Blair Enns, a Canadian business development consultant and author, will be talking at the final Designers Breakfast of 2011 on Thursday November 24th.

Entitled ‘Add value, don’t give away your thinking for free’ it will focus on how to reclaim the high ground in client relationships and abandon free pitching.

The series this year has delivered some hard-hitting truths and insights into business development and client relationships from a design agency perspective – if you missed any of them, they will be available online from January 2012.

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.

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.