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…..

I read Steve Henry’s blog on ‘What does a start-up need?’ with interest.

He raises the question about whether a start up agency needs creatives as well as planners on board; I can see the need for both myself but from my perspective of running a business development agency, I would add that one of the most critical elements in setting up a new agency is ensuring you have a well thought through new business strategy and plan.

Yes, most start ups bring a number of clients based on long standing relationships and yes, you’ll be able to work that network of old client relationships for a few months to help secure those initial accounts, but our experience shows that the little black book and the incoming calls will dry up sooner rather than later and you need to instigate a decent business development program in order to build your business successfully. New business wins from a standing start can take up to 12 months plus to convert and you need to start building the pipeline a long time in advance.

Anyone engaging with a new business agency would see budget as being a key part of the qualification process:

“We don’t want to meet anyone without an approved budget for our marketing services!”

On face value that is a perfectly valid comment and it is always something Alchemis has highlighted as part of our core meeting quality criteria. However, more and more of our clients are developing propositions around very targeted offers and services, which revolve around specific client issues. This is great news as we are able to offer something unique and different, but as a result, whilst these offers provoke interest from the prospect, it is unlikely that they will have an allocated budget for that specific activity.

This is where the new business approach to qualification needs to change. Would that offer or service provide a solution to a business need that the prospect has? If the answer is yes and we can convince the prospect that this is the case, it is not necessarily about allocated budget, but more about the authority and decision making power of that individual within their organisation. If they can see a true benefit, a budget can always be found.

In terms of the new business process, you have grabbed their interest and the next step is to persuade them to create or reallocate budget for that activity. It could be that you now need to work with that prospect to build a business case internally. This is time consuming and often arduous, but this kind of approach, should it be successful, is likely to result in stronger relationships.

At the end of the day, of course there needs to be a significant “marketing” budget in the first instance and that needs to be qualified. However, from the perspective of a business development partner, the emphasis really needs to be on the decision making power and authority of a prospect. Qualify that and you are over one of the largest new business hurdles.