Hunter & Farmer

The new business process is at a tipping point

On April the 18th we will host our fifth Art of New Business event at LBi’s offices in Shoreditch. As April will mark six months since our first event, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on our journey and recount what motivated Sarah Bradley and I to set up The Art of New Business, an organisation that represents challenger thinking in the field of agency new business.

Before Sarah and I met for the first time at the Hilton Hotel at London Euston in November 2011 we both knew we shared something in common. We had read each other’s blog posts, followed each other on Twitter and read each other’s LinkedIn profiles. No one had introduced us or suggested that we should meet; we had found each other based on a shared passion, attitude and way of thinking.

We both firmly believed that the way agencies went about prospecting for new business was alienating the very clients they wanted to engage with, and as a result, an industry that was valued on the basis of its ability to help brands using its marketing and creative expertise was essentially digging its own grave.

More times than we cared to admit in our personal careers we had witnessed management at agencies pitch a big innovative idea to its clients in the morning, only to sit through an internal new business meeting in the afternoon where topics like cold calling to make meeting appointments were being discussed and approved. It seemed to us that agencies weren’t applying the advice they were giving their clients to their own marketing.

When we would question it, people would laugh and say “cobblers shoes syndrome” it’s just something “that happens in agency life”. As if that’s how it’s always been and so it will always be.

Given a brief from a client to attract more customers for their brand how many agencies would present that pitch, “we think you should buy an untargeted list of people and then cold call as many of them as you can, asking them if they want to buy your product? Or failing that, send them a mailer with a picture of your product on it with your company’s telephone number on it so they can call you”?

The answer, of course, is none I hope(!), so why do so many agencies fall into the trap of marketing themselves this way? This was just one of many questions we wanted to address.

One thing we knew no one in our industry would ever disagree on is that new business is the life blood of an agency. With over 17,000 agencies in the UK alone, each with at least one person responsible for bringing in new business, we were convinced there had to be audience open to discussing how to do new business better.

The Art of New Business was born.

Our strategy was pretty straight forward. Our aim was to:

1) Bring new business people together so they could share what they thought and felt about the role and the way they were expected to do it.

2) Find out who out there was doing things better and different and ask them to share their knowledge.

3) Ask clients for their thought on the way agencies prospected and pitched to them so we could build a case for change.

In the first instance, the best way to do this seemed to be to create a series of events in the UK for anyone charged with bringing in new business for their agency. To date we’ve held two events in Manchester and two in London with our third London event scheduled for April. We took the decision from the start that we’d share whatever learnings we took from the events using Twitter and Facebook as well as blogging and creating a community group on LinkedIn.

Even though we thought that The Art of New Business was addressing a definite need in the market (and we haven’t even mentioned the lack of focus on training, development and support for those tasked with bringing in new business for their agency), we are utterly overwhelmed by the number of new business people who have emailed and called to thank us for setting the events up, indeed, a number of high-profile new business directors in the UK and overseas have contacted us to congratulate us on starting a conversation that should have probably started quite some time ago. Your encouragement and support fuels what we are doing no end.

In addition, we could not have predicted how many authors, new business experts and industry leaders would willingly give up their evening to stand in front of the audience and share their knowledge and insight for free, their only motivation being to inspire others. A particular favourite of ours so far were the fantastic presentations on our Pecha Kucha night, videos of which can be seen here.

Lastly though, and probably the biggest surprise of all, has been the request for involvement that we have received from clients side marketers. The stories they’ve told us are of sometimes shockingly bad agency approaches, but horrible as these stories are, they serve to motivate and drive us on, because they support what Sarah and I already knew when we set out this journey – new business is at a tipping point. 10 years from now the way clients find and select agencies will have changed radically. In fact, it’s already changing.

If you want to find out how and what to do about it, sign up to be a friend of TAONB on our website and come along to our next event in London or Manchester.

It’s time for agencies to understand their new role not just as local staff managers, but as worldwide talent managers.

In the pre-Internet economy, talent and resources clustered around companies that hired and cultivated people who provided a particular class of services. Professional service companies, including advertising agencies, are a classic example. Agencies have historically been hired to provide “creative services” for marketers.

But because the internet has enabled creatively-talented people around the world to contribute ideas – solicited or not – to an exceptionally wide range of problems, from science to business, there’s a new dynamic at play in the world of marketing communications firms. Crowdsourcing – using the internet to solicit the thoughts and work of talented people around the word – has become a valuable new source of ideas and problem solving for companies ranging from software developers to manufacturers.

Not just creation, but co-creation

Several popular websites are successfully engaging the power of distributed creativity on behalf of some big-name marketers. Crowdspring, GeniusRocket, and 99 Designs generate tens of thousands of submissions from hundreds of thousands of both amateur and professional designers, art directors, and writers from around the world.

Crowdsourcing allows – indeed, encourages – marketers to bypass agencies altogether. But agencies need not stand by and regard this phenomenon only as a threat. By embracing the ability of the world wide web to solicit and deliver creative ideas from across the globe, agencies can stop defending their position as the exclusive creators of content and also adopt a role as curators.

An agency curating the best content on behalf of its clients is like a museum curating the best art on behalf of its patrons. While some museums and galleries have exclusive relationships with selected artists, they also curate the work of other artists. These are not mutually-exclusive ideas.

Unconventional “agencies” like Victors & Spoils – built on the crowdsourcing model — have been in the news lately for securing some important assignments from some notable brands (such as the iconic Harley-Davidson). The business model of firms like V&S is built on what they call “mass collaboration,” and its redefining the way “creative” gets done in the 21^st century.

Not just crowds, but experts

Related to the concept of crowdsourcing is “expert-sourcing,” where only professional talent is employed on behalf of the marketer, as modeled by innovative firms like Ideasicle. Founder Will Burns describes their approach this way:

“We have assembled an award-winning team of Ideation Experts from tier one agencies and clients around the world to ideate around your business need. We can give you access to this because of a custom-built, proprietary technology platform that makes it incredibly easy for the Experts to absorb the video briefing, post ideas in time-deferred ways and then riff off, and build upon, each other’s ideas. It’s not crowd sourcing, its expert sourcing.”

Given the options for creative development that transcend the agency’s own creative department, agencies really have three basic choices when it comes to content creation:

An organization called The Future Foundation was commissioned by the IPA to study the future of advertising agencies. In a fascinating report titled “The Future of Advertising and Agencies – a 10-Year Perspective,” one of the predictions is that agencies will become “content collaborators,” not just content producers. Citing this as one of the important dimensions of agency evolution, the report observes:

“If agencies don’t take these opportunities there will be tremendous implications in terms of their relationships with clients, their remuneration packages and their very existence.”

The point is that marketers will crowdsource and expert-source whether agencies do or not. Much better to be ahead of this curve than behind it.

Tim Williams leads Ignition Consulting Group and is author of the books “Take a Stand for Your Brand” and “Positioning for Professionals.”

Can you describe your agency in two words? Are you reaching out to potential clients in new and exciting ways?

We’ve recently repositioned creative agency We Are Acuity as ‘frontline marketeers’. We helped them to see that at their core what they do best is help national brands sell more through their sales outlets or franchise network.

Together we’ve redesigned their website, begun to build a social media profile, hired an SEO specialist and created a quarterly publication called Frontline Thinking, a book that contains insight and interviews on how to increase sales and retention by optimising a brand’s frontline communication.

We’re also bringing together friends and suppliers of the business on a regular basis in order to let their network know they are valued and to facilitate networking for their contact’s businesses.

Your network directly impacts your success. The more you help them, the more they will want to help you.

When we’d defined the new positioning we reached out to two target clients in order to test it. One was a major high-street retailer and the other a well known automotive manufacturer. We got meetings with both of them.

Of course a meeting does not a relationship make, so we’ll be working together to build those first contacts and the others we make into ongoing relationships.

We’ll be tweeting, sending out DM, networking, entering awards – the whole shebang! That’s what it takes nowadays. There are no shortcuts to growth.

We’re actively targeting automotive companies (they’ve been brand guardians to Citroën UK for the last 12 years), so if you’re involved in that sector, you might like to check out their website: www.weareacuity.com or follow @weareacuity. They’re LOVELY people to work with.

What else are we up to?

Coming soon, a gallery space at 1 Baltic Place just over the bridge on the canal of Kingsland Road. We’re helping the massively creative Accept & Proceed turn their office into a showcase area for collaborations

Do you work client-side looking after design? Why not join nearly 300 other design-heads in the discussion around meaning-centered design by joining a LinkedIn group we set up of the same name. MCD is the name of the approach our client Precipice Design are pioneering. Their best case-study to date came from a client finding out about them as a result of joining this group. We’ve been working with them for nearly two years and have introduced them to many, many brands.

Next months we’re doing workshops with Everyone Associates and 101 London. Exciting!

For those of you who missed our first Art of New Business event on the evening of October 10th you can read a review of it from Campaign here. To attend the next one in London on Jan 17th, email karla@hunterandfarmer.com expressing your interest. If you’re based up North, there is an Art of New Business event in Manchester on the evening of November 27th which you can buy tickets to now here.

New business doesn’t have to be boring. It should identify your assets and bring them to life.

We believe in the power of ideas. New business is an art, not a numbers game.

If you need someone to help you find your difference, get in touch to discuss how we can work together!

New business is an art, not a numbers game.

Many people say, “new business, it’s not rocket science!”. Actually, Business development is a lot harder than it used to be. More on why here.

The truth is, most agencies do exactly the same thing and aren’t meaningfully differentiated from one another; they haven’t spent anytime at all outlining what they want to achieve and how they’re going to achieve it. That’s a big opportunity for the agencies that take a different approach.

Content is king and marketing is moving from outbound to inbound. These changes affect agencies as much as brands.

My belief is that new business isn’t a numbers game. It’s an art.

The numbers game strategy:

Cold-call at least 500 decision-makers in a week in the hope of getting some meetings.
Send regular blanket untargeted emails and direct mail.

The reality of that strategy:

Cold-calling certainly gives you a chance of getting some meetings but, if we consider that thousands of agencies are taking the same approach, you have to feel sorry for the marketing director’s PA who has to field those calls on the other end.

Research into prospecting practice carried out by Acquire reveals that of the seventy client-side marketing professionals interviewed, 70% were sceptical of cold telephone approaches, with a further 21% expressing a positively hostile attitude.

Phil Rumbol, ex- marketing director at Cadbury’s said  at the recent Art of New Business event in London that 90% of DM he received was un-targered, uninspiring and went in the bin.

You don’t need meetings, you need new business. There’s a difference.

What is the art?

It’s marketing, not selling! Marketing being the creation of demand, selling being the converting of that demand. Far too much of how agencies do new business falls into the ‘selling’ camp.

Marketing 1o1:

1. Set a goal (make it a big, hairy, audacious one)
2. Define a strategy
3. Decide on the actions you are going to take (your tactics)

A clear direction is vital.

If you don’t know what you want to achieve, how can you decide how to get there?
If your customers don’t know what you stand for, how will they decide if you are right for them?

Knowing what makes you not necessarily different but definitely better is absolutely crucial to increasing the amount of high-value new business you can win (and decreasing the amount of effort and time it takes you to find and win it). If you know what you do (and more importantly what you don’t do), you can start to build a clear profile of your ideal client.

Once you have narrowly defined who your target audience is you can start to define a way of describing yourself that fits with the needs and desires of that audience; you can start to see potential ways to market yourselves to them, such as what events to attend that they will be at and the type of blog posts to write that they would want to read. For many of my clients, we design our own events around their core expertise.

If you have a clearly defined value proposition, you have the makings of what I call “The Internal Agency Brief”. This is a brief that the whole agency works together to respond to, it states who you are targeting, what the objectives of the brief are and the brand personality & expertise you need to bring to life. The brief is put together in response to an audit that I conduct for my clients consisting of internal and external interviews based upon key questions. These interviews ensure all stakeholders contribute to an articulation of the agency’s brand proposition. After all, new business is a culture. The more people behind the cause the better.

Once the tactics are brainstormed and agreed in response to the brief I work with my clients to manage the plan to ensure momentum continues. I proactively make the connections needed to get where they want go. Who those are depends on the goal!

Follow me on @KarlaHuntFarm and @theartofnewbiz for information on future events.

Join the conversation by joining The Art of New Business group on LinkedIn.
 

The Art of New Business

When I first met Sarah Cheal (cofounder of The Art of New Business), we realised that we were both obsessed by one question: “Why does new business still work the same way it did 30 years ago?”. Having started blogging about new business at the beginning of 2011 I knew we weren’t the only ones asking this question. Around the world today thought-leaders on the topic of new business are also asking this very same question; Blair Enns, writer of “Win Without Pitching”, David Wethey, Chairman of Agency Assessments International and pioneer of Mutual Decision™ and Tim Williams, cofounder of Ignition Group and author of “Take A Stand For Your Brand: Building a Great Agency Brand from the Inside Out” are experts who are all contributing to the discussion in meaningful ways.

 The Art of New Business is a series of events in London and Manchester that aim to facilitate a discussion on ‘a better way’ because new business is a lot harder than it used to be:

• There are more agencies
• Agencies perceive and pursue the same opportunities
• Agencies describe themselves the same way
• Agencies promote themselves the same way
• Agencies offer the same product

I’ve worked in new business since 2004 (at agencies and a leading new business consultancy), I know that the job of winning new business ain’t always a walk in the park (to say the least). As the saying goes, “It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it”. Not only do new business people often work in silo from the rest of the organisation but, more often than not, the people who manage them have never worked in new business themselves and often struggle with accepting some of the everyday facts of the specialism, facts like it takes on average 9-18 months to convert a client from cold and that while relationships count for a lot they are by no means a guarantee of work.

I’m not saying it’s all the MD’s fault, new business agencies and some freelancers have a lot to answer for too. For the last ten years agency founders have been sold up the river by ‘consultants’ who promise meetings in return for large sums of cash (one new business consultancy I know of currently charges over £4,000 a month for their services). You might ask where the problem is – we need meetings! My answer is no, you don’t need meetings, you need new business – and herein lies the problem. What agencies need and what they are subsequently sold isn’t always the same thing.

New Biz Directors may be painfully aware of these recurring scenarios: spend two days creating a credentials documents to send to people who “may be interested in your services at some point”, or present an hour-long introductory meeting with someone who may or may not be a decision-maker (but most likely isn’t) or may or may not have a project to outsource (but most likely doesn’t). Kevin Duncan, a mentor of mine and another expert on the topic once said to me, “No one ever asks how many meetings you had in order to secure a million pound piece of business”. Kevin makes the point here that new business effort focused on activity vs. outcome isn’t a strategy at all, it’s a headache.

You need new business, not meetings. Yes, at some point you need to meet the people you’re going to work for however (and for some of you this may come as somewhat of a revelation), your first meeting doesn’t need to be a credentials meeting. If you’re doing new business well your prospective client should only need to meet you for one reason: to see if you get on as people. They’ll be meeting you because they’re almost certain you could handle their business. They already know what you’ve done and what you could do for them, at this stage your job is to reaffirm those beliefs.

If you are positioned to attract the right clients for your business (and put off the wrong clients – what I call “Marmite agency propositions”), do good award-winning work, have a website with clear case studies and that is well optimised for search, maintain a positive reputation (on and offline) and create content that brings your expertise and brand personality to life in a creative, intelligent way, you’ll start to see some real growth.

Sound like hard work? It is.

Your agency is your most important client. It needs a CMO that can manage the strategy and implementation necessary to win new customers. This for me is the foundations of ‘a better way’, a realisation from the industry that great new business people need to be embraced as marketeers whose job is both strategic and delivery focused.

Do I still make cold calls? Absolutely. But only as part of an integrated new business strategy.

I passionately believe that new business is an art, not a numbers game. What that means is that I believe in a strategic approach over a scattergun one.

I’d love to know your thoughts on the topic!

In two weeks time I’ll be posting a blog called “The Art of New Business”, a post that outlines what a strategic approach actually is. If you would like to receive this ASAP email me at karla@hunterandfarmer.com.

David Wethey believes “better pipers get to call the tune”.

David Wethey is Chairman of Agency Assessments, an agency search and relationship consultancy in the UK. David will be a panelist at our upcoming event called The Art of New Business on October 10th. Here he shares his thoughts on the pitch process, in particular, why he feels it needs to change. 

Anyone observing the agency/client relationship over the past few years (especially long term residents of the global jungle like me) would have to be struck by three phenomena – none of them particularly encouraging:

1. The balance of the relationship has become skewed to a master/servant level never seen in the last 40 years with, I believe, client respect for agency expertise at an all time low
2. The pitch circus has become nearly as important in terms of agency focus as the day job of handling clients – and the defining criterion in most pitches is now subjective reaction to the speculative creative work developed by candidate agencies
3. Agency scope of work has become largely commoditised, as increasingly powerful procurement departments have taken control of fee negotiations.

I have been a client-side pitch consultant for many years, watching clients demand, and agencies offer more and more free creative. I now strongly feel that pitches should be faster, less expensive, involve fewer agencies, and be based on proven expertise, fit, strategy and affordability, rather than on which agency can come up with the most convincing free ideas. Giving away creativity is not just a bad idea for agencies. It also makes it less likely that clients will choose the best agency for them – ie the one that ticks all their boxes. We have devised a proprietary and much better-balanced new system of running pitches called Mutual Decision™. The name recognises that an agency’s decision to negotiate with and take on a new client is just as important as the client’s to choose a new agency

We also need to do something fundamental about the commercial basis of the relationship.

I think it is now clear that the industry took a huge leap into alien territory when it moved from commission to fee in the 1980s. The commission system had many faults – not least the fact that the commercial relationship was effectively between media owner and agency, not agency and client. Commission also didn’t measure input cost and effort. What commission did, however, was act a pretty effective performance kicker. The better the brand did, the more the client tended to spend on media – so the agency benefited too.

But the input-based people/hours fee remuneration method – purloined from the creativity-free zone inhabited by solicitors and accountants – is the superglue that threatens to stick the communications industry to the floor of commoditisation. Before long, ads and ideas will be traded on some commodities exchange alongside wool and base metals.

Of course clients call the shots. The brands are theirs, and it’s their money. But there are agencies that have earned the right to premium fees by dint of a superior track record in creativity and effectiveness. Better pipers can call the tune, for the excellent reason that they regularly outperform their less talented rivals. Winning service providers – from film directors to kitchen designers – are generally selected on their record, and that enables them to charge more.

So why does our industry give crackerjack, award-winning agencies two or three weeks to prove they are creative? Worse, why do we expect them to work for the same money as their mediocre competitors? A more civilised and rational pitch system will produce more productive and long-lasting partnerships. Within these relationships there needs to be a compensation regime that fully reflects outputs and deliverables, but also recognises quality, added value and results.

Follow @davidwethey

Want the opportunity to meet David and ask him questions? David will be a panelist at The Art of New Business, our event that will be held in London on October 10th 2012. Sign up to attend here. You can also follow @theartofnewbiz and join our Linkedin group.  

It’s a question I’m increasingly being asked, so I thought I’d share my point of view on this blog.  I’m not an expert (and you shouldn’t trust anyone who says they are), but when a social network beats big names like Linkedin and Google+ in Hitwise’s top list of social networks (December 2011) any business would be a fool not to ask “Can I use it for my marketing?”

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest differs from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google+ in one main way: it’s image-led.  Using a visual emphasis, Pintrest is focused on the concept of a person’s (or a company’s) lifestyle, enabling you to share your interests and preferences with others and discover those of like-minded people.

As Pinterest puts it, this is a social network meant to connect everyone in the world through the things “they find interesting”.

It is looked down on to use Pinterest as nothing more than a self-promotion tool, therefore B2B businesses need make Pinterest part of their inbound marketing strategy, posting images and video on the network that are both useful and relevant.

Why Pinterest matters

Differentiation: The B2B marketplace is over-saturated with businesses offering similar products and services at similar prices. Pinterest can be used to communicate what makes your company unique.

Awareness: Pinterest offers a range of activities you can initiate to market your company to a new audience. The goal is to build brand recognition, drive traffic to your website and be successful at converting new visits to leads.

Where to start?

Conduct a brand review:

• What is the personality of your business?
• What is its purpose (above and beyond making money and winning awards)?
• What values do you hold dear?
• What is your core area of expertise? Do you specialise in a sector or have an in-depth understanding of a territory or age-group?

Sign-up!

• Create your profile and link it to your social channels
• Add the “pin-it” button to your website
• Put someone within your company in charge of Pinterest
• Measure impact

Having established your company’s difference through the brand review, magnify these differences by creating, commenting, sharing, liking and re-pinning on Pintrest:

• If you’re a business that’s passionate about sustainability, you might like to have an ethical packaging board
• If you’re a design agency specialising in luxury, why not create a range of boards that showcase trends in these areas, or interesting up and coming designers or materials?
• Use Pinterest to promote your company as an industry thought-leader; create highly visual covers for your blog posts, ebooks and white papers in order to draw attention to your content.
• Hold a contest (consult Pinterest’s terms of use)

My Pinterest is a mix of who I am and what I do. Give it a go!

“Chemistry and trust is more than presenting a solution and then holding your hand out to get something back”

Matt Bird is CEO of Make It* Happen. He is an expert in the art and science of relationships and how they drive and determine life happiness, social impact and business success. Make It* Happen creates value for people and organisations by helping them collect, keep and grow relationships in order to achieve even greater success.  

Over the years Matt has met with a number of successful business people in which he identified a common factor: they all have around them a web of trusted relationships.  Matt decided to create a social science called “Relationology” that explained not only how to achieve success in business relationships but also success in life.

Matt believes that some people are born skilled at making lasting, mutually beneficial relationships; he also believes that those not as naturally adept are able to learn about and improve upon their relationship-building technique, and that’s the audience Relationology is focused on.  Relationology is an approach to help people who are ok at building relationships become great at it.

Matt’s three steps of Relationology:

1. Collecting

Matt calls those people who are excellent at “collecting” relationships “multi-relators”. Essentially, they are people with big address books.

2. Keeping

Matt believes people are too quick to give up on building relationships e.g. if they don’t hear back they assume that person isn’t interested in them or their business and they let the relationship go cold and lose the opportunity to build on a relationship.

Intentionality and following through is profoundly important.

3. Growing

This stage is all about developing relationships.

“Chemistry and trust is more than presenting a solution and then holding your hand out to get something back – tit for tat as it were. You need to be genuinely interested in them as a person”.

So how is all this relevant to agencies?

Listening to Matt, I was reminded of some key problems in how agencies approach new business:

• Most agencies only ever think about developing relationships at the point when they need more business

• Most business development people don’t do enough follow-up; it can take many calls and emails to get noticed/prove your genuine interest

• Business development people are not allowed the time to build “non-transactional relationships”; much of the focus of their time is to push non-transactional relationships into the “client” category

• Many fantastic ideas die a quick death because agency management are only interested in the ROI and not open to the collection of relationships as a measurable

Essentially, most approaches to generating relationships are far too short-term in nature.  By following Matt’s three stages of collecting, keeping and growing we accept that there is no fast track to a meaningful relationship. A business development strategy that segments current and desired audiences in this way would be very interesting as the strategy and tactics would be different dependant on the stage.

Follow @relationology or read more about Matt and his approach at www.relationology.co.uk.

Matt Bird will be speaking at our upcoming event, The Art of New Business. To be sent information on the event once details are confirmed please sign up here. 

"Agencies should do a much better job at understanding the person in the client organisation whose skin they’re trying to get under"

Joe Clift leaves Lloyds Banking Group at the end of February after three successful years as Brand & Customer Marketing Director. Joe spent the first half of his career agency side, at Ogilvy. During his time at Lloyds Joe ran and sat through many pitches. He is an acknowledged expert in all aspects of pitch management.

I asked Joe for his five top tips on how agencies can ‘get in the door’ of clients they’re not currently working with.

1. Be famous for something specific

All good clients will know broadly know where they can go for their main agency needs, so if you are new to them and wish to stand out, you need to have a clear point of view as to what makes you different and special and why they should give you an opportunity.

2. Agencies should do a much better job at understanding the person..

No Marketing Director is the same. We all have different backgrounds, different operating styles, different preferred approaches, modes and methods of communication. Even – at its most basic – different times of the day when you’re likely to get our ear.

3. Understand the business and the brand

What’s likely to be keeping them awake, given their business and brand health? What has their main competitor just done that they might be looking at in admiration or ridiculing by the water cooler? What campaigns have they just launched? What can you find out from your industry contacts about what’s coming next?

Use all those “scraps and straws” (as Jeremy Bullmore says in a different context) to build your best possible view as to how you can position your clear point of view, your point of difference, to spark some interest.

4. Be a partner…before you’re even a partner!

Most big clients have rosters, which they nurture and don’t readily disrupt. Work out how you might partner with one of their existing agencies. I call this “working the roster dynamics” and, if handled well, can work to everyone’s advantage.

5. And above all, be clear who you’re after

Clients prize their agencies, often above all else, for their communication planning and targeting skills. So why on earth don’t agencies wield the same brainpower on their new business strategies and communications? I’ve lost count of the number of approaches I’ve had which claim to be highly attuned to my needs, promising the answers to all my problems, when it’s crystal clear that I’m on the receiving end of something pretty vanilla and untargeted.

It’s critical that you understand the person, brand and business you’re targeting, so that your communications have the potential to be both relevant and adjacent. Only by meeting those two key criteria are you likely to get though my door.

Karla Morales is a new business and marketing consultant based in London. Over the last seven years she has worked with some of the most brilliant agencies in the UK to help them identify and win high-value new business. Follow KarlaHuntFarm on Twitter.

"A big part of our new business strategy today is taken up by time invested in the audience that impacts our success"

Ian Millner is Co-Founder and Joint CEO of Iris Worldwide, a marketing, advertising and experiential agency. When Iris first started out the founders didn’t anticipate growing larger than their team of 30, 12 years on and they are a workforce of 1000 with offices from London to Singapore.

I was keen to interview Millner, he is one of a handful of CEOs in the agency space that started their career in new business, studying what he calls the “dark arts” for a couple of years before co-founding Iris.

To what do you attribute Iris’ growth?

We have always embraced change rather than letting ourselves be intimidated by it.  Every time we’ve had the opportunity to transform or change we have.  Obviously sometimes those things haven’t come off and it’s cost us money, but when I look over the last twelve years I realise a great many more ideas have come off than didn’t and that’s why we are where we are.

How has the discipline of new business changed since the agency opened its doors?

Today we need to have a multidimensional view of how we are attractive to the things that create value for our business: what the intermediaries do and say and think; what the press and talent community say about us; what printers, photographers, recruiters are saying about Iris.  Our influence is a barometer of our ability to be successful.  A big part of our new business strategy today is taken up by time invested in the audience that impacts our success.

The bottom line in new business is that no matter how big you are, or how cool you are, or how famous you are, most clients won’t have heard of you.  Part of the problem in new business is that the dominant view is that it’s all process, a numbers game: “knock on enough doors” blah blah.  It isn’t a sales process – it’s a listening game.

Do you take a strategic approach towards new business?

We have a model at Iris called “helping people buy“, it’s a simple framework that says between any customer and any purchase there are a set of steps someone needs to go through to make a decision – steps we need to preempt or overcome.  If we are able to overcome these specific barriers we will be in a good position to be bought.  This is the strategy and against that we do all the things that agencies do: direct mail, cold calling, PR, proactive ideas, events, IP building – all of which is focused on building momentum about Iris and what we stand for.

How do you differentiate yourselves from other agencies?

We have always wanted to be the agency of choice, opposed to the agency of record. “Ordinary is the enemy” is a personality statement that we use.  It is a way for people to understand that we’re a certain type of company.  We have a challenge that is typical for most agencies in that our positioning doesn’t say a clear benefit, we don’t just work in one specific discipline.  Our diversity is our USP but our challenge is that diversity lacks credibility from a client’s perspective.  The marketplace is oversaturated with agencies claiming meaningful differentiation.  Today it matters less what an agency stands for and more what it can prove.  So much of agency communication is superficial.

More and more we’re interested in advocacy and the impact that conversation has on a brand’s performance.  We believe that conversations are as influential consumer-to-consumer as they are brand-to-consumer and so we’ve just completed a global study around the value conversations create, specifically what it is and how a brand can make and manage it in different categories.

Just being different isn’t all that, it’s sort of not the point.  The client doesn’t care if you’re different, they care what you know, what you’re like and if you’re good.

How do you approach pitches?

You have to believe that you’ve been selected for a pitch list consciously.  I find myself regularly saying, “We got on the pitch list because we’re Iris, and we will do this our way“. New business is binary, you have to win.  The way our business grows is that we win something small and specialist and grow the business over time.

Do you use cold calling?

We do and it can work.  However, having done new business for much of my life, I’m far more realistic than most agency founders on how long it can take to turn a cold conversation into a piece of business, realistically you’re looking at 9 to 18 months – it can’t be your only tactic.  We wouldn’t have got to where we are today without a) being adventurous and entrepreneurial and b) taking a multidimensional view towards what it takes to find, win and grow new business.