The main change for us wasn’t so much a question of stop doing this, start doing that. It was more a question of stepping back and realizing that we needed to be far more coordinated and strategic in our overall approach.
We’d always been fairly successful at making direct approaches to prospects, building pipeline and creating opportunities. But we weren’t as joined up as we needed to be so this year we set out our strategic goals, defined the types of clients we wanted to help solve problems for and fine tuned our offering around omnichannel search and social.
Alongside introducing better orchestration of our new business efforts we’ve also increased our use of personal network content outreach.
By this I mean we’ve encouraged all of our staff to regularly post useful, insightful content that previously we may only have published on our company social pages and websites.
‘Go to Network’ over ‘Go to Market’ was a phrase I kept hearing in 2023 and we took that to heart in 2024!
The challenges with this approach, of course, are rooted in the usual enemies – time, aptitude, commitment to consistency! It’s also fair to say that sticking to the strategic plan throughout the year can be difficult especially if tactical opportunities come along that are too good to turn down.
I have to say that with the increased rigour and co-ordination we’ve put in place alongside all the usual new business levers the pipeline has never looked better, despite the tough and uncertain economic climate we find ourselves in.
I’d always fall back on classic ‘direct’ techniques – test, test test and hopefully learn something along the way.