Another interesting advertising and marketing column in the Evening Standard (25th October 2010).

The piece comments on the benefits of real time feedback through digital technologies and social media, enabling real engagement with consumers and allowing brands to react to feedback and messages immediately. The example cited is that of Gap and the feedback the company received when they announced a new brand logo. The company binned the logo almost immediately based on the Facebook postings.

Clearly, the capacity for big brands to focus their efforts in the digital world and use social media to gather quick feedback enables them to adapt campaigns in real time. Indeed, research agencies such as You Gov are developing specific products and services to cover this responsive research channel. It has fantastic potential for large brands in terms of consumer involvement and engagement as well as campaign management.

Social media is the new medium for achieving that end result, but actually speaking to consumers or potential consumers for your brand/proposition has been a successful and often underrated and/or under utilised tool for years. The phone is not just about slick sales people chalking numbers on a white board. It is about using each and every call and conversation to learn more about your market and how your offer is perceived.

Alchemis has been doing this successfully for the past 23 years. OK, the brands we represent are marketing agencies and not large consumer brands, but what we are able to do through actually speaking to people is gather a true response to a proposition on behalf of our clients. Based on the feedback we provide, we are able to work with our clients to adapt or focus on part of their offer as well as test new propositions.

We collect some valuable quantitative data through our bespoke software, and this, combined with the qualitative insights gathered by their New Business Manager is the added value our clients buy into when choosing Alchemis to deliver an effective business development campaign on their behalf.

September-November is traditionally the purple patch for new business and September 2010 didn’t disappoint.

We fell just short of the record number of meetings set in August but still recorded a figure that stands as 2nd best in the past few years. More impressive is the number of quality new business meetings our clients attended, which was a year best.

October is already shaping up to be a good month and it will need to be as we have had an influx of new clients coming on board. Any client starting in October is going to get in front of some great companies before Christmas but they will find the real work starts in the New Year. With December being a ‘festive’ month finding a date that works for all parties to meet can be a bit like nailing jelly to a wall so meetings tend to back up in January. Although we try to be sensitive to our client’s need to recover after the Christmas and New Year break I’m afraid most will be returning to work in January to face a busy diary of good prospects with money to spend.

So if you are thinking of making ‘new business’ a resolution for the new year then now is a great time to get the ball rolling.

Referring back to my blog posted on 30th September 2010 here is my response to question number 2 on that list:

How do you manage conflict and confidentiality?

Inevitably, with a client base of over 50 clients, all of whom offer creative, strategic or digital marketing based solutions, we work with clients who have similar offers or who wish to target the same prospects.

This is a crowded, competitive marketplace, so there is no way we can prevent this happening, but what we do NOT do at Alchemis is share new business leads amongst our competing clients.

We have two ways of preventing this happening, a technical solution and an incentive based approach.

Firstly, the technical solution; we invested in developing our own bespoke software about 20 years ago (and this development has been ongoing ever since), which enables us to build discrete password protected databases for each of our clients, only allowing access to each client’s campaign by the New Business Manager who represents that client.

We hold updated decision maker information to benefit all of our clients in a central database which holds over 150,000 marketing decision makers, but every specific conversation, brief, pitch, opportunity or meeting on behalf of each clients is ringfenced.

Our incentive scheme is based on client retention and the quality of meetings that our clients attend, which no New Business Manager would wish to dilute by passing that lead to one of his/her colleagues.

We always encourage prospective clients of Alchemis to sit on the sales floor and see for themselves how the software works – we are justifiably very proud of how it can help us search for and develop new business on behalf of our clients.