Ad Agency New Business: Talk About the Passion

Get ready for a very unscientific post, but an important one for your new business program nevertheless. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at length, both on the phone and in person this week, with 2 of our agency clients.

As Business Development Director at RSW/US, I talk to agency principals just about every working day, but not as often with existing clients, so I look forward to that when it happens. These conversations made me think about two important things that can get overlooked in the daily grind:

1) You should look forward to talking to prospective and current clients, not dread it

2) Showing/Reflecting your passion is crucial to selling your agency and maintaining your clients

Looking briefly at each of these:

1)

You should look forward to talking to prospective and current clients, not dread it.

There are always those days when you might not feel up to prospecting or interacting with a client, for whatever reason.  Well, when it comes to prospecting for new business, if you’re constantly dreading it, that’s a problem of course.  Easy to say “you need to fix that,” but you may want to think hard about how you can help alleviate the problem, either by sharing the responsibilities, a new hire, or outsourcing if budget permits.

More importantly to this point is the client. Maybe something happened recently that makes you dread a particular call, fair enough, but if you constantly dread speaking to a specific client, truly ask yourself why. And then do something about it. You have to. Because that usually means you’re not servicing the client the way you should be, or it’s a client who’s so difficult that in your heart you know you should fire them.

2)

Showing/Reflecting your passion is crucial to selling your agency and retaining your clients.

Let’s not kid ourselves, we all know some days you’re just not feeling it.  That’s natural and it happens but what a difference it can make in your prospecting and in your client interaction when your passion shows through.

This should not be news to you, but I was inspired talking to the two clients I mentioned in the beginning of this post. You could truly tell how much passion they had talking about their respective agencies and it made me want to get to work.

So I’ll get up on the soapbox for a moment and say, don’t forget how much of yourself you’ve put into your agency. Let that show when you’re talking to prospects and clients, it’s inspiringly infectious.