(Exclusive excerpts prior to January 20 Publication, Preorder here)
There are 17,000 agencies in the U.S.
Or maybe 37,000. It depends on the source. Let’s put it this way: there are a lot of agencies! And winning new business is tough.
With so many options available, prospects often feel overwhelmed and unsure of where to turn. Meanwhile, agencies are scrambling to differentiate themselves and emerge as the obvious choice. After all, every agency needs new business to thrive. But in a sea of thousands of firms offering help, how do you get your agency front and center of that consideration?
Amid all of this competition, agencies often face three challenges that weaken their success rate:
- Agencies aren’t ready to be found.
- Agencies don’t know how to be found.
- Agencies don’t effectively pitch once they are found.
Agencies that know how to address each of these challenges land more new business. Let’s talk about these challenges.
Challenge 1: Be Ready to Be Found
We’ve frequently heard agencies say, “If we can just get in the room, we’ll prove we’re the best agency for the job.”
So, how do you get in the room? You can’t showcase your strength if you’re not even invited to the party. Preparing for that opportunity means investing in your agency first. Several critical readiness steps are essential for growth — steps you overlook at your own risk.
The first step in this journey is to define your agency’s positioning, making it crystal clear what kind of agency you are and why you stand out. This involves two key elements: understanding your agency’s identity (your frame of reference) and articulating your distinctiveness – what makes your shop unique and appealing from a prospect’s perspective.
The second step is to make sure your website is prospect-friendly, so when a prospect does discover you, they immediately see you as a potential partner. A prospect-friendly website allows visitors to find the information they’re looking for quickly and effortlessly.
Of course, all of this requires time and resources — and many agencies operate on razor-thin margins with lean teams.
Challenge 2: Know How to Be Found
You might be the perfect agency for a prospect in need, but that opportunity vanishes if they can’t find you. That’s why it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of the marketer’s customer journey for agency services.
Marketers don’t think about agencies until they must. They are focused on their business. And since they don’t think about agencies very often, most marketers also have very low unaided awareness of specific agencies. Even with agencies they may have heard of, their knowledge is limited. When we interview clients during an agency search process, we typically ask which agencies they would like us to consider. They can rarely name more than one or two agencies. Often, they will say things like “that Nike agency” or “the agency that did the Apple work.”
Prospects often have little awareness of where to even begin searching for the right agency. Most clients don’t pore over Ad Age, Adweek, or Campaign from cover to cover. They might subscribe, but they don’t engage with these publications with the same frequency or depth as agency professionals do.
If they reach out to their personal networks, they’ll find little help. Clients simply don’t know where to begin, so they behave much like any B2B buyer these days. They do much of their research online, and most of it before an agency even knows that the client or prospect is looking for help.
What happens behind the scenes when a marketer needs to find a new agency? Typically, a middle manager is assigned the task of researching agencies and compiling a shortlist of potential candidates. Often, they start with a simple web search. A Google search for “advertising agencies” can return millions of results.
Or they might turn to an AI tool to research the industry. In a market flooded with thousands of agencies, there’s a good chance your agency won’t even surface in the results of a search or AI prompt. Clearly, the odds are against any one agency.
But they don’t have to be – there are steps agencies can take that will enhance their odds of being found when the right prospect is looking.
The key is to develop and execute a marketing plan that elevates your agency’s brand.
By making strategic and focused choices, you can balance limited resources with the most impactful marketing efforts, whether that’s submitting award applications, creating compelling content, engaging in PR, participating in trade shows, or securing speaking engagements.
Marketing your agency is a critical foundation for your agency’s success!
Challenge 3: Pitch Well Once You’re Found
“Pitching” can take on many forms and meanings.
For our purposes, we’re not focused simply on competitive opportunities. Rather, we are referring to any conversation you have as a representative of your agency that can yield new business. A conversation over coffee, an introduction at a conference, a call about something else that leads to a question about your agency. These all have the potential to lead to new business, so they can certainly be “pitches.”
We’ve observed thousands of formal and informal pitches, and the unfortunate truth is that most of them end up looking the same — to us and to our clients.
These pitches often fail to excite or inspire the client or prospect. Someone wins simply because a decision has to be made — but it’s frequently not the right agency, and sometimes not even the best one.
And most of the agencies that make it to a presentation probably can do the work. They have the capability; that’s how they got in the room. But it’s a shame to see a good agency — the agency that has the strongest skillset to meet the prospect’s specific needs — lose the prospect by not being properly prepared for or delivering a customer-centric pitch. And, unfortunately, there’s little opportunity for an agency to learn what they’ve done wrong because they rarely, if ever, get a chance to receive any concrete, detailed feedback.
After sitting through thousands of pitches, we have observed three main missteps that account for most pitch failures:
- The agency is too focused on themselves.
When the agency focuses on themselves rather than the prospect, everyone loses.
We’ve often witnessed agencies spend the first 20 minutes of a pitch talking about themselves, and then say, “Enough about us.” Our thought is generally, “It was enough about you 20 minutes ago.” Remember, you wouldn’t be in the room if the prospect didn’t already know enough about you to carve out valuable time for a presentation.
And let’s be clear: these meetings aren’t about you in the first place, they’re about the client’s business. You set your agency apart by focusing on the client and demonstrating how you can help address their challenges, not by talking endlessly about your agency.
Always remember: You bond with a prospect over their problem, not your solution
“Strategy is the art of deciding what not to do. It’s easy to throw a lot of ideas and tactics around. What’s hard is winnowing them down to only what will be most effective in addressing a specific business challenge. The most prospect-centric pitches don’t just tell your story — they tell the prospect’s story, better than they’ve heard it before.”
– Rob Davis, Novus Media
- The agency misses the mark by failing to address the prospect’s key business issues.
Agencies often fail to focus on the key business issues of the prospect.
Your incredible pitch and presentation are pointless if they don’t tackle the prospect’s real challenges. Remember, no one is looking to buy advertising, PR, media, or digital marketing. What they’re really after is help solving their business problems. A strong focus on the prospect’s business challenges helps convey thoughtfulness, expertise, and showcases that you understand their business. You “get” them.
Agency selection is an important considered purchase for a client. It is a risky decision. Clients can lose their jobs for hiring the wrong agency. Give them confidence that they are making a sound decision by showcasing how well you understand their challenges.
“A winning pitch begins not with what we want to say, but with what the prospect really needs to win in the marketplace. The pitch solves a problem the prospect already feels.”
– Jason Parks, Chief Growth Officer, BarkleyOKRP
3. The agency jumps straight to tactics instead of starting with strategy.
Many agencies focus on tactics without having a strong strategy in place. This approach rarely works well. When an agency leads with tactics, there is no logic to how to evaluate the tactics, nor whether they should work or not. Basically, the agency is asking the client to decide whether they like something without providing the criteria for evaluation.
The strategy is the benchmark for determining whether the tactics are effective. Strategy is the glue that connects the dots between the client’s business challenge and your proposed solutions. It weaves a seamless narrative and provides the rationale for why your tactics will succeed.
“We won an account recently because the client said we understood his business and what his needs were. He appreciated our deep understanding of the industry and what he was trying to accomplish. He said to me that they finally felt like they were heard, and they felt like they weren’t being sold to. They really felt like we understood them.”
– Nicole Mahoney, CEO, Travel Alliance Partnership
How to Win More Business
The world is evolving rapidly, and the agency landscape is in a perpetual state of disruption, impacting buyers, the purchasing process, and the competitive field. These challenges often result in agencies missing out on opportunities to win more than their fair share of pitches and secure new business. It doesn’t have to be that way!
It’s these challenges that led Robin Boehler and me to write It’s Not About You: Winning New Business in a Crowded Agency World. We cover:
- Distinctively positioning your agency
- Writing compelling case studies
- Making your website prospect friendly
- Steps to take when a pitch opportunity arises
- Building a pitch plan and calendar
- Reengineering an RFP
- Standing out during Q&A sessions
- Identifying key business issues
- Crafting a winning written proposal
- Running a prospect-friendly tissue session
- Delivering effective presentations
- Rehearsing to win
- Discussing financials
- Conducting successful pitch meetings or agency visits
Preorder now on Amazon here! The book ships on January 20.
Robin Boehler, founder and partner at Mercer Island Group, has led consulting teams for clients across various sectors, including Discover Financial Services, Viator, Sevrpro, Ulta Beauty, UScellular, Seabourn, Kaiser Permanente, Stop & Shop, Amazon, Giant Food, and Brooks Running. She is an industry leader, captivating speaker, and strategist often solicited to speak on marketing services and agency topics.
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
Mercer Island Group helps marketers and agencies succeed. Company leadership is as much at home with marketers and their C-Suites as in an agency’s boardroom. With marketers, Mercer Island Group is a top 5 agency search consultancy covering all types of agency relationships (creative, media, web, PR, experiential) and assists marketers with marketing organization structure, workflow and critical skill development (briefing, creative evaluation & feedback, etc.). The company also supports leading and aspiring agencies with positioning, pitch and strategy training and pitch support.
