If the economy slows over the next 18 months winning new business will get more challenging. To keep your business strong in any economic condition, you need to upgrade your business development process. There are three critical decisions you have to make to ensure you’re able to win business in unfavorable economic conditions: Focus on…
Thanks for your replies to Tuesday’s email about making business development easy. If I could summarize the replies, they’d (collectively) say, Once I’m “in the room” with a buyer, I’m golden – but how do I get “in the room”? How do I find more people who could hire me? 1. Who are the “people…
For the last few days, I’ve been comparing the process of bringing new money into your business to the process of gathering firewood. The most common reply I’ve gotten is some form of, “Sure Brad, but gathering firewood is easy, finding clients is hard! If I could just find clients lying on the ground that…
I imagine that you’re in a cabin in the woods. You’ve been gathering firewood every day for months. Firewood is piled all the way around your cabin, and yet, you feel compelled to collect more. You have to go farther and farther to get firewood; the once beautiful forest has been stripped of anything that…
You’ve been cultivating this lead for a while, truthfully, for years. They finally have a project that would be perfect for you, and as luck would have it, you reached out just as they were thinking about how to get it done. You’re in the door – and there’s an actual project on the table….
It’s hard for a creative agency to serve more than 10 – 20 clients at a time. It splits your brain in too many ways. For most creative agencies, growth is getting bigger clients, not more clients. Successful new business efforts might mean closing 5 – 10 new clients every year. That would be a…
7 Simple Strategies to Motivate Exceptional Feedback Getting feedback from customers is arguably one of the most important aspects of being an owner of a creative agency. Feedback from clients can help you to understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s the best way to know what your clients prefer and dislike about a service…
You can accomplish your goals in a very relaxed, slow, and fun way. ~ Steve Chandler Our last conversation talked about how amping up the pressure and intensity might not be the best way to find opportunities. I suggested that there might be a way to try to slow down, listen and take time. For…
When you put together a proposal for a piece of work you’d be perfect for, how long is the document you are creating? Do you wax poetic about your “proprietary process? Do you include bios of your key people? Have you added case studies of similar projects? Or do you create a one-page summary that…
Last week I talked about spending more time thinking so that we can make better decisions. One of the categories of decisions that I see the least thinking about is new business decisions. When someone wants to talk to us about starting a new project, there is no pause – just a pavlovian response, “When…