Don’t Let “Meetings” Be The Sole Focus of Your Ad Agency New Business Effort

An excellent article from Blair Enn’s Win Without Pitching site called Meeting Madness contains several thoughtful insights on agency new business meetings, incentives and quality of meetings generally.

As Blair points out midway through his article, some agency new business meetings just shouldn’t happen at all.  He goes on to say:

The second lesson from my experience ten years ago is that up to half of all new business meetings shouldn’t take place at all. Many of them happen because the meeting is what we are pursuing when we get on the phone, but many times the prospect offers us a meeting before it is in our interest to agree to one, and of course we take it.

Blair nails it here, and you should read the entire piece.

The comments afterward touch on further points as well, specifically the notion of keeping busy.

Busy is good, undoubtedly, but not necessarily within the context of new business.

Blair goes into it, but think about the new business mentality you’re currently fostering.

Is your compensation model based solely on meetings and/or is the overall focus for you or your new business director the amount of meetings acquired?

No one said it would be easy: as an agency principal, meetings acquired are easy evidence of activity, and for a new business person, an obvious way to prove your worth, but you can’t go down that path.  This is why weekly reporting, in whatever form it takes for your agency, is so important.

Consistently showing how the effort is moving forward and the steps being taken to assure that meetings are worthwhile should be part of your new business process.

Inevitably, there are going to be those meet and greets with a high value prospect that make sense in order to start a relationship and begin the process, but your new business value will truly begin when you can vest your entire agency in quality over quantity when it comes to initial meetings.