How your agency can come back stronger. Part 4: Have a plan.

From my own experience, most small to medium agencies don’t have a business development and marketing plan. They have an objective (even if it’s somewhat arbitrary) but no real idea of how they are going to meet it. Instead, they are far too reliant on referrals and (at best) a haphazard approach to lead generation, jumping from one silver bullet to the next.

The result? Revenue up and down like a yoyo. Sound familiar?

Somewhat bizarrely, these peaks and troughs are accepted as normal. They don’t have to be.

But to fix the problem you’ve got to address the root cause. The peaks and troughs you experience (and the stress they bring) can probably be traced back to a lack of consistency in lead generation. The tap is on one minute and off the next. This is no way to grow an agency.

Instead, you need a plan. And you need to execute that plan. Consistently.

As part of my series on helping agencies come back stronger, here’s how I help my clients do just that.

Not another bloody ‘canvas’ Ben

Yep. I love a ‘canvas’: a simple, one-sided planning framework. I’ve got one for positioning. And another for creating a business development and marketing plan. At this rate, expect another couple before the year is out.

This one helps to answer three questions critical to shaping and executing your plan:

What are we trying to achieve?

What do we need to do?

How are we going to make it happen?

Whilst it might look like a lot to consider, it should take you no longer than half a day to work it through. And perhaps another half a day or so to write up your summary (think a couple of sides of A4) and action plan. More on that later.

Using the canvas, let’s break each of those questions down.

What are we trying to achieve?

The easy bit. In theory.

Target audience

Pretty self-explanatory, this is a brief description of who you are trying to target; the businesses and people you are best placed to work with. If this isn’t crystal clear, go back a step and work on your positioning.

If you are targeting a number of different sectors / segments, list these in priority order.

New business objectives

Me: “How much do you want to grow next year?”

Agency owner: “Err, 20% would be good”

Me: "How did you come to that number?”

Agency owner: “Well we did about 20% last year so I reckon we could do that again.”

Me: head in hands.

What is it with 20%? Invariably, when I ask an agency owner about their growth plans for next year, “20%” comes the reply. But it’s completely arbitrary. 20% might be right. But it could also fall well short of what is achievable. Or it might be far too punchy.

Any objective you set should be thought out. It needs to be SMART. Whilst there isn’t a perfect science when it comes to setting your new business objective, it needs to be grounded in reality. If you did £200K last year, is £500K likely next year, if all else remains the same?

So, before you look forward, you need to look back. How many new clients did you win last year? How much, on average, were they worth? Where did your leads come from?

And then looking forward, consider what are you going to do differently next year? Are you increasing your marketing budget or planning to hire a BDM, for example? Are there new services you are introducing? Will your pricing model or rates be changing? Thinking through these questions will help you arrive at a realistic new business objective.

The goal from there is to break down the big (and possibly slightly frightening) objective into smaller (less scary) targets and ultimately, actions. Start that process by calculating how many clients you will need to win (and bill) during the financial year. You might use an average client value or range of values depending on project size e.g. X2 clients @£25K, X4 clients @£50K and so on.

Pipeline targets

Once you know how many wins you need, you can estimate the number of pitches / proposals, qualified leads, meetings and, ultimately, leads you are going to need to meet your objective. Remember, you are trying to break down the big number into smaller, more manageable targets. Think your classic sales funnel. This is old-school but I make no apologies for it.

Again, it’s not a perfect science. And it will depend on how much historical data you have to work with. You may need to make some assumptions if, for example, you don’t know how many of your qualifying meetings result in a proposal. Now would be a good time to start tracking this sort of thing if you don’t already (see ‘Reporting and review’).

Other goals

It’s not all about the money. Consider non-financial goals, such as increasing your profile in an unchartered sector, specific brands you’d love to get in front of or winning an award in a new category.

What is going to make you and the team happy? If you don’t know, ask them.

What do we need to do?

So, now you know what you want to achieve, it’s time to work out how you are going to get there.

Barriers

“If you fail to identify and analyse the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you either have a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen”. Richard Rumelt, ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’.

With this in mind, explore the internal and external challenges you anticipate facing. What might stand in the way of meeting your objectives and goals? Where do your weaknesses lie e.g. resource, skills, processes, assets and tools? What do you need to start doing now to mitigate these issues?

Capabilities

Review what you already have to work with. What are your strengths? What has worked well in the past when it comes to lead generation? What do you enjoy? What role could the wider team play?

Opportunities

Consider if there is anything you are not doing now that you could be doing in the future. What is happening in the agency market? How are the needs of your target audience evolving? Are there services you should consider introducing? Where do these fit into your plan?

Channels

If you’ve done a decent job on positioning, you’ll know exactly who you are targeting. But how do you decide where to invest your time and money to increase awareness, capture their interest and build trust?

These days, it’s like being a kid in a candy store with the number of channels, tactics and shiny new ways we could spend our marketing budget. But invariably we don’t spend it on the right things. We try a bit of everything hoping some of it might stick.

Some activities are given: referrals and strategic partnerships, for example. But others will depend on your target audience and your available capacity and budget.

Keep in mind that an effective approach to lead generation combines inbound and outbound activity, alongside more traditional marketing and PR tactics, such as events and public speaking (when they return). Ultimately nothing works in isolation. It’s about finding the right mix and balance.

Spend time brainstorming ideas. Consider where your target audience spends their time. How do they find new agencies? On this basis, what should you be doing more or less of? What excites or energises you? What is your budget? How much time do you have available?

Don’t discount any of your ideas. For now, anyway.

How are we going to make it happen?

Knowing what you need to do is one thing. Making it happen is quite another. It’s time to start prioritising activity and work out who is doing what.

Priorities

It’s difficult to create a detailed plan for eight or nine months down the line. So, don’t try. Inspired by ‘The 12 Week Year’, I recommend creating more manageable quarterly plans.

Start by prioritising the ideas from your earlier brainstorm. You might find this matrix a useful tool in assessing effort and financial investment Vs the likely impact.

Realistically in a small agency, you’ll probably be able to do six or seven things well (this is far better than doing fifteen things OK). So, in putting together your action plan, only worry about those activities you are going to start working on during the first quarter. It’s all about focus. The rest you will revisit when you create your next quarterly action plan (or you might have already dismissed some based on where they sit in the matrix).

The keyword here is ‘action’. As Brian P Morgan and Michael Lennington say in The 12 Week Year…

“You have greater control over your actions than you do your outcomes”.

That’s why it’s not a sales and marketing plan. It’s not a lead generation plan. It’s an action plan, detailing the tasks you need to carry out on a week by week basis.

For example, let’s say you set a goal to meet with five prospective, strategic partners over three months. From there, you establish five or six actions to meet that goal, for example:

• Create an ‘ideal partner’ profile
• Research and create a shortlist of 15 prospective partners and add to CRM
• Write cover email template
• Set up means to track opens / clicks
• Send emails / LinkedIn messages
• Diarise follow up calls

You then plot the actions, in priority order, in your quarterly plan (keeping in mind that some actions might be repeated at regular intervals). At the end of each week, you review the number of actions completed. And then based on planned activity for next week, schedule time in your diary accordingly (according to James Clear, you are X3 more likely to follow through on actions if the time is blocked out in your diary in advance).

Roles and responsibilities

Work out who is going to do what, remembering that business development is a team effort. Building a new business culture is an article for another day. But in short, everyone in the agency can (and should) bring something to the party.

Based on your action plan, decide who is going to take ownership for what (and why?). How much time can each stakeholder put in? How are you going to set this time aside? Do you need additional support? If so, who and when?

Tools and technology

Summarise the tools and partners you are already using to support activity, such as your CRM, data services and intelligence tools. Where are the gaps? Consider where technology could be used to automate processes and tasks. Work any actions into your plan.

Reporting and review

In business development, we only tend to measure lag indicators, such as the number of leads, win rate and revenue. 

But you should also measure lead indicators, most notably the number of actions completed on a week by week basis. It’s a little brutal. But Morgan and Lennington claim that if you complete 85% of your actions (consistently, week by week), you’ll more than likely achieve your objective.

As an absolute minimum you should be tracking:

• Weekly actions completed
• No. of leads (and source)
• No. of qualifying calls / meetings
• No. of qualified opportunities
• No. of proposal / pitches
• Win %
• Average lead time
• New business revenue vs objective

Depending on what's in your plan there will be a whole load of other things to keep a track of. Decide how you are going to do this and who is going to collate any reports, along with the frequency of progress meetings.

Now, go and make it happen

When you break it down, business development is simple. It’s about doing enough of the right things, consistently well. Always. Even when your attention is diverted to other stuff.

For a lot of agencies, pipelines have been decimated in recent months. It’s unlikely they are going to replenish themselves. Now, more than ever, you’ve got to make things happen.

Have a plan. Focus on action. Review weekly.

It's the only way.

P.S. If you’d like a copy of any of the graphics included above, just shout.