And finally, to my response to number 5 in my list of the 5 most frequently asked business development questions (in my experience):

How will you get to know not only my agency’s offer but the personality of my agency?

A crucial concern for a lot of agency owners, as we are representing their brand on the telephone; a brand which they have often built up over years with a lot of blood, sweat and tears and therefore the last thing they want to happen is for Alchemis to misrepresent them.

I often draw parallels between outsourcing new business and sending your precious child to school. You’ve done a great job in bringing them into this world and giving them the basic skills, but now it’s time to send them to the professionals for the next stage of their development.

All 3 of the working owners of Alchemis are parents (and I’m a recent grandparent too!) so we understand this and take great care to ensure we understand what your agency and your people are all about, as well as obviously getting to grips with your work and your case studies.

We do this through a structured and an intuitive approach to briefing. This involves an initial set up where we discuss your case studies and agree your offer to market and your target prospects – to demonstrate our understanding of your offer, we then write a campaign plan which summaries your key selling points. This is then often followed by an immersion programme which varies from client to client and can involve standing on Waterloo station handing out samples, attendance at relevant exhibitions or simply spending a day at a client’s office. This immersion tends to follow some calling activity, as by then our New Business Managers will have feedback from the market and therefore some informed questions to pose.

Rest assured, we will look after your brand as though it was our own…..

Linking back to my blog posted on 30th September about the most frequent questions I get asked whilst speaking to agency owners about business development, let’s have a look at number 4:

Can I pass over lead and contacts for you to follow up on my behalf?

 The simple answer is yes, and the slightly longer one expands like so….

The most effective new business campaigns consist of a well researched and considered targeting strategy plus several tactical strands. These strands include Alchemis checking out all the trade press (both paper based and online) including NMA, Campaign, PR Week, The Drum, Event, Design Week and Marketing Week as well as the nationals (the FT, for example), the relevant vertical press (eg. The Grocer, Retail Week and Pharma Times) looking for current leads that are right for your service offer.

Our experience shows that once a lead is in the trade press, then it’s often too late; so our best sources for leads tend to be the financial and vertical press. As these leads are not necessarily part of the overall targeting strategy, we will then check with our clients to make sure that they’re not already talking to that lead and that they are happy for us to do so.

 Equally, if our clients see a lead and don’t have the time to follow it up, then we are more than happy to do so on their behalf. Similarly, if they’ve attended an event and come back with a load of business cards, send them our way – it’s why we’re there and it’s our day job!

Here’s the response to question number 3 in my blog posted in September about the five most commonly asked business development questions:

How can you guarantee me results?

 A good question and one which any new business professional in any market will get asked frequently.

The short, but insufficient, reply is that there are no guarantees in new business.

There are, however a significant number of critical success factors that influence the effectiveness of business development campaigns, namely (in no particular order):

 * clear business objectives

* a well thought through and researched targeting strategy

* a robust proposition that reflects current market needs

* case studies that demonstrate success

* meaningful and relevant collateral

* the ability to listen and therefore identify opportunities that aren’t always obvious

* the skills and confidence to convert those opportunities to briefs and wins

With all of the above in place, we will have a greater chance of being able to set quality meetings for our clients, thereby helping them to secure new business.