Let Results Speak for Themselves

In the world of creative work, your reputation hinges on your most recent achievements (unless you're still bragging about tweaking a logo's colour a decade ago). Case studies hold immense value, even if they've aged a bit. You can indulge in all the self-promotion and hyperbole you desire (rest assured, I'll be there to question every extravagant claim just for fun) but when you present me with a case study brimming with tangible results and glowing testimonials, well... I'll accept it all as genuine, providing an honest glimpse into your capabilities (and trust me, if it's all smoke and mirrors, I will track you down and make your life hell).

In a recent report published listing the "Biggest Red Flags," the absence of testimonials and case studies ranked high among the turn-offs for potential clients. This proves the point that the review of your work by someone else will always outweigh your own self-promotion.

When assessing potential clients, we swiftly bypass anything resembling an "About Us" section and head straight for factual case studies (or at least a portfolio). That's where the true essence of your abilities lies.

When we guide clients in crafting their case studies, many express hesitation due to a perceived lack of "real results" to showcase. But here's the thing - a simple testimonial holds immense value, worth its weight in gold even if you can't conjure up a grandiose "300% increase in sales."

And oh, if you do happen to be fortunate enough to boast a "300% increase in sales," please ensure it features prominently and prominently in the case study. It may seem a tad ostentatious, but showcasing potential customers a concrete commercial outcome resulting from your work is always a wise move.

So, let your case studies do the talking. Let the results speak volumes about your prowess and allow potential clients to witness the tangible impact of your expertise.

The Importance of Efficiency

In today's business landscape, the concept of "time and motion" studies may seem outdated and rarely mentioned. However, the lessons I learned from those practices during my lengthy career have proven to be invaluable. While these studies primarily aimed to identify the most efficient methods for task completion, their principles still hold relevance, especially when it comes to sustaining your business.

Take a moment to reflect on the single activity that keeps your business alive. Is it maintaining an unchanged client base for the past decade? Is it continuously acquiring new clients due to your focus on project-based work without any retainers? Or perhaps it's indulging in reading blogs because they're undeniably captivating (you’re welcome).

The truth is, many of the tasks we engage in daily may not significantly impact our success; they are simply activities we enjoy (and we’ve become experts at rationalising to justify their continuation).

"Networking" is a classic example of turning something enjoyable into a seemingly legitimate business pursuit. However, any diversion from activities that genuinely contribute to your business will inevitably hinder your progress.

One could argue that engaging in "fun" activities benefits the company by promoting mental well-being, and that's a valid point to consider. Yet, it's essential to be honest with yourself. Have fun, but don't deceive yourself into thinking that it directly advances your business objectives. Instead, view such activities as a means to earn brownie points that allow you to indulge in the next enjoyable endeavor.

Now, it's time to shift your focus from reading blogs and dive into real work. Concentrate on tasks that truly drive your business forward and make a tangible difference.

Good luck and have fun (but not too much).

New business: narcissism and SEO

To my mind there are two reasons to blog: narcissism and SEO.

As I scroll back through the tens of blog posts I’ve authored, I’m not wondering how many people have read it (I know it’s just you, mum) no, all I’m hoping is that all this unique content has bumped us up the SEO ranks. The sad truth is I write for Google. I am Google’s bitch. It is what it is.

The really galling part is that I actually take a bit of trouble over these posts. I make long lists of subjects on which I think I have something to say, and then I’ll write, re-write, edit, abandon, revisit, fine-tune, etc etc, before finally posting. I CARE. No, really. I actually do. It’s heart-breaking.

So make sure that you don’t kid yourself. It doesn’t matter to Google what you’re writing, just that you ARE writing and that it’s unique content. No one is going to use the sentence “Five Danish otters saunter through the blazing heat of Dame Jennifer Gimlet’s tree-themed fountain park” today, so I win. Go on Google. Bump me up why don’t ya - that sentence alone has got to be worth two spots up the table!

If, however, you genuinely think you’re a guru, then fill your boots. Poop your knowledge all over Google. Smear it up the face of LinkedIn. All your peers will no doubt ‘like’ your post regardless of what you say, and if they’ve got one hand free might even comment with incredibly thoughtful replies such as “nice one Dean - you’re not wrong” and “Dean, you are my God” so you will immediately be validated by people just as useless as you are.

Words, words and - dare I venture - more words.

If we’re talking about the opening paragraph on your home page then it matters. A LOT.

If, however, you’re just blogging into the void, safe in the knowledge that only the person who commissioned you to write it is reading it (morning Steve) then just get the job done. Write something you won’t be embarrassed by, but don’t spend too long on it. Google is a fickle mistress; she’ll notice you (as someone might notice a small spider on a coffin) make whatever adjustments are required to acknowledge your meagre effort, and then be done with you, discarding you like an empty Snickers bar wrapper or an exercise bike that’s become a clothes horse for the last nine years (another excellent unique sentence I think you’ll agree).

Cat. Pound coin. John Menzies. Paralegal. Barry Norman. Finger. Regina Phalange.

Do enjoy your garden.

Built by robots

There’s a PC game I play (to an almost obsessive level) called Factorio. You could argue that it’s not really a “game” in that anyone watching me play it would struggle to ascertain how much “fun” I’m having, but I genuinely love it. I could spend hours describing the game, but the key to success within the game is automation.

You start off with nothing, punching trees to gather wood to fashion into wooden tools… to then bash against rocks to make stone furnaces (fuelled by “punch wood”) to then forge stone tools, etc. etc.

After a while (about 400 hours to be exact) you’ve levelled your way up to having solar, nuclear and steam power, all feeding itself - and the rest of your production line - via beautifully-complicated systems of robot arms and conveyor belts. It’s like Sim City meets Minecraft (which I’ve just realised I could have said initially and saved us all several paragraphs).

HOWEVER (are you still here?) once you finally reach automated self-sufficiency, you find yourself missing the simplicity of how things were 400 hours ago when you were getting your hands dirty and had a solid ‘feel’ for how things were actually going. If you can zoom out far enough from your world to 1) still have it larger than your screen and 2) be so far out that you can’t see anything anymore, you might have gone a tad too far. The same can happen in business.

In New Business Development (see - I did remember why I’m here) there are SO MANY tools on offer to ‘help’ you automate your outreach campaigns it’s staggering. Automated news alerts kick-start segmented CRM systems which are linked to macros automating your auto-personalised emails, which are linked back to your CRM, which then updates your calendar… and so on, and so forth.

It’s tempting to spend 400 (ish) hours setting up such an automated masterpiece, but be aware of the perils of ‘zooming out’ so far that in any given moment you don’t actually know where you are in your campaign(s).

Many’s the time I’ve walked away from my game only to return to some snarl-up in my automated mega city. For me that involves some panicky robot building; for your company this could mean some very embarrassing and costly errors by the very macros you delighted in creating.

Remember: It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever.*

*Unless you press the STOP button.

Just say no

Training any new member of staff is challenging (especially when remote) but training new staff for new business development is particularly tough, simply because cold channel is a very unforgiving sector to specialise in. Unless you’ve previously worked in door-to-door charity sales collecting for slightly injured badgers, you probably won’t have been told “no” as much in your life as your first day in biz dev.

The temptation for any newbie is to take too soft a “win”. Someone absent-mindedly says: “sure, send me some literature” and ol’ newbie puts that down as an interested party. It’s the kind of well-meaning positivity that can only come back to bite you in the rear when a client asks for more information about this ‘promising new contact’ only to find it was really nothing worth reporting.

The simple trick is to be honest with yourself. If you have a chat and someone says, “call me in June” is that because something is happening/changing in June, or is it just a smart way for them to ensure they don’t have to deal with you for another six months?

When someone says, “send me info” feel free to say no. Say something like “I’d much rather know when is a better time to have this conversation so that our details don’t simply get lost in all the noise”. You might score a few points for being brave/honest and you might have a slightly longer conversation than if you just agreed to send over a PDF and let them hang up.

Running a dishonest new business agency would easy. You can make the most uninterested prospect sound like they’re on the cusp of buying (keep them dangling there for months). Being honest in your assessment of interest levels is a tougher line to take, but it’ll serve your business development endeavours much better.

Do what you say you do, not do what you do do. Do.

By its very definition, hyperbole is never honest. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s interesting (or worth mentioning).

If you genuinely think that the most remarkable thing about your agency is that you’re responsive, then fair doos - go ahead and remark upon it. It’s not exactly exciting (and one would like to hope that any agency worth its salt would be responsive) but if that’s the first thing you want to say about yourselves to a new prospect, then fill your boots.

You will, however, then have to ensure that you are faultless in that attribute. If you EVER aren’t the most responsive agency in the world, well… now you just look silly (we’ve even had clients who didn’t bother to turn up to a meeting we’d slaved to win them, and shrugged it off as if it were of no importance). Responsive you say? Hmm…

Would it not be MUCH better to actually be the guys that are super-responsive rather than the ones that tell people about it? Now anyone in contact with you can experience how responsive you are rather than read all about it and then hope you are. Now you can replace that sentence on your site with something more meaningful (perhaps a great testimonial or a key result achieved).

Successful new business is about making lots of small improvements to the way cold prospects see you. When you stop listing things as remarkable (that any prospect would simply expect) then you suddenly free up lots of space to say things that might move the needle.

Oh and don’t even get me started on “on budget, on time”…

Agency new business. What works?

There are so many ways to build a sales campaign for an agency. Many agency bosses don’t want to be seen as needing to sell, but once you’re past the honeymoon phase and it’s time to scale-up beyond what falls in your lap, you’re going to need to have some outreach strategy.

Cold-channel business development is, when considered in isolation, inefficient. But there are ways to make it work better. It takes discipline and you have to throw out any ideas you have about high-volume telesales campaigns or mass-email outreach. Forget transactional selling (for at least 95% of the process) and sell something that has huge relevancy to your prospect. A recent Dun & Bradstreet report showed that 67% of b2b buyers see “relevant communication” as a top influence for choosing one vendor over another.

But it’s more complicated than that. A Gartner report found that the number of people in a company buying decision has increased from 1-2, to 7-8 in a small business (up to 500 staff). Each level of decision-maker will have a different idea of what is relevant.

Luckily, it’s not just the direct outreach that can create that relevancy. Your content marketing is part of what makes you relevant. A Forrester report from a while back (2014) found that even back then, half of b2b prospects will view at least 8 content pieces during the buying process. 80% of them looked at a minimum of 5 content pieces. This is all part of the selling process and your direct outreach should dovetail nicely with the content you produce. Sadly agencies’ content is all too often the sort of thing that impresses other agencies rather than prospects.

The reason agency new business endeavours are so frustrating at times is the need to maintain relevant contact with a large number of prospects, who have rarely been profiled and segmented properly. And if you get busy, you drop new business. And if it doesn’t bring in new clients quickly, you drop new business. And that’s why it becomes cyclical. You blame everything in turn. Your proposition. Your creds. Your Business Development Manager. A new business agency. The prospects. Your website. You. Another new business agency. You might be right (about one or two of them), but the chances are that nobody has ever really explained how cold-channel outreach works. It’s literally the opposite of winning through referral. It’s very, very hard. But it can work.

I’ll finish with some insights from Hubspot – their survey of buyers said that the top things that lead to a positive sales outcome are:

-          Listening to the prospect’s needs (69%)

-          Not being pushy (61%)

-          Providing relevant information (See!) (61%)

-          Responding in a timely fashion (seriously, it’s such an easy win – and so many agencies screw this up) (51%)

We can help with all of these things. We can consult with you on your agency’s many value propositions, selling personas, positioning statements, outreach strategies, and content strategies. We can do the outreach for you. You’ll feel it move under your feet and you’ll finally be able to tick “get the new business sorted” off your to-do list. Let’s have a chat.