This Year, Abandon Your Agency’s Annual New Business Plan
Jody Sutter
I help marketing agencies go from an unpredictable, inconsistent and exhausting approach to winning new business towards one that leads to reliable, predictable success.
It’s Q4 and it’s that time when we start to think about our big plans for next year’s new business growth.
Creating your annual plan for agency business development is exciting! An exercise fueled by possibility and healthy ambition. It’s also time-consuming and requires a lot of work so it’s in your best interest to create a plan you can stick with.
But, if we’re being honest, that doesn’t always happen. Does reality look more like this?
Q1: A bright and shiny start!
It's January*, your intentions are strong, and everything is pure potential. You've returned to work after a restorative holiday break. You feel refreshed and ready to tackle that big plan.
In fact, you’re feeling so positive that you allow yourself a little extra time to ramp up, maybe even delay the start of your new business plan to work on some other projects that have been neglected, or even just decide to pace yourself because you know it's going to be an intense year.
And sure, it’s possible that January turns out to be slower on the new business front than you'd like it to be. A January lull isn’t uncommon (after all, your clients are ramping up after the holidays too).
Besides, there's plenty of time. You still have nearly twelve full months remaining to the year!
Q2: Enthusiasm + distraction + hubris
However, by the middle of Q2 you haven't made as much progress as you’d intended.
That doesn't mean you haven't been busy. There have been plenty of emergencies requiring your attention—client demands, staffing issues, urgent administrative needs. It’s all necessary right? But of course, the unintended victim is your big plan for transformative new business growth.
Nevertheless, it's only April and you’re still really excited about the plan. It’s fine. There are still more than eight months left in the year.
Q3: Valley of Despair
Then suddenly, it's September. You're back from summer vacation and you're ready to focus, despite the anxious voice inside your head reminding you that you only have four more months. (Who are you kidding? Between Labor Day and the Jewish holidays September is half over. So, make that three and a half months. Crap.)
Deep down, you knew this would happen. Your worst fears have been confirmed.
Every year you invest a ton of time coming up with a big plan, and other stuff—important stuff! —always gets in the way.
Fortunately, you've managed to get yourself invited to enough new business pitches that you’re not too far from your revenue goals. Unfortunately, they’ve been competitive pitches over which you have little control with the result that you and your team are burnt out and exhausted.
And they’re not always for work you really want. It's not shaping your agency into the business you want it to be.
Still, you're in no position to turn down revenue. Besides, there's still one more quarter—maybe you’ll rally and make a dent in that new business plan.
Q4: Regret, chagrin, and yet… hope
But the Q4 rally falters, despite all your good intentions.
To be fair the year wasn't a disaster. You're even slightly up over last year, but nowhere near the goals you set.
And not just revenue goals. You had big ambitions to make qualitative improvements over how you market your agency and pitch new business. You regret not making more time to execute and chagrined that once again you fell into the same unconstructive pattern.
Nevertheless, next year is right around the corner and with it comes the opportunity to try again. You know what? You’re feeling optimistic!
In fact, you're going to set up a meeting right now with your senior team to start to write next year's transformative new business plan…so that you can start this whole cycle all over again.
Abandon the annual plan
This cycle is familiar to me personally. I confess that in the past I succumbed to the allure of the annual plan and was its victim. And I've seen plenty of my clients fall into this pattern as well.
This troubled me because I want my clients to succeed—it's good for them and good for me and my business!
So, I started exploring alternatives (in fact I continue to explore alternatives—if you have an approach that works for you, I’d love it if you would share it with me!).
The one that was most appealing was the concept of a 12-week working sprint. This idea is not original to me. There are plenty of other experts who extoll it and have even built businesses around it. I've simply applied the concept to agency business development. (I personally have found Brian Moran’s 12-Week Year methodology most useful.)
Embrace the quarterly sprint
And why twelve weeks?
It's long enough to get things done yet short enough to create a sense of urgency.
Around the same time that I was experimenting with 12-week working sprints for my clients, I came across this quote from Seth Godin in his 2020 book The Practice:
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?“Real goals aren’t outcomes.
They are actionable, measurable behaviors that lead to outcomes.”
It was an important reminder to me that sometimes we treat goals more like wishes, as in “I wish I could increase revenue by 50% next year.” I have no problem with stating wishes—it’s the first step in making them come true—but it doesn't tell you what you're going to do tomorrow.
The 4 steps in your 12-week sprint
1. Set the waypoints
If your goals are your destination, you need to set waypoints along the journey.
In other words, if the goal is to increase revenue by 50% next year, what achievements do you need to see along the way to make that goal a reality? Those achievements might be to:
2. Define the steps you must take to reach each waypoint
Now, define the specific actions you need to take to get those done.
For example, if you want to delegate more new business responsibility to others, what kind of training do they need? Do you have a documented process they can follow? Is your positioning clear enough that they can easily have a conversation with a prospect about what makes your agency different and why?
It may sound like I’m just giving you more work to do but you’ll benefit by being honest about what’s been standing in the way of reaching your goals. Often, it’s the unsexy but essential stuff of getting the right systems and tools in place.
3. Choose your priorities and map out your waypoints.
?What must happen first in Q1 and what can follow in subsequent quarters? Break each down into manageable and measurable tasks.
Finally stay accountable for getting the work done. Identify the leading and lagging indicators that you will monitor to measure success.
A quick digression to define a leading indicator versus lagging indicator. You, dear reader, may already understand what these terms mean, however I encounter many professionals who don't or who are glancingly familiar with them but when push comes to shove couldn't define them. So here they are:
And how do you know if you're seeing the leading indicators of success?
You measure them, my friends, you measure them. Weekly.
4. Weekly measurement and recalibration
Each week, have a plan for making progress and at the end of each week, measure the extent to which you executed on that plan. Did you do ten out of the ten things you said you would do? Congratulations, you were 100% successful. Did you only do five out of the ten things you said you’d do? You were 50% successful.
No judgement, stuff happens. In fact, that’s why this measuring thing can be so helpful. First, it tends to keep you accountable so that you think twice before siphoning off your time to other demands no matter how worthy.
Second, it offers you a perspective from which to assess whether you’re on the right track. If you’re only 50% successful for too many weeks, then something is wrong and needs recalibrating—
Make adjustments and gauge whether they made a difference.
Does this sound overly complicated? I promise you it's not once you get into the 12-week rhythm.
Plus, you have a guide at the ready. Me! (12-week sprints play an important role in my programs. Want to learn more? Let’s chat.)
Besides, what are the alternatives? Gathering your team and investing lots of time to create an annual plan only to fall short again on executing it?
It doesn't sound very satisfying to me.
This year, leave the regret behind. Abandon the one-year plan and embrace the 12-week sprint.
* With apologies to those of you, such as my friends in Australia, who start their year on July 1 and celebrate different national or religious holidays at different times of the year.
Jody Sutter, is the owner of The Sutter Company, a business development consultancy that specializes in working with leadership at small ad agencies who are underperforming when it comes to winning new business and would like to win the right clients consistently but also make the process less chaotic and exhausting for their teams. To learn more about how she can help transform your annual new business plan from a “wish list” to a plan of action, schedule a free 45-minute consultation here. For more information about The Sutter Company’s programs for optimizing new business at small agencies, go to www.thesuttercompany.com.