How to let your prospects find you
“Does new business have to be this difficult?” It’s a question Ignition increasingly hears from agencies around the country and around the world. Business development is in fact much harder than it used to be. And it’s not just the economic recession that’s causing the problem.
And why exactly is it so difficult? An interesting piece titled “The New Psychology of Leadership” in the Harvard Business Review articulates part of the reason: “Because most business strategists have similar mental representations, they perceive and pursue the same opportunities.”1
In fact, not only do we pursue the same opportunities, but we say the same thing, and most of the time, even sell the same product. So let’s stop and ask, what’s the first and most important thing we preach to clients? Yes … its differentiation!
If you just copy, you’ll always be behind
Longtime Advertising Age reporter Matt Creamer observed in an article titled “Man Men Offers Lesson in Agency Branding”:2
"Telling an effective agency brand story should be easy for companies that are in the business of telling brand stories, right? … I can tell you, after perusing many an agency website, that fewer than you’d think have figured it out. Very few take stands … All this has made the agency landscape feel too flat and featureless, and that is exacerbating the commoditization of the business … If agencies don’t stand out, then what do prospective clients have to judge them on but for how much or little they’re willing to charge to handle an account?”
It’s a curious trait of human nature that our natural tendency is to mimic and imitate what others do – even, and especially in, business. Actually, anthropologists tell us that “copying” is one of our oldest and most basic survival mechanisms.
10,000 years later, the way that translates to a business setting is that instead of staking out a completely unique position, we tend to look around at what others are doing and conclude that that’s what we should be doing as well. While this might have helped us adopt successful hunting techniques as early humans, this tendency doesn’t serve us well at all in the modern business world.
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