Build a Solid Foundation to Sell From First

by Chris Lombardo, Deltek

With fewer RFPs going out to tender, many agencies have to rely more on traditional sales tactics in order to grow. The days of reliance on AMs and the C-Suite to fill the gap have passed. What they need is a more sustainable, targeted effort.

While there are many strategies and tactics to increase the volume of your outbound pipeline, in this article we will concentrate on building a stronger foundation of selling by solidifying these three factors:

• Defining the things that you do well and establishing your position

• Understanding what makes your best client

• Learning how to sell your talent, technology and process 

Working on the wrong campaigns for the wrong client type with the wrong processes is not going to cut it anymore. Your road to profitability and future growth starts with a good foundation of selling.

Establish Your Position

When outsiders consider your agency, what do they think of you? Too expensive or specialized, or built for small business only? If you define your position correctly, they will be thinking of you exactly how you want them to. A prospect should never land on your website and be confused as to what you do best.

Ask yourself, “Why would a client looking for a specific skill hire a ‘general’ agency when agencies specifically built for it exist?” It’s like running to Walmart for milk when you live next door to a dairy.

Defining your position is a blend of resource management, past successes, and marketplace evaluation.

An inventory of existing resources may quickly define a potential position. What are you built for? Maybe you are heavy on design talent or more technically proficient with SEO? Are you about moving pictures or great stats? You will need to pick one and make it obvious.

An evaluation of past campaigns will tell you plenty about your ability to deliver profitably and whether you have the success stories to tell from an “expert” point of view. Don’t bring volume of work into the mix. It just confuses things. Good, profitable campaigns matter most. Time wasters are for pro bono work.

Finally, does the demographic demand your services in masse enough to provide a sustainable pipeline? There is such a thing as being too specialized or attaching yourself heavily to a short-term trend. Don’t be intimidated by a crowded marketplace either. If you’re built for it and good at it, you’ll take your share and leave the bit players behind.

Define Your Best Client Criteria

Being particular about who you work with is a learned skill that few have mastered. It is so hard to turn down money and additional work when you have the capacity. We’ve all accepted bad clients in order to “keep the lights on.” It happens, but it should not.

Most clients aren’t actually bad. It is the established relationship between agency and client that often is doomed from the beginning, and small cracks soon become large chasms. When properly managed, it is difficult for a partnership to go sour.

Here are five factors to consider when evaluating or establishing rules for a client to make the cut:

1. Size & Capacity Matching – It’s great to have a large enterprise client, but oftentimes one or the other is mismatched. Are you rightsized for that type of client? If you are re-configuring just to take them on, what are the long-term implications?

2. Watch The Price Watchers – If decisions are primarily a price point for this client, you’ll be sure to be caught in situations where you’ll lower prices to meet them. When both parties feel treated fairly on price, you now have established value moving forward.

3.  Missing Effort & Missing Key People – From the onset, you are going to need the involvement of stakeholders in order to establish a comfortable working relationship based on agreed upon expectations. Furthermore, client involvement from those key people during project time must continue. If they abandon the ship soon after the contract is signed, you are in for rough seas. 

4.  It is Not OK to Be Vague – Your description of services and milestones should be in agreed upon language. A client who wants to get started and “figure details out later” is a red flag. Leave nothing for interpretation.

5. Growth: The Two Way Street – There is an expectation from client to agency that newer technologies, tactics, options and ideas are part of the year-over-year plan. However, the responsibility to push boundaries and avoid staleness lie client-side as well. Does this client support growth and new ideas?

Make It About Talent, Technology AND Process

Your people ARE your agency. Without their tremendous creative abilities, you wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. After all, you so proudly display their work.  However, everybody claims to “do good work” and push creative boundaries.

Given this, how can your agency stand out a bit more from the competition? The answer is to spend a portion of the pitch clearly defining and touting your operational technologies and processes. Proving that you are easy to do business with, via a clearly defined process and modern operational technology, signals to clients that efficiency and collaboration is a priority. If you can, get another client to speak about the merits of your process and technologies.

Of course, if you are still using disparate software applications that do not work together, manual spreadsheets for tracking and job jackets instead of collaboration tools, you are doing a disservice to both your agency and your client. With consistent pressure from clients to do more for less, these operational inefficiencies lead directly to over-servicing, missed deadlines and missed opportunities. Consider fixing this so your process can stand out above all the others.

In the end, you are making it easier to do business with you. By focusing on your best offerings, establishing good relations from the get-go and implementing processes that make the agency-client partnership better, you’ve cleared the way for long-term happiness. Coupled with your awesome creative and many years’ experience as a top performing marketer, you are stacking the deck for a more comprehensive offer to prospects and exemplifying just why you are better than the competition.

Chris Lombardo, Deltek

Chris manages marketing activities for the agency solutions business unit at Deltek. With 15 years in agency, five managing his own shop, Chris has in-depth experience in agency operations, including account management, scoping & pricing, resource management and production. He uses his experiences to help identify agency operational pain points and provide thought leadership to help agencies learn and grow.

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