There are so many ways to build a sales campaign for an agency. Many agency bosses don’t want to be seen as needing to sell, but once you’re past the honeymoon phase and it’s time to scale-up beyond what falls in your lap, you’re going to need to have some outreach strategy.
Cold-channel business development is, when considered in isolation, inefficient. But there are ways to make it work better. It takes discipline and you have to throw out any ideas you have about high-volume telesales campaigns or mass-email outreach. Forget transactional selling (for at least 95% of the process) and sell something that has huge relevancy to your prospect. A recent Dun & Bradstreet report showed that 67% of b2b buyers see “relevant communication” as a top influence for choosing one vendor over another.
But it’s more complicated than that. A Gartner report found that the number of people in a company buying decision has increased from 1-2, to 7-8 in a small business (up to 500 staff). Each level of decision-maker will have a different idea of what is relevant.
Luckily, it’s not just the direct outreach that can create that relevancy. Your content marketing is part of what makes you relevant. A Forrester report from a while back (2014) found that even back then, half of b2b prospects will view at least 8 content pieces during the buying process. 80% of them looked at a minimum of 5 content pieces. This is all part of the selling process and your direct outreach should dovetail nicely with the content you produce. Sadly agencies’ content is all too often the sort of thing that impresses other agencies rather than prospects.
The reason agency new business endeavours are so frustrating at times is the need to maintain relevant contact with a large number of prospects, who have rarely been profiled and segmented properly. And if you get busy, you drop new business. And if it doesn’t bring in new clients quickly, you drop new business. And that’s why it becomes cyclical. You blame everything in turn. Your proposition. Your creds. Your Business Development Manager. A new business agency. The prospects. Your website. You. Another new business agency. You might be right (about one or two of them), but the chances are that nobody has ever really explained how cold-channel outreach works. It’s literally the opposite of winning through referral. It’s very, very hard. But it can work.
I’ll finish with some insights from Hubspot – their survey of buyers said that the top things that lead to a positive sales outcome are:
- Listening to the prospect’s needs (69%)
- Not being pushy (61%)
- Providing relevant information (See!) (61%)
- Responding in a timely fashion (seriously, it’s such an easy win – and so many agencies screw this up) (51%)
We can help with all of these things. We can consult with you on your agency’s many value propositions, selling personas, positioning statements, outreach strategies, and content strategies. We can do the outreach for you. You’ll feel it move under your feet and you’ll finally be able to tick “get the new business sorted” off your to-do list. Let’s have a chat.