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Zig Ziglar and Ad Agency New Business Directors

August 1, 2011

Agency new business directors have one of the most important, as well as toughest, jobs in advertising – selling the agency.

Why is agency new business so tough? Primarily because agencies are notorious for their inability to sell themselves. Agencies desperately need an expert/specialist in the mechanics of new client acquisition, someone who has the sole focus and capabilities to bring“life-giving” new business to the agency.

“It’s just such a hard position to fill,” said Michael Zuna, New York managing director at Publicis Groupe’s Saatchi & Saatchi, “The Mad Men-rainmaker days — that doesn’t happen anymore. It’s a tough job.”

In my time in the trenches as a new business director for a number of agencies, I was often inspired by the writings, tapes, videos and presentations of Zig Ziglar, a fellow Alabamian. He is one of the most famous motivational speakers and authors in the world. He is also one of the nicest persons you’d ever want to meet.

Ziglar comes from a successful sales background and has a first hand understanding about the daily grind of being in sales and the need for motivation.

He once said,

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily!”

To help feed your daily motivational needs, here’s my list of Zig Ziglar’s most notable motivational quotes (I’ve paraphrased a few of these to make them a bit more specific to our industry). Hopefully they will provide you with a spark of motivation as you attend to one of the most important jobs of your agency – business development:

Motivating gets you going and habit gets you there . Make motivating a habit and you will get there more quickly and have more fun on the trip.
Stop selling and start helping.
Your agency’s most valuable asset is its reputation.
Prospects are perishable – handle with care.
Obstacles are the things we see when we take our eyes off our goals.
If you’re sincere, praise is effective. If you’re insincere, it’s manipulative.
The primary reason prospects will choose not do choose your agency is lack of trust.
New business is more than a profession, it is a way of life.
If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.
When we do more than we are paid to do, eventually we will be paid more for what we do.
A goal properly set is halfway reached.
Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.
If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.
Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.

Click here to heck out the official Zig Ziglar website for additional new business resources.

Additional articles that may be of interest:

Photo credit Matt Wright

2 Comments | Agency Blogs, Facebook, New Business Tips | Tagged: Ad Agencies, ad agency new business, business development, Michael Gass, motivation, new business director, sales, Zig Ziglar | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

Blogs Can Convert Visitors into Leads for Ad Agency New Business

May 3, 2010

The chief benefit to your agency from using social networking is “getting new business leads.” Creating a community of followers through Twitter and a regularly updated stream of content on a blog builds engagement, can boost your agency’s presence on Google and ultimately bring in more prospective clients.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Inbound online marketing platform HubSpot’s The State of Inbound Marketing report that inbound marketing can double average monthly leads for small and medium-sized businesses. It can also generate leads for less money inbound marketing bring leads for less money.

“This report is designed to help businesses and marketers understand the current usage and results of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and its products.

Inbound marketing is becoming widely accepted because it complements the way buyers make purchasing decisions today — using the Internet and related media to learn about the products and services that best meet their needs.” – Hubspot

Three key takeaways from this report:

Businesses are generating real customers with social media and blogs. The use of social media and company blogs as marketing tools gets your company better brand exposure, but it also generates leads that result in real customer acquisition. 41% of companies who use Twitter for marketing have acquired a customer from a Twitter generated lead. 41% of companies using LinkedIn for marketing have acquired a customer from that lead generation source. 43% of companies using Facebook have acquired a customer and 46% of those using company blogs have acquired a customer from a blog generated lead.
Inbound Marketing channels continue to deliver dramatically lower cost per lead than Outbound Channels do. Respondents who spend more than 50% of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing channels report a significantly lower cost per sales lead than those who spend 50% or more their budgets on outbound marketing channels.
Inbound marketing budgets are increasing while outbound marketing budgets are decreasing. As a percentage of the overall lead generation budget, inbound marketing expanded slightly from 2009 to 2010 and outbound marketing contracted. The net effect is that the gap widened from inbound marketing having a 9% greater share of the overall marketing budget in 2009 to a 15% greater share in 2010.

An additional report highlight that I thought was interesting: Customer acquisition through blogs is directly related to frequency of posts.

The report concludes that, “Traditional outbound marketing techniques – including direct mail, print advertising and telemarketing – are becoming less effective. Buyers are not only finding ways to tune these messages out, but more importantly they now have the capability to evaluate the products and services they need on their own.

Click here for a downloadable copy of this report. There’s also a free Webinar On Demand: The 2010 State Of Inbound Marketing

Here are five things that you need to incorporate into your blog to have success:

A genuine passion for the topic
Expertise, credibility, authority
Honest recommendations that really work
Welcoming, helpful, rewarding information, given freely
Demonstrate value

These are the things we should incorporate into any agency new business program. A blog is a great tool that almost forces you to do these things.

A blog is a new tool for agency new business. It is possible to stop chasing business and have business chasing you.

In celebration of Fuel Lines’s 500th post, here 10 agency blogging resources:

2 Comments | Agency Blogs, Facebook, New Business Trends, Social Media | Tagged: blogs, Blogs I Recommend, Hubspot, inbound lead generation, Michael Gass, Social Media, Twitter | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

Ad Agencies: Facebook’s True Ambition

April 23, 2010

The first time the world finally sees Facebook’s true ambition, to be the single service that dominates identity on the Internet.

Some Quick Stats about Facebook:

More than 400 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
Average user has 130 friends
People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

Ad agencies must keep up with the new transformations of Facebook and its impact on social media and the advertising industry.

Robert Scoble, best known for his blog, Scobleizer, reports from Facebook’s F8 developer conference with some enlightening interviews and video of Facebook’s press conference.

Robert’s first interview is with David Kirkpatrick is very enlightening and I wanted to share it with the readers of Fuel Lines. David is one of the foremost authorities of Facebook. He just finished a book, The Facebook Effect, about Facebook. David says, “This is not just another company, it is a transformational phenomenon, it is really great, but it is really scary in some ways too.”

Facebook announces new ways subscribers will be able to personalize their online presence and share what is important to them:

The Open Graph: A social platform that Facebook is intending to turn into a more intelligent way of searching the internet, offering an individually relevant set of search results based on the user doing the looking. The Open Graph could offer the first serious challenge to Google.
Social Plug-ins: Facebook is offering a lot of new social plug-ins as a way for other websites to embed widgets on their own pages with direct and often live access to what’s going on in Facebook in relation to the site that you happen to be looking at. Facebook will try and get us to use Facebook Connect, which means all of these other websites will have access to our Facebook profiles and data
Docs.com: From within Facebook, users will be able to create documents, share them with friends and edit them together as well.
Graph API: Facebook API which will allow developers to create better applications and more easily as well. Anything you share or Like around the web is going to turn up on your profile and be obvious to all your friends as well as appear in widgets on external sites as well, an extension of the Public portion of your profile.

This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we’re really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.

This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken. From Mark Zuckerberg’s (CEO of Facebook) Blog Post

The Bottom Line: All of this is geared towards Facebook being able to make money by advertising with more relevance to its users

A good guide: What you should know about Facebook’s changes

Leave a Comment » | Agency Leadership, Facebook, Social Media | Tagged: David Kirkpatrick, Facebook, Facebook F8, Mark Zuckerman, Robert Scoble | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

100 Facebook Tools for Ad Agency New Business

May 5, 2009

Facebook now has over 200 million active users. More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once a day.

The INSIDECRM blog provides a comprehensive list of 100 tools and tips that will help your agency to maximize the marketing opportunities available through Facebook.

This is a great resource list that will make Facebook part of your agency’s social media marketing mix for new business.

Learn why Facebook has rapidly become the go-to networking site for marketers.
Learn about the current and future advertising opportunities on Facebook.
Learn about the endless ways you can use Facebook to promote your agency at no costs. Use your creativity and marketing mind to maximize these features.
Learn about the tools and applications, add-on features for Facebook, that will allow you to customize your profile and fan pages to build relationships with agency clients and prospective clients.
Learn how to narrow down your target audience through researching Facbook’s demographics.
Learn to taylor your social media new business strategy through”How-to Guides” to help fully utilize Facebook.
Learn the benefits of Facebook for small-to mid-size ad agencies from this list of tools and tips.

Bookmark and read, The Facebook Marketing Toolbox: 100 Tools and Tips to Tap the Facebook Customer Base

1 Comment | Facebook, New Business Tips, Social Media | Tagged: ad agency, Blogs I Recommend, Facebook, Facebook tools, INSIDECRM, Social Media, social media marketing | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass