Guest Post – Knowing When to Say “Yes” to New Business

When you’re responsible for leading growth at an agency, it’s tempting to take what you can get in terms of new business. You feel this expectation to deliver immediately and consistently over time. The need to showcase your value through securing new clients is always top of mind. At least that’s how my mind has been wired after a decade in sales roles in other industries.

Prior to joining Crawford and the agency world, I worked for two companies, one of which was a large Fortune 500 company. I started in an entry-level sales role and worked my way up. It was highly competitive, and your individual results were public to the entire team, so if you weren’t performing, it was very apparent. Therefore, it was pedal to the metal, and if that meant meeting with prospects you knew weren’t the best fit, you would still do it because you needed to keep your numbers up.

The experience and mentors in my previous positions taught me more about the sales process, prospecting and aligning your services to clients’ mission-critical priorities better than anywhere else. But at an agency, if you chase everything or say yes to anything that comes through the door, you’ll burn yourself out, as well as your talented team.

So, as you think about how to determine if an opportunity is a “yes” or a “no,” my experience has taught me there is a lot of groundwork to be laid to make that decision properly. I’ve adapted that knowledge for an agency setting and will share three items our team starts with when reviewing new business opportunities.

Establish a Clear Ideal Client Profile (ICP)

This seems obvious, but it’s important to ask yourself and your agency leadership a series of questions to define what type of brands your organization is most interested in working with, as well as broadly, what types of work the agency wants to bring in. It’s important to think about this beyond the specific industries an agency wants to target. A few of the questions we ask ourselves: Who do we want to work with, where have we had success as an agency, what problems do we like helping clients solve and at what stage do we most enjoy supporting a brand during its growth journey?

For example, at Crawford, we’ve determined we work best with well-established brands that have ambitious growth goals and expect marketing to be a “growth engine” because they know the value marketing can provide. At the same time, these brands may not have the resources to be that growth engine. They want a fully integrated, strategic thought partner who can be an extension of their team, execute under tight deadlines, and deliver unique creative that solves business and consumer challenges. That’s Crawford, and that’s where our team shines. When you are confident about where your team shines and where you know you can deliver value to clients, that helps when analyzing new opportunities.

Meet With Department Heads to Determine the Biggest Value Drivers

As a fully integrated agency, we have a lot of ways to get our foot in the door. So I consistently meet with each department leader to better understand where our clients are getting the most value. This helps me filter the type of work coming through the door, because I know:

A) What our agency teams like to do.

B) What they would nail for a client.

For example, our Group Director of Media and Analytics has built her own proprietary reporting dashboards that our clients rave about. If that’s an entry point for us (and the company fits in our ICP), I know we should say “yes” because it’s not a massive lift for our team and allows us to showcase value quickly. Our team’s extensive reporting capabilities are just one of the ways we provide insights and value for our clients.

The lesson here: communicate early and often with department heads to understand where they’re driving value and results for clients.

“Establish Your Floor”

A third thing you can do, and I credit this to a book called “The Science of Scaling,” is to establish your floor. This is when you and your leadership team set a bar for the agency – budget, type of work, growth potential, fun-factor, etc. – and stick to it. This will make it easier to say “yes” or “no.”

For example, if a one-time opportunity comes up and they clearly want to work with you, your first thought might be, “Yeah, let’s do the quick project, and maybe it will lead to more work.” But will it? Before chasing the dollars, think about your team’s bandwidth in conjunction with the bar you set.

Are you going to make your creative team spend hours on a project for a company that only sort of fits your ICP and might not lead to anything else? What’s the trade-off? What could your team spend their time on instead? These are questions you need to answer, and if it’s determined that it’s below your floor, then it’s a “no.”

Alternatively, sometimes it’s an obvious “yes” when it’s clearly above the floor. It depends on the situation, but if you work with the leadership team to establish the agency’s floor, it helps you, as the leader of new business, review and make decisions about new opportunities.

One thing I’ll mention with all three of these points is balancing revenue-generating work with projects that flex a different creative muscle for the team. That’s a challenge any business leader must manage. You need work that pays the bills, but you also want to give your team variety – chances to stretch skills they don’t always get to use on the day-to-day roster.

This process looks different for every agency. Maybe you specialize in one industry. Maybe you’re just a creative ideas shop. But if you’re responsible for new business:

• Get to know the types of clients your company excels at supporting.
• Figure out what problems you’re good at solving.
• Know what kind of work your team gets excited about.

These apply regardless of the type of organization you work for. Take it from a guy who is new to the agency world and still learning how it works every day. If you’re able to create your own version of this three-pronged lens and apply it to your everyday work, you can make saying “yes” AND “no” an effective growth strategy.