New business agency blog

Speaking to a client recently, the general talk took a familiar “it’s not all doom and gloom” flavour and indeed it really isn’t. The reason for this client’s optimism was a recent run of new business wins, both through Alchemis and through their own efforts.

This particular agency works in the digital arena and interestingly, The Sunday Times on 6th February reported on small businesses and highlighted that those companies able to identify and act upon a fledgling trend are able to flourish in a weak economy. As well as a Fairtrade cosmetics and a food company, the article focused on We Are Social, a social media agency based in Clerkenwell. They are in their third year and riding high, helping businesses to develop or introduce a social media strategy to aid growth.

The rise of digital marketing has created a whole new world of niche specialist companies. Unsurprisingly, digital agencies make up a substantially higher percentage of the Alchemis client base than a few years ago. From our perspective, we have seen the whole development of the industry from the “New Media” (effectively website build) agencies of the late 90s. New digital agencies are setting up every day and often entrepreneurial, talented experts have identified a niche in which to focus. As an offer, this is great for Alchemis. We love working on tight, interesting offers. We tend to glean more interest during conversations and our clients are able to build on that in the subsequent meetings.

However, we don’t just do this for digital agencies where a point of difference and resulting USP is normally fairly obvious. We are also extremely adept at developing business for more traditional PR, research, creative and integrated agencies. This makes us something of a bellwether. Our client base tends to be a strong indicator of market trends and we see starkly through our results which propositions are most effective and which markets are buying what. Clearly there are client confidentiality constraints, but we are able to utilise general trends to develop a client’s proposition and new business strategy. By understanding their experience and case studies, we are able to identify angles and issues that set each individual client apart.

This has resulted in a record breaking number wins for our clients in 2010 and the start to 2011 has been equally positive.

There is no doubt that digital offers will continue to rise, adapt and even fall by the wayside, but across the raft of marketing services, it is those agencies that are able to identify new trends and develop innovative offers or propositions early that will make hay in tough times.

Apparently, there are some new business agencies currently doing the rounds saying that cold calling is dead!

Clearly, their experiences are very different to ours at Alchemis.

 For the last 18 months (after the drought during the first half of 2009) we have witnessed an ever increasing number of wins for our clients, generated by our cold calling approach to prospects. It may sound slightly old fashioned, but it’s still the most effective method of identifying a prospect’s needs, challenges, priorities and issues.

And without that specific company/decision maker information or insight, all you can achieve via a piece of DM or an email is raised awareness.

We have run (and will continue to do so where needed or appropriate) email/DM campaigns on behalf of our clients, and have compared these to cold calling campaigns running alongside these. The statistics show that engaging one on one with marketing decision makers still deliver the best quality meetings. Some of these DM/email campaigns have helped increase access to decision makers, but only those with genuinely relevant insights. A generic campaign will neither help nor hinder.

I remain to be convinced (and would love to hear from any of you who have some proof of success) about the use of social media when targeting senior marketing decision makers, for the very reasons that I have outlined above …

Here are some top line results from the analysis of our 2010 business development activity on behalf of our clients.

They summarise why a prospect will agree to meet an agency based on calling prospects who meet the agreed criteria of vertical market, size, spend, profile and location.

1. Rapport with prospect (this scored highly in those disciplines where there are neither discernible differentiators nor clear ROI, for example, creative or corporate comms agencies)

2. Direct relevant experience supported by case studies (this scored highly in all disciplines, particularly PR and creative)

3. Proven ROI supported by case studies (particularly relevant in PR and DM)

4. Unique methodology (primarily in research)

5. Niche skill set, namely in technology (mainly in digital and research)

6. Chance of gaining insight from the meeting (mainly in creative and PR)

7. Location of the agency (again, mainly in creative and PR)

This insight into what prospects are looking for when meeting new agencies is one of the many reasons our clients win new business from working with us.

Another key reason is our ability to develop rapport with prospects through asking the right questions and being able to empathise with their current challenges.

Our Sales Director, Dave, will be writing a more detailed paper on this, so watch this space…