Before I was involved with Sponge New Business, I didn’t even know the new business sector existed. I’d sit in my office being pestered by various agencies (I was a senior marketing decision-maker), never for once thinking it wasn’t the actual staff themselves getting in touch. This is either a testament to the job being done by those reaching out to me, or a testament to how stupid I am. Take your pick.

Once I was aware and involved in the sector I started researching the different business development companies to see how their offerings varied. Though it’s a fairly busy sector, it seemed the companies I encountered were easily pigeonholed into two boxes: they were either focused on delivering the lean, tough scraps achievable in this sector, or they lied through their teeth about the HUNDREDS of opportunities they were going to bring to the table just to win the business.

When pitching to new potential clients it seems we have two options: we can either tell them what they’d love to hear, or tell them the truth.

When I was in PR, people would ask for guaranteed coverage from our activities. I’d tell them “You’re thinking of advertising; that’s not how PR works”.

Similarly, if you’re shopping for new business agencies and REALLY like the sound of their proposal, you’re probably on the cusp of disappointment.

#fearpromises

You’re using email to approach potential new clients (aren’t you?), but knowing what to put in them is hard. So here are some simple strategies and tips to help you.

Research

If you’re going to hit someone up using email, research them and their company. Use the info you find to truly personalise the outreach. If you’re automating, make the entire first paragraph a content field and tailor it if you want to make an impact.

Use your research to guide your subject line. Everyone hates cheesy subject lines and they can spot a “Hey [firstname]!” a mile off.

Use simple tools to find the golden nuggets of inspiration. Google News is great, newsnow.co.uk is great - there are hundreds of resources to make your emails pop.

Design

You’re gonna hate this, but ditch the flashy templates. If you want to seem like you’ve just tapped out an email to someone individually, it needs to look like that. So design it by not designing it.

Opening lines

Make it about them, using that research you’ve now done. If you can’t figure out how to phrase it without sounding false, try something like “I was supposed to be doing detailed research into [COMPANYNAME] but I ended up nerding out over your new range of [NERDYPRODUCT]”. Human tone beats polished copy every time.

What to sell

Nothing. Don’t just describe services at them, as if they’re someone who really needs a creative agency but has forgotten how to use their search engine. Focus on outcomes - these are not always numerical - and you can work backwards to the process proposition. A paragraph that basically says “You know how keeping your best team members is tough but worthwhile? well we make it a lot less tough - look, here’s us doing it for [IMPRESSIVECASESTUDY]” will beat a load of patented processes any day.

Calls to action

Ask for what you want, simply and directly. “Can we have a conversation next Monday afternoon - I think it’ll be more than worth 15 minutes of your day and I’m not going to turn salesy?” will do it, as will many other simple and direct CTAs. As long as you have one and it clearly asks for a thing to happen. Never send cold outreach without telling someone what happens next.

Stages

Create follow-up emails but maintain the human tone. With any email copy, if you can read it in the style of a DFS advert or it’d slip easily into your creds PDF then it’s wrong.

There’s more. There’s always more. But the above will keep you in the right zone. Imagine the sort of email you’d respond to. Bet it’d be simple, direct, personable and I very much doubt it’d be in a gorgeous HTML template. And I bet you’d be more likely to respond if the person had done you the courtesy of doing a little research before crashing into your inbox.

Steve Fair can be found writing all sorts of business development content on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/spongenb/