As marketing matchmakers, Setup is often asked how agency leaders can best position their agency for growth.

We recommend starting by 1) differentiating your agency’s positioning, then 2) build a culture of business development where the entire agency gets excited about growth, and 3) invest in the tools that prepare the agency for success.

While leads that come from referrals are the best, they are not scalable. At the end of the day, agencies need to generate unaffiliated leads, create a sustainable pipeline, then nurture that pipeline to convert the leads into clients.

There are three legs to the infrastructural stool that prepares agencies for growth:

• Process - What happens when a lead walks through an agency’s door?

• Team - Who interacts with the prospect and works behind-the-scenes to win the business?

• Tools - What digital (or offline) tools are needed to help the team win?

Leg #1 - Develop a Process

When an opportunity from a potential client comes into the agency, what happens next? Who fields the email, phone call, Tweet, or other messages? What is their reply? What is the flow from there?

To ensure a conversation with any inbound opportunities, it is important to assign and establish a clear flow for follow-ups.  

Here are a few tips to develop that process:

1. Clearly define overall business development goals for the entire agency and BD team.

2. Create a rubric to decide if an opportunity is “qualified” or worth pursuing. 

3. Establish a “service level agreement” about timeliness and approach for responses/follow-ups.

4. Leverage tools such as a Call Planning Worksheet that establishes goals for each interaction with a prospect and documents the next steps.

5. Outline who should be involved with new business deals and who should not.

6. Set key performance indicators (KPIs) about business development success.

Leg #2 - Invest in the Team

Structuring an agency business development team for growth requires distinct roles with diverse skill-sets. Smaller agencies tend to fill these roles with as few people as possible, but separating them gives the agency a much better chance to win bigger deals. 

A BD Leader/Quarterback manages the entire team. Their job is to ensure that the business development team lives up to their commitments to prospects and the agency staff. Sales, Marketing, and Operations typically report to the Quarterback.

The agency business development team is often segmented into Sales, Marketing, and Operations.

Here are some key roles within those departments:

Sales:

• Inside Sales emails and calls prospective clients with the goal of setting up phone or in-person meetings for the outside salesperson. This person also is responsible for leveraging marketing automation and other tools to help drive opportunity.

• Outside Sales conducts meetings with prospective clients. This person also attends pitches as the “pitch quarterback.”

Marketing:

• Art Director ensures that all requests for proposal (RFP) responses and pitch decks are designed well as a representation of the agency. When the Art Director is not working on the RFP or pitch preparation, they should help to create thought leadership content for the agency that can be leveraged by Inside Sales as “bait” to attract potential clients. It is best for this person to not have direct responsibility for client work.

• Copywriter stitches together RFP or pitch responses from the rest of the agency team. Their job is to make the response sound like a single fluid voice rather than a piecemeal of various responses. When they aren’t working on a RFP response or pitch preparation, the copywriter should create thought leadership content. 

• PR/Events is responsible for finding the agency opportunities to showcase their skills or thought leadership - whether that entails leadership speaking at a conference, the agency’s work published in a relevant publication, or coordinating agency events designed to establish agency credibility and attract prospects.

Operations:

• Operations/Project Management ensures that the team is focused on the right tasks and that all deliverables are met in a timely fashion.

Leg #3 - Utilize Available Tools

While the right technology tools for any particular marketing agency can vary, it is crucial to have key tools that help the agency find, communicate with, and track prospective clients.

Here are the key DIGITAL tools that are crucial for agency business development success:

• CRM - Customer Relationship Management enables the agency BD team to track people and opportunities in order to effectively update the entire team on the progress of leads. 

• Marketing Automation - The purpose of marketing automation is to track and nurture prospects with content so that sales can gauge the “digital body language” of prospects to understand when to personally reach out to them. For example, if a prospect downloads or interacts with content continuously, they are most likely suitable for further outreach. 

• Sales Automation - Sales Automation is similar to marketing automation, but offers business development the ability to send customized emails to prospects with prompts for follow-up and full tracking.

• Website - The purpose of the website is to attract potential clients and employees. When a prospect visits a website, they should understand the problems the agency solves and the agency’s purpose instantly.  

• Project Management - With so many balls juggling in the air, it is easy to lose focus. Project management aligns team members by tracking the progress and completion of marketing projects throughout the organization.

Additional tools for agencies include Winmo (list building), LinkedIn Sales Navigator (prospect research and outreach), Calendly (scheduling), Google Hangouts (communication), and SurveyMonkey (surveying).

Setup hosted a #MarketersBreakfast with marketing leaders from brands and agencies where we discussed the top-tier tools for marketers - get access to that list here. 

Setup uses the following tools as a part of our marketing and business development process:

Marketing agencies can level-up business development and marketing efforts by implementing a strategic process for leads, investing in a growth-minded team, and utilizing tools. With the three legs of infrastructure, agencies will have a firm base to not only obtain leads, but to continue to successfully grow and nurture them.

Agencies interested in improving their business development processes, obtaining more opportunities with clients, or investing in growth should reach out to Setup.

Setup offers marketing agencies business development training that helps agencies think through positioning, infrastructure, and outreach/closing. Contact us to learn more.

This blog was written by Joe Koufman, CEO and Founder of Setup.

Armed with 20+ years of marketing, business development, and management experience, Joe Koufman founded Setup to ignite relationships between marketing agencies and client-side marketers. His unique agency perspective – having worked at a small digital firm, an independent full-service marketing agency, and a massive holding company – is what inspired Joe to help marketers find agencies that are the perfect fit.