New Business Intel

» How to Build Rapport, Before Talking New Business

People do business with people they like

85% of buyers of marketing services state they're more likely to purchase from a provider with whom they've established some kind of personal chemistry. This was cited in a white paper I read recently and points to the incredible importance of building rapport with your prospects.

People prefer to do business with people they like.

Some of us are natural "people people" who thrive on meeting new people and establishing new relationships. Many of the rest of us are uncomfortable meeting people for the first time and establishing new business relationships. This post is for those who would like to improve their rapport-building abilities.

Five Steps to Connect with Your Prospects

1. Be Yourself - Be Genuine. You can't maintain a fake persona over time, so don't try to be someone you're not. Most importantly, don't try to be "salesy". Just relax and be yourself.
2. Be Sensitive to Time, But Not Pushy. You'll never get to know someone if you use your hour talking about your firm or yourself. Too many inexperienced new business people walk into a meeting, open up their Mac and walk through a PowerPoint credentials presentation. Don't. You've got to come across as a real person: if you jump right into business you may create a tense environment. Start by getting to know the other person, and then use your intuition about when to make the switch to business conversation. Wait too long and they will wonder if you're just wasting their time.
3. Balance Asking Questions with Talking/Advising. If you ask too many questions, or too personal questions too early, your conversation may feel like an interrogation. The trick is to balance smart questions with talking about yourself, providing real-life examples, or offering suggestions or advice. Your goal is a comfortable balance of the two.
4. Active Listening. Better yet, actually listen. All of us are guilty of barely listening to the person we're with, while we wait to jump in with what we want to say. The single most important thing you can do to build rapport is to listen. (Read a post about this.) When you're actively listening you have the opportunity to hear opportunities that many others will miss.

Your goal is to establish a connection with your prospect. Said another way, to find how you're similar. It could be job, family, school, home town, sports, hobbies, travel, etc. Once you have a connection or two, your opportunity is to match the services you provide with a current or potential need.

While being liked may not win you the business, it can tilt the odds in your favor.

» Great Rainmakers Sell While Serving Their Clients

Stay true to yourself

To many marketing services providers, sales is the equivalent of checking your values at the door and becoming a slimy salesman. Your mental image is along the lines of getting a prospect to part with their hard-earned cash in exchange for something they don't really want or need.

You can picture the door-to-door salesman, in your face, with a slippery voice, pushing something at you. You almost want to buy something from them just to get them to go away.

Is this new business? Does this resemble the great rainmakers you know or have read about? Would their loyal clients feel they were mislead into choosing the wrong agency? Of course not.

This slime-ball image is really far from the truth!

What do the great rainmakers do?

• They care deeply about their clients' well-being and success.
• They prepare for every prospect or client interaction.
• They ask engaging questions.
• They listen carefully for what is said, as well as what isn't.
• They identify problems.
• They solve them.

More importantly, they create possibility for their clients. They think big. They paint a picture of a future that their prospects may not think is possible - without help. Of course, the rainmaker's firm is well-positioned to provide a solution - and deliver on the promise.

Great rainmakers are also patient.

• They are tuned-in to their prospects, sensitive to potential issues, and listen carefully for when to push and when to hold back.
• They make it about when it's right for their prospect, not for the agency.

While remaining patient, they also set expectations and then deliver on them. Over and over again. This build trust, and helps to establish a relationship built on accountability.

When you think about it, is this approach all that different from really good account service?

Proactive new business is really that simple: great rainmakers establish their firm's client service paradigm before a client relationship ever begins.

This is a long way from the used-car lot, isn't it?

» Knowing What You’re Worth: Part of Your New Business Allure

The issue is timeless

Knowing what your services are worth and being able to articulate and sell the value to a prospect is a critical new business skill.

I was recently emailed the following story, which was delivered in a 1999 commencement address by Charles M. Vest, President of M.I.T.. I almost deleted it before realizing the power of the "value message" that it describes so poignantly and relevantly for all marketing services companies.

In the early years of this [the 20th] century, Charles Proteus Steinmetz was brought to General Electric's facilities in Schenectady, New York. GE had encountered a performance problem with one of their huge electrical generators and had been absolutely unable to correct it. Steinmetz, a genius in his understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, was brought in as a consultant -- not a very common occurrence in those days, as it would be now.

Steinmetz also found the problem difficult to diagnose, but for some days he closeted himself with the generator, its engineering drawings, paper and pencil. At the end of this period, he emerged, confident that he knew how to correct the problem.

After he departed, GE's engineers found a large "X" marked with chalk on the side of the generator casing. There also was a note instructing them to cut the casing open at that location and remove so many turns of wire from the stator. The generator would then function properly.

And indeed it did.

Steinmetz was asked what his fee would be. Having no idea in the world what was appropriate, he replied with the absolutely unheard of answer that his fee was $1,000 [about $200,000+ in today's dollars].

Stunned, the GE bureaucracy then required him to submit a formally itemized invoice. They soon received it. It included two items:

1. Marking chalk "X" on side of generator: $1.00
2. Knowing where to mark chalk "X": $999.00

Many clients think of value as #1 - how much time does it take to perform a task?

The challenge is being able to communicate #2. What I love about his approach is that it's hard to argue with: He had the knowledge and they didn't. End of discussion.

How might you communicate the value of a big idea in such a simple, hard-to-argue-with way?

» What’s Working in Agency PR to Generate New Business?

Guest Post

Janet Northen is Partner and EVP Director of Agency Communications at McKinney. She's been in agency PR for many years, including significant stints and Fallon and The Martin Agency. When I think of agency public relations and how to do it right, I think of Janet. She graciously accepted my invitation to write a guest post on its state of affairs.

First, I'm happy to say agency PR is working.

It’s been a tough ride for agencies large and small and while agencies might look at this area as a place to decrease resources, most agencies are keeping their agency communications pros in place. Staff size may be smaller and budgets for travel tightened but the overall need to keep your brand top of mind is just as important as it ever was.

What’s been the impact of social media?

It’s one more very powerful way to help tell your agency’s story. At McKinney, we’re always working to reinvent the conversation to build more powerful connections between people and brands. So I keep that top of mind when I do any outreach on behalf of the McKinney brand. For me, it’s a real balance of traditional and non-traditional methods. 

Let me tell you a story. I was at a recent industry event. A reporter I’ve known a long time said it must be hard for agency PR folks like me. I asked him what he meant. He said with newsrooms shrinking, there are fewer and fewer folks to pitch. I just about dropped my obligatory glass of chardonnay. What rock is he living under? 

Just that day, I had reached out to a wide array of journalists and bloggers with several different ideas for adding to the conversation. I had encouraged one or two of our agency’s bloggers to blog about same idea on our agency’s blog. I checked to make sure work was going to be uploaded to YouTube. And scheduled pending news story for our agency web site news feed. And that’s just one idea for one conversation we were hoping to join or even create.

Now one more note. For fear that that reporter or anybody else thinks I sit in my office and “check the boxes” to make sure I’ve dumped our stuff in all the social media buckets, that’s wrong thinking. I make sure there’s a strategy for using social media in the first place. Maybe it’s right. Maybe not.

Are you worried about the decline in traditional print media?

I hate to say it: I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the decline in print media. Instead, I am reading, viewing, listening and experiencing every kind of media out there to determine how McKinney can add to the conversation. Of course, if anybody, repeat anybody, ever takes my Sunday New York Times print edition away, I will tell the reporter living under that rock to move over. I’m coming in!

» New Business Cold Calling Conundrum: Research More or Make More Calls?

The answer depends...

This is the last in our three-part Q&A from our reader in Finland, who posed an often-debated question: "Should I thoroughly research my prospects and make fewer calls, or research less and make more calls?"

The answer is that it depends, which I'll explain in a minute. Most importantly, if your job is to secure meetings via cold calls, recognize that it's a numbers game. If you don't make enough calls, you won't have enough good conversations with your prospective clients, and you won't secure enough qualified meetings.

And, whatever you decide is the right amount of research after reading this post, if you end up doing too much research because it's interesting and perhaps more enjoyable than making calls, you're unlikely to be a successful prospector. And, if you've been a prospector for very long, you know Murphy's Law - do a lot of research on a company or person, and you'll end up reaching their voicemail, and perhaps never even having a conversation with them!

I think the right amount of research comes down to three things:

1. Self-Awareness & Balance
2. Agency Positioning
3. Industry Category

Self-Awareness and Balance: Know yourself and your tendencies. Do you like making cold calls, or avoiding them? Do you like researching companies and industries, or would you rather just pick up the phone and have a conversation? If you like making calls and hate research, you may need to do a bit more research. Alternatively, if you love research, you're going to need to practice serious time management, scheduling (and sticking to) a calling calendar. Keep in mind that it's very possible to do too much research. You have to balance what you need to know to ask smart questions, and the odds of actually talking to your prospect.

Agency Positioning: The amount of research you need to do will be impacted by the strength of your agency positioning. If you have a strong positioning statement you can be effective with a limited amount of research. To do this you need:

• To really know why you're a good fit for the potential company or industry you're targeting.
• A relevant message that differentiates you from your competition.
• To properly target the appropriate person in the organization.

Industry Category: Who you're targeting will also impact the amount of research you need to do.

• New industry: If you're targeting a category that's new to your agency, you're going to need to do a lot of research. You're going to need to learn to talk like them, know the acronyms, the industry-specific terminology, as well as the slang. You're going to need to determine where the industry-wide pain is, their specific company pain, and where the growth opportunities are. In this case, targeting and reaching out to a smaller list will be more effective that a large list.
• Popular industry: If you're targeting a popular industry (like consumer packaged goods), where marketers receive dozens of calls a day, you're going to need to do less research and make many more calls. You'll also likely need to target a specific need or leverage your strongest capability so you can differentiate yourself from the competition. A category like this requires a larger list - cast a wider net.

I hope this helps, and appreciate the feedback, comments, and questions. Please keep them coming, whether via the blog or email.

» What’s The Best New Business Strategy for a First Meeting?

Question and answer from a reader (#2)

Recall that I promised to answer three questions from a reader in Finland. His second question is, "What's the best strategy for a first meeting?"

I've written in the past about the importance of first building a relationship with a prospect. Recession or not, one thing hasn't changed: people buy from people they like. You have to create a relationship with your prospect in order to create the trust upon which a hiring decision is made.

Conference Calls

A new business person, who's finding herself on more conference calls than ever before, suggested the following initial-meeting "get to know you" strategy. She asks her prospect to join the call 5-10 minutes before everyone else. She then has a few minutes of "unguarded" time to casually get to know them, and ask questions like:

• How many kids do you have?
• Where did you grow up?
• Where did you go to school?
• What did you study?
• What are they doing this weekend?

None of these questions are too personal. They're all questions you ask someone you're meeting for the first time, which is the point.

She'll then pass along what she's learned to the agency principals via chat or email so they can either steer the conference call towards or touch on something she just talked about. (You'll notice that she's also gleaned details about the prospect that she can build on every time she interacts with him.)

In-Person Meetings

Another new business person emphasized the importance of research in advance of a meeting, determining:

• What are their needs?
• How can your agency truly ad value?
• What sets your agency apart - from the prospect's perspective?

Having researched and thought-through this information ahead of time, you're poised to ask good questions and act as a trusted advisor during the meeting, which is the best strategy I know of.

Lastly, a key part of having a successful first meeting is practice. Set yourself apart by never "winging it".

» As a New Business Person, Can you Close at the First Meeting?

Answers to a reader's new business question

A reader from Finland recently emailed a few questions, which I'll answer over the next few days. The first is, "When you're selling something as intangible as advertising, how can you close at the first meeting?" This is surely the hope of every ad agency new business person, so how realistic is it?

There are ways to do it. Here are two:

1. Have unique product offering not found anywhere else. It must be something that will significantly improve their sales - today - and be easy and fast to implement.
2. Find a champion in your target company. They may or may not be part of the decision making process, but definitely must know what the real need is and be able to help you develop a simple and clear strategy that hits the dead center of their "need bullseye". They must passionately believe that your firm will be successful, and be willing to risk their reputation by recommending you.

As #2 indicates, however, knowing what the issue is when you arrive for the first meeting presupposes that you've done a significant amount of pre-meeting work to understand your prospect and their business needs, not to mention nurturing internal relationships, and turning one into your champion.

To assume that you'll have a phone conversation, set a meeting, attend it, and walk away with a project is wishful thinking.

Think about it from the perspective of your prospect: how likely would you be to award a five-, six-, or seven-figure project to someone you just met? Is one meeting enough to get to know them? To trust them? To know their reputation? To risk your career on? I wouldn't. Would you?. So, why expect your prospect to react differently at your next first meeting?

Perhaps like an episode of Mythbusters, we should say that when selling marketing services, the odds of closing at the first meeting are pretty low.

» Delivering on Expectations, Communication Create Organic New Business Growth

How Justin is turning around an almost-lost client

Customer retention, let alone organic growth, usually comes down to people delivering on promises. Missed deadlines, less than acceptable quality, and poor communication all naturally lead to lost accounts.

So it was invigorating to hear how Justin, a high-potential junior account manager I meet with a few times a year, yesterday described how he's being called upon to revive an account on the verge of being lost.

Over coffee, I first asked Justin what he discovered upon receiving his new assignment last spring. He described:

• Missed deadlines. Initial deliverables that were days late. They weren't weeks late, but it was a bad precedent.
• Poor communication. The higher ups at both agency and client had no idea what was going on in the trenches.

But, as he started digging into the depths of the relationship, he found that the situation was much worse that it appeared:

• Deadlines meant nothing. Future deliverables would be weeks late and there was no sense of urgency to meet promised delivery dates.
• Communication was broken. It had completely broken down between client and agency and within the agency itself.
• Personality mismatches. Certain members of the agency's team were oil and water with their client counterparts.

As it was now October, I asked what progress he'd made in the last six months. He said that he was not yet out of the woods, but had made significant progress by focusing on four things:

1. Management involvement. He made sure that a key manager was present from both sides at key meetings.
2. Communicating reality. He made sure everyone knew the problems, and more importantly what was being done to address them. He did not put the problems on the key managers' shoulders; he let them how they were being handled and if he needed help overcoming an obstacle he asked for specific help.
3. A new team. He removed two toxic members of his team and replaced them with people who better meshed with the client.
4. Hitting deadlines. The new team was setting realistic deadlines and had hit all milestones since July.

I'd like to focus for a moment on one of the things that Justin did that is really important when communicating with your boss. It's best summarized by two words: No Surprises.

Particularly when things aren't going well, it's critically important that you don't surprise your boss with bad news. As you learn things or have a "gut feeling" that things are changing for the worse, tell your boss. You don't want to make the problem theirs, so go to their office prepared with an action plan to correct the problem.

Never let your boss discover the problem by asking you questions. If you do, he or she will likely conclude that either:

• You aren't on top of what's going on; or,
• You're trying to keep bad news from them; or,
• You're trying to fix the problem so they never know there was one.

Once your boss does find out what's going on, which they will, they'll be surprised. Surprises are almost never good. (Even good news, if it's kept hidden for very long.)

The best news that came out of my meeting with Justin was hearing him say that his client had started talking about future projects. Six months ago it was how his firm was likely to be replaced; now he has a chance to create organic growth and earn a bonus.

That's the mark of a good account manager. And as we all know, account managers like him are an essential ingredient for organic new business growth.

» Forwarding is the New New Business Networking Strategy

Cultivate your network with relevant information

It wasn't that many years ago that you'd send snail mail that included an article with a note attached that read something like this,

Saw this and thought you'd enjoy it.

The approach was simple and effective. It showed that you were thinking of a friend, colleague, prospect or client and wanted to send them something that they probably hadn't seen on their own. The recipient appreciated the thought and effort you took to stay in touch and provide them something of value.

Yesterday I read a post by Tom Davenport in Harvard Business Publishing (click here to read), which suggests that this tried-and-true networking strategy is alive and well. (It's good to know as I haven't stopped doing it.) Of greater interest to me, though, is that it's a natural addendum to my last post.

Naturally, snail mail is just about a thing of the past, so we're talking about forwarding information of value via email. The trick is do it as personally as you would were sending snail mail, which is a good way to ensure you don't cheapen the impact of your efforts.

Here are three "rules of thumb" that Tom suggests we keep in mind:

1. Only offer information of value. You need to know the people in your network well enough to know what they value, and what they don't.
2. Selectively forward information. Just as you would with snail mail, think carefully about who will benefit from the information you've found. Be sure it's relevant.
3. Never forward to a long list of people. Doing so depersonalizes the impact and networking value of your action.

There's no silver bullet here, just common sense things to keep in mind. Forwarding information has never been easier (think "retweet"). My suggestion is to remember "snail mail" before hitting "send" on an email blast.

If you didn't have the convenience of email, who would you send this information to? Let that drive your new business networking efforts.

» Social Media, a Good List, and New Business Karma

Helping your network with no expectation of ROI

One definition of karma is "actions that bring bring upon oneself inevitable results". I was intrigued by a recent conversation with Jane, a new business person, who claimed that this was the key to her success.("Jane" asked that I not use her real name.)

Jane's approach is simple: Give and expect nothing in return.

It has two well-integrated tactics:

1. Grow and manage a large network
2. Offer no-strings-attached help

Grow and Manage a Network

Jane is a networker. She uses LinkedIn and Facebook to grow and manage her large network. She combines that with The List, which she uses to identify people she wants to reach via her network, many of which she can't find on LinkedIn. She works hard to stay in touch with her contacts, connect people, and offer help.

Offer Help

Jane puts herself out there as a go-to resource for ideas on marketing (interactive is her specialty), finding a prospective marketing services partner, helping her network manage an existing agency relationship, as well as connecting her network with companies and people that may offer a service that will benefit them. She'll occasionally offer to do small projects free of charge through her firm, but this is rare. Normally, she operates independently, doing whatever she can to help her network.

The most interesting thing to me is that Jane appears to do this out of a genuine desire to help, with no expectation of getting anything in return, which is why she feels she is creating (good) new business karma.

Throughout the year she receives "blue birds" - calls out of the blue requesting her firm's help. They're almost always from "referrals and reputation" sources, which are the very best new business leads. People have heard of her through her network and call. She believes they do so because they've heard they can trust her.

Is this a strategy you can use? It's certainly not for everyone. The challenge of trying to emulate it is that it's unlikely to work if there's even a hint of disingenuousness in your approach.

What do you think? Is this a method you use or do you know someone who does it successfully?