Ad Agency Strategies to Develop New Clients
Making the Presentation is Just Part of the Game for Small Agencies
Apr 29, 2009
The PJA ad agency has won three consecutive business-to-business development awards and founder Phil Johnson credits at least part of that success to its unique agency growth scorecard. He, agency president Mike O'Toole, and Greg Straface, PJA’s vice president for-business development, discussed the scorecard at the Mirren New Business Conference in New York recently.
The PJA form is a hard-nosed test of the agency’s progress and appears almost as unforgiving as a baseball scorecard.
Grades Agency’s Strategic Plan
The scorecard requires answers in these five business development areas:
- The Plan, which grades the agency’s strategic plan, employee awareness of the plan and whether the plan can be "translated" into a financial plan with "measurable objectives."
- Positioning, which grades the agency’s positioning statement and staff awareness of it.
- The Pipeline, which asks if the agency has a list of targeted list of accounts, and an annual revenue goal. It also grades the agency’s marketing communications.
- The Pitch, which grades the number and content of the agency’s presentations, including its "core pitch team."
- Perception/Reputation. which grades the agency’s visibility and image in its target markets, as well as its participation in social networking.
Measures Performance
The scorecard measures performances in those five areas on a one-to-five scale with comments ranging from (1) "not on your life" to (5) "absolutely."
As committed to the plan as PJA is, Johnson reminds readers of his small business Advertising Age blog that having a plan does not guarantee success. Some of the agency’s recent successes resulted from lessons learned in losing efforts, he said.
Johnson said PJA decided some time ago that it "didn’t want to be just bigger. We wanted to be an elite national agency recognized for leadership in our categories. That goal has shaped the agency plan and helped focus everything we have done in recent years," he said.
Stay Within Areas of Strength
The PJA scorecard encourages the agency to restrict its presentations within its "areas of strength" and to decline invitations to make presentations outside those areas. Johnson said the agency has declined some requests, but such decisions are usually difficult. The scorecard also prompts the agency to devote most of its presentations to "talking about the prospect" rather than its own capabilities.
In a comment on Johnson’s blog, Michael Hong of AdAsia Communications Inc. noted that "many companies have a written vision statement, but most do not have a clear action plan against the vision."
For other ideas on how agencies pursue new business, see "How Ad Agencies Advertise Themselves."
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