As my first full year as a New Business Manager at Alchemis draws to a close, I pause to reflect, assess and summarise what I have achieved in the last 12 months.

I am pleased with the number and quality of the meetings I have set for my clients, who offer a range of services from mobile apps to full service creative solutions.

However, let us not forget the sole reason that our clients embark on a proactive new business campaign with Alchemis – to win new business.

Whilst the temptation is always there to push for a speculative or credentials based meeting to hit targets, I have approached my calling with the knowledge that we are building a long term relationship with our clients, and that quality will always trump quantity. A client winning business and yielding a good ROI is a happy client, who are much easier to work with and converse with on a weekly basis. Furthermore, I have found that a by-product of clients winning business is that you also win their trust, which means they are willing to go on a few speculative meetings, which can be equally as fruitful, if approached in the right way.

As for 2011, our client base is growing and the marketplace is evolving with the technology available to us. These are exciting, albeit challenging times and I for one am looking forward to 2011 and building on the success of 2010.

Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year to one and all!

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…..