How To Win New Business

The recent Public Relations Global Network meetings in Toronto featured a presentation by Jody Sutter, author of The Small Agency’s Guide To Winning New Business.  Jody’s company, The Sutter Company, is a new business consultancy that specializes in working with leadership at small agencies and creative services firms.
Her workshops and individual clients get a much deeper dive into obtaining new clients, however Jody’s book offers eight steps to winning more of the right kind of business.

Eight Steps to Winning New Business

1. If you’re not clear about what you do, no one else is either.
   1. You have to know what you are selling
   2. Who you are selling it to
   3. How you are selling it
2. Quieting emotions. Is your positioning:
   1. Succinct
   2. Targeted
   3. Repeatable
   4. Accurate
   5. Flexible
   6. Differentiated
3. Staring down the fear of:
   1. Missing revenue
   2. An unmotivated team
   3. New business patterns
   4. Misrepresenting the agency
4. Defeating abstraction – agencies have a hard time describing what they do
5. Storytelling is selling – connect with prospects who just want to hear a good story
6. Your new business strengths profile. Are you a:
   1. Hunter
   2. Promoter
   3. Communicator
   4. Thinker
7. It’s not about you: defining your ideal client profile, including:
   1. Size
   2. Client’s team
   3. The type of work
   4. The type of work you like
   5. The type of work that gets the best results
8. Optimizing your new business ecosystem ™. Jody describes this as “including anything you would use to support the pursuit of agency growth, from a pricing proposal to a website to social media streams.”

All of this reminds me of any agency’s need to continually be working on new business development.  There is one thing agency life that we cannot forget:  all current clients will some day be former clients.