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How to Win New Business

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By: NMK Created on: March 19th, 2003
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Advice on the process of generating new business, from identifying leads to convincing potential clients that yours is the right company for the job.

This NMK seminar in June 2002 offered advice on the process of generating new business, from identifying leads to convincing potential clients that yours is the right company for the job.

Speakers: Dan Douglas, Business Development Director, de-construct; Jennie Soffe, New Business & Marketing Director, Universal McCann; Patrick Owen-Browne, Commercial Director, Arnold Interactive; Karen Dugham-Diggins, PR Consultant, KDD; Jason Wilburn, Senior Consultant, Deloitte & Touche; Jamie Galloway, COI.

Dan Douglas of De-Construct began by focusing on the subject of new business generation from a small agency’s perspective. For small and medium-sized agencies, new business is likely to come from one of the following sources:

  1. Same clients, same products and services.
  2. Same clients, new products and services.
  3. New clients, same products and services.
  4. New clients, new products and services.
Dan stressed that it is easier to get repeat business from existing client relationships than new business from new relationships: 60% of de-construct’s business comes from existing clients or referrals. Good account management is the key to winning repeat business, but if you want your business to grow, it will be necessary to build new relationships as well as mining existing ones.

New business leads can come from anywhere, so it is vital to build and maintain your networks of contacts, and constantly be on the lookout for new opportunities. Getting onto clients’ pitch lists can be difficult if your company is not well known, and word of mouth and referrals often play a vital role in generating invitations to pitch, as does an effective PR strategy that publicises your existing work to a wider audience.

Regarded by some as an unpleasant but necessary part of the new business process, Dan emphasised the positive aspects of pitching: it helps you refine and focus your products, keeps you competitive, and is emotionally rewarding when you win. On the downside, he conceded that preparing a pitch consumes a lot of time and resources, while losing can be demoralising – particularly as your reasons for losing may have nothing to do with the quality of your offer. Dan’s advice is to reduce the risk to your company by evaluating all pitch opportunities carefully before deciding to proceed, weighing up your odds of getting work against the resources you’ll spend trying to win it. Finally, Dan recommended prioritising the work you are most passionate about doing: potential clients will always be able to tell if you don’t really want the job.

Referring to the methods of her larger, more corporate employer, Jennie Soffe of Universal McCann described how developing a more strategic, process-driven approach can help to make new business development more efficient. Cultivating new prospects can be a long-haul process, and it is vital to have the right machinery in place in order to research, record and track potential new clients.

A well-maintained contacts database can be invaluable, but is nothing without relevant research and intelligence on your target. While a friendly call is seldom enough to persuade a company to change its website developer, a friendly call that happens to coincide with that company’s annual review of its online strategy could be another matter. Sources of such information include former clients who have changed jobs, and opinion formers such as journalists and media owners.

Preparing tenders requires a specialised skill-set that differs to lead generation and other aspects of business development. Building libraries of standard material, such as company CVs, will save you time when you come to write tenders and give you more time to concentrate on the unique elements of each proposal. Once you’ve decided to tender for a job, make sure you provide all of the information requested, and stick to the specified structure and format. If this seems like an obvious point, failing to follow it is a sure-fire way of having your tender rejected. Jenny also advised against trying to false-fit case studies to suggest experience or capabilities you don’t have, as such chicanery is invariably spotted. Better to concentrate on the client’s needs than talk about yourself: they want to know about what they can’t do themselves, what they daren’t say about their own company, and what they’re too close to their business to see for themselves. Finally, anything that makes the individuals commissioning your services look good is guaranteed to go down well.

No true business development professional ever misses an opportunity to sell their services, according to Patrick Owen-Browne of Arnold Interactive. However, developing a viable sales and marketing strategy for your company is the key to getting results. It’s vital to know what kind of clients you are targeting, what sector your company plans to cater for, and how it’s going to get there.

Cold calling is an extremely inefficient way of drumming up business, but ‘warm calling’, in which your unsolicited approach is backed up by some decent research and knowledge about your target’s company, can be more effective. Follow leads gained from old friends and colleagues, networking events and conferences, and the press.

On the subject of tenders, Patrick expressed his exasperation with a protracted process that sometimes ends with clients backing out at the last minute. This cannot always be avoided, but the pain of producing a tender can be reduced by ensuring that the entire project team is in agreement about the pitching strategy from the very start of the process, reducing the need for last-minute rewrites.

According to Patrick, getting to know potential clients can be “a bit like going on a first date”. Listen to what they say, remember it, feedback something relevant and “you might get a second date”. The trick is to be open and transparent at all times, as many potential clients are scared and intimidated by digital media, and want you to make them feel at ease.

When not following leads or responding to invitations to tender, what can be done to increase the chances of new clients approaching you? One answer is to develop a PR strategy to raise your company’s profile, according to Karen Dugham-Diggins of KDD. Regular appearances in the new media press will not only help you to earn a place on companies’ pitch lists, but it will keep your existing clients happy too – especially if they receive positive press coverage at no cost to themselves.

It’s important to set realistic targets about what you want to achieve in terms of PR. Consultants who promise you screeds of coverage in several publications a week are being disingenuous, for column inches can rarely be guaranteed, and stories will be spiked if the news agenda changes. Some companies bombard publications with press released every week in the hope of getting a mention, but this is pointless unless you have something relevant to contribute. KDD’s advice is to ‘drip feed – not force feed’, and to send out press releases of some substance at regular intervals.

To make the right impression your message has to be consistent, and it is often a good idea to appoint a single company spokesperson. The trade press will accept articles and comment pieces written by industry practitioners, but only if they are appropriate: don’t badmouth [SP] your competitors, and if you must rant at least make sure there is a salient conclusion to your diatribe.

If handling your company’s press relations in-house, try to build relationships with journalists on the publications you are targeting. Taking writers out to lunch is not necessarily the best way of doing this; better to make hard-pressed journalists’ jobs easier by providing them with timely information, helping them to understand your industry – and by always beating your deadlines.

Another strategy for seeking new business is to do so in partnership with other companies. Partnering is advantageous when it enables companies with complementary skill-sets to pitch for projects they could not win on their own. This is the strategy adopted by the digital media group of Deloitte & Touche, which has expertise in consultancy and project management, and a roster of outside developers and agencies to whom implementation is sub-contracted on a job-by-job basis. Jason Wilburn of Deloitte & Touche discussed the pros and cons of three models of partnering: extending your skills range, sub-contracting and preferred supplier alliances.

Extending your skills range involves working with a network of partners from complementary disciplines, helping you to provide more cost-effective solutions than full-service agencies, and to pool leads and opportunities for new work. Jason’s advice to those considering this approach is to find partners of a similar size and with a similar corporate culture, and develop a joint framework combining your methodologies. Present a united front to your clients, and define your areas of responsibility, hours and costs in advance to prevent a ‘digital land grab’ by one of your partners mid-project. In such relationships, quality is assured through good project management across both companies, so sufficient resources must be dedicated to this task.

As a sub-contractor, you will be providing development resources to a partner (generally a large consultancy or agency) that will be leading the project and managing the relationship with the client, with your company in a subordinate role. It is a model that provides opportunities for smaller companies to get involved in large prestigious jobs, and is likely to lead to future work as a sub-contractor if the relationship is a success. This model appeals to larger clients, who will feel they are benefiting from both the stability and reliability of a larger agency and the innovative qualities of a smaller developer. Ensuring that main client is aware of your specialised expertise may result in them coming to you directly for future work, although you must be careful not to step on your partner’s toes and risk being dropped from their approved supplier list. (Remember, your partner is also your client, and should be treated as such.)

On the downside, you will have to work to your partner’s methodologies, they will charge inflated day rates for your work (but pay you the standard rate), and you might have to endure long delays before receiving payment for your work. Jason’s advice was to include penalty clauses for late payment in your contract, so that if you do have to wait for payment you will at least get paid more.

A third partnership option that could bring in new business is to enter into a preferred supplier alliance implementing products for a technology vendor. Such arrangements can bring in regular work with little pre-sales activity, tend to be low risk, and allow you to build a relationship with a product partner for future bids. Before going down this route, make sure that any up-front fees requested by the vendor will lead to definite work, and beware of hidden training costs.

So how will all your efforts to win new business be perceived by those on the receiving end – your potential clients? Giving the client’s perspective, Jamie Galloway described his experiences at COI Communication, the state agency responsible for commissioning marketing and communications across all Government departments. COI Invitations to Tender (ITT) worth more than £50,000 are posted on the European Journal (OJEC), and when pitching for such contracts it is necessary to follow the submission guidelines to the letter. Answer all questions, provide the details requested, return it on time, be prepared to answer further questions, and expect to wait for an answer, as many COI jobs are massively oversubscribed.

If you are applying to be included on a Government roster, don’t expect work to follow automatically should your application be successful; you will still need to pitch for individual jobs, and will be judged on the strength of your pitch or most recent performance, and factors such as your ability to work with a range of partners.

Jamie summed up his presentation with the following guidelines for pitching for work:

Do

Don’t What makes an agency stand out: This event was presented in association with Business Link for London (www.bl4london.com)

 For more information about the original event click here.

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