Valuable Connections

In the ever-evolving world of industries, it's common for good professionals to seek new opportunities. Thankfully, we have LinkedIn - a platform that not only alerts us when our connections switch jobs but also insists we congratulate them with a sincere click of a button.

However, what truly matters is how you respond to these job changes and utilise them to your advantage. When a new Marketing Director joins a company, they often strive to bring positive changes and address key challenges. This presents a unique opportunity for you to showcase your intelligence and become part of the solution.

While offering your heart-felt congratulations, it’s crucial to conduct some research and identify the specific obstacles the new hire might face. For instance, if the company has recently undergone a merger, how can you contribute during this transformative period? Alternatively, if they have recently acquired new clients, how can you help meet the unique needs of those clients? In essence, your goal should be to empower the new hire by becoming their "secret sauce."

Instead of merely listing your services and saying "well done," demonstrate that you have invested time in understanding their situation. Show them that you are familiar with the Post-it notes on their screen.

If you choose to delve deeper into their professional endeavors, do so with purpose and finesse. Your efforts should be geared towards building meaningful connections and offering genuine assistance.

Lead Generation or New Business

A quick basic online search will reveal that there are hundreds of lead generation companies in the UK. So now that you know it won’t be hard to find a company to generate those leads, how do you go about choosing one (and, er… what do you do with those leads?)

We (obviously) put ourselves forward as a true solution to delivering new business simply because we offer a complete service. By this we mean that we take your brief, generate a list of prospects accordingly, and then approach those prospects on your behalf, human-to-human. New GENUINE connections = GENUINE new business.

The difference between our new business solution and lead generation is revealed by the word “generation”. Kinda suggests automation doesn’t it? Aha.

When you see phrases like “leads are developed and delivered to you in real-time” and that these leads will be “automatically integrated with your CRM platform” ( Salesforce, HubSpot, Highrise, Zoho, etc etc.) it all sounds a bit sterile doesn’t it?

Also, if it’s “that easy” and automated, how likely is it that you’re not one of tens (if not hundreds) of companies all signed up for the same service and all receiving the same leads?

Lead generation solutions are often impressive on paper because of the big numbers they promise and the ease of implementation they suggest. Sadly (as we all know deep down) when it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

That’s why we do things ‘the hard way’ - because in our experience, if new business isn’t a tough job, you’re probably not doing it right.

Obligatory blog post about agency new business, written by ChatGPT.

Robots wrote this:

As a marketing agency in the UK, generating leads is key to growing your business. However, with so many companies offering lead generation services, it can be hard to know where to start. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the top strategies for generating leads for marketing agencies in the UK.

First and foremost, it's important to understand your target audience. Who are the businesses or individuals that you want to reach? What are their pain points and challenges? By understanding your target audience, you can create content and campaigns that are tailored to their specific needs.

One effective strategy for generating leads is to offer valuable content that addresses the challenges and pain points of your target audience. This could take the form of blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, or webinars. By offering valuable content, you can attract potential clients and position your agency as a thought leader in your industry.

Another strategy for generating leads is to optimize your website for search engines. This involves using keywords that your target audience is searching for in order to rank higher in search engine results pages. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can attract more organic traffic and generate more leads.

In addition to offering valuable content and optimizing your website for search engines, you can also leverage social media to generate leads. This involves creating and sharing content on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. By engaging with potential clients on social media, you can build relationships and generate leads for your agency.

Finally, it's important to track your results and make data-driven decisions. This involves setting clear goals for your lead generation efforts and tracking your progress towards those goals. By analyzing your data, you can make informed decisions about which strategies are working and which ones need to be adjusted.

In conclusion, generating leads for marketing agencies in the UK is all about understanding your target audience, offering valuable content, optimizing your website for search engines, leveraging social media, and tracking your results. While there are many companies offering lead generation services, by focusing on these key strategies, you can generate more leads and grow your agency's business.

The Lead Generation promise pandemic

Sponge NB has existed for nearly twenty years. That’s twenty years of talking to prospects on the phone, shifting our know-how to emails as they became the preferred way to communicate (and hide!) and - in more recent times - learning to master SEO, refining the manipulation of Google, and understanding the algorithms of LinkedIn.

You can therefore probably imagine how frustrating it is to see SO many lead generation companies pop up (especially in the UK) promising to “replenish your lead funnel” at the touch of a drop-down menu. If only it were that simple!

Being honest, we’ve looked into automating our offering. The dream of sitting back and letting some macro do our job for us is a tantalising one, but though it can appear to deliver fast and instant results, they are often results that crumble under closer examination.

In research for this article, I encountered phrases (time and time again) such as: “generate a list of leads for customer acquisition and pass them on to you for closing” which seems to go against everything we put value on. What thought process is backing up the generation of these leads, how are they being sense-checked and validated, and whose experienced eyes are looking over all of this data that appears to effortlessly spew into the world without effort?

“AI-based platforms”… “Bionics”… “holistic strategies”… “social prospecting—generated by AI-enabled research” are just some of the ‘techniques’ being sold that - apparently - result in huge volumes of leads, seemingly generated in moments.

At this point I am aware I am like some old codger telling you how modern music has no beat and you can’t hear the lyrics properly, but the difference between companies with experience of new business and those tempted by these magnificent promises and sci-fi methods is massive.

If it was genuinely that easy, EVERYONE would do ONLY this.

I’ve met people with infallible systems for roulette, but none of them are millionaires. Funny that eh?

It’s the same here; if you could actually triple your incoming business with one subscription, wouldn’t it be unaffordable?

Match the promise to the fee and you realise it can’t possibly deliver what it promises. If I said I could make you £20,000 a week by downloading my “How to” brochure for £5 would that seem likely? Surely I’d be too busy making £20,000 a week from my yacht to sell you the know-how for a fiver.

If it were that easy, we’d already be doing it.

New business and social media

Following 678 - Followers 8

It’s my strong belief that anything you do when it comes to self-promotion should directly be linked to winning new business. Social media has become a quick and easy way to share results, key announcement and the work you actually produce. It can, however, also become an albatross around your neck (or at least several pigeons if you don’t have albatross in your region).

One quick exercise… take a look at your followers on any given social platform that you actively spend time posting on. How many of those might one day become customers, and how many are simply other agencies that want to keep an eye on you (or followed you back because you followed them)?

I imagine the ratio is pretty heavily weighted towards peers rather than future customers (let’s be honest, what are the chances BA’s Marketing Director follows loads of design agencies on Instagram?)

So, the larger question is, why are you spending all this time showing off to your competitors? Is it to prove you’re better than them? Is it to gather those eight ‘likes’ from chums in the industry who appear to spend their lives looking for things to like?

If you put all your time posting on social media down as building “good brand awareness” you’re simply trying to justify a massive waste of time in your day. The time you’ve spent showing off on social media could have been spent reaching out to potential customers.

Stop trying to make people who will never employ you think “oooh, how clever”.

Every time you get the urge to prove how clever you are, instead impress me by writing a great email to a potential client. You might not get any ‘likes’ that day but you might make a new connection and win some business.

A policy for success

I recently heard an industry colleague referring to New Business Development as ‘insurance’.

I like this; it not only sets the tone but also gets your head in the right space.

Insurance is (in most of our lives) an investment we hope never comes to bear fruit. I insure my car but I’d much rather keep it than find myself saying “thank god I insured it!” (because that would probably mean it’s wrapped around a monster truck SUV somewhere along the school run).

If it’s holiday or home insurance, you’re hoping that all you ever do is pay into it, but when it comes to new business it’s more an insurance against the phone suddenly losing its ring or emails no longer blessing your inbox with enquiries.

Healthy business is about growth and survival. New Business ‘insurance’ is an investment that promises nothing as an absolute guarantee, but will always (yes, always!) bring something to a business beyond expectations. You’ll talk to companies you’d never otherwise encounter… pick up project work that leads to retainers… ping into existence on radars you’d never appear on otherwise.

Sign up today! (Or at least give Steve a call).

Built by robots

There’s a PC game I play (to an almost obsessive level) called Factorio. You could argue that it’s not really a “game” in that anyone watching me play it would struggle to ascertain how much “fun” I’m having, but I genuinely love it. I could spend hours describing the game, but the key to success within the game is automation.

You start off with nothing, punching trees to gather wood to fashion into wooden tools… to then bash against rocks to make stone furnaces (fuelled by “punch wood”) to then forge stone tools, etc. etc.

After a while (about 400 hours to be exact) you’ve levelled your way up to having solar, nuclear and steam power, all feeding itself - and the rest of your production line - via beautifully-complicated systems of robot arms and conveyor belts. It’s like Sim City meets Minecraft (which I’ve just realised I could have said initially and saved us all several paragraphs).

HOWEVER (are you still here?) once you finally reach automated self-sufficiency, you find yourself missing the simplicity of how things were 400 hours ago when you were getting your hands dirty and had a solid ‘feel’ for how things were actually going. If you can zoom out far enough from your world to 1) still have it larger than your screen and 2) be so far out that you can’t see anything anymore, you might have gone a tad too far. The same can happen in business.

In New Business Development (see - I did remember why I’m here) there are SO MANY tools on offer to ‘help’ you automate your outreach campaigns it’s staggering. Automated news alerts kick-start segmented CRM systems which are linked to macros automating your auto-personalised emails, which are linked back to your CRM, which then updates your calendar… and so on, and so forth.

It’s tempting to spend 400 (ish) hours setting up such an automated masterpiece, but be aware of the perils of ‘zooming out’ so far that in any given moment you don’t actually know where you are in your campaign(s).

Many’s the time I’ve walked away from my game only to return to some snarl-up in my automated mega city. For me that involves some panicky robot building; for your company this could mean some very embarrassing and costly errors by the very macros you delighted in creating.

Remember: It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever.*

*Unless you press the STOP button.

Beyond the horse's mouth

I’m often asked why I left the video games industry - which is a fair question considering I’d spent some 15 years trying to progress my career, hit the dizzying ‘heights’ of European Marketing Director for a company called Midway Games (if you know anyone who likes pulling video character’s spines out with Mortal Kombat, that’s my fault that is) and then walked away to make poker tables in my garage while running down a very generous gardening leave allowance.

Apart from the fact that I felt like I’d run out of new things to learn, I mostly left due to the frustrations of working AS AN EXPERT with people who WANTED AN EXPERT but who then (magically) KNEW BETTER THAN AN EXPERT.

I have a billion related anecdotes, but a general recurring issue was having, say, an American supplier come to me and ask how best to release a title in Italy. My experience was pretty good in the Italian market but luckily, my ITALIAN team had LOADS of experience in ITALY (which is why I kept them around). So we got our heads together and put together a plan for success in Italy. The American MD in question was very grateful for our detailed and sensible plan… and then disregarded it completely, did exactly what he’d do for an American market, and failed in oh so many beautiful ways. The cultural tone was completely wrong, the imagery was way off the mark, and various decisions on timings were completely against our recommendations.

When things crashed and burned he asked why it had gone so horribly wrong. We could have given him a detailed breakdown of why, but this simple answer was: ‘you sought out experts, and then ignored them’.

A similar incident involved being totally ignored (by Americans again - sorry America!) when I recommended against releasing a jet ski game in a country where I knew (but apparently the Americans didn’t) jet skiing was frowned upon and in the process of being regulated due to some horrendous accidents. Telling them this changed nothing, so they released an average game into a market that wouldn’t talk about, advertise or promote an activity. Needless to say, I had the last laugh (I didn’t actually; I was just aware how smug I was sounding). #partridge

The point (finally) is… in any walk of life, if you’re lucky enough to have experts on hand to assist you in a task, TRUST THEM. If I walk into a dentist’s and he tells me I need a filling, I don’t challenge him. I don’t insist he proves it. I TRUST HIM. He is the expert. “Thank god you’re here!” I say. “Thank god you can stop the pain!”. (I also don’t tell him “I was rather hoping for a new hip”, but that’s for another blog about moving goal posts).

I’m stunned when a failing restaurant owner calls in Gordon Ramsay (therefore acknowledging they need some expert help) and then argue the toss over every point. “I think our food’s great” BUT YOU’RE FAILING! “I think our staff are great” BUT YOU’RE FAILING!

Don’t be a kitchen nightmare; if you need an expert’s help then 1) good on you for dispensing with ego and asking for help, and 2) DON’T IGNORE IT.

Happy hunting.

Four good reasons to invest in new business development

The objection we hear most often when approaching companies about helping them do better new business development is: “we’re already busy with work; we don’t need any more”. Ironically, THIS is the perfect scenario to do some effective new biz. If you wait until you NEED new clients, you’ll be operating under stress, rushing a process that needs space to accommodate the inherently long leads times.

This objection also ignores the fact that running a new business campaign brings more benefits than the obvious. Because people like lists, I shall stop writing in paragraphs and instead switch to a four-point list. Enjoy.

WHY IS NEW BUSINESS IMPORTANT?

1) Growth. The obvious point of New Biz is to boost your revenue and client base. Reaching out to new companies and partners moves you away from relying on the phone ringing and email pinging with incoming enquiries. It also means you’ll create new opportunities to increase your referrals from these new contacts.

2) Image. New Biz can be incredibly beneficial to your company’s image. Even in instances where you don’t necessarily succeed in securing work, your ‘Rolodex’ grows as more companies who had never heard of you previously, now know who you are and what you do.

3) Opportunities. This could be where you talk to someone new to find that there is some business to be done… just not the business you were expecting. You may have contacted a prospect about “service X” only to find them asking if you can provide “service Y” instead.

4) Relationships. We’ve had relationships that have grown over years. From a pitch that didn’t close… to a keeping in touch… to a friendly regular ‘checking in’… many of our strongest relationships started simply by being smart, reliable and consistent in outreach. By the time you close that long-lead new business you’re already ahead of the game on a personal level.

There are even more great reasons to be doing better new business development, but we’ll save those for when we talk inperson. Until then, happy hunting.

Words are results too

We’re constantly asked for advice from both clients and business acquaintances regarding the best way to present case studies. Our reply probably seems a little simplistic but - in a nutshell - it’s “results results results”.

People don’t buy processes and they don’t buy services; these are just the mechanics necessary to get what they really want - i.e. the aforementioned results (results, results).

Business Development (especially PURE cold channel new business) is all about maximum impact in a minimum of time. When people say you have three seconds to grab a cold prospect’s attention, they really aren’t exaggerating.

With that in mind, don’t drag your heels when presenting case studies. People aren’t ‘fascinated’ to hear all about “The Brief”… “The Problem”… “The Solution”… etc. They want to know… “DID YOU WIN?”

Don’t show me your copywriting ‘skillz’ with a text-heavy case study… SHOW ME THE MONEY! (or at least show me the outcome, which is more accurate but not as much fun to shout).

And if you don’t have a great big “400% INCREASE IN SALES” or “15,000 IMPRESSIONS” to shout about, make use of a testimonial. If the ONLY thing a prospect sees about your case study is the CEO of Aldi saying “OUR SALES INCREASED” then your three seconds have been well spent (and you’ve probably got a 1.5 seconds left to play with).

If you can’t say it with numbers, say it with words.

Er... what is new business development?

Ok. Sounds kinda silly to ask doesn’t it, but it’s easy for these terms to become faceless generic phrases that people use in sentences but don’t entirely grasp. Like “hedge funds” or “bitcoins” or “monogamy”.

We’ve recently found ourselves pitching to prospects who seem to go to great lengths to ask ‘what exactly are your methods?” or “…and how exactly will you be doing our new business?”

Initially, I thought they were just testing us, but I’ve come to realise that while some folks will honestly tell you "I don’t even know where to start” when it comes to biz dev, many others simply don’t know what it is.

So, without wishing to patronise those in the know, I thought it’d be worth defining what WE mean when we talk about new business development. Put very simply, biz dev means increasing your client base (and revenue) by doing anything other than sitting waiting for the phone to ring or email to ping.

Networking at a show and sharing business cards? That’s new business development (as long as you bother to contact the new folks you meet once you’ve got back to the office).

Calling a couple of companies you’ve never spoken to before to introduce yourself? New biz. TICK!

Putting together a small batch of outreach emails to initiate some creds-sharing. Yep - that counts (although we wouldn’t recommend that particular one without some specific ‘tips’ in effect).

Many companies are successfully ticking over having come into being when someone went solo and brought old clients with them from a previous career. As a result, they’ve never needed to (or wanted to) do any cold channel prospecting; it doesn’t feel like fun and might involve people saying “go away”. We get it. That’s why we do it for you.

There’s much more to new business development than listed here, but it’s an interesting discipline that warrants investigation if you are one of the many uninitiated. Don’t feel embarrassed - come and say hello and we can tell you more.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Three ways to improve database management

A wise man once said, “you’re only as good as the trousers you wear” and boy was he right.

Now, the above has nothing to do with what I’m about to post and - in truth - I just made it up, but it’s a compelling thought isn’t it?

Now that you’re totally onboard, let’s talk about doing a better job of managing your database, for ‘tis the very foundation upon which your outreach lives and dies.

1) I love a list.

2) Here is one, featuring three items.

---

1) Don’t make your database too big. If you start off with 400 populated prospects on a list you’re going to struggle to ‘get round’ it all before the prospects you so diligently populated in spots #300 onward start to go stale.

2) Be realistic. Don’t just go for vanity clients; think about the clients you’ve done well for, then build a profile from those and go fishing with the same bait for the same kinds of companies that ‘bit’ last time.

3) Cull with wild abandon. Once you’ve hit the same prospect fruitlessly with five emails and called 15 times, it might be best to admit it just isn’t happening for you and instead move on to fresh targets. The fact that your database is shrinking is a good thing; it means you’re working through it in an intelligent way, and now have capacity for fresh, better-targeted prospects thanks to what you’ve learnt from your efforts thus far.

I hope that helps. If you’d like more of our wisdom, please get in touch.

And don’t forget your trousers.

Five simple ways to improve your cold emails

Most people only do a little bit of genuinely cold new business. As a result, they’re sending out email campaigns in such small numbers (and so infrequently) that it’s almost impossible to draw any conclusions as to whether one campaign (and therefore one ‘style’) does any better than the other.

The advantage of being in our position is that ALL WE DO is genuinely cold channel prospecting. As a result we get to test the hell out of any and all variables you might consider in an email outreach campaign. How many paragraphs should it be? Do we say “hello” or “hi”? etc. - you get the point: WE KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING. So here are five tips to help you do better with your cold emails.

1) Don’t try to tell the recipient EVERYTHING about your company. This email should be the teaser trailer, not the whole movie.

2) Tell them WHY you are getting in touch. Show that you’ve done some research. Don’t just list your services; talk about the things you know will benefit them.

3) Feel free to name-drop relevant current/previous clients. People like to know they’re in good company, so flaunt your connections.

4) Don’t ‘jazz up’ your email. If you were sending a genuine email by your own hand it would be simple text. As soon as someone receives an animating HTML email they know they are being sold to. Be authentic, not flashy.

5) Don’t waste a PS. You’ve sent a nice casual non-HTML email, but a simple “here’s the work we did for…” hyperlink snuck into a PS. is a nice way to give them a little breadcrumb trail to follow.

If you want to know more about doing better new business development, you know how to get in touch with us.

Happy hunting.

You're not alone. Ish.

Steve and I were recently asked to guest present on an Agency Hackers’ video training session (check them out - there are some incredible agencies in their community), talking to agency owners about smart ways to improve their own business development. As lovely as it is to be asked to do such things, the part I actually enjoy the most is the Q&A session at the end.

Apart from it being a nice opportunity to interact with the many many faces floating on the screen, it’s also always interesting for us to hear which part of ‘new biz’ trips them up the most.

The kinds of questions we got asked on this occasion included:

How big should my database be?

How should I approach our ‘dream clients’?

What email platform should I use?

As you might imagine, we had a lovely time addressing all of these questions (no, I’m not giving you the answers ‘for free’ here – you’ll have to give us a buzz for those gems) but more important/interesting is that you get to see how – with just a simple prod in the right direction – the weight lifts from some seriously-intelligent people who just happen to not know where to begin when it comes to business development.

So… you’re not alone! If you know you should be doing some/more/better business development but don’t even know how to get beyond a napkin with a few prospects scribbled down, fear not; lots of other smart people are in exactly the same boat.

It took the SpongeNB collective many years to feel confident enough to host such a video session, so there’s no way you’re going to get everything right in your first few attempts to reach out into the (never-forgiving) cold channel.

And before you ask, no, I don’t have a copy of the video to share (but I do have a VHS of Robocop if that’s any use).

What you can get from Sponge NB

Everything we do is done to find you new clients. We do the obvious things (I’ll list some of them below) and we do some less obvious things (I’ll list some of them below). We cost the same as hiring a full-timer and you get a fully-functioning business development department.

THINGS WE'LL DO

-    Research your prospects properly before contacting them.
-    Research you properly before contacting anyone for you.
-    Make really smart, non-salesy calls. Ask questions on those calls. Listen a lot on those calls. Not make too many of those calls.
-    Write readable, snappy, professional emails. Individual ones. Not some bulk-mailer “look, we’ve discovered Mailchimp” email/newsletter that any prospect deletes immediately. 
-    Consult properly for you. We have a vastly experienced project manager and sales trainer to make things work well. We have an ex-Global Marketing Director and Copywriter here, so your written communications are remarkable. We're not bashing out calls here.
-    Build sensible, well-managed databases. Refresh them often. Update them constantly.
-    Report honestly and usefully. 
-    Never enshroud our efforts in meaningless stats, graphs and numbers designed to provide false reassurance and keep the project running, even if it really needs reviewing/improving/sacking off. If it needs fixing, we’ll say so. Loudly.
-    Make sure you never think “I wonder what Sponge are up to?”. Speak to you regularly, but concisely. You don’t have time for fluff. You do have time to know what’s working and what’s not.
-    Conduct a really enjoyable and informative briefing day. We don’t need to learn “what you do”. If that’s not clear on your web site, we’ll be helping to make sure it becomes clear. We want to know your people, culture, language, highs/lows, hobbies, least favourite client. The stuff we’d know if we worked there.
-    Offer the benefit of our owner Steve’s experience – 15+ years of agency business development.
-    Find opportunities worth having. If it’s a meeting, one with an agenda, where we’ve asked about budgets. We average a couple of those a month for clients (that’s a historic number, so it might not be what you get. Some very large clients have seen fewer, some clients have seen far more).
-    Help you follow up those opportunities. Not pester, just keep up to date with.
-    Offer training if you want it. You might not need it but we can help polish even a decent business developer’s approach.
-    Give you a chunk of code for your web site so we (and you) know which companies have been on your web site. 
-    Think of smart things to make things happen for you. For example, we found a way to increase the number of senior marketers at larger companies with whom we could secure conversations. It takes an hour or two and you can then use it every day forever. 
-    Sell you actual things we’ll really do - however fuzzy - rather than impossible promises. Whatever you think of our web site, our size, our clunky logo, our address or our team photos, give us a call and you’ll only ever be sold the things we do every day. No inflated outcomes, no crazy KPIs . Honesty. 
-    Celebrate the wins we find for you and genuinely beat ourselves up when we don’t win. Our culture is to give a hoot. 

If you’re doing well in your business development endeavours, call us. Don’t’ wait until things are going badly. We can’t wave a magic wand, nor will we be likely to find really quick wins. If things are going badly, we can help you plan the right next steps. When things are comfortably plateauing, or growing nicely, we’re in a great position to help grow your company using a sensible, sustained approach.