Winning New Business: Playing for Club and Country
Successfully marketing a group of agencies comes with a unique set of challenges. There are four brilliant agency businesses within the UNLIMITED group, each with their own specialisms, positioning, customers and prospective customers. Talking about them collectively could very easily have been a bland average of their messaging. We needed to be able to combine those offerings, yet still be distinctive and have a strong story to tell. How to play for both club and country?
Agencies can be a sea of sameness for clients, with so many good agencies capable of doing very similar things. It’s tempting to be a chameleon and try to appeal to every client, to keep lots of doors open. But anyone likely to be reading this has probably experienced the results of that approach.
To grow you need to win the ‘right’ clients. So you need to be crystal clear about who you are, what your real strengths are. To stand for something. Human Understanding was ours.
We have neuroscientists, behavioural scientist, data scientists, researchers and strategic planners embedded in the business, the Human Understanding Lab. Everything we do is underpinned by a deep understanding of what makes customers tick. It’s woven into the offers of each of the agencies and it is a compelling part of our story, so we dialled it up and put it front and centre.
There’s a lot of clever work that goes on in the Human Understand Lab and it would be easy to get wrapped up in the technical nuts and bolts. The discipline comes in consistently finding and telling the memorable and interesting stories.
Every agency is different, success comes from finding that difference and shining a light on it… over and over and over again, in every channel, in every conversation. It may feel like repetition but it takes a long time to land and be remembered.
For us this approach has impacted both client satisfaction and new business. Last year our pitch-to-win rate was 67% more successful when Human Understanding Lab was front and centre. And we took home the below awards: