Here are our suggestions:
I’ve written for years on the impact that three-option proposals can have on your closing ratio and your average selected price. Providing your clients with three or four different ways to engage you—at different price points—might be the simplest and fastest path to improving profit.
Everyone likes games. I have a fun one for you. There’s a simple financial metric that you might want to use throughout the year. Once you start measuring it, you will become addicted to improving it.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s try on outrageous success by moving to the outer range of what you have already proven is possible for a firm like yours.
Some firms are black holes where accounts go in and seemingly never come out. Other firms are new business development machines, consistently generating 40%-50% (sometimes more) of their revenue from new clients every year.
Over 20 years, I’ve heard a lot of success stories from people who have implemented our advice. This post is for everyone else—those who haven’t been able to make Win Without Pitching work for them.
I’ve written previously on the steps creative firms should take, but here I’m suggesting we finally call bullshit and throw out the RFP altogether.
Qualifying is the act of vetting. In a qualifying conversation, the agency vets the lead to see if this prospective client and their project is a good fit for the firm, and the client vets the agency to see if their expertise is a fit for them and their project. That’s how it should work.
You reinvent your firm one new client at a time. You are only 3-4 years and 10-15 clients from being whatever you want your firm to be—if you treat every new client as a step in your reinvention.
The Innoficiency Principle states that innovation and efficiency are mutually opposable goals. In any reasonably functioning organization, one cannot be increased without decreasing the other.
If you run any business of expertise you will come to rely on all sorts of models. The longer you are in business, the larger your model toolbox becomes.
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