Upfront Business Development
Articles
Your Agency New Business Strategy: Outsourcing Business Information & Insights
Strategic Development Director
It is impossible to create a new business strategy without considering where you will obtain you leads and insights from. Increasingly clients expect prospective suppliers to devise meaningful and relevant communications prior to any cold approach. Failure to do so will quickly get your agency identified as just another agency, with no key points of differentiation.
Whilst it is clearly ideal to have some first hand insights into your target prospects brand or business, this is not always possible. Instead, you will need to find the right brands to target, the right people responsible for your particular marketing discipline, and a message which is timely and relevant to the sector, their brand, or their specific role. This can be hugely time consuming as many of you will already know.
So what are the options available to your agency?
First, you could assign this to the role of the Business Development Director or managing partner in smaller agencies. This will almost never be the most effective mechanism for generating insights (outside of that individual’s personal contacts), since the skill set of these individuals is far better utilised in the creation, pitching, and sometimes managing of a potential new business project. This often takes the form of multiple online subscriptions and masses of RSS feeds which often leads to the really relevant information being lost in a mass of daily inbox spam.
An alternative method many agencies use is to employ their own in-house BDM. This can be effective if you are targeting a small number of brands and the ability of your BDM is clearly evident in developing such relationships. Often this is not the case, or the BDM leaves (along with all their contacts made), and the relevance and dynamism of the data you record is only as good as the number of times your BDM speaks to each contact. For larger agencies the BDM may be replaced by a researcher whose role it is to specifically gain all appropriate sources and information to maximise the accuracy and detail of your insights into a small number of specific brands.
Finally, you can outsource much of the legwork regardless of who is responsible for generating new leads using an industry specific business information tool.
So, what are the key elements you should consider when outsourcing in this way, what are the pro’s and con’s of doing so, and how do you differentiate between each supplier offering?
Here’s a quick checklist to assist you in the selection of your new business partner:
Tip 1 How many relevant contacts?
Check how many contacts there are in the database, and how many are specific to your discipline? Most suppliers will offer somewhere between 10-20,000 industry contacts, though it is extremely rare that any agency will be interested in more than a small number of these (circa. 200-500). Of course this depends on the size of your agency and new business team, where you will segment your sector focus (and need for more data) accordingly.
The important things to consider here are two fold: first, the number of contacts will quickly get out of date if the process for re-validating isn’t extremely robust. Ask how this is done, how often, and by how many? Additionally ask for documented SLA’s. If the SLA is too low, or they cannot easily bring their SLA to mind, you should insist on testing the integrity of the data through a random sample (chosen by you during a 24 hour trial login). Second, many agencies will only be interested in brands where they have the best credentials, and job titles specific to your discipline (e.g. Head of Online, Head of Search, Head of Digital, and so on). Again take a sample to test these, and ask for a breakdown of the job titles within the database. They should be able to provide this for you using their own analytics tool
Tip2 Usability
Ensure that the search functionality is easy to use and enables you to find what you’re looking for in the shortest amount of time. Since multiple licensees will usually be using the database of contacts, the more intuitive the search functionality is, the less likely it is that your business development staff will miss their target brands through user error.
As a minimum you should expect data to be searchable by brand, company, and sector. Ideally you would also be able to search by company turnover, job role, and contact name. With a few you may even be able to search by discipline specific marketing spends. Added to this, ensure that there is an after sales process which offers online training for all licensees who were not part of the procurement process.
Tip3 Can you tailor the news feeds?
It is essential that you have bespoke RSS feeds and list saving functionality. All well targeted new business strategies depend upon having a clear proposition, within a specific target market or markets. Usually this will mean that a single Business Development Manager will want to focus on circa.2-300 companies or brands, a small number of industry publications and news stories, and sources of briefs that fall within this space. Inevitably, different people will want to segment and ring-fence data appropriate to there area of expertise within the agency
Tip 4 Compatible with your own CRM?
Since you will rarely want to use the business information tool as a CRM database for your agency, make sure the data can be downloaded in a format compatible to your own in house CRM. Only one supplier offers the possibility of updating records directly within their new business tool itself, but all information is saved locally for obvious reasons. This creates great difficulty in transferring all this information across should you later decide to terminate your subscription
Tip 5 What improvements are in the pipeline?
I would encourage you to ask for the product roadmap for the current year. If no such roadmap exists, you can safely assume that either the service they are offering is without fault (which will never be the case), or the supplier in question has a very arrogant and regressive approach to the integrity and relevance of their product
Tip 6 How many subscribers?
Within marketing communications, many of the suppliers of data & insights tools also provide lead generation for agencies. These businesses should be ran as completely separate entities and involve different personnel. Ensure this is so to avoid conflict, though this is even more important with the “marriage bureau” services that bring clients and subscribers together to pitch for “exclusive” briefs. Where the latter is in place, check whether you or your prospective clients are charged for this service. It varies from one supplier to another greatly, as do the numbers of exclusive briefs on offer each year. Even when you know this, you should take into account the subscription base in terms of assessing the likelihood of you being selected for any such pitch
Tip 7 Check number of licenses allocated
Almost all data and insights tools will offer a “newswire” service, giving daily updates on relevant industry press, a “movers & shakers” list of key sector and role specific personnel, and data download quotas. Make sure you have all of these as part of your service offering, since this segmentation of data provides timely relevance for any prospective client approach.
It sounds obvious but make sure that you have a sufficient number of licenses since additional licenses will cost you an additional fee. Additionally check on the number of record downloads you can make during your subscription time. 1000 downloads may seem plenty but five licensees experimenting with prospect lists can quickly exceed this, and new downloads will cost more money
Even when you have checked the above and chosen your preferred supplier, make sure the tool gets utilised properly in-house. This is straightforward for small agencies since only one or two of you will be using it. For larger teams, segment each person or teams target lists, and look to set up bespoke RSS feeds so that all alerts, regardless of the source selected, are relevant and worth reading. Subscribing to mailings across multiple sectors is counter productive. The old consultancy saying, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do” is worth bearing in mind.
Clearly set the direction of your new business targeting and activity, create a proposition and story to support this, ensure the timely and relevant nature of the contact, and then the rest is down to the person pitching your agency.
