In the current economic climate of bank struggles and consumer nervousness it’s essential that you keep your eye on the most important driver of creative success — your sales pipeline.

We often see creative companies who are brilliant at driving business for their customers but less than savvy at doing it for themselves. Creative companies tell us the best way for them to get new business is by word of mouth – and yes word of mouth is great – a true accolade that you are really good at what you do – however it relies on your clients knowing other great potential clients to recommend you too.

It’s essential not to leave new business wins and growth of your customer base to chance – you need to do for yourselves what you profess you do for your customers – great creative that drives you business – and from that it needs to be followed up, managed and supported.

So how do we know a successful creative agency?

At Sohnar we can often quickly and easily identify a successful creative business or one that we know is going to grow and succeed. 9 times out of 10 its one that has a defined sales process and someone responsible for new business. It helps if it’s not just the owner of the business – as this normally means that it’s a part time job and it most definitely is a full time job.

It’s very important to have a sales process in place, that you have mechanisms like brochures, case studies and a portfolio of great work. For starters case studies are key – and clients that will act as references – ask them and then keep them abreast of anyone who may get in contact.

You need to embrace cold calling – we know that no one (except the mad) jump up and down with excitement at doing it BUT having someone who does this and builds a data set of companies that you can target – named contacts – with a record of them and their buying habits. Knowing who to call to get on the roster – when pitches are coming up and recording this with times to call back, and budgets. We all know we need to do it but it’s all too easy to not to. You need a CRM system – something that manages all this data for the company. Great sales and new business people leave – unfortunately – so it’s essential that if they do – you hold all the key relationship information and all the follow-up times. It’s what you’ve paid them for.

As a general rule we’ve seen that only 3 out of 10 creative companies have a common place for data or a database with this type of information.
Every person responsible for new business also needs a defined sales target, this can be weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. From our experience a monthly target is best; as it doesn’t leave you to the last few months of the year to focus on it. But no matter the time scales any target needs to be measured, recorded and tracked. Expected sales against actual is key. As is being realistic it needs to be something that is achievable and it needs to be rewarded if the target is hit. And even better rewarded if it’s overachieved.
It’s also our belief that there is no better reward than a financial one – we encourage commissions. Transparency to see who is bringing in business and who’s not is also important.

It’s also vital to remember that sales is not an island – it needs to be run with the input of everyone in the business – if you can give your account mangers an up-sell target all the better. If someone finds business out of hours and they are a designer – reward them. Tell the business about this great person.

Recording of all new business needs to be split between current clients and completely new business so you can track it – and forecast for it. The most common reason for a creative business going bust is unfortunately the loss of a big client. Of the creative businesses that Sohnar sees, over 40% rely on one client for over 50% of their billing. That’s a huge risk to the business, your staff, and the future of your creative company.

There are lots of other important factors within the sales process that we’ve only briefly touched on, up-selling current clients, the use of CRM, and tracking targets and what these would be in a typical creative business. We will cover these next month.

Some Clueless But Amusing SEO Whingeing 18 August 2009

A couple who seem to think they are entitled to create their own set of SEO techniques got themselves shedloads of free publicity on The Guardian today with their “saga” on how they have failed for three years to get listed on Google.  They are waging an all out crusade (complete with a blog called “The Google Delusion” which – curiously enough – is dated today) against big bad Google and its anti-competitive, anti-business techniques.

…the problem being that they are the worst possible spokesmen for their “cause”.  Their business idea (a price comparison site – you know, those obnoxious ones that show up in your search engine results as “Get Cheap Prices On…!”)  is a carbon copy of several others.  Their web site itself, code and construction wise, is shocking.  There are more basic daft SEO sins and mistakes in the bloated code than I have hours in the day to describe, but just as a taster: when I pulled up the code, I saw table layout, no H1/H2 tags, and almost no text – but hundreds of hidden links.  The site is so plain, uninviting, and sterile that no one wants to link to it, so they’re suffering on inbound links.  If they phoned me up to ask me to do SEO, I would have taken one look at this site, laughed out loud, and hung up the phone assuming it was a wind-up.  No joke: I’m a professional and I would not touch this train wreck for any amount of money.  Hmm, I think that makes me part of the conspiracy!

In their blog and even in the article’s comments section, the couple behind the site are on a self-righteous mission to blame everyone but themselves.  Yes, Google has faults, and Google is too powerful, but I don’t know what it’s going to take for this couple to realise that “pffft yeah I know you are but what am I?!” is not a business strategy.   They have been told several times about the structure and coding errors in their site which they are well within their power to fix at any time.  Yet they claim they don’t have to fix them because their site “regularly goes head-to-head in rigorous competitive procurements against other leading price comparison sites, and wins. Any assertion that {it} is low quality, therefore, contradicts the conclusions of {our} many prestigious partners.”  Pff, yeah I know you are.

But offering a quality service isn’t the point for them, is it.  As this comment in the article’s page put it best:

Whilst government etc bang on about ‘encouraging innovation and enterprise’, too many hapless, deluded wannabees are allowed to believe that they’re being entrepreneurial – and for some reason they seem to believe they’re entitled to business success. Sad really – but an article that IMHO misleadingly plays up the ‘big bad google sinks plucky Brit startup’ angle just perpetuates the problem.

Now, place your bets on how long it takes them to start complaining about Richard Dawkins taking their blog traffic away.

Postscript: they have added an entire blog post today (19/08) consisting of almost admirable technobabble and obfuscation to once again deny why they should have to do any page optimisation at all.  Totally missing the point, once again, that good page optimisation benefits your site visitors and users as much as it benefits Google.  Better to spite the big bad evil corporate monster than make the site into something worth bookmarking, right?  Up until I spotted that post I had 10% sympathy for them.  I take it back.