How do you win business when potential clients are behaving badly, and competitors are low-balling rates?
Believe me, I know how hard it is right now. Clients are ghosting you, competitors are cutting their fees to crazy-low levels. Staff want pay rises. It doesn’t matter if you are running a smaller business or something big; it’s hard for everyone. But not nearly as hard if you get the business fundamentals right.
I have been round the block a few times. Through four recessions, the worst financial crash since World War Two, the Pandemic, and all the rest.
With some stellar colleagues I have worked through economic adversity to turn around one of the biggest PR firms in Europe; started, grown and sold my PR business for ~8x. I have advised firms in how to overcome a plateau and scale successfully, and watched others continue to struggle. I have learned a lot and this is what I know.
It doesn’t matter what flavour the crisis comes in, including this present one, if you don’t have the fundamentals right you are going to find it really difficult as budgets are cut, clients get more demanding, etc. And, in my experience, many otherwise good PR firms do not have the business fundamentals right (because most PR Founders and CEO’s have not had a business education – their skills and training tend to be in the comms space). What I mean by getting the fundamentals right is:
- Having a solid commercial strategy. Not something that takes five minutes to dream up, but one informed by data, market research and much thought. The three simple questions mask a great deal of work and consideration: What are you selling, to whom and delivered how (and these are in the process of being transformed by AI. So if your commercial strategy today is the same as two years ago, you might want to revisit it). And the point of your commercial strategy is to create a business that sells high-value, must-have services, since these are the most immune to the market forces that swamp firms that have a generic offer.
- Having a compelling value proposition. One that is Big, Simple, Unique and True. This is taken from Moore Kingston Smith; these folks know what they are talking about; high-performing agencies have this sort of proposition.
- Having a marketing and sales machine that uses Insight, Challenger and Experiential methods to create a pipeline of warm prospects, and demonstrates to them your firm’s superiority (whilst others simply assert they are good). And “machine” means you are filling the hopper regularly, efficiently and winning >70% of the pitches you choose to go after (without cutting rates to the bone). This stuff is achievable!
- Paying close attention to the numbers, especially productivity (to tell you what the market really thinks of your firm), staff cost / GP ratio, cash, client profitability, staff utilisation, pipeline numbers and win / loss ratio.
- Facing problems head on. Especially the difficult ones.
- Biting, scratching and fighting for every bit of business you choose to go after.
If you have these in place, then there’s no shortage of tips and tricks out there that will help you that wee bit further. But if you don’t have these things sorted, your business is built on sand.
The good news is that it’s never too late to get the fundamentals right. For most people, it means tweaking or changing what’s already there. And the sooner you start, the faster you will pull ahead of the competition. How about this weekend?
As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.