Tom is paid by big brands to help them model their future strategy to make sure they’re not caught out by cultural and economic changes that are heading their way.
All of us at The Advertist welcome you to check out The Fuel Podcast, where we pull on the experience of leaders of companies in a variety of sectors with loads of fantastic interviews, tips and tales.
To check out this episode click here.
What a swell party we had last week – the perfect show for the perfect storm!
The Advertist – the UK’s only decent source of new business development intel, data and insights has decided to launch a new product.
And frankly, the timing couldn’t be better!
While business executives are in isolation, seeking new and innovative ways of pushing forwards and keeping the wheels of commerce turning, what better thing to do than join our gang?
That gang is The Fuel Podcast.
Produced by the founders of The Advertist, The Fuel Podcast is our brand new show, designed to help all those working in business, with an interest in finding new clients available now on Spotify and iTunes.
No flim-flam – just honest-to-goodness, inclusive, insightful, funny and lively interviews and think pieces, designed to help you on your new business journey.
We’ve just dropped five episodes and we’ll be publishing every week with fun, informative and engaging interviews with some of the UK’s most knowledgeable winners of new clients.
And you could do us no greater favour than subscribe to the show, so that we can continue to sprinkle a little jet fuel on the fire of new business.
In no particular order, I’d like to thank the following guests:
Additional thanks to Donna Smith, Editor of The Advertist for her co-production advice and to Matt Smith at Quijibo Design and Photospherix for his technical skills and input. In fact, anyone with the name Smith.
And don’t forget – the same team behind The Advertist is the team behind The Fuel podcast and we have only one thing in mind: to make your job of new business prospecting a whole hell of a lot easier.
So wash your hands, pull up a chair and tune in to The Fuel Podcast and we’ll keep coming back with more help, advice, great guests and general new business-themed entertainment for you.
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Keith Smith is the co-founder of The Advertist, the UK’s only independent new biz dev platform. Copywriter, blogger, podcaster and published author. You can email him at keith@theadvertist.com if you are interested in finding out more about how to grow your new business pipeline, or how to be involved with The Fuel Podcast.
Ben is on a mission to make the experience of buying and selling digital services better by helping agencies craft a winning approach to business development. In this episode, Ben outlines the basics of the process, while explaining that now is exactly the right time to be doing all this engineering.
All of us at The Advertist welcome you to check out The Fuel Podcast, where we pull on the experience of leaders of companies in a variety of sectors with loads of fantastic interviews, tips and tales.
To check out this episode click here.
A motivational talk with Phil Lewis, CEO of Corporate Punk who had to change pace rapidly to include advice on how sales and marketing teams and businesses should approach the crisis presented by the Coronavirus. But then, he’s used to handling rapid change and he’s as cool as a cucumber.
Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!
All of us at The Advertist welcome you to check out The Fuel Podcast, where we pull on the experience of leaders of companies in a variety of sectors with loads of fantastic interviews, tips and tales.
To check out this episode click here.
Ch..ch..ch..changes. Everything we knew before to be true has changed, given the news about the Coronavirus.
But there are reasons to be confident that we’ll all come out stronger and better. Keith, managing director of The Advertist shares his feedback from speaking to leaders of the UK’s business development community.
All of us at The Advertist welcome you to check out The Fuel Podcast, where we pull on the experience of leaders of companies in a variety of sectors with loads of fantastic interviews, tips and tales.
To check out this episode click here.
The publication RockstarCMO asked our Managing Director Keith Smith for his predictions for the year ahead. In typically disobedient style, he offered a vision of 40 years ahead, inspired by The Doors’ retrospective – The Future Starts Here.
” ‘The Future Starts Here’ – an advertising line for a gig worker sponsor, lifted from a music album from the turn of the century.
It just popped up in my visual feed and it got me reminiscing.
My father had the record – a 40th anniversary celebration of music by a band called The Doors and I used to sneak into his study and listen to it when I was a kid. The Doors was one of his favorite bands even though they were a bit before his time.
“Music was music back then,” he’d tell me. “Not like this electronic, mind numbing robot-manufactured crap you all have today. Music had a personality.” I miss his rants against my generation. I think it was trying to deal with the stress of his work that finally blew up his heart. I only got to know him for 13 years of my life and he hadn’t retired. He was still on the wheel, trying to make sure he had enough cash to live on when he finally got off – which he didn’t.
I often wonder what he’d make of life now. “How can you live with all the uncertainty?” he’d say. “How can you do all this ‘work a bit here, work a bit there’ way of life? It’s so…Romany.”
I consider myself to be one of the fortunate ones. I found my gig worker sponsor early in life. Gig worker sponsors pay for your lifestyle, like a retainer. They gamble on your future and in return, you provide them with a drip, drip, drip of regular income, like a tithe from the old days. Many tithes make a fortune and that’s what my sponsor is banking on. It’s all he can bank on really. The old days of buying and trading company shares is a lock out. It’s the privilege of the institutional investor now because they got sick of all the get rich quick strategies that sent the markets soaring and then plummeting. So Phil, my sponsor keeps me in the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed and, in return, I generate money for him to fund his lifestyle.
I’m one of his gigs.
I’m lucky really that I’m always so busy. I have gigs in three countries now, three in Britain, one in The Netherlands and I just picked up a new one in Australia. I make lots of different products for the gaming and entertainment industry, which is cool because I’m always doing something different – it keeps my mind active and I find that work I do, say for the Australian outfit, crosses over into other jobs I do. But the main thing is, I do them on my time. I can control the deadlines and I’m known for always delivering as promised, which makes me a more successful gig worker. The better your brand, the higher the fee you can command.
Phil funds all my healthcare needs and in return, I make sure I stay in peak condition. I eat well, using products grown in the community garden in my block. I can’t remember the last time I had a burger – probably when I was a kid, but if too much bad cholesterol shows up on my monthly health scan, Phil hears about it and then he’ll be all over my ass about keeping myself healthy so I don’t affect his revenue stream.
The block, where I live and work is one of the better ones in the area. It’s got massive storage for all the elements I need for printing out the prototypes I use for work, as well as for all the practical things I require for life. I just printed out a new bike, which I need, but it’s just so handy to have all the raw materials piped into the building. I can’t go out that much because of the state of the air but my block has its own velodrome and me, and a bunch of other gig workers run a competitive league, so I built the highest spec I could afford.
Jenni, my partner and I live apart, but in the same lifestyle block. We met after we both made ourselves available on the in-house dating network. She’s pretty cool. Her family are mostly gig worker sponsors and she’s trying to recruit me into their network but three things bother me about it. Number one, we’re not a permanent item and if that all goes south – awkward. Number two, they don’t have any entertainment experience in their portfolio – mostly sales and marketing operators, so I would have to deal with trying to justify my every move to them. Lastly, I like Phil. He took a big gamble with me, given my father’s untimely demise but he’s done a lot to connect me with new opportunities and I feel I owe him a lot more than just a slice of my income.
Besides, the sales, advertising and marketing sectors are so unpredictable. The new economy drove a flying bus through their revenue models. I choose what advertisements I see, and when. My block is signed up to an agency that covers a lot of buildings in the area. We’re all what they used to call upper middle class. We’re all professionals in a high-earning gig-working neighborhood so the agency that broadcasts all the in-vision ads we see is very particular about the brands and products vying for our attention. It works like this: We sign up to an ad-view list, specifying what things interest us, what we’re looking for, and the agency tenders for bids from suppliers. The ads are then broadcast to the system in my lifestyle block and I get them on my entertainment screen, my Hololens and all my comms. I can also earn credits for recommending products to my contacts, based on my own credibility and influence factors. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
I’m not much into politics. Because I work around the world, which is such a vital part of the global economy, the global political system dominates the local, country-specific one. All I’m concerned with is that I don’t get blocked or banned from any of the international gig working network directories, so as long as the powers don’t screw with that, I’m happy.
Politics became such a street-fighting process, people got fed up with it because it was taking up all the precious oxygen which, ironically, they continued to ignore concerns about. The air became so toxic because governments repeatedly refused to deal with the problem and eventually, they were all in danger of losing their jobs, so the balance of power transferred back to the people. It was too late to stop global warming but we slowed it down considerably and within the next few decades we’ll be looking to new, other worldly solutions.
New planets offer new opportunities and wherever these pioneers fly, they’ll need to be entertained, which is great for people like me. There’s always hope, right? You just need to know where to find it. “
The original article can be found here:
Is your sales process more Frankenstein than frankly strategic? Inspired by Johnny Cash’s song about a man who builds a Cadillac from parts stolen one piece at a time, Keith Smith chats with CEO of new business agency Incite – Alex Kirkpatrick – to find out how to streamline your sales process and have it runnin’ just like a song.
“Now the headlight was another sight
We had two on the left and one on the right
But when we pulled out the switch all three of ’em come on.”
Are you working with a Psycho-Billy Cadillac sales department? If so, you’re not alone.
It’s only natural that after a few years, a company’s sales effort might require an a-dapter kit, just like the song “One Piece at a Time” – a humorous tale about a man trying to build his own Cadillac by stealing occasional parts from the assembly factory where he worked.
In the rush to fill order books, a company might be willing to take on new business that meets a financial deadline but at the same time, places the resources of the business under unnecessary strain. So much strain that when the right piece of business does come along, the company’s departments are so stretched that they can’t do the job that they really want to do.
It’s a direct result of an uncoordinated sales strategy, or perhaps no sales strategy at all. Without a firm hand on the sales tiller, any ship can go adrift and before you know it the course correction required is drastic.
Sitting down with new business expert Alex Kirkpatrick, who runs one of the UK’s most successful new business generation agencies, Incite, it becomes clear that a company needs to focus on sales from the get-go. Working with a well-planned marketing drive, sales can literally make themselves, but working in an uncoordinated fashion, they might end up costing more than money.
Alex’s consultancy works with the most demanding of client types – marketing and advertising agencies, but his principles have been learned over the course of more than two decades and can easily be parlayed into any b2b or b2c environment.
Firstly, any new business isn’t necessarily good new business. As Alex says, there are many forms of bad new business but this number is far outweighed by the number of potentially bad clients: “Looking at long lists of data, making notes such as: ‘likely no money’, ‘would never work with us’, is a surefire way to curtail your market and destroy any chance of winning great clients from outside of your usual target suspect list.”
Alex recommends creating a client profile – an imaginary client that has all the features your company would find attractive: “from the type of person and internal culture you like working with, all the way through to the kind of product they sell and buyers they target.”
“The back end looked kinda funny too
But we put it together and when we got through
Well, that’s when we noticed that we only had one tail-fin”
Obviously, not all prospective clients have the same degree of appeal, so Alex always advises his clients to divide them up into three categories: ‘Must work with’, ‘Should work with’ and ‘Could work with,’ and typically, this list would be like a Chevvy tail fin: sharp at the top and thicker at the bottom.
When you don’t have a coordinated strategy, you can end up with ‘Frankenstein’ sales. These are sales without a framework or, as Alex sometimes finds, they are over-complicated by converging activities on social media and in different channels at different times: “If you think about the Must, Should, Could structure, then there are three established approaches to effectively target these markets: Account Based Marketing (ABM), InBound Marketing and Outbound Marketing.”
The ‘Must’ category (the thinnest) tends to be more one-to-one marketing-based. Creative and personal. However these take time and patience and could potentially take up to three years to come to fruition, depending on review anniversaries.
The ‘Should’ category can be broken down into common sectors and given the outbound marketing treatment, so sales calls and/or direct marketing using case studies of similar work or in similar sectors.
The ‘Could’ category is your widest possible audience and the right marketing treatment for this is usually inbound. However, as Alex advises, this is where the science part comes in because you know less about these prospects than you do the other ones, so you’ll need to create content tailored to very specific personas and you don’t know these people.
And while this may seem like a lot of work, don’t worry, help is at hand. In fact help might actually be in the same building as you, so it’s always worth introducing internal sales incentive programs to draw out any prospective closers working in the same company as you.
“Now gettin’ caught meant gettin’ fired
But I figured I’d have it all by the time I retired
I’d have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.”
If your plan is to use just word-of-mouth to sustain your business, think again there Red Ryder. As Alex says: “90% of agencies rely on referral new business for at least some part of their journey. Sadly for too many it is often how they start and grow and why they decline and ultimately fail.”
You will always need an ongoing new business or sales program because if you don’t, when you need it, it’s not there. If you rely on referrals all the time, you are not in control of your destiny and companies that do this “..are whatever they are referred to be,” according to Alex.
Alex suggests taking charge of your own sales destiny and to add proactive marketing campaigns that best enhance your company’s brand values: “Marketing your own brand effectively allows you to test technologies and tactics, creating cases and expertise that can be proved and sold to clients.”
“So we drove up town just to get the tags
And I headed her right on down main drag
I could hear everybody laughin’ for blocks around
But up there at the court house they didn’t laugh
‘Cause to type it up it took the whole staff
And when they got through, the title weighed sixty pounds.”
So the moral to the story is to be prepared for all new business eventualities. A company needs to be agile enough to be able to effectively react to all potential new business events – be it a cold request, a meeting follow-up, a call, an email, whatever the circumstance; your business needs a response that flatters the new business prospect.
“Make it look amazing,” said Alex. “Graphic design is so important, irrespective of whether your output is an aesthetic one, client buyers still care about design.”
You can adjust the response according to the type of lead, but don’t over-egg the omelet: “Better to get something good faster, than something amazing late,” says Alex. “Ultimately, look at your deck as a person.” Don’t drone on about your own accomplishments. Keep it tight. Keep it focused and keep it short because the prospect can always ask for more if they’re interested.
And as a CMO, it is absolutely part of your role to be contributing to the direction of your company’s new business strategy, working hand in hand with the business development or sales team: “CMOs should have a responsibility to sit at the heart of a company’s growth plan, to help develop a position, a proposition, build awareness, create cut though and increase conversation,” said Alex.
To help your company maximize its sales effectiveness, the following areas can be included as part of your bailiwick:
When all is said and done, marketing and sales need to be as harmonious as Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. One works so much better with the other when they both have the same intent.
Piecing sales campaigns together and being reactive, not proactive can wrong foot any company.
But when sales and marketing work hand-in-hand the effect can be stunning – as stunning as a jet black, fin-tailed 1960 Cadillac.
This time around, Q10 attempts to get inside the agile mind of Patrick Nandu – the owner of specialist new business development consultancy Booster. Patrick has successfully navigated the slings and throws of the new business economy by applying a detail-driven attention-to-detail approach to his clients’ new business pipeline development. In this interview, Patrick shares his thoughts on high altitude strategies.
What inspires you to go to work every day?
When you have your own business I believe that this should be enough inspiration – but you’ve got to enjoy it. Everything is down to you and determines whether you succeed or fail. I would never have set up BOOSTER if I didn’t feel inspired by what I do.
What has been the most pleasant surprise you found once you started Booster?
The main thing I noticed is being less stressed as I only take on the amount of clients I can handle compared to before when I had no say in that matter and just had to get on with it.
How does your ideal day at work go?
I get up early every morning, first thing is a coffee and quick look through emails, news and insights. I scan for anything pertinent that could help with the business development process. If all is okay, I’ll jump into the shower to be ready for 8.45am. Ideally I like to be finished by 6pm but sometimes I have to go on for much longer depending on what needs to be done.
What channels do you really love working in and why?
I enjoy working in a variety of channels, I couldn’t give you a specific one, as I believe you’ve got to be versatile and agile in all.
If you had one piece of advice to give someone thinking of getting into the world of new business, what would it be?
Be prepared to go that bit further than your competitors and most importantly, don’t do it if you’re not passionate about it.
What do you to do switch off from work?
I have a Private Pilots licence, so to completely switch off I try to go up at least twice a month. There’s so much to see and visit, Northern France is only a 40 minute flight away – very enjoyable particularly in the summer.
Who inspires you?
Nelson Mandela would certainly be an inspiration of mine, the sacrifices, hardship and sheer determination to achieve his goals could be applied to anything in life.
You’ve got to take a brand new prospect to lunch anywhere in the UK. Where would you go and why?
I would probably say The River Cafe in Hammersmith, serves great regional Italian food and fantastic terrace. I believe an environment can affect a situation, so somewhere relaxed, bright and of course good food helps.
What has been your proudest moment so far working at Booster?
I think the proudest moment for me was realising that I could set up my own business and acquire my own clients. It’s a tough and competitive sector to be in and I’ve managed to keep it going several years now.
Where do you want to be in ten years time?
Hopefully relocated somewhere in Italy, I love the food, fashion, culture and my partner is Italian, so a move there would be great whilst still managing a business.
If you would like to be the subject of an intense grilling of these proportions and you think you can stand up to the scrutiny, then please let us know by emailing us and submitting your details. We’ll be in touch soon.
