Hi,
Last month we talked about the importance of sales and new business to drive your creative company forward, and how this needs to be more than just relying on word of mouth.
Sell, sell, upsell
Part of ensuring the growth of your creative business is going beyond new sales and actively getting more business from your current clients.
Once you get to know a client, you’ll understand their needs and requirements. You’ll become familiar with how they work, what pressures they are under and the style of the team and their business.
For this reason upsell should be easier than new business activity, but in most instances we don’t give it as much focus. You need to get a good rapport – remembering birthdays, facts about their family and other personal details makes your client feel that you care and that they are your most important client. It’s often that you know this – but if it’s recorded and kept in one place then everyone else can know it too.
It’s just as important once you have a client to pitch ideas – these should be costed and you should take the initiative. If you are given a yearly budget, put forward a plan. Your CRM system needs to be robust – you should save as many details as possible about the client team – you never know when someone gets promoted or moves to another area of the business or maybe to another business – your knowledge may prove vital.
Track targets
Now we come to the key part of tracking sales targets, these need to be split between new business and current clients, and also planned and non-planned expenditure – it’s often that you have an activity schedule for the year, for a client – but the real skill here is adding things onto the menu. It’s about land grab – doing more – over and above the clients initial budget. You can often add another 30% on top of budget by pitching great ideas. For additional spend on activity, if it comes with a robust business case and a convincing ROI for the activity it’s difficult for anyone to say no. So why not try to sell ROI or success based fees.
Get Feedback
Tracking the achieved targets for any activity is key, as is the feedback on a project or job. You should keep a record where you compare delivery against the brief, and success against defined targets. Also how the client perceived the project, as well as feedback from the creative team on the brief, and the account team on their deliverables. All this information should be stored in a central place. In Traffic we have a ranking system where we rank a job out of 100 based on the delivery of a number criteria against each success criteria. We rank it from the team and then from the client – and then track against the two. If there are any shortfalls you know about it early, it’s often that creative teams think everything has gone well.
The importance of project management
This therefore brings us neatly into the area of project management – this is the other major factor that helps in retaining clients. Ensuring they have regular and accurate communication, that timelines are given, updated, and delivery is ranked and recorded.
Current project management systems fall into two categories – very complex and time intensive scheduling or programmes that are not specific to the creative process. A key requirement is to break a project into jobs, and within those jobs different stages, and those stages can be further classified into tasks, which are specific to a person. Also important in management of projects is scheduling events, the things that need to happen, and are not about time based tasks but are factors that need to be completed before you can move to the next stage. Any project management process needs to work to a framework and scheduling of events and staff activity needs to be easy and simple to record. And to report back as to what everyone in the team is working on. You need easy Gantt charting – and any changes in the schedules relayed to the client with new information.
Finally tracking all the correspondence related to a client, a job or a project is vital. It’s important that this is recorded for everyone to see, including emails, and phone correspondence and a history of everything that’s happened on a job.
Thought for the Month
“Good design can’t fix broken business models .” Jeffrey Veen
Have a great month!
Cheers,
Tracey