At some point, every new business person has been presented with this situation: A prospect comes to us that heard great things about what our agency does from a previous client and they think we are a great fit for them. Unfortunately, we don’t think it’s a great fit. They could be too small of a partner, in an industry we don’t want to work in, or located in an inconvenient region of the world. Whatever the reason is that they aren’t a perfect fit, we are left with the problem of needing new business, having an “easy” win standing in front of us, but possibly taking on another client that could be more pain than they are worth. What do you do?

Whether or not you choose to work with the referral above, there is an easy solution to the dilemma. Actively seek new referrals and STOP WAITING for them to come to you. If you are trying to truly grow your agency this year, sitting back and waiting for those referrals will not lead to double-digit growth. We need to proactively build a referral machine that will generate conversations between our networks with companies that we actually want to work with. So how do we go about doing this?

Creating a true referral machine has a ton of different pieces that incorporate almost every piece of your agency. Your marketing, sales, account management, executive team, and social presence all need to be aligned in order to really build a scenario where referrals produce themselves naturally in an organic way. If you want a great book on referrals, I would recommend “The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch. While he has gone through many of the points above, the one that I believe is most applicable for my new business directors and easiest to institute immediately is the idea that “the most easily referred companies are naturally social”.

So what is “naturally social”? In the new business world, to me it means that you are creating content that invites conversation, telling stories via blogs or video, working with partners to deliver content that is of value, and most importantly, actively having conversations within your immediate and extended networks. The last part is where we tend to see people who fall off the most, reaching that extended network. We all work to build these LinkedIn networks, and then we find ourselves only really “liking” content or posts that come from those that we know the closest. Well, those folks are already the most likely to send us a referral if they come across one, right? What I want to push my new business directors to do is find specific companies that they want to work with and then utilize those extended (and less used) network contacts to generate a conversation. There’s a really simple process that you can take advantage of tomorrow to do this:

1. Build a list of prospect companies

2. Search each company in LinkedIn and find their most applicable contact for prospecting that is also a 2nd-degree connection.

3. Identify your shared connection with that prospect and request a referral directly to that prospect company from your shared connection.

Seems simple right? Here’s the key part – make the referral EASY for your shared connection. Too often we either a) simply don’t ask our shared connection for a referral or b) we put the onus completely on them in terms of coming up with the reason for the referral. The idea here is that we want the referral ask to be specific, time sensitive, and pre-written for our connection. This allows them to simply forward on a message with as little work as possible for them. And because your message is time sensitive in nature, we have a built-in urgency to the request for referral.

Here’s an example:

Hi (First),

I was hoping you could help me.

You’re connected to (John Smith) of (Company) and I have some (Valuable Marketing Intelligence) that I’d like to put into their hands, and it’s a bit time sensitive. 

Since you two are connected on LinkedIn, I hoped you’d be open to introducing me today with the message below?  Feel free to edit as you desire:

 -Or- 

(First Name),

It’s been a while since we last connected – hope all is well! I thought you’d be interested in this introduction to Matt Chollet (cc’d) who has competitive market intelligence on (Company) that he wanted to ensure got into your hands today – it’s time sensitive and may impact your competitive media investments in Q3.

I’ll leave it with you both from here, hoping this is a valuable connection for you.

Best,

The essence of the above sample is the fact that all your referrer has to do is hopefully copy and paste two sentences, sign their name, and move on with their day. By making it simple like this, you take away the hurdle of creating a whole new message themselves.

By building a very simple, straightforward referral plan like this, with a straightforward referral request, we can begin to proactively create referrals around prospects that we actually want to work with.  Hopefully, this pushes us from a place of hoping and wish for referrals, to actively pursuing and engaging referrals on a daily basis that can convert the types of prospects we really want to work with.

“How do I get more hours to devote to business development? I can’t give you more hours in a day, but I can give you times of the day that will make your hours more effective.”

In the new business development world, our time is everything. We are all trying to figure out how much time we need to spend prospecting vs cultivating vs RFPs. How we go about prioritizing this time and what we do very often depends on working around our schedules of executive meetings, client meetings, and putting out fires. What happens, time and time again, is that we wind up doing our prospecting and cultivating activities at odd times when we actually get a few minutes free. We have to change this mind set if we are going to really grow our agencies biz dev, by making our schedules work around the very best hours for business development.

“Time of day matters for outreach. People as a whole have certain, generally consistent behaviors across jobs and industries that typically occur at the same time each day. As business development professionals, we need to understand our prospect’s schedules and work to maximize our efficiency around them and the way they behave.”

Timing your Business Development:

6:00 – 8:00 AM – Action emails are most likely to get a response between these hours. This means that those one to one, text only emails where you are asking for a direct meeting or a call are best  to be sent first thing in the AM, before their inbox fills up.

8:00 – 9:00 AM – Get on the phone.  While most agency new business people I speak with are deathly afraid of phone follow up, the fact is that a real conversation can absolutely separate you from the barrage of stock emails that marketing decision makers receive every day. Most of these decision makers are available first thing in the morning, before the active work day gets started, and at the end of the day, once they are prepping for the next day. They are most likely to pick up the phone not only during this time, but you may be able to avoid a receptionist or two, as decision makers are typically in the office before most employees.

10:00 – Noon – I’m on LinkedIn during this window either actively prospecting, working referral networks, or posting new content to Pulse or our blog. Studies show that LinkedIn is used heavily during the day for most professionals, and the chance for content reads increases after the 10am hour.

Noon – 1:00 PM – I use this time to scan and curate content through my social channels. Some of these posts I automate ahead of time (with a free Buffer account), but since Twitter tends to be used more as a feed that is reviewed on commutes or breaks, lunchtime is a great opportunity for me to  amplify any content messaging in order to increase views and hopefully clicks/reads.

2:00 – 4:00 PM – Back to email, but this time, I’m focusing on content related emails. This means that any of my marketing automation around content are typically either being written and sent at this time, or I’m scheduling them to go out for future dates around this time. The key is, these are content related for delivering knowledge and interesting reads. Research has shown that while replies are lower around this time, opens and reads tend to go up during these hours post lunch, so take advantage of a few free minutes where their mind may be open to reading a blog post or case study.

4:00 PM and later – I’m back on the phone trying to catch prospects that are wrapping up their day and planning their next day. Most times meetings are held before this time, so with less meetings and more planning occurring, now is your time to catch a few more people on the phone rather than earlier in the day.

No matter what your personal schedule looks like, it’s important to consider how you go about timing each prospecting activity in order to maximize the effectiveness of each.  With so few hours in every day, maximizing our prospecting time is key in order to drive the number of quality conversations we can have each day.

The road to agency new business Nirvana is paved with never-ending training, consulting, workshops and self-help guides. Undoubtedly, growth through a systematic business development program often eludes agencies, but there’s no reason for agency business development professionals to go at it alone.

The reality is, like anything worth doing well, its hard. Really hard. New business is work that the vast majority of those within the professional marketing services industry didn’t sign-up for, and have no inclination to be held accountable for now, or in the future. I see it and hear about it from out of work agency new business people and frustrated agency owners every day.

The good news? It is possible for your agency to have an effective new business process in the year ahead. While it can be difficult to know what your competition is doing to be so successful, we have found that the invisible trend has increasingly been to outsource your new business.

Over the past five years, for more agencies than you’d guess, the answer to solving the business development equation has come from partnering with an outside firm for proactive prospecting. More recently, the trend has evolved to include organic client development too, once the exclusive domain of the agency account and leadership team.

Why are more agencies increasingly handing the reigns of client growth over to a third-party? It’s a daunting thought for some, but for those who’ve experimented with this model, success has come quickly. “I’ve seen agencies win more business from our involvement in their organic client development efforts this year than any other,” said Dave Currie, President of List Partners Inc. “Its often the low hanging fruit that everyone can see, though rarely is there a systematic and accountable plan to harvest it,” he continued.

What value do agencies find in outsourcing?

 

A Systematic Approach.

Agencies often find that creating a new business process from scratch is difficult. It’s usually thrown together last minute at the onset of a lost account and the strategy and tools are often lacking. Outsourcing to new business professionals, like Catapult, allow agencies to implement a systematic approach to how they win new business. Teams are able to move swiftly into market because there is a proven model of success, and the tools to back it up.

Accountability

We come across agencies every day that have multiple people working on new business, but not dedicated to it with 100% of their time. Once you have this “we all chip in approach,” when it fails, who is accountable? All? Nobody? With this outsourced model, it is very clear who is accountable for success and we can put clear objectives and goals at each stage of the process. This leads to greater transparency and understanding to who the responsibility of driving new business lies with.

A Specific Focus on New Business

Similar to our Accountability point, according to Hubspot’s Agency’s Pricing & Financial Report, 66% of agencies do not employ a full-time new business person. What does this mean? Those in-house people that are working on new business do not know where to spend their time every day. If I have learned anything during my time as a new business professional, it’s that you cannot minimize the importance of focus. Focus ensures greater success by keeping all efforts dedicated to prospecting and driving conversations with those most sought after prospects.The invisible trend of outsourcing may always remain slightly hidden due to the nature of the business, but we are seeing more inquiries than ever from agency execs that are seeing the benefits of having a systematic approach that provides accountability and focus. I’m confident we will continue to see an increase in adoption of outside resources to manage new business in 2017.

When you can win more business at a lower cost, why would you not outsource?