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Something is in the air in Agencyland. After a long, cold and seemingly endless winter, something is finally in the air. Free pitching, the addictive and destructive opioid of both client and agency is disappearing like the White Witch’s endless winter. It may not yet be summer, but spring is most definitely here.

I’m a fan of constraint-driven exercises, so let me pose one for your consideration. Imagine that you could never employ a full-time dedicated new business person (let alone a team) What changes would you need to make in your business as a result?

I’ve become aware recently that when I’m speaking to creative and marketing firm owners or other advisors in this space, we can sound like we are describing two entirely different industries. The agency owner is biased in thinking that the industry is made up of firms like theirs, and advisors like me are influenced by the types of agencies that we’ve most recently worked with.

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.

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.

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.

There are three keys to getting paid: start with new standards for new clients, summon the resolve to enforce your new standards the moment client behavior starts to slip, and be willing to walk away from clients that don’t honor their commitments.

What a year. Our Win Without Pitching annual planning meeting is tomorrow and I can’t help but think back to the plans we made a year ago for 2020. The phrase “We plan, God laughs” comes to mind. Who planned for this? Putting aside the human tragedy of more than 70 million infected, 1.5 million

Many agencies like to boast on their websites and in their pitch decks that they “partner” with their clients. It’s bullshit of course. What they mean is they aspire to have their clients treat them like partners instead of vendors. I get it. It’s good to have a goal. But putting it on the website

Postmortems are great tools for steady improvement. At the end of any project or new initiative you simply revisit the objective and discuss what went well and what you would do differently next time. A similar idea is the premortem. Project yourself into the future, past the project you are about to undertake, and imagine

We in the creative professions often recoil from the function of selling because we are scarred by the bad buying experiences involving the first salesperson who, for reasons of ideology, training or incentives, saw selling as the requirement to convince.

In last week’s post Three Steps to Surviving and Thriving in a Crisis I said step one is to survive the crisis and economic gridlock that will be with us for a few weeks. In part one of two in my survival series, I’ll share some specifics of how you can shore up revenue now.