look at these and prepare answers prior to the briefing.

4) Don’t assume we know everything

You know your business back to front, but we don’t.

Often clients rattle through case studies and propositions as they have heard it/said it a million times in advance. I promise you, we find this interesting, so please take the time to go through things properly and methodically.

We really want to understand why you did what you did for any given project and often this understanding can provide key points of difference or angles to use on the phone.

5) Be enthusiastic

We know you are enthusiastic about your work, but we also know that you probably have a hundred other things on your mind.

However, I guarantee that your New Business Manager will feed off your passion for the work and this will be reflected in the results.

Some of you who have read my previous blogs will know that I like to have a bit of a rant sometimes. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily a grumpy person, but with a fair amount of research experience over the years (ultimately earning me the nickname “Robbie Research”) I do like all business matters to be conducted with an acceptable level of care and attention.

A lack of professionalism when trying to win new business is one of the cardinal sins in my book. My previous blogs on customers for life and the difference between new business and business development will give you an insight to my way of thinking.

So picture the following scenario.

Before Christmas, I get an email from a “new business agency” – and I use the term in the loosest possible sense – offering me business development services for Alchemis.

Perhaps they sent it by mistake. I’ll just ignore it and we’ll say no more about it.

But a few weeks later a follow up email arrives – they’ve tried to get in touch with me but to no avail, surely I would be interested in their business development services for my company. This time, I couldn’t let it lie. I sent a polite reply to the sender which simply said “Gemma, please have a look at our website to see what we do as a company and then decide if we are likely to need a new business agency to help us.”

Surely this would do the trick – a two second check of our website would have shown the sender that we are, in fact, a new business agency ourselves. They could put me on their do not approach list and we will all be happy. But alas, my words fell on deaf ears as a while later I received another email from the same person – albeit this time into my junk email filter as I had marked the previous one as such.

Then last week I received yet another communication. Here is an excerpt:

We aren’t about sending over a high volume of poor quality appointments, we will create highly qualified meetings to make sure you are only meeting prospects that have a genuine need for your services.

Robert we would love to come and meet with you to discus in more detail how we can help you get in front of prospects and get you on track to fulfil new business targets. If you would like to arrange a date for a brief meeting then please do not hesitate to reply to this email or call me.

A few terms jump out of me from this. “Poor quality”; “highly qualified” (not) and “genuine need for your services.”

They also claim to provide a recording of every call they make – which is great except it is illegal unless the prospect is made aware that they are being recorded (and how would you react if you received a cold call from a company you didn’t know and were told they were going to record it)?

I am the only person at Alchemis who is not actively involved in a “sales” role of some description. But even I know that the key thing to any new business approach is to know a bit about the company you’re approaching (like, for example, what they actually do), listen to what the prospect is actually saying and only then are you in a position to know whether your services will be of use.

I’m not going to name and shame the person or company who keep sending me these unqualified approaches (despite my reply advising them to check what we do first) but as Mr T would say “I pity the fool” that would take them on to help with business development if this is an example of their attention to detail.

Companies like this give the more respectable agencies a bad name. And if the company in question happens to be reading this blog, please – for the love of god – practice what you preach.

Following on from Amanda Francis’ comment on the importance of soundbites to engage a prospect on the phone, I have been thinking about how we put these together for our creative communications clients based on their offer. I cannot stress how important the first 20 seconds on the phone are to a New Business Manager at Alchemis. We have just a few sentences to convey to a prospect what sets you apart from every other digital/design/research/communications agency out there. So how do we do this?

David Newman our Sales Director likes to encourage the ‘so what?’ factor when we develop our pitch. The rule of thumb is this – if you can remark on any one-liner with the response of ‘so what?’ then the pitch has fallen flat and you will lose the prospect’s interest at a horrifying speed. Another thing we periodically look at is ‘sexing it up’, which focuses on making an introduction sound interesting enough for the prospect to want to know more and be open to telling you more about their business. Putting these two key elements into practice I personally look to position my clients in the following three ways, below are examples of the good and the plain ugly:

1/ What is my client’s speciality?

- ‘We develop brand vision’ – this is sharp and interesting and explains that we are creative and work with brands from a conceptual and development standpoint.

- ‘We design brochures’ is not interesting, this may be exactly what you do but it’s all in the phrasing and this screams ‘so what?’

2/ How does my client go about doing what you have just stated?

- ‘We create sensory customer experiences through branded environments and communications’. This is the crucial part of introducing a client to a prospect, so here we indicate our core skills and subtly show we are interested in adding value to their business by placing emphasis on the word customer i.e sales/money

- ‘We design things which look good’ a prospect doesn’t want to necessarily know about the design being great, pretty pictures are not solely responsible for attracting customers, communicating a message or encouraging sales.

3/ Who do they work with of relevance? In this instance it’s all about tailoring; if I’m speaking to Tesco and my client specialises in high-end design for the luxury sector I’m potentially barking up the wrong tree if I tell Mr Tesco we work with Burberry and Dior. Again, it comes back to relating to the prospect in those first few moments and tailoring every introduction to each individual company.

Of course then comes the questioning part of the conversation where we gain understanding of things like budget, scope of projects/retainers, who they currently work with, why, do they review, why not, when, how- you get the gist, but that is another blog for another time.

All in all, when you have a New Business Manager from Alchemis working on your campaign, you can rest assured that they bring an insight into specific linguistics to ensure they speak to as many people as possible about your company and leave a lasting impression.