What you get

Understanding your agency and its culture

Our first step is to visit you and your team at your office. We’ll take you through a two-day agenda involving you, your management team and several members of your staff. While we may make some observations in the early stages, we’ll principally be auditing your agency, looking for every point of contact with potential clients and finding the first raft of improvements and recommendations for your business development plan.

We’d return to your office within 2-3 weeks of the initial session to present our findings, including a document outlining our recommendations and changes to your agency’s business development efforts.

We’ll consider resource and budget planning if you’re looking to create a business development programme, assisting you in understanding the characteristics of an effective in-house business developer.

Your web site and its copy will be assessed to ensure that it is suitable for business development. Too often we hear that an agency’s web site is popular with prospects. We’re more interested in understanding whether the prospects that choose not to call are dissuaded by some part of the site or its copy.

Your credentials would be analysed, looking for ways to make them more prospect-oriented. Whether the creds are a short-form document designed to be emailed, or part of a pitch, we’ll distil them down to a pure, concise version of your agency’s abilities and achievements.

Most agencies’ social media output is impressive to other agencies, but rarely to prospects. We can train you to keep your output relevant to your market.

Sponge NB: Consult

Ongoing support

As part of our package, you’ll have access to our team for three months, with up to four meetings and eight phone calls to discuss business development opportunities, your ideas for a new business development push, or staff training issues. The calls are around 20 minutes each and the meetings are up to 90 minutes each.

Website visitor identification

We offer our tracker.spongenb.com service whereby visitors to your site are monitored, often revealing the company name of the visitor. Our clients typically see somewhere between 15-40% of their site’s visitors’ company names listed.

The goals

 - To increase the effectiveness of your business development endeavours OR to put in place a completely new programme if needed.
 - To profile your agency, comparing your true strengths against the prospects you would like to win.
 - Ensuring that every part of your agency is geared up for business development.
 - Enabling you to maintain a business development effort - the cyclical nature of in-house business development can be beaten.