It’s Not About You: Winning New Business in a Crowded Agency World
(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
It’s Time to Drive Organic Agency Growth
The current economic outlook can seem frightening. P&G Chief Financial Officer Andre Schulten recently noted, “Consumers on both ends of the spectrum—low income and higher income—are reacting to the current volatility they are experiencing. We see consumption trends consistently decelerating.” P&G Chief Executive Jon Moeller added, “This new behavior is driven by worries about the future, whether over immigration policies, inflation, or how tariffs will filter down to consumers.” With consumers on edge and political uncertainty, agencies are facing a number of headwinds, including less pitch volume. Agencies everywhere are finding business development to be a greater and greater challenge. Agencies everywhere are finding business development to be a greater and greater challenge. Unfortunately, the business development strategies of many of these agencies are not up to the current challenge. Unattainable growth rates are often needed to achieve agency growth objectives The investment required and the low odds of winning pitches is debilitating Too much reliance is placed on a small group of senior “sellers” Difficulty “standing out” in pitches leads to expensive, wasteful theatrics Cold calling experiences are generally unsuccessful and demotivating If you experience some of these challenges, your team is not alone! Most agencies face these challenges – hence, an opportunity exists to reinvent the industry’s business development strategies. Many agencies approach business development with a focus on these three areas: Reviews: By far the biggest area of focus. Reviews get most of the business development resources – in people, focus and money. This is a tough focus, however, in a period of reduced review activity. Prospecting: Agencies do some prospecting, but this invariably is mostly relationship oriented. Few major accounts are landed today because an enterprising agency executive cold called an account they wanted and managed to work their way through to win the account. What happens more often is that agency executives maintain relationships and follow client executives from one company to another, hoping to land some business when the client executive has the chance to dole it out. This is a fine strategy, but not a predictable one. Current clients: Current satisfied clients are often an excellent source of organic growth – but rarely is there a devoted strategy to building business with the current client roster. Worse yet, there are very few well-conceived and effective processes in most agencies aimed at even maintaining the current clientele. For example, I don’t know of very many agencies that work with their major clients to establish disciplined, third-party-driven annual 360-degree review processes—yet our work shows that an annual third-party-managed 360-degree process can virtually eliminate performance-related major account losses. There is a better way – and if you start today, you will have a more promising future. Agencies everywhere need to turn their business development strategies upside down. Instead of the classic priority order of: Reviews Prospecting & cold calling Hoping for organic growth and praying you don’t lose accounts Instead, turn it around – and re-invent your approach to each strategy: Avoid account losses & drive organic current client growth Learn to sell – and then go get the accounts that you really want Use your newly gained sales skills to improve your odds in reviews A few words about each of these strategies: Avoid account losses & drive organic current client growth: This is where it all starts. Your senior team probably can’t do this today because their lives are overwhelmed with the black hole of major pitches – most of which end in failure. And because these senior agency execs are so distracted, they can’t love the agency’s current clients the way the clients want to be loved. The result is lost business – putting that much more urgency on the new business pitches. A vicious cycle ensues – a race to less profitability and a lousy quality of life. This is no way to run an agency. Your senior team must spend much more time ensuring existing clients are satisfied. Just one of the many ways they can do that is by championing the third-party 360 process. It is an early warning system to identify possible problems. And, in working through the process, the two parties are more committed to each other, understand each other better, and organic growth opportunities almost magically appear. This, along with training and quality performance, can be one of the best investments you can make in achieving your annual growth plans. In addition to a 360, another key to consistently growing your existing clients is to create an endless stream of discussions about their business – which can often lead to opportunities for your agency to help even more. Job #1, of course, is to simply do great work. We won’t discuss that in this article because it is so painfully obvious. If you aren’t delivering on your existing SOW with distinction, you don’t deserve additional work.Assuming you are delivering great work, here are four ideas that can add value and lead to additional opportunities for your agency: 1. Updated Strategy: A refreshed look at your client’s customer-facing strategies can be a powerful way to create important conversations about the client’s business and how your agency can help. Where possible, and certainly for important clients, we recommend that agencies make such a review a routine part of their relationship management efforts. This typically involves taking a fresh look at the client’s brand, competitors, and target audience. Look to derive important new insights where possible and recommend strategic evolutions as appropriate. 2. Provide a Competitive Review: Your clients need to understand their competitors’ strategies and tactics in order to stay current with their own marketing activities. Providing an updated competitive review to clients is a fine way to highlight your commitment to their business and to showcase your focus on their success. Has the positioning of key competitors changed? What is the focus of their current campaign work? What search terms are they buying? Has their media mix changed? What are they doing to navigate the current economic
