Operationalizing Your Agency’s New Business Strategy: What to Do on a Weekly, Quarterly, and Annual Basis
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko via Unsplash
New business is one of those responsibilities that should be fully integrated into your daily schedule—some days in a more active and focused way, other days more passively or opportunistically.
But sticking to the rhythm and consistency that lead to new business success is a challenge for some small agency owners.
Instead (and despite best intentions), new business is an activity for times when there’s not enough work in-house and your team is under-utilized. Or, it’s in reaction to an invitation to a competitive pitch.
When it's not a habit, consistent action is hard to sustain—because it means starting over again and again and again...
You’ll reach points when you conclude you can’t go on like this any longer. You’ll pause, gather your team, and brainstorm ideas for a better business development strategy.
There’s satisfaction in developing new ideas. It's inherently optimistic and creative! You remove yourself from the daily grind and whisk your team off to an inspirational spot to think big strategic thoughts and reshape your agency’s destiny.
And I encourage this! In fact, I conduct these kinds of workshops. They’re energizing and I get satisfaction from watching an agency team walk away excited about the plans they’re going to implement.
What I don't enjoy is watching them neglect those plans as soon as the daily grind takes over again.
Good Habits are Helped by Strong Frameworks
Acting on new ideas requires us to form new productive habits, which is a challenge in and of itself. I'm not an expert on how humans form habits, but I can speak from personal and professional experience that good habits around business development are aided by strong frameworks.
I created such a framework a few years ago after I’d had this epiphany: if money, time, and resources were no object, agency owners would embrace it all—podcasts, social media, longform content, webinars PR, prospecting outreach, networking events. Anything that they didn’t like to do or didn’t have time to do, they could hire someone to do it or outsource it.
But time and money is always an issue. And agency leaders are rarely going to do stuff they don’t like to do.
What I realized was that to make a business development strategy stick, it must be based on tactics that are right for that agency.
This inspired me to develop the idea of a New Business Operating System.
A New Business Operating System includes anything your agency uses to support business development, from a pricing proposal to a website to social media strategy.
When I’m building a New Business OS with my clients, we look at all they’re currently doing and the tools they’re using and we assess their utility against goals, resources, and strategic positioning. We ask:
Are the tools and activities right for the culture and environment?
Do they encourage and nurture growth?
Do they support the agency's goals?
Are there too many tactics to easily sustain?
Do they all interact in a healthy way?
Usually, the outcome of this exercise results in a sort of kanban board for new business. From there we can create a plan and define the activities required to get to the goals.
Filling the Void between What You Want and How to Get There
This plan helps fill in the void between stating a goal, such as increasing revenue by 25%, and taking the right steps to achieve it.
A New Business OS offers you not only a bird's-eye view of the activities that are most likely to get you closer to your goals, but a roadmap for what you must be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
When you know exactly what actions to take, and those actions nudge you out of your comfort zone, you start to see progress. You can apply this to any goal you have in life, whether it’s to retire at age 50, learn how to juggle, or… grow your agency’s total revenue by 25%.
Your New Business OS will be custom to your agency, but here’s my advice on the actions you should take on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis.
Annually
Your New Business OS is the underlying structure for your 12-month new business plan. Annually look for opportunities to systematize and scale what you’re already doing that’s getting good results. Explore what additional tactics might be layered in and consider what might be taken out to keep your operating system performing at an optimal level.
Here are four areas to consider:
Recommit to your core tactics. Analyze the core business-generating activities you’ve chosen based on your new business strengths. (Here’s a quick quiz you can take to find out your new business strengths profile.) Are they working? Do they need improvement or optimization? Can they be delegated to others or are they still dependent on your involvement?
Add complementary tactics. If you’ve got the core activities running on autopilot, consider adding complementary activities that support them. For example, if you’ve got momentum behind a speaker strategy and it’s starting to generate leads consistently, complementary activities might include nurturing those leads with a webinar series, getting a better CRM tool in place to manage those leads, or adding functionality to your agency’s website to better engage leads.
Assess the health of your agency’s intellectual property. Review IP workhorses like case studies, team bios, and credentials documents to see if they need updates. These don’t change frequently, they do require care and attention if they are going to work effectively. Be proactive instead of being forced to make last-minute and hasty updates to fulfill an immediate need.
Review and recalibrate new business policies and procedures. Are they still working smoothly? Do they help you make the right decisions about what new business to pursue?
Quarterly
I like working in quarterly sprints to accomplish goals.
Quarterly sprints are a great method for tackling both necessary projects, like a website redesign, which easily get pushed aside by daily emergencies and distractions, as well as “always improving” projects—projects that push you into new areas and have a positive effect on your new business operations over time. These are often those complementary activities mentioned in bullet #2 above—initiatives you’ve been wanting to start but never seem to have the bandwidth for.
This approach works because it deconstructs big, amorphous statements like, “we’ll improve how our agency generates leads” which can be hard for teams to convert into action, into a tactical road map that everyone understands and follows. Seeing progress being made instills a priceless sense of satisfaction.
Daily, weekly, and monthly
I lump these together because they’re all related to frequent and consistent action required to keep your New Business OS up-to-date and humming.
Plus, they tend to vary by goal, individual, and agency. For example, if your core activity is outbound prospecting, your activities will include things like daily list-building and sales calls. If your activity is content marketing, your weekly and monthly activities will be related to keeping the content engine running: creating, refining, formatting, distribution, and promotion.
And, of course, always include:
A regularly scheduled new business status meeting. Many agencies have these weekly (a few neglect to have them at all, which astounds me). I like a biweekly cadence, which frees up time on the schedule and allows you a wider perspective to see progress over time.
Pipeline report updates and distribution. I’m all for a wider distribution of the pipeline report, especially if you expect most people at your agency to be involved in new business. Consider having a modified report that omits sensitive financial information that you can share with your larger team. I bet you’ll find they feel more invested and willing to participate.
Finally, document in an operations manual the ongoing activities that won’t be going away any time soon so that you can grow and scale them as your agency grows.
Consistent Action Leads to New Business Success
I’m a career business development professional, which means I’m biased toward the importance of a strong operational structure to healthy new revenue growth. But I also want to acknowledge that the ongoing battle for time and resources is real.
How can an agency owner stay accountable to goals and objectives when it’s so easy to get pulled off track by client needs?
Lean on your New Business Operating System.
Having a new biz OS in place makes it much easier to maintain momentum. It eliminates that common and demotivating feeling of “starting from scratch”.
Because the fact is you will get derailed, but you can minimize the impact by going back to the actions that are right for you.