Awards and New Business

And the 'Meh' award goes to...

Yes, it’s time to dust off your tuxedo (along with my cynicism) because award season is upon us. Worried about the cost of hiring a new business agency? Why not blow it all on the pursuit of meaningless awards instead! All you have to lose are the entry fees, all the time you’ll waste filling in forms and submitting material, and the cost of a prestige table on awards night (why not sponsor the coat room too!)

But just think of the gains: You might be one a scant 100 or so companies that night (that week) that get to put an award logo on their site that 1) is lost in the sea of other meaningless awards on EVERYONE’S sites already, and 2) brings in no additional business because NO ONE chooses an agency because it’s won an award (primarily because there are apparently no non-award winning agencies out there anyway).

ANY NEW BUSINESS?

I will vaguely tip my hat towards the value of being yet another award-winning agency when it comes to attracting staff. Ego is as ego does, and who doesn’t want to work for an award-winning company?

Whether you’re struggling to find a new business professional to look after your outgoing pursuits (there is a serious lack of them right now) or just want to attract fresh, hungry talent, perhaps the odd award logo does tip the scales for those envisioning themselves in one of those group “winners on a stage somewhere waving a plastic statue” photos.

I’ve asked before… what is it you do in your day that moves your company forward. If you can think of anything more valuable than filling in awards submissions and booking Travelodge rooms for the night after, do that instead.

Oh, and good luck (because we all know you’re still going to enter, don’t we).

The language of New Business

The language of New Business (a.k.a. the importance of manure)

When you’re about to hit ‘Publish’ on your latest website update, do me a favour - participate in a little role playing (before you reach for the PVC mask, let me explain…)

Imagine you’re a really stressed Marketing Director whose American counterpart is really pissing him off by putting the Q2 budgets under a biased magnifying lens. Can you do that for me?

Ok, great. Now imagine you’re about to receive the fifth email of the morning from a brand/digital/marketing/design agency, and try to imagine the voice he hears in his head as he reads about how you “really get under the skin of your customers” or “bring brands alive online”. What’s that you say? you “…move at pace, act with integrity and collaborate relentlessly”? Well that’s smashing.

You know how perky and impressive your statements all sounded when you read them out in your proud voice? It doesn’t sound the same at all when you simply don’t care does it? Instead it sounds like a dullard spewing tired clichés into a tin bucket.

Now that you know the recipient’s frame of mind, why not write the next email without trying to impress him. Instead, HELP him. Don’t tell him you’ve “built a frictionless design ops platform”, tell him (brace yourself) that you can help. Tell him how you’ve helped people just like him and are going to make his day better.

Don’t talk crap, just talk.

In it for the likes

“Please like and subscribe” has become the modern day deal with the devil. “If you want to look at this THING, you have to become one of the stats that helps me monetise the THING”.

With something like YouTube, there’s a very simple and obvious monetising mechanic. However, don’t think for a minute that your heartfelt post on LinkedIn about returning hostages, invaded countries (or whatever’s the topic du jour) is just you sharing your inner thoughts because you’re a profoundly deep person and simply “have” to tell your audience how affected you are.

If you were really affected by something, you’d be off work talking to your mum or best friend about it, not broadcasting to a bunch of agency people you met at a conference in 2019 (who then joined your network in case you had some work for them and/or they had some work for you).

The fact that you’ve chosen to talk about non-business matters on a business platform can come over as a tad opportunist. If you’re thinking that’s a harsh appraisal, ask yourself how many times you checked to see the number of ‘likes’ you’d racked up on your latest earnest post. Why would you care about likes unless you’d hoped to boost your profile? People don’t talk to therapists to be told they’re great story-tellers…

Anyway, I’m being overly-mean because I’m trying to make a point, but why not impress and inspire people on LinkedIn with your business prowess, not by looking deep into the lens and tearfully sharing your thoughts on a plight that barely impacts on your life.

Point made (now LIKE and SUBSCRIBE for more tips on HOW TO DO NEW BUSINESS).

New business agencies. What's it all about?

New business agencies are far less rare now than when we started. In 2004, there were probably fewer than 10 of us. There were a few good ones (us, Icebreaker, Teeming, a coupla others maybe) and few okay ones and a few dreadful ones (one was investigated by the OFT!). There were also some really great business development consultants out there doing great work. And some naff ones bashing out bad phone calls. Most of the new business agencies targeted London advertising agencies. A few of the business development agencies were headed up by former agency directors. It was all a bit....close. Then came Sponge NB.

Sponge NB

I'm Steve and I started Sponge in 2004 after deciding that my employer wasn't as good as me. To this day, I'm probably the least sociable of the new biz people. I really don't want to go and have a beer with my competitors (apparently they do that, but it's just not me). Quite quickly, we annoyed a few people (one of our biggest competitors sent a snotty email to an agency boss because they'd hired us over him. Mostly we did good work, though a few dodgy staff members did our reputation no good. Someone who shall remain nameless but will recognise himself if he's reading this was literally the laziest person I've ever encountered. We had some stars - Katie Butterworth who has gone on to be a proper marketing lady at M&S. Kim Peatling, who is now a business development director at a huge agency, reaping deserved success. Of our current team, Jon is a long-serving and effective business developer - and he's surrounded by some of the best we've ever had. But being good at this isn't always a guarantee of success. And sometimes it's not even a guarantee of courtesy.

Bad clients

Look, we've screwed up over the years. It happens. It's never been through lack of effort, endeavour or skill. Sometimes mistakes happen - or the fit is just wrong. And then there's the time I had an agency boss threaten to throw a cup of tea over me for not hitting an imagined target. Or the time the Deputy MD of a PR agency was so rude to a team member that we decided to resign the account with no notice. And then they fired us, giving full notice. So I kept quiet and we toasted their departure with a good beer. And the one who refused to pay because they didn't like one of our emails. I could go on. A recent client swore at me in our briefing day and then tried to bully us into accepting zero payment for months of work.

Good clients

We've had some true gems over the years too. Current and past clients including thehouse, Tannahill Reay, Chase & Co, Tangerine, Patter, Sparekeys, 20:20 London, Vine Insights and a long, long list of others have been supportive, patient, collaborative and helped to develop a mutual respect that made projects fly. We've helped clients win business worth £800k and others win a £300 t-shirt design job.

18 years later...

We're one of the established business development consultancies now. We're still relatively small (we got a lot bigger a few years ago and I hated it) and I like that I'm still involved in our clients' projects every day. We're more consultative than ever and we have a huge asset in Matt Broughton - our former Atari Marketing Director. He's horrible to our clients. That's not true. But he's brutally honest about their cold outreach collateral. It's like having a tamed prospect on your team. and our research capabilities are first class. We don't buy in bulk lists - we create targeted databases of qualified prospects. We're worth our fee, more than ever before. There are far more players in our game than when we started - for good and bad. Some of the dreadful ones are still hovering around. And some of the scarily good ones (Treacle, The Advertist, a few others) are breathing down our neck too.

And we still enjoy getting our teeth into an agency's value proposition, creating seller and buyer personas, writing smart emails and building outreach strategies. We can do those things (and more) for you, if you like. We'd like that.

Agency new business emails

You’re using email to approach potential new clients (aren’t you?), but knowing what to put in them is hard. So here are some simple strategies and tips to help you.

Research

If you’re going to hit someone up using email, research them and their company. Use the info you find to truly personalise the outreach. If you’re automating, make the entire first paragraph a content field and tailor it if you want to make an impact.

Use your research to guide your subject line. Everyone hates cheesy subject lines and they can spot a “Hey [firstname]!” a mile off.

Use simple tools to find the golden nuggets of inspiration. Google News is great, newsnow.co.uk is great - there are hundreds of resources to make your emails pop.

Design

You’re gonna hate this, but ditch the flashy templates. If you want to seem like you’ve just tapped out an email to someone individually, it needs to look like that. So design it by not designing it.

Opening lines

Make it about them, using that research you’ve now done. If you can’t figure out how to phrase it without sounding false, try something like “I was supposed to be doing detailed research into [COMPANYNAME] but I ended up nerding out over your new range of [NERDYPRODUCT]”. Human tone beats polished copy every time.

What to sell

Nothing. Don’t just describe services at them, as if they’re someone who really needs a creative agency but has forgotten how to use their search engine. Focus on outcomes - these are not always numerical - and you can work backwards to the process proposition. A paragraph that basically says “You know how keeping your best team members is tough but worthwhile? well we make it a lot less tough - look, here’s us doing it for [IMPRESSIVECASESTUDY]” will beat a load of patented processes any day.

Calls to action

Ask for what you want, simply and directly. “Can we have a conversation next Monday afternoon - I think it’ll be more than worth 15 minutes of your day and I’m not going to turn salesy?” will do it, as will many other simple and direct CTAs. As long as you have one and it clearly asks for a thing to happen. Never send cold outreach without telling someone what happens next.

Stages

Create follow-up emails but maintain the human tone. With any email copy, if you can read it in the style of a DFS advert or it’d slip easily into your creds PDF then it’s wrong.

There’s more. There’s always more. But the above will keep you in the right zone. Imagine the sort of email you’d respond to. Bet it’d be simple, direct, personable and I very much doubt it’d be in a gorgeous HTML template. And I bet you’d be more likely to respond if the person had done you the courtesy of doing a little research before crashing into your inbox.

Steve Fair can be found writing all sorts of business development content on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/spongenb/

Avoid fun; stay focused

No one seems to mention ‘time and motion’ studies anymore, but in “the old days” they were all the rage. Many of the processes I was forced to go through to establish just how effective I was being have (fortunately) stayed with me throughout my (depressingly long) career.

Though time and motion studies were all about the search for “the most efficient method of doing a task” they’re still worth bearing in mind now, especially if you consider keeping your business alive as “a task”.

Ask yourself this: What is the single activity that keeps your business alive?

Is it maintaining a client base that’s been unchanged in 10 years? Is it bringing in new clients because you only ever do project work so have no retainers? Is it reading blogs because they’re so darn interesting?

Chances are, a lot of the things you do every day aren’t things that really have an impact on your success; they’re just things you like to do (and you’ve become very good at making seem reasonable and legitimate so that you can keep doing them).

“Networking” is a CLASSIC way of doing something fun by making it sound legitimate, but anything that takes you away from activities that genuinely matter to your business will - of course - slow your progress.

You could argue that doing ‘fun things’ benefits your company because it’s good for your mental health - and that’s a BRILLIANT card to play - but at least be honest with yourself. Have some fun, don’t pretend it achieves anything, but then get stuck back in. At the very worst you can see the ‘real work’ as earning the brownie points required to allow yourself the next fun thing.

Now stop reading blogs and go do some real work!

Serve, don't innovate

If you went to KFC would you be impressed if they gave you some asparagus and said “we’re thinking outside the box”?

If you collected your car after a service only to find they’d replaced the engine with a cauliflower, would you tip your hat to them for their creativity and vision?

No. Stop being silly. Of course you wouldn’t. 12 hot wings please.

Before becoming excellent at new business development (#blatantkeyword) I had a few rows in my career after describing creative teams as a “service department”. They do not like that one little bit I can tell you.

To a marketing/sales manager, design is a means to an end. One (sadly) can’t just drop a blank white box into Sainsbury’s and expect people to pick it up; it has to be covered in colourful shapes or photos of nauseating children pushing sugar balls into their face holes.

I once asked for a simple glowing icon reminiscent of an on/off switch on a PC. Before I knew it a ‘mood board’ had gone up and the department disappeared for a day to ‘conceptualise’. Luckily I found a friend of a friend who knocked up exactly what I wanted in 20 minutes for £100.

Never forget (I’m talking to you now creative folks) that while people will want to hear your thoughts and ideas, they also have something specific they want, so work with them to produce the best version of THAT rather than sell them something that turns you on more than their ‘bland’ requirement does.

They also serve those who wait INSIDE the box.

Embrace expert opinions

My dad needed his flat roof rebuilt to better drain the rain. He had an idea of how that might be done (like all men who know how to makes things out of wood as long as they are essentially boxes) but called in a few local builders for estimates.

The first one suggested a solution that didn’t match dad’s expectation, so he didn’t like it.

The second one suggested the same solution as the first one, so - again - dad wasn’t a fan.

The third and fourth builders unknowingly agreed with the previous builders… and proved just as unpopular with my dad.

The fifth builder, however, offered up the solution my dad had been expecting all along, so he went with him.

It would make my story WAY better if I could now tell you that the roof had caved in, but that would be a lie (at least at the time of writing; I guess there’s still time).

I’ve written many times about the perils of ignoring expert advice. This is somehow worse. It’s asking for expert advice, but then only treating someone as a ‘true’ expert when they agree with your non-expert expectation.

If four doctors told you the blue tablet would kill you (but you like the colour blue) would you then take the blue tablet if a fifth doctor told you that he also likes the colour blue and that you’ll be fine?

To summarise. Don’t have flat roofs or take blue tablets or look for validation from experts (I’m just like the bible aren’t I).

Don't promise; just communicate

As you might imagine, I look at LOTS of agency sites every week. We’re always interested to see the good work done by creative folks, but we’re also (being honest) looking for people doing a dreadful job of representing themselves in case there’s an opportunity to swoop in and save them from themselves.

As a result of said browsing excursions, I encounter LOTS of bullshit, hyperbole, and criminally wasted space (why would someone pass on showing a killer case study to instead tell me what they were like at school, how they met CFO “Dean”, when they were established, why they chose their office building, etc. etc?)

One of the most common BS plops I encounter are statements that were no doubt written while standing proudly atop a mountain, chest out, staring heroically into the sun, but are - under brief examination - utter guff.

“Will will only take on a client if we believe we have the knowledge and expertise to help them.”

Yeah. Right. So when Client X turns up with a bag of gold you’re REALLY going to turn them away because you don’t think you have the expertise to help them?

We’re meant to read such statements and think “Gosh darn it; these guys have integrity” but all we do is snort tea out of our noses and roll out eyes (which isn’t as easy as I make it sound).

I Skyped the statement to my colleague (yeah, we’re total bitches) who replied: “It's such a bullshit line: it's easy to claim, impossible to disprove and unlikely to be true.“

Wise words mate.

So, in summary, stop saying silly things. We all see straight through you, and all those heroic statements are taking up space that could be used to impress us with your work and the outcomes attached to it.

Bring me your unicorns

There are some situations where the lowering of standards is a good thing. Let me immediately say that I can’t think of very many, but the one that led me to the opening statement was how (since COVID) people have stopped worrying about the quality of what’s behind them when making Zoom calls.

Previous to COVID, the world of video conferencing revolved around some VERY showy boardrooms (and those omni-directional microphones that look like a manta ray having a lie down in the middle of the table).

But then we got trapped in our homes and realised that the priority should be with continuing to communicate face-to-(screen-to-)face rather than never seeing another human again. Sure you get some hilarious (and famous) instances (pants-less children wandering into view while top politicians speak to the BBC come to mind) but on the whole, pitching via video to a CEO backed by pink wallpaper covered in unicorns has become commonplace.

Beware, however, the dangers of taking this relaxation of standards too far. Having a “take me as I am” attitude is great for maintaining a “Keep calm and carry on” resolve, but please don’t think that having the odd background unicorn means you can let other standards slip too.

In the same way I’d never turn up to a real-world meeting in a t-shirt, I’d similarly never turn up to a video meeting in a t-shirt that I’d won in a pub quiz (see, it’s all relative).

We’ve recently attended video calls where the attendees had not only not worried about their background, but had also not worried about remembering why we were meeting or who we were. I know none of us look as professional as we did in 2019 (when we all still shaved and used nearly all the buttons on our ironed shirts) but you can still be professional from the corner of your kids’ play room.

Just because we’re relaxed about how things look in video meetings doesn’t mean that you should be any less professional in your preparation and commitment to the meetings themselves.

Impress me with your professionalism, not your unicorns*.

*Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d be saying back in 2019.

Conversation cards

Sad truth #1: Just because you’ve been told you need to blog more doesn’t mean you have anything to say. Luckily for me, I’m a total word Womble, so as soon as I start typing, gunk just comes out of my fingers (as if I have a nail infection).

Sad truth #2: “Finger gunk” is the kind of gibberish that sometimes comes out when I let my fingers do more of the writing than my brain.

Anyway, now that I’ve appalled you with the concept of “finger gunk” (WHY do I keep saying it!) I’d like to win you back by offering up some advice. ALWAYS be on the look out for something that inspires a valid thought from you. Make a note of it, and then make a blog of it.

You are - without knowing you personally - definitely going to be looked upon by others as an expert in something. It may be by your peers, prior customers, or (even better) future customers, so don’t disappoint them by saying nothing about anything. Whether your discipline is creative, commercial, managerial (or anything else you care to put in your LinkedIn ‘expertise’ section) you should have something to say of worth at least once or twice a week (enough to maintain a healthy blog cycle anyway).

Seen an advert that annoys you? Tell us why and what you’d do differently.

Witnessed a business decision you think is ill-advised? Tell us why and how to do better.

This route to content also means that it’ll be topical rather than clichéd, and you might even be able to link out to some stuff (and get some links back - which never hurts).

Don’t use the excuse of “having nothing to say” as a reason to not blog when you know you should be.

Oh, and one more time, FINGER GUNK.

(You’re welcome).

A policy for success

I recently heard an industry colleague referring to New Business Development as ‘insurance’.

I like this; it not only sets the tone but also gets your head in the right space.

Insurance is (in most of our lives) an investment we hope never comes to bear fruit. I insure my car but I’d much rather keep it than find myself saying “thank god I insured it!” (because that would probably mean it’s wrapped around a monster truck SUV somewhere along the school run).

If it’s holiday or home insurance, you’re hoping that all you ever do is pay into it, but when it comes to new business it’s more an insurance against the phone suddenly losing its ring or emails no longer blessing your inbox with enquiries.

Healthy business is about growth and survival. New Business ‘insurance’ is an investment that promises nothing as an absolute guarantee, but will always (yes, always!) bring something to a business beyond expectations. You’ll talk to companies you’d never otherwise encounter… pick up project work that leads to retainers… ping into existence on radars you’d never appear on otherwise.

Sign up today! (Or at least give Steve a call).

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.

Dress for success

When you go to dinner with your in-laws, do you dress the way you would to wash the car on a hungover Sunday morning?

When you send a “Happy New Year” WhatsApp to your aunt, do you include a photo of your personal body parts?

When you get an email from the hospital about your appointment, is it an animating HTML showcase with various fonts, colours and a funky auto-signature?

I’m sure some people might answer the first question with a “sometimes” but I’m hoping “never” is the universal answer to question two.

I also feel very confident that question three comes with a solid “no” across the board.

The point of this jovial Q&A is to drive home the fact that genuine communications tend to be quite simple. If I receive an email that looks like it’s been written just for me, comes in a standard font, and is in and out of my brain in two or three paragraphs, I approach it as genuine and worth looking at.

The moment I open an email to see some ‘impressive’ HTML monstrosity, I know I’m being sold to or on a newsletter mail group (or its my aunt using her Etsy account to get back at me for that WhatsApp message).

Don’t be tempted to ‘impress’ cold prospects with how great you are at HTML. Give your email a chance to succeed by writing it well and having something worthwhile to say (plenty of our other blogs have advice on this).

If you REALLY want to make some progress with your emails, you’ll just have to talk to us (or write to us… just not in HTML. Please).

Stalking with confidence

Good people tend to move about in an industry. Luckily for us we have LinkedIn, which not only lets us know when a ‘connection’ changes jobs but then demands we congratulate them with the idle click of a button. How sincere.

The more important thing to consider is how you should react to any new appointments you’re privy to.

When a new Marketing Director (for example) arrives at a company, they are generally expected to sprinkle glitter over existing problems and solve a few key issues. Here’s your chance to be smart and become a part of the solution.

Congratulate them, certainly, but more importantly do some research and try to ascertain what problems that new hire might be confronted with. If you know that the company in question has recently merged, how might you help in this tumultuous time? If they’ve recently won new business, how might you help nail that new client’s needs. In a nutshell, how do you make the new hire look awesome by being his or her ‘secret sauce’.

Don’t just list your services when you say “well done”; let them know you’ve done your homework and already know what the Post-it notes on their screen say.

If you’re going to stalk, you might as well do it with purpose and style.

MailChump™

I’m telling you something you already know when I say that bulk emails are crap.

Every once in a while (if you’re lucky) you might get an email that HAS to be a bulk email but is written so well that you’re not 100% sure you’re “1 of 2,000” on this campaign.

In New Business there are two truths:

1) Email outreach is completely necessary

2) Personalisation makes a MASSIVE difference to response rates

So… how do we keep the emails flowing while still retaining personalisation but without it smelling like an obvious bulk campaign?

One simple approach is to do a little email outreach very often. So, this afternoon, open up that wish list of potential clients and pick the top ten you think are realistic targets. Now write the first prospect a genuine and honest bespoke email. Tell them why you think you can make a difference to their business. Tell them about the work you know they’ve been involved in that’s led you to them. Tell them about results you’ve achieved in their industry….

Lovely.

Now take that email and copy and paste it into the 2nd email of your daily ‘campaign’. If you’ve written the first one honestly and intelligently, you should now be able to go in and replace a few details but still come out with a personable, non-bulk-smelling email. Do this ten times and boom - you’ve got the basis of a decent email outreach that won’t jump out as lazy automated new business spew.

Do that a few times a week and you’ll find those hundreds in your database all soon get attended to.

Now you just have to convert them. Happy hunting.