Yes there are some short term challenges in terms of Covid restrictions but they won’t be there forever.

The barriers to entry are lower than ever before and agencies can open in new markets with minimal costs and time investment. In this article we are going to look at some of the ways we can support your agency internationally, helping you establish new clients and setting up offices in international locations.  

Understanding your market: Picking the right market is critical. There is no point trying to be in several locations at the same time, unless you have the size and scale to make this a reality. It is better to understand and focus on one market first. 

Focus on the Mega Projects: There are a huge number of mega projects in the world that drive business for creative agencies. Whether it’s sporting events such as The World Cup or cultural events such as Expo 2020. I visited Expo last week for a client and the sheer scale of creativity is incredible. Many of our clients have won business in the preceding years running up to these events. The next World Cup and Expo are already being planned. What could your agency do to target business in these (and other) mega projects? 

Cultural Differences: Each market has it’s own specific differences and nuances that must be understood. Winning business in New York or North America is a very different process to doing it in Dubai or The Gulf! Spending time getting up to speed on the sensitivities and cultural details will stand you in good stead. Things don’t happen overnight either. A long term and patient approach is required, which takes a committed board or agency owner(s) to see things through. 

Growth plan: When going into any new market you will need a clear plan for growth. What are the steps you need to take to secure business? How can you do it in an effective and lean way? Most SME creative agencies do not have FTSE 100 budgets when it comes to international expansion! I have watched many agencies burn through 2 years worth of business class travel, to China for example, with precisely zero to show for it at the end. Getting bang for your buck and spending carefully is essential. 

Foundation clients: Ideally, having 2-3 foundation clients can help provide a springboard into new markets. Those can usually be won from base camp – before you take the plunge and invest significant sums in travel and a new office. This is a very effective strategy that has worked for lots of our agencies. 

On the ground network: Build your on the ground network as quickly as you can. Get to know the key players and major prospects in a specific city you may be targeting. There are lots of resources via British Embassy teams and the DIT (Department for International Trade). There is a well developed infrastructure on the ground, all over the world, to help you. Tap into those services and get to know people locally. 

Office: This will probably be the final stage in the process, taking the plunge and opening an office. It may take a while to get to this point, if you build up business and your client roster beforehand. Being able to say “we have an office here” or “we’re about to open an office here” is a very powerful signal to prospective clients and it goes down very well. A satellite office with a simple presence can often be enough to start with.   

In summary, there has never been a better time for SME’s and agencies to expand abroad. The technology is there to support you and there are less barriers to overcome. The political and economic link between many countries and the UK are a major focus on government agendas. Markets such as North America, The Middle East and The Far East are all very hot for creative companies.  

The UK creative sector is revered around the globe. Whether in music, arts, fashion, film, events or createtech it’s one of the things we do best. Now is the time to take your creativity out there to the world!  

Rob King – The Client key: A new way, for new business 

The post Agencies Going Global: Now is the time. appeared first on The Client Key.

We are currently in the middle of a huge evolution in the way that clients work with their creative partners and agencies. The biggest challenge of all? Engagement. How do you engage people (e.g. your clients, current and new) in this hybrid business environment? In a world where they, seemingly, have much of the power and control?

Agency new business has always been the thing that separates the good from the great. Great agencies understand that new business comes before all else, and that without it, there is no agency or indeed creativity. The merely good agencies, often pay lip service to new business and it usually plays a secondary role. Today, amidst this evolutionary period, things are no different. The great creative agencies are finding smarter, new ways to adapt in the digital, post pandemic realm.

What are the best ways you can thrive and develop meaningful relationships with new clients, that quickly convert and lead to direct business, for your agency?

Relevance: Before you even think about approaching clients (new or current) have you considered whether you are truly relevant to them? Everything you write, or deliver in any meeting, should be aligned with their needs. That takes time to consider, craft and prepare. Client meetings are immensely difficult to secure and yet many agencies always under prepare for them. Spend time thinking about your clients businesses and their needs. When you genuinely align them in the right way you will soon be pushing on an open door.

Cut through: Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of all right now. Many clients are not in the office, e.g. no phones, and therefore contacting them, getting access or any kind of ‘facetime’ (these days, digital facetime) is harder than ever. That tips the balance massively in their favour, not the agency. The Client Key are using new technology to get you access to clients and land those highly relevant messages that start the all-important first conversations. Find a way to cut through the noise and get in front of clients. If this is a challenge, ask us to help you!

A structured process: Don’t get stressed, get a plan! New business & sales really doesn’t need to be hugely difficult or challenging. Most agencies are standing on a mountain of value – they just need someone to help them unlock it. In order to do this effectively devise a clear strategy and campaign plan for growth. We can help unlock your assets and value so that clients are quickly ready to buy from you.

Client Clarity: Ask any agency who they want to work with and the answer will usually be one of the ‘FAANG’ companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix or Google. Sound familiar? Clearly we’d all like to be working with these companies, perhaps you already are? But how about going after the ones under the radar? The global behemoths that most people have never heard of. These are the kinds of clients that we love – and there are lots of them out there! Know who you want to work with and, more importantly, why. If you start with a direct relevance to the client from the outset your first engagements will be far more effective.

Rainmakers – To bring all of this together you need people who intuitively know how to do all of this! The points we’ve shared are second nature to them and this is how they operate all day long. If you don’t have natural born rainmakers in your team, find some externally!

The old agency model for growth has changed. Previously, companies looked to the Sales Director or Client Services Director and largely, left them to it. That is a risky and ineffective plan for agencies not to grow. Why try to deliver such a critical function in-house when you don’t have the skills or team to do it?

There is a new way, for new business. A service that brings in expert specialist knowledge with the proven skills to grow your agency. The game has changed and it’s now time to embrace new and innovative ways of growing your creative business.

If you have any questions or want to discuss any of the points covered, get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

Rob King, Founder

The Client Key – A new way, for new business.

The post Agency Growth – Has the game changed? appeared first on The Client Key.

A lot has changed in the last decade and agencies are struggling to find the leads they need. GDPR has complicated data leads. While in-bound marketing has become a behemoth task now including social, emails, podcasts, youtube and influencer content strategies.

There are many options for those who haven’t got time, or contacts, to run email campaigns nor the budget to hire a full time marketing lead. To help you out, here are some (but not all!) of the ways we carry out lead gen for our clients.

Traditional formats still work – well!

At The Client Key we undertake lead gen holistically. Creating pipelines for your business which are managed in our CRM, tailoring activity to leads. Before that, you have to feed the pipeline. You need to find and harvest the data of your dream clients and do this in the thousands, not the hundreds.

You then have to call and email every single one. This is often outsourced (we can do it for you) because it’s so labour intensive and the hit rate is low, but trust us, it works. A recent client had 1,500 emails sent to new leads which resulted in 80 responses, 10 enquiries and 6 jobs. Calculate that by an average project value of £10k and it starts to make sense. We are fee earners for you!

Utilise software and tools

We utilise the best marketing and lead gen tools. There are plenty out there, it’s just the case of choosing the right one for you. Our tools find the data, create campaigns, personalise contact and feed our CRM. If you’re starting from scratch think about mail merge, CRM software or monitoring software like lead forensics.

Get your shop window looking its best

If you’re driving outbound traffic to your platform without a great website, clear messaging and fantastic case studies then you’re wasting your time. Your leads will always look to validate your credentials. At the very least update your website, but look at the big players in the market, they have curated IG feeds, live streams, email campaigns and passion projects. It’s all about content – content validates credentials!

Pay for ads

Simple. Get yourself to the top of google by paying for it. Rightly or wrongly, these days… you are, what google says you are.

Lead with lapsed clients

This is something we are always repeating. It’s easier to go back to old leads than to create new ones. Have you had someone you’ve been courting for 12/24/36 months? Are there clients who worked with you but have gone off the radar? These are your low hanging fruit. Get back in touch, send them some of your new content and keep pushing.

There are many other ways we develop and nurture leads. If you’d like to hear more about how we can manage your new business pipeline, then please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

Rob & Amy – The Client Key

The post The dark art of lead generation appeared first on The Client Key.

Are you now too busy working ‘in the business’, instead of ‘on the business’ to fix it?

Would your agency benefit from our new business development audit and bespoke action plan? We’re looking for three creative businesses to trial this new programme at a one-off-cost of £950+ VAT.

Our audit and action plan will help you if your agency has slow and sluggish growth. If the pandemic has affected your sales pipeline or you feel you have an unclear vision of what you want to build or focussed strategy for new business, then this programme is for you.

How it works

We conduct a workshop with up to three of you organisation’s leaders. We will analyse your current performance, your goals, pain points and different ways of engaging your client base. Lead by Rob King, our founder and director with 20+ years new business experience and Amy, our project director with 10 years in marketing and agencies.

After the workshop, we’ll deliver you a customised easy to action plan and strategy, with a follow-up session for discussion to help ensure the programme is successful.

The sessions will be conducted in May and June and will be awarded on a first come, first served basis. We will be running a waiting list beyond the initial three agencies who successfully apply.

If you’re interested in finding out more or would like to sign up to a session, please send us your details here

The post Could you use a pair of fresh eyes? appeared first on The Client Key.

The Client Key has decades of experience in successfully growing agencies, production companies and creative organisations. So, in this article, we’re going to share some of our core ‘truths’ in agency new business.

We hope that you’ll find them useful and relevant to your agency!

1) Strategy is paramount

Do you have a new business plan? Where is your next client coming from? How does your sales team operate? Not having a clearly defined road map for growth will slow you down hugely. Most agencies try to do things organically without a clear process and rigorous implementation of the new business function.

2) You need rainmakers

Rainmakers are the people who consistently win you business. They genuinely know how to engage clients and do whatever it takes to get them over the line. They operate instinctively and it’s in their DNA. Sales and new business comes naturally to them, and often without any formal training – they just know how to do it. Who are the real rainmakers in your business and have you got enough of them? Do you celebrate and reward them? Does everything fall squarely on their shoulders, or do you help them share the load?

3) Your brand proposition alone will not win you business

There are many people who believe in ‘win without pitching’ via a well-defined brand proposition. Namely, that if you communicate your agency value well enough, clients will automatically choose you without a pitch. Very, very rarely is this ever true. This single thing will not win you business. Yes, it’s important to have a clear and well defined brand proposition, that clients engage with. But forget the idea that on its own this will win you work – it won’t! Very rarely do clients ever single source major pieces of business without entertaining some kind of pitch. So…

4) Get good at pitching

Pitching is not a dirty word and ‘win without pitching’ is dead. Clients are duty bound to carry out their due diligence and entertain multiple conversations before placing a significant piece of business. They might know who they want to work with but 95% of the time they still have to run a pitch. Successful pitching is an art form in itself. So, get good at it! Learn what their major success factors are before you say yes. Learning how to pitch more effectively is the one of the single most important things you can do to grow your agency.

How to pitch!

5) New Business is the only building block for success

This is what separates the great from the good. The ability to put new business and sales at the heart of your organisation. It’s not great creative work (although yes, of course, that’s vital) it’s your ability to go out and sell that creative work. When you can embed this idea, across everything you do, your agency will grow, very rapidly.

6) Your clients might be further away than you think

Creativity is in demand all over the globe. The UK creative sector is among the best in the world. Through technology it is now easier than ever before to work with international clients. Are you doing this in your agency? How can you open up new clients in different markets more effectively?

Finding new international clients

7) There is ‘A New way, for New business’

You are operating in a very crowded marketplace so your ability to stand out and differentiate is vital. The Client Key helps businesses operate a new, more effective, way for sales and new business. Gone are the days of ineffectively trying to do this solely in-house. Our model is the ‘uberfication’ of the biz dev function. Proven and effective that generates results.

Let us know what you think about our agency growth truths! We’d love to hear from you.

Rob King – The Client Key

The post The Truth about Agency Sales appeared first on The Client Key.

The barrier to entry for agencies these days is low. Very low. A slick website, beautifully curated social presence, a strong creative track record (often for former employers!) and boom; you’re off. A fully bona fide ‘agency’ is in business. Form an orderly que please clients.

Many people think that just by setting up shop and simply ‘being’ an agency their business will thrive, succeed and grow. A lot of start up’s I encounter think that clients are relatively easy to engage and win. You might think that sales will happen and continue to grow organically because that’s what they’ve always done.

You also believe might think that clients truly understand what you do and how you can help them – sadly, they almost certainly don’t. To change that you need an effective pitch. You might also believe that once they do understand  they will want to give you a pitch opportunity. Reality check – they probably won’t.

Clients have more information, more knowledge, information and more power than ever before. It’s now easier for them to identify, qualify and reject you. And, yup, you guessed it, reality check – they almost certainly will. Even more scarily, they can do all of this in a few moments and in just a few clicks of a button. They won’t even bother to tell you they’re not interested. Far worse, they’ll probably just ignore you. They will have already moved on whilst you’re sat there expectantly waiting, hoping, that something might come of your fleeting encounter.

However, you’re not responsible for new biz, other people are leading the sales drive within your business, aren’t they? No, they’re probably not. They’re all too busy and overrun with other things being fired at them from all directions. We live in the information overload age, especially in agency land. Which means that sales and new business is not top of most people’s list, however talented or well-intentioned they may be.

So how do you begin to change the reality you are faced with? How do you tip the balance back in your favour. The first thing to do is implement a clear strategy for sales and execute it effectively. Being very clear about how you communicate and delivering your value so that clients realise they can’t get it from anyone else but you. We’ve covered strategy in another article ‘the only five ways to grow your agency’.

Does the world really need another creative agency? – no, possibly not.

However, if you start from a different place altogether and recognise that understanding people comes first – above all else in fact – then you’ve got a fighting chance. Because once you understand what they want, what makes them tick and more importantly, what they need, then you are beginning the client conversation from a far stronger place. Armed with this knowledge and insight you will begin to stand out and once you stand out you’ll also start to resonate with your clients. When you resonate then you will start to accumulate.

Reality check: You are not just in the creative business: you are in the people business. You are in the building relationships business. Understanding these points, and implementing a radical shift in agency thinking, are the single most important things you can do to help your business grow, differentiate and thrive.

Reality check – it works. Try it.

The post Reality Check: You are not in the agency business. appeared first on The Client Key.

You might not know it yet (or be willing to face the reality?) but there is only one thing that is going to keep your business moving forward and that is Growth. In simple terms change or die. Or rather, in today’s hyper competitive landscape, grow or die.

So, just how do you grow creative businesses in the most efficient way? How do you really move the needle? And, crucially, how do you do it in the most efficient way and over what time frame?

There are many different ways to answer these questions but in my view there are only 5 main ways to grow creative agencies. So let’s have a look at them and evaluate each in a bit more detail:

1) Organically: Short to medium term

Organic growth. Has there ever been a nicer way of saying we’re lazy and haven’t bothered to do much? “Organic growth” sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Yet, when I hear people talk about organic growth I think lack of a plan, and disinterest in a clear new business strategy. I’m usually right! Yes you may attract new clients and pick up pieces of business but it is not going to deliver you long term sustainable growth.

2) Business Development campaigns: long term thinking

A well planned and strategic new business campaign can transform your business. Agencies who run effective sales and new business strategies, aligned with a clear and unique proposition, are the ones that really thrive. Taking in marketing and product strategies they are able to clearly connect with their client base, have higher pitch wins and as a result grow quickly, outperforming the competition. Now it’s getting interesting!

3) New Products & New Services: innovation

Launching a new product to steal a slice of the market is a brilliant way to grow. If you’ve spotted something that no one else has, congrats! But how fast can you move? How quickly can you get it out there to maintain first mover advantage? (hint, see number 2 for an effective plan!)

4) Major Investment: team & resources

With major investment comes the luxury of resource. The luxury to be able to spend your way to growth, should you so desire. But how best to spend such privileges? Use your riches wisely – do you have a plan and moreover can you implement it? Buyer beware!

5) Acquisitions & Strategic partnerships: fast track growth

Spending your way to growth can be a fast track way to add turnover (and hopefully profit), client base and capacity in a relatively short space of time. If you can find the right company at the right price (and have the required means) then this can be a very effective way to grow your agency. Acquisitions of course come with their own challenges but that’s down to your skill as an entrepreneur to effectively integrate and align the newly joined businesses. Partnerships and alliances can also work well but are rarely the golden ticket they’re often made out to be.

So, in conclusion you can try and shortcut your way to growth. You may have some been told about some new biz “hacks” that promise to deliver the client dollars. Perhaps you believe the ‘win without pitching’ hype which is, largely, something of a fallacy. Or maybe you’re just happy to wait for the phone to ring?

In reality new business has to be at the very core of your agency, the life blood from which it feeds. There needs to be a holistic approach to client engagement that understands how you succeed, add value through your work and grow alongside your clients. If there is not then you have a major problem.

Too many creatives make the mistake of only focussing on their product and creative output. The truly great agencies understand that clients (aka new business) and creative output go hand in hand. These are the ones that really thrive and excel. They focus on prioritising both things equally and don’t just focus on delivering great creative work.

This is the key to long term agency success and sustainable growth of your business.

The post The only five ways to grow your agency. appeared first on The Client Key.

I attended the event this week which brought together entrepreneurs, intraprenuers, technology experts and creative leaders to discuss and share their vision in the Createtech space. But first things first, what is Createtech?

Createtech is the umbrella term used to cover the emerging genre of activities in which technology enables creativity to produce new value-added products, services or experiences – and vice versa. Developing Createch fields include augmented reality, VR, programmatic branding, creative robotics, AI, immersive technologies and the application to performance and experiential markets. Createch is a wide-ranging term that describes an eclectic array of projects combining technology and creativity. Musicians and artists using blockchain to protect and exploit their IP. Brands creating blending virtual reality and live experience to launch new products. Craftspeople teaching new techniques to surgeons and scientists.

The UK is already leading the way and one conference speaker Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates, who acclaimed London “the Createtech capital of the world.” A combination of the world’s leading creative industry and a tech sector which is growing exponentially have already cemented the UK’s authority as the leading global Createch economy. There were numerous themes on the blurring of technology into every part of our lives presents to global companies and gain insights into how the sector can help shape our collective future.

There were examples throughout the day of how technology was being used in the creative sector to solve business challenges, specifically sales challenges. I was particularly interested in TRX a new platform aimed at the international TV distribution market. Founder and CEO Matthew Frank described the challenges of slow and inefficient deals which can often take more than 9months for a single rights acquisition deal. The TRX platform is a digital marketplace – a kind of stock market for the TV industry – that aims to bring streamlined deal making and far more efficiency to an area ripe for disruption. They have secured investment and VC from Channel 4 and Sky TV.

The potential for change is huge and the UK is leading the way. How can creative agencies and technologists innovate to drive growth and revenues? The answer according to Iain Tait, Executive Creative Director at Wieden & Kennedy, is to “invite everyone in”. Many big clients are “programmed to protect” and inherently stick to traditional methods of campaign management and delivery. The ones that thrive are the clients who are not afraid to embrace such rapid change, for everyone, across the board. Easier said than done for global behemoths! Invite everyone in – embrace change. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

http://www.createch2018.com – http://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk

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