Don't take my word for it #2: Research

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I get a lot of sales approaches; we all do. I think it’s part of the job these days - to filter out spammy sales emails.

It’s a sign of the times.

And as long as podcast promoters from Uzbekistan are happy to give LinkedIn their hard-earned cash to spam out 30,000 LinkedIn accounts that mention the word “Podcast”, then who am I to argue?

What usually happens when I get one of these direct messages, is that LinkedIn also handily provides a “No thank you” auto response.

So I hit that and move on.

Just because your business is in the same area as my business, doesn’t mean we were made for each other.

I need more than just “I have a pulse, you have a pulse, it’s destiny!”

I need more than that. I need you to know about my business and tell me why we’re a good fit.

I need you to have done your homework.

So this newsletter is all about doing your homework, and how new business can help you build your agency.

There are essentially, two types of new business: referrals and cold new business.

Referrals and recommendations come from your existing client base. These are companies that already know you or know of you and are happy to take an approach from you. They may even reach out to you.

In my publishing days, that was what we call “in through the window” business. It requires a different set of skills than cold new business.

Referrals is centred around your ability to retain clients based on your service delivery, be it hitting the mark creatively and consistently or providing great advice, service or great value for money – all the things you pride your agency on.

However, these are not the same factors that win cold new business.

Cold new business represents where you see your agency going in the next 12-18 months. To paraphrase the hockey player Wayne Gretzky, your agency needs to be where the money or the best clients are going to be.

And this could change. This is not a fixed target. You might take on someone with a particular skill set in the healthcare sector, or you develop a talent as TikTok video production department and this opens up a new avenue of business potential.

This is cold new business.

They look and sound like your existing clients, but they don’t know you and you don’t know them.

So how do you get started?

Homework.

In my capacity as host of the Fuel podcast, I’ve been very lucky to speak to a lot of highly qualified people who have explained how they generate cold new business and it mostly comes down to two things:

Knowledge and chemistry.

If you can demonstrate that you understand their business drivers, objectives, pressure points, whatever, and can provide innovative solutions to overcome or address them, then you’re in with half a chance. If you can create a relationship with the prospect by being useful, helping them in their job and making them look great, all the better!

Two of my guests who really blew my mind when it comes to research were Andrew Tenzer and Ian Murray – authors of three critical pieces of research into the mindset of the creative sector: Gut Instinct , The Empathy Delusion and The Aspiration Window . If you haven’t read them, I advise you to. They are valuable, not just for their conclusions but for the wider point they raise:

The dangers of assuming we know our audience.

We project what we think is right onto the target audience, without actually knowing what motivates them.

Ian explained how his research got misinterpreted:

“I go to Zoom calls, conferences or, meetings or whatever, and there'll be someone in the room that will start saying ‘have you read this thing called Empathy Delusion? it's about the London bubble, or more broadly, a metropolitan bubble. And if only, all the people in advertising could just get out beyond the M25, they would figure all this stuff out.’ And this is a good illustration of how that's not what the research is about at all. We're talking about a much deeper cultural and psychological problem.

“I don't think anybody would be surprised to hear that the kind of people who work in advertising, tend to be at the liberal end of the spectrum when it comes to kind of social and political values. But the contradiction is that they seem to have projected that liberal set of social values on businesses at sharp end of driving capitalism and the economy and these are the places where you achieve progressive social reform.”

If I could sum up the conversation with Ian briefly, it would be that his and Andrew Tenzer’s research never set out to prove that the creative industry is run by a bunch of liberals, but because that could be one possible conclusion, it became all about that. The creative industry then projected its own fears and biases on to the research, which in turn demonstrated that the creative industry tends to project its own fears and bases onto their own creative work. It superbly demonstrated – unintentionally – that he was 100% right.

The moral to the story is never assume you know all about a client’s business just because that’s what you think the business is all about.

Do research into the sector. Vox pop the key players, write white papers, attend seminars, webinars, get under the skin of the industry and learn the lingo.

Which leads me onto your agency positioning. What you think is a benefit to a client might not actually be a benefit, or if it is, might not be as much of priority as you think it is.

Futurist Tom Cheesewright was talking to me about how companies – big companies – pull him in to help them strategise their 10 year plans and the subject of Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) came up:

“The ethical dimension is really interesting. I'm always skeptical about how much it drives people's decision making from a procurement and purchasing perspective. I think people talk a good game in terms of making ethical purchases, but they don't necessarily spend a good game. Given everything that's been going on with a certain very large ecommerce company, you'd expect an awful lot more people to be boycotting them, than actually are. And so they'll rage against behavior online, but not actually change their behavior.”

Simon Derungs , a legendary agency ‘suit’ pointed out that Marmite for decades sold itself to the public based on the tag line ‘The Growing up spread you never grow out of”, which is fine, but sales really took off when research showed that Marmite was actually a very divisive product. You either love it or hate it.

When you turn that into an advertising campaign, you really hit the sweet spot.

Simon also told us about Maurice and Charles Saatchi, who, when confronted with a new product or device to sell, used to take it down to the local markets and give it to traders to see how they would sell it.

What I’m driving at here is that we might think we have the answer, but sometimes, we need to get out of the way, clear our prejudices and get inside the head of the end user.

That’s the way to sell your agency.

So in the world of new business, your referrals and recommendations are your bread and butter. That’s what keep the lights on and provides cash flow.

Your cold new business is your forecast. It’s your future and when it comes to designing your future, you need to make sure you know your onions and that your prospects actually want onions.

I feel a Marmite & onion sandwich coming on...