New business agency blog

Those of you who have seen Glengarry Glen Ross may remember the scene where Ed Harris is telling Alan Arkin about what he learned when he first got into the sales racket:

“You don’t sell one car to a guy, you sell him five cars over fifteen years. But those guys who come in and burn everyone for as much money as they can get and then go to Argentina ruined a good thing.”

I can think of several household name companies off the top of my head that fall into the “burn everyone” category in order to boost sales, particularly within telecoms, utilities and banking. One of the reasons that Nationwide’s “brand new customers only” parodies a few years back were so successful was because so many people have had first hand experience of this type of practice.

It could be argued that we were all brand new customers once. We all had our slice of ‘enticement cake’ when we signed up, so we should just stop moaning and eat the gruel for the remainder of our 24-month contracts. But for every month of gruel I dream about the day when my contract finishes and I can stick two fingers up to the offending corporation and say “You just lost yourself a customer, mister!”

Now I’m sure that my actions won’t be causing sleepless nights to the top brass at the likes of Vodafone or Natwest. But I do have a long memory for perceived injustices against me by big faceless corporations and I’m pretty good about sticking to my guns of never using certain brands again once they’ve made it onto my blacklist. I’m also pretty good at moaning to anyone who will listen about what poor service I had from said brands – and brand reputation can be raised or lowered quicker than ever before in these days of internet review sites, online consumer forums and social networking sites.

So now to my point: according to research from insight group SMG, retailers are expected to spend 64% of their marketing budget on new customer acquisition by 2015 – this is despite the fact that long-term loyal customers are more profitable in the long-run.

New business is vital to any organisation. Whatever industry you are in, there will inevitably be some natural wastage of your client base, sometimes for reasons beyond your control and sometimes not. So for that reason it is crucial to have a pipeline of prospects in order that your business can grow.

At the same time, customer retention is apparently more profitable (although there will be a significant variance of this between different market sectors) and that’s where the business development side comes in. Build lasting relationships with the clients you have in order to sell them more in the long run.

It’s a fine balancing act, but there’s no point in having one without the other.

After reading Graeme Crossley’s blog on Brand Republic yesterday which asked “Why do some brands think they deserve to get free consulting?” I thought I’d share my thoughts on the matter from my perspective as Director of Operations.

Graeme is understandably somewhat irked by his perception of an increasing trend over the last year of brand owners expecting free consulting from agencies, which as he sees it is not just an evaluation of the brand as part of their conversations about potentially working together, but wanting all of the work for free.

We’re living in pretty tough times at the moment – thousands of people are losing their jobs (including vast numbers in marketing departments up and down the country). EVERYONE is trying to keep costs down to the absolute minimum and everyone wants their suppliers to go the extra mile to secure their business.

I totally sympathise with the situation that Graeme finds himself in; realistically there is likely to be another agency that will put in extra work for nothing for the chance of ultimately winning that big brand account.

We often refer to “the benefit of the back door” or “getting under the radar” – both being descriptions of effective ways of securing decent sized new business accounts from small initial projects. Impress the brand enough and they will use you for work as and when it does come up. However, you have to make sure you have an effective new business strategy in place to nurture this relationship to fruition. We have come across many agencies in a similar situation to Graeme and our New Business Managers have built and maintained excellent ongoing contact strategies that have ultimately resulted in winning new business. I won’t deny it’s hard work – although it’s also our day job, so you won’t find many people in a better position to help you.

In his final paragraph, Graeme says that nobody who applies for a job would work for free for the first three months, so why would agencies do so for brands. Well, I remember leaving college way back in 1993 and looking for a job in the marketing communications industry. Several agencies offered to take me on for unpaid work placements for 3-6 months – the logic being that if you impressed them enough there might be a paid job afterwards but tough luck if there wasn’t and at least you’d have some agency experience under your belt. Even as recently as a few months back I read about a guy who offered to refund his salary to any employer who took him on and wasn’t pleased with his work. On top of this, the number of students doing ‘internships’ (a fancy American name for unpaid work) has risen dramatically in the past few years.

I suspect that these practices have been going on in one form or another for a long time and will continue to do so. In times of economic hardship where competition is fierce for every scrap of business the scale of the problem is magnified as the buyers hold all the cards. The ultimate goal for the agency who wants the business is to convince the buyer that appointing them will yield the greatest possible return on investment for their brand.

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…..