This program will improve your agency’s focus, discipline and commercial rigour, aiming to deliver a 25% increase in success across your organic growth, new business development and pitch process.
The bespoke modules are tailored for companies to get more from what they already have and improve their ability to lead and persuade both current and future clients to buy more from them. New Business Mastery™ gives you the tools and power to make immediate improvements to your business growth success.
NBM’s Mastery Program has been developed into 40 “pick-and-pack” modules enabling you to select the combination of modules that targets your agency’s most challenging barriers to growth. Our flagship program, New Business Mastery has been developed over 25 years of working with agency leaders to achieve rapid growth in their businesses.
Anyone responsible for winning new business or more business from existing clients. This is a valuable self-assessment for anyone in your company who deals with clients, to help break down the ‘war’ between us and them.
The Inner Game Self-Assessment QuestionnaireTM is designed to highlight limiting beliefs and negative attitudes that are sabotaging your ability to win.
See your blind spots instantly, and issues of entitlement that
you didn’t realise were eroding your relationships. You will start replacing your negative beliefs with positive beliefs that are more rewarding, and lift your attitude and your spirit.
Those responsible for delivering the business growth as part of their KPIs, from both new clients and existing clients.
This exercise projects three years into the future looking back, and is designed to apply much more commercial rigour to where your company is going to be in 36 months.
See a crystal-clear road map of why, where and how to grow the business, and have a defined set of criteria by which you assess whether to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to opportunities that won’t achieve your goals. You will be able to say ‘no’ with conviction. You will be confident that everyone is aligned.
Those responsible for delivering the business growth as part of their KPIs, from both new clients and existing clients. This module directly builds on the previous module, No. 2 The Future – where are you going?
Now you know where you want to go, from Module No. 2,
fill the difference between the future and now with a short-term 12-month plan of specific goals and an action plan to implement.
See clearly all the time you’ve been wasting. You will have
a step-by- step 12-month plan to help you focus on becoming more disciplined and judicious with your time. The guesswork will be removed about what you should be doing next.
Anyone who has responsibility for growing revenue and margin for the agency, and/or has authority to approve any cost within a pitch.
This complex formula calculates the revenue required to make your pitching efforts profitable.
Feel shocked to realise the 1000s of hours of unbilled staff time, the impact on morale and reputation based on your win rate, and how much revenue you really must make so the cost of pitching is worthwhile. You’ll have the hard evidence to justify your rationale to say ‘no’ to pitches you can’t win, and feel good about it. You’ll be able to apply the wasted time of losing pitches to proactively prospect for business.
CEO, New Business team, major account leaders.
Set up a rigorous, step-by-step methodology to get all the business you want from all the clients you have. Uses Module No. 7 The Hook and Module No. 20 The 3-Meeting Strategy, plus No. 21, Developing Assets and No. 8, Productising your Services.
Let clients see you in a new light going beyond what you do for them, so they see the entirety of the services you offer. Lead them into new work you could be doing for them due to their expanded understanding of how you can help them. Show them what you truly do vs. what they use you for.
CEO, head of strategy, anyone aware of the business results achieved for clients, by the agency.
Scope out away from the day to day processes and tactics the agency is focused on delivering for their clients, in order to take a bird’s eye view of the commonality of business pressures and challenges the agency resolves for their clients. This module gives you the intel and the territory you need to develop your Hook in the next module, No. 7.
See the one or two challenges – often unbeknown to or misunderstood by the agency – that the majority of your clients come to you to solve.
CEO, head of strategy, anyone aware of the business results achieved for clients, by the agency, plus who’s driving business growth for new and existing clients.
This is the attention-grabbing, concise headline (or title) that allows you to get in the room with any time-starved decision maker who doesn’t know you, and isn’t looking for your services. A great Hook triggers a robust discussion that allows you to co-create opportunities with that client that didn’t exist before they met you.
Stop your reliance on talking about yourself and sharing your credentials at the first meeting, as if they were of interest to the client! Start to focus your conversation on them and initiate meaningful discussions that are of real value to the client, that are so intriguing they will make time to hear. The Hook will bridge the gap between what the agency has been trying to sell and what prospective clients want to buy.
CEO, new business team and strategist.
How to make it easy for the prospect to buy from you, by packaging up some of the services you would normally give away free in a pitch or to a new client. Draw these services from right across the agency.
Have a menu of variously priced packages that form an important part of your co-created briefs that you lead your prospect towards buying in Meeting 3.
The entire agency, from the receptionist to the CEO.
This is a self-assessment of the critical skills needed for successful new business growth. Each individual ranks themselves on the 20 critical skills needed to win business from new and existing clients, first on whether they are “good” or “bad” at that skill, then whether they “love” or “hate” applying that skill. This is the Good Bad Love HateTM skills matrix.
See at a glance where each person can contribute most to the essential skills of growing the agency’s business. When all these matrices are layered together, the CEO can see who is best suited to form the ideal new business team; hidden “loves” and latent talents within the staff are revealed and can be harnessed in the pursuit of new business; and HR now has an instant guide to required training for current staff and gaps for recruitment.
The agency CEO.
We analyse the layered matrices of the previous module (No. 9 New Business skills assessment) to select the best individuals to form the core New Business team, then begin shifting time and job allocations according to the new intel you have on your whole agency team. This will help avoid the common pitfall of putting the most ‘available’ people to run new business, rather than the most ‘appropriate’ people.
Invite the core New Business team members identified in the matrices into a briefing (which is the next module, No. 11)
Staff members identified as ideal for New Business and the CEO.
We design the roles and responsibilities, and later the KPIs, of the optimal new business team, tailored to meet the agency’s growth ambitions (identified in No.2 The future and No. 3 Goals). This is the step-by-step process to on-board the new business team and engineer the New Business MasteryTM program into the heart of the agency.
Introduce the New Business team to the rest of the agency and reveal the core objectives they will be working to achieve (and how, and when).
Core New Business team and additional pitch team members, plus anyone responsible for securing organic growth from existing clients. Relevant for anyone client-facing, so you could include all of account service.
This is the most successful current technique used by the elite sales teams in professional services around the world. It’s the opposite of ‘Solution Selling’, which has dominated the approach to new clients for decades, and is clearly outdated and ineffectual. Instead of relying on credentials presentations and being invited to pitch or tender to solve an already established need of a client, ‘Insight Selling’ identifies the emerging needs that clients or prospects are not yet aware of, or are yet to have consensus on how to solve. It gives you an opportunity to become a respected business ally and not just a vendor.
Have the techniques and the understanding of how to co-create new projects and briefs with clients and prospects that didn’t exist before you raised the provocative insights that led to the project. Identify the ideal prospects, who are those most in need of change and with the agility to change.
Core New Business team and additional pitch team members, plus anyone responsible for securing organic growth from existing clients. Relevant for anyone client-facing, so you could include all of account service.
The previous module was about knowing the right companies to pursue. This module is about knowing how to identify the most powerful individuals with whom to build relationships.
It will deepen your understanding of the decision makers within your clients and prospects. You will know how to identify the change-agents within an organisation and build a relationship with them to your advantage.
Assess each and every client and prospect you have and identify their dominant stakeholder profile. Critically you will be able to identify the number, or lack of, change-agents you have pitched to or work with directly right now. You will see through their job titles and truly understand their power to mobilise or not. You will see clearly the inhibitors you face to winning pitches, getting your work through, and learn new techniques to influence and persuade, including how to make it easier for them to buy from you.
Anyone involved in the executive and financial decision to invest agency resources into pitching competitively for business, as well as the people who would be leading the pitch team.
Establishes bespoke criteria used to rigorously assess whether the agency should pitch, and reveals if you have a realistic chance of winning based on the ‘level of effort’ vs ‘level of return’. This module has two parts: The mechanics and process of doing the pitch (internal), and more importantly, the outer edge of the pitch, i.e. the behind-the-scenes motivations and politics, the transparency of the pitch, and the real reason for it happening in the first place (external). This module uses the OUCH! Factor formula in Module No. 4 for financial measurement.
1. Can you win? Is it a waste of time or a smart investment to go ahead?
2. What are the rules by which you will play, e.g. who you get to talk to, the timing, payment, number of competitors, etc. When you establish these rules, you get to play your game, and say ‘no’ to pitches that are commercially unviable.
3. Used properly, this will help you increase your win-rate to 75% or higher.
Leaders and participants of the pitch team.
Once you decide to pitch, what are the strategies and tactics you must use in order to commandeer the pitch and the client’s thinking about why they are pitching.
This involves changing the narrative of the pitch so you own it, reframing the client’s purpose of the pitch to give you the competitive advantage.
Know how to make sure you answer the pitch as the client has conveyed it, while going beyond by applying the thinking process that will allow you to find the territories from which you can commandeer the pitch.
These are new ways of thinking about the pitch, not ‘challenging’ the pitch; this is a step beyond that current common thinking within the industry. It includes how best to build relationships you must have within the prospective client.
The CEO and executive leadership team, business development/new business person.
Most agencies have a top ten list, their personal contacts, an idea of the loose accounts in the market, and the weak agencies to ambulance- chase. But this is unrealistically small to keep your pipeline full.
This module first establishes your ideal client criteria that will help you to manifest the goals and ambitions of Modules No. 2 Future and No. 3 Goals.
The rigour of the criteria is applied both in terms of the industry sectors, and the specific companies within them. The result is a realistic list of companies that you can win in a reasonable amount of time. This is your “database of gold” that will endure for the life of your agency.
Create the list of your Top 100 Prospects that fit exactly to your criteria so that you win.
CEO and executive leadership team, business development/new business person.
Learn the key information that needs to be collected at different stages in your new business process (before, during and after contacting a prospect) that will help you build a dossier of valuable intelligence to use when activating the ‘Insight Selling’ from Module No. 12.
Begin the research and intelligence gathering, and know how to use the whole agency staff – not just a select few tasked with growing the agency and winning new business. This is a key module to engineering new business into the heart of the agency. Your entire staff will think and listen differently in their daily tasks to identify growth opportunities that are typically overlooked or missed by agencies because they lack the discipline and structure that make capturing this information automatic. This embeds new business from the receptionist and interns right through to the CEO.
The CEO and executive leadership team, business development/new business person.
How to go beyond the typical decision makers most agencies pursue in their growth acquisition strategies – don’t be fooled by job titles, learn how to identify who has the real power in an organisation. This allows an agency to understand how to better embed themselves broader and deeper into existing and future clients. This relates closely to Module No. 13 Stakeholder Profiles & Motivations.
Identify other areas within a prospect or client that have budgets the agency can tap, areas that you may not have been previously aware existed.
People responsible for hitting growth targets both organic and new clients within a specific time, e.g. YoY growth, as well as the people driving new business activation.
Specific mathematical formula that shows you the real time it takes to achieve the number of new clients and the growth of existing clients within a year. Granular evidence to the days, hours and minutes, for the relationship building program to win new business. Linked to Modules No. 2 Future, No. 3 Goals and No. 16 Top 100 Prospect List.
Become judicious with your time and realise how precious it is, and how much you have wasted, in your previous endeavours due to lack of commercial rigour. Instantly stops you from having meetings – internal and external – that won’t achieve anything. You will see the true value of your time, beyond billable head hours.
The growth team: CEO, New Business team (organic and new business).
How to go from a cold prospect to a paying client within three meetings without having to pitch competitively.
Have a step-by-step activation plan with a clear, overarching understanding of what to do before, during and after each of the 3 Meetings. Use the 3- Meeting Strategy to put the client in a ‘buying state’, so the agency doesn’t feel as if it has to ‘sell’. Understand how to lead a discussion with the prospective client using new techniques to leapfrog traditional hurdles to quickly signing up new clients.
CEO, new business team, creative director, anyone involved in marketing, PR, the look and feel of the agency.
A self-assessment of your agency’s owned media and marketing assets. A plan to leverage strong assets, improve weak ones and set a timeline for filling any gaps.
Start treating your agency like your own best client, put yourself on your WIP for your assets to be completed. It is crucial to achieve this module before activating contact with prospects, so you are putting the best foot forward for yourself and your agency’s brand.
CEO, new business team, creative director, anyone involved in marketing, PR, the look and feel of the agency.
Following on from Module No. 7, Developing your Hook, to create all proactive new business, marketing and PR assets needed to drive the communication plan with prospects.
Create the content marketing strategy and new business assets, including the calendar and subject matter that ties into your new business key messages.
The CEO, new business and growth teams, strategy and creative.
A review of all previous modules to make sure your whole program is aligned and you are ready to test your activation plan.
Fill in any gaps and be ready to activate your relationship building program.
CEO, new business team, anyone driving the relationship building program with new prospects. This is your Activation Team.
Identify the hurdles that prevent you from connecting with the decision makers you want to work with. Learn techniques for circumnavigating the gates that companies often construct to deter the overwhelming number of business suitors from approaching them. Tactics to help you stand out from the crowd.
Stop using approaches to new clients that just don’t work, and develop new techniques that do. Have clarity on crucial elements that you may not have realised are preventing your success.
Activation Team, happy clients and partners.
Practise on a list of ‘friendlies’ that forms your test market for your Hook, established in Module No. 7, the new business assets you have developed in Module No. 22, and your productised services created in Module No. 8.
Fine tune your new approach based on the candid feedback from the ‘friendlies’ who want you to succeed and have your best interests at heart.
Activation Team, new prospects only.
Similar to the previous Module No. 24, however this is tested with the lowest priority prospects on your Top 100 Prospects List created in Module No. 16.
Further fine tune your approach, test your new techniques that reduce your reliance on credentials, practise your new skills in discussion around your Hook and leading new prospects towards your productised services. Build your confidence further in your new approach.
CEO, new business team, head of strategy and/or business analyst.
Building on from Module No. 17, Company Research and Module No. 20, The 3-Meeting Strategy. Further research on the prospect you are meeting, the company, the individual, the industry, and the commercial context they all face. This is strengthening the agency’s ability and skills in using business analysis to create a point of view about the prospect’s potential emerging needs, and not just focus on communications strategy and execution.
Understand what intelligence needs to be gathered so the agency can speak the language of the client’s boardroom.
CEO, new business person.
The new business tango! The artful weaving of The Hook (No. 7) that got you in the room, with Insight Selling (No. 12), Stakeholder Profiling (No. 13), Sales Matrix and 5 Qualifying Questions (No. 37), Creating the Buying State (No. 38) and the Productising of your Services (No. 8). Lead the prospect while reading the nuances of what is shifting during the discussion, and have the agility to use those shifts to co-create new work with the prospect.
Have set a date for Meeting 2.
Or they have said ‘no’ (go to Module No. 36).
The CEO, new business person.
What to capture about the discussion immediately after the meeting. This relates to the answers to the Sales Matrix and 5 Qualifying Questions in Module No. 37.
Ascertain the ‘level of effort’ for the ‘level of return’ for this prospect, and therefore how much time to invest in pursuing them. Then reprioritise this prospect based on the results of the Meeting 1 fact-finding mission in Module No. 28.
CEO, new business person, and whoever would work on the prospect should they become a client.
Share with the wider team the intel from Meeting 1. Start designing multiple potential projects that you can co-create with the prospect in Meeting 2, based on your productised services (created in Module No. 8) and the issues discussed.
Devise an action plan for what needs to be created to deliver in Meeting 2.
CEO, new business person, plus start to introduce one or two other people e.g. who would be the head of the account, strategy.
Recap Meeting 1. Deliver the agency-created project opportunities. Co-create a number of briefs with the prospect.<
Have a date for Meeting 3. Know what work the client is most willing to sign off on and invest in. Or they have said ‘no’ (go to Module No. 36).
The same people as in Module No. 30 and the team that would work on the business.
Fine tune the co-created briefs developed with the prospect in Meeting 2.
Know the scope of work, i.e. the commercial drivers, KPIs, cost and timings – the objectives and the hard evidence needed to measure success.
The same people as in Module No. 31.
We devise the final co-created briefs including the scope that you researched after Meeting 2. Decide which order you will present these briefs according to your judgment of their priority. Prepare contracts / letters of agreement for the prospect to sign in Meeting 3.
Know the exact briefs and priority thereof that you will present in Meeting 3.
Same people as in Meeting 2 (Module No. 30) and the team who would work on the business.
We quickly recap Meetings 1 and 2, assess what’s changed in the client’s business pressures since Meeting 2, which might mean you need some agility in what you present. Lay out the co-created briefs with all the commercial variables and data to track.
Have a signed contract with a new paying client! Or they have said ‘no’ (go to Module No. 38).
The whole agency.
Celebrate the win. Devise and implement a new-client induction and training program specifically designed to make them an ideal client to work with so you continue to ‘close on your terms’.
Present an induction program to your new client that includes your full scope of services offered by the agency, introduction to the team, and the best way to work together.
CEO, new business team.
Understand why the prospect said ‘no’, seek out other contacts within the business to pursue (just because one person said ‘no’ doesn’t exclude other decision makers in the company, see Stakeholder Profile and Motivation, Module No. 13), and decide on the best strategy and timings to put this company into your ‘Keep in Touch’ program, in Module No. 40.Remember, “no” means “not now”.
Reprioritise that prospect and decide the best way to maintain a relationship.
The CEO and new business team, new and organic growth.
The Sales Matrix is the structure of a conversation that is non-linear and allows you to lead the discussion and ethically influence and persuade any prospect or client. Used in any meeting, especially Meeting 1.The 5 Qualifying Questions are used in Meeting 1 to determine the time investment you should dedicate to pursuing a prospect. These two together can increase your win-rate to 80%.
Know how to lead any conversation, no matter where it starts, using the Sales Matrix. The resulting intel will give you the prospect’s own language and parameters to use when writing the scope of work for a number of projects. Know the techniques to getting honest answers to critical qualifying questions, to ensure you are investing your time on the right prospects (and not wasting time on prospects who are least likely to convert).
CEO and new business team, new and organic growth.
Creating the Buying State discusses the subtle techniques that let you ‘read the room’ and influence and persuade anyone in it. It builds on the awareness and control of the three critical states of your Self Mastery learned in Success (Module No. 1). It describes the straight line persuasion techniques of rapport and looping objectives, along with how to lower the action threshold to achieve the sale.
Stop selling and instead create a ‘buying state’ in those you are meeting. You’ll understand how to use the drivers to ethically create doubt (in your competitors) or certainty (in you, your company and services) that win you work from your current and future clients. Useful in any meeting, including with your colleagues.
Anyone accountable for new business growth, organic and new.
Step-by-step process and calendar of actions to maintain and measure required activity so new business runs from the heart of the agency, and doesn’t stall or come off the boil. The structure and demands of this program are tailored to your agency, and designed to keep the agency achieving not only its goals, but its highest standards.
Instil a methodology for all involved to have rigorous discipline in the new business program, including daily, weekly processes & actions.
People responsible for relationship maintenance with prospects and existing clients with growth potential.
Keep In Touch Program, the activation of the content marketing strategy and assets devised in Module No. 21. Aims to evolve key messages of your new business program, and create new territory and new Hook conversations that give you new reasons to contact people (and get in The Room!) who have fallen loose or not converted in the 3-Meeting Strategy.
<h3″>In the next 24 hours, you’ll be able to:
Have an ongoing relationship building strategy that allows you to stay in touch with prospects and clients with growth potential from now for years to come, in a way that converts them to clients (or if clients, to give you more work) as quickly as possible. Broadens who you build relationships with at a prospect’s or client’s company so you are not limited to one or two people who might leave and take their knowledge of you with them.
Christine Gartner, Managing Partner, M&C Saatchi
Jonathan Samengo, Head of Strategic Services, DraftFCB (Foote, Cone & Belding)
Mark Alexander, Founder & CEO, Bamboo Marketing
