Freezing Cold

When I moved into my current role and took on accountability for our business development we didn’t have a great conversion rate. It wasn’t shocking by any stretch but I knew we could do better! From analysing our previous year’s new business performance, I realised that we were more likely to convert leads generated by a recommendation or from an existing relationship. This won’t be new news to anyone in bus dev and of course the insight is supported by industry data such as the jfdi New Business Barometer which consistently calls out chemistry as the key factor for clients when choosing an agency.

Warmer, Warmer, Warmer

In order to focus us on improving conversion we made the (some might say crazy) decision to decline any ‘cold’ new business enquiries that came into our inbox – by cold I mean a lead where no one in our agency had a connection to the brand / business / client team. And instead we only focused on developing and unlocking ‘warm’ leads through our networks.

We knew that declining ‘cold’ inbound leads could negatively our pipeline – we could end up with no pitches if we weren’t careful!

But we knew it we got it right it would have a positive impact on conversion rate, so in a bid to tackle this, we created a new business development bonus open to everyone in the agency incentivising them to bring leads into the agency. We also ran training with an external business development coach to upskill the agency on how to drive new business leads through their own networks.

To manage the process, we set monthly new biz KPIs around new contacts, meetings, creds, pitches and pitch conversion to track how proactive we were being with our business development. We also initiated a new weekly meeting where we reported against these KPIs, shared learnings and successes to help maintain our ‘hustle’ mindset and fuel our business development pipeline.

Sizzling Hot

Over a year later we’ve found that taking control of our business development pipeline by prioritising leads through our network has increased our conversion rate by more than 40% year on year.  My advice to any bus dev leaders who are struggling to rectify a conversion issue is to treat new business like a sport:

Have a game plan – analyse your strengths and weaknesses and build a strategy accordingly.

Create a team mentality – It can be lonely in new biz when the rest of the agency is busy on client servicing. By making new business everyone’s business means it feels more like there’s a team approach (even if you do have ultimate accountability).

Train hard – Like all athletes we can increase our chances of winning if we view our day-to-day work as training for a big competition – learning every day and finding those 1% gains.