Always On - How to FINALLY break the boom and bust cycle
The agency year normally pans out like this:
Start of the financial year – year starts well with carry over from last year
Pressure is off, teams are in full-gas production mode, delivering what was sold
Couple of months later - deliverables are done and the inevitable ‘need to start bringing in more wins’ crops up again.
Pressure comes on to the teams to find new work.
Client reach out happens - Some like this, others really don’t
Work begins to come in. Hopefully some nice big chunky projects/contracts
See point two again and repeat to year end
Boom bust, boom bust, every year, without fail.
It’s a cycle pretty much every single agency we’ve ever worked with struggles with. It’s a totally understandable one too People can only do one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth. Lack of time is not.
Thankfully, there is another way. This way is for you to move to an ‘Always On’ approach.
Put simply, being Always On is getting your teams to adopt a combined, smart approach to client communication.
It is this approach that will finally mean this stressful pattern of working disappears from your life.
That’s quite a big claim, but one we stand by.
We’ve been seeing the results in action over the last 18 months. Some of our clients who are utilising a combined approach to their client communications – brand awareness and direct contact via email/LinkedIn - are now growing smoothly throughout the year.
And that is what ‘Always On’ is all about.
We’re going to break the rest of this blog down into the three critical things that you can do to get your teams Always On, so they can:
Bring in business more consistently.
Increase your conversion rates and your awareness in your market.
Feel in control of their commercial goals.
1. Think long and short
Riddle me this - When you come to the end of your delivery cycle how do you approach finding the next wave of growth?
We bet it involves asking your teams to contact clients to find out if they can do more work with them. This may involve emails, LinkedIn messages and even a phone call or two.
Now although this is a proven, effective way of generating new work, and new revenue. Some of your people may enjoy it, some of your clients may be OK with the approach, but many are not.
Whatever attitude they have to this, it sets off the boom/bust rhythm challenge we see year in and year out and doesn’t help pull clients towards you.
There’s been a lot written about ‘growing long and short’, and this is exactly what we are referring to here. Search ‘Binet & Field’ on Google and you’ll be able to read a lot more about it. For a summary video from the great men themselves, click here.
Simply put, brand awareness means using non direct communication to highlight how you help your clients, or what your agency is all about, or another piece of comms that does not call for immediate action.
It’s all about building your brand’s presence in your client’s minds.
If you and your team do this year-round, you’ll smooth out your boom/bust pattern and increase growth.
We would also say it's less daunting, less scary, more efficient, and holds a wealth of benefits for the agency as a brand than only doing sales activation.
Here’s how to prime your team to get started on it:
· Step 1: think about your target clients
· Step 2: think about their challenges – where you are helping and where you are not
· Step 3: Choose the 1 or 2 challenges you want to focus on
Once you know that, you can move on to point 2.
2. Using your content wisely
Whenever we share long- and short- activity with participants on our training programmes, they often think that building brand awareness will involve a huge amount of work, having to create lots of content to post or to write blogs about, fancy infographics and deep-thought white papers.
This is not the case. If you haven't already got content such as thought pieces, white papers, views on the market, or you haven't written many posts, then yes of course you will need to write some content.
But the secret to using your content wisely is to write that content thinking about how you're going to create longevity in communicating it.
We've seen agencies create some fantastic market reports or presentations, then send it out to all of their clients, make a big noise about it for a day on the channels that they use, and that's the end of it.
But, if you really think about how you can use this content more to create brand awareness for your agency, with a document like that you will be set for the next three or four months.
And even with a blog or a thought piece that you create there could be potential to communicate several aspects of that for up to a month.
So here is tip #2:
Write your content.
Re-read it, breaking it down into the key points that you have made.
Work out a schedule of posting for those key points under the umbrella of the overall topic of that piece of content.
For example, as I write this, we currently have posts going out on LinkedIn about how to write great proposals. I didn't even need to write an article about great proposals, I simply decided that that was the topic I would cover in my next series of posts, scribbled down the three or four points that I wanted to make in order to help people write great proposals, and hey presto I had a couple of weeks’ worth of content to post on LinkedIn and other channels.
If all of your team are doing this, or you agree as a team what the topic is going to be and decide what your points are going to be, when you post the awareness of your agency will instantly rise. And if you and your team are doing this year round, The boom and bust cycle will immediately reduce as clients become aware of you throughout the year.
But this isn't the full story so we must go to point three.
3. Create your story arc
It's great that you are creating content and building your brand awareness. But in order to minimise your boom and bust even further your topics that you post about or write about need to somehow connect with each other throughout the year.
For example, in 2023 we are going to be launching one of the most significant changes to the way in which we train people that we've ever introduced.
We are starting that story arc with this blog. But note that we haven't even mentioned it until now.
As we go through the year, we’ll be referencing more research we’ve been doing, more of our own thinking and what’s happening in our market, to build towards the release of our new approach.
You may well be able to do something similar. It doesn't even have to be something as big as a new approach or a new product launch or a new solution. It can be something as straight forward as writing up your view on a market, but it must be something that has longevity to it. Here are some ideas:
Your forecast of what is going to happen in your clients’ markets for the year, where you then update versus reality regularly throughout the year
Your own company position and values regarding a topic of client interest
Something that you help your clients with frequently that you're good at. You can break this down into key points that you can refer to throughout the year.
You will come up with even better ideas than these, but they give you a start point from which to get thinking.
Summary
To capture consistent growth you need to move from a boom bust way of working to an always on mindset. This means:
If you start doing this, you will be addressing the other 60% of your go-to market strategy for this year.
Yes, you and the team will still need to do sales activation, there is no getting around it. But one of the massive benefits of doing brand awareness is that it also directly increases your short-term win rates too.
Win-win.