It’s the Holy Grail.   Phoning someone just at the point they are reviewing or may be considering a new agency or indeed using an agency for the first time. If someone tells you that they can accurately predict this, take it with a pinch of salt or at least question their methodology or criteria. … Read More

A lot of agencies we meet are often concerned about how to open up a cold new business meeting and how to close it effectively. They are most comfortable once the meeting is up and running and they can show and talk through their case studies, but find the beginning and the end problematic. As … Read More

What is a good value proposition? Our role in new business development is to help our clients define just that. It doesn’t matter if you are a creative, digital, research or any kind of agency, competition for business is rife and any prospective buyer of your services needs to be able to quickly identify the … Read More

As anyone who may have read any previous blogs of mine might gather, I’ve been at Alchemis for a VERY long time. But prior to that – in the final 6 years of the last millennium in fact – I had a somewhat different role. I used to work in contract publishing. Not just any … Read More

As we move into the second quarter of 2019, new business development and lead generation activities should be well underway for the year. Growing an agency is both challenging and rewarding. We have outlined 7 great ways to grow your agency below: 1) Set some core KPIs around turnover, new clients, extension of current clients, … Read More

15 years ago, when I was in my relative infancy as an Alchemis employee, I remember a great murmuring resonating through certain parts of the marketing industry and national press. An event was about to happen and its ramifications were so great that they were almost unthinkable to thousands of sales organisations across Britain… Companies … Read More

With over 30 years’ experience at the sharp end of business development, we have witnessed absolute talent and frankly, downright nonsense when it comes to agencies trying to win new clients. Here are just a few examples of what NOT to do: 1.    Over-promise and under-deliver. Sounds obvious but it’s actually quite difficult to put … Read More

The latest Bellwether report from the IPA has stated that marketing budget growth hit its slowest rate in three years during the third quarter of 2018. You can read the report here but one major factor seems to be uncertainty over Brexit, with marketers adopting a cautious stance. A few snippets taken from this report claim … Read More

After enjoying the hottest summer on record, it’s hard to believe that we are now entering autumn and before you know it winter will be upon us. However, before you get too depressed at the nights drawing in and settle down for evenings binge-watching box sets instead of enjoying BBQs in the garden, there is … Read More

As a well-established business development agency with a good spread of clients across the UK, we have noticed an upward trend in the success of Yorkshire based agencies winning new business. With this in mind, we decided to chat to a range of agencies based across Yorkshire, including creative, digital, integrated and specialists (like sound … Read More