Your Agency New Business Plan-I Want To Start A New Life

One of my favorite bands, (and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s as well BTW) is Guided By Voices (GBV) out of Dayton Ohio.

They’ve got a song called My Valuable Hunting Knife, with the lyrics:

“I want to start a new life, with my valuable hunting knife.”

I was listening to GBV on the plane coming back from a new client kickoff and this line reminded me of where agencies often find themselves.

In the kickoff, our new client expressed reservations about how prospects would view their experience in multiple sectors.

The two sectors were entirely separate from each other and they weren’t sure how to handle that, especially on their soon-to-be-relaunched site and in messaging overall.

Looking past this specific meeting, we’ve seen agencies take this to the level where they do indeed want to start a “new agency life,” and often they don’t need to, or shouldn’t.

 

Having more than one area of expertise is a very good thing.

We’ve found prospects, on the whole, find value in more than one area of expertise.

It gives them the sense that you can step outside specific comfort zones and provide more than one avenue of thinking, creative and strategy.

Are there exceptions-of course.  If you’re a pharma agency, for example, I’m not suggesting you’ve suddenly got to diversify.

But like the new client I mentioned, if you’ve got the expertise, don’t abandon one sector in your agency new business plan for fear that it will hurt your chances with a prospect.

Yes, you’ll need to separate disparate sectors, but that’s easily done on a site, for example, with separate landing pages, portals or URL’s.

A bit more work, but well worth it.

Unless your team is just “done” or burned out with a sector and you can afford to leave it, embrace multiple sectors you excel in.