Finding Your Buyer
by Rob Noble, Founder
After my first decade in the industry it became clear to me that pitching is the reason agencies aren’t profitable enough. I made a decision 10 years ago never to pitch again and I’ve been carefully refining the art and science ever since. The key is empathy. The buyer and the talent you’re selling need to understand and value each other and the client’s aims and the agency’s need to align. It seems obvious, but many agencies unravel when their hunger for new business eclipses their reason for existing in the first place.
As we boldly state on the Group of Humans website ‘We don’t pitch because pitches are a waste of your time and our money’.
Ultimately, as the pace of business increases, it’s almost impossible to ask the right question at a pitch, but winning one requires huge investment from the agency. In fact they force clients to pretend they know the problem to be solved and cause agencies to form too deep an attachment to the answer. Things get awkward pretty quickly. Hardly the best foundation for a long term relationship of the kind that makes sense of the price paid for the first date.
The dating analogy isn’t glib. If your goal is long term value for both parties, compatibility is key. Like many approaches to selling, buying or dating there are a number of layers that provide the whole solution.
1. Understand Strategic Points of Control
To begin you must first start with understanding the strategic points of control within the organisation you are considering as a customer and then contextualise your engagement strategies for your services to align with those points of control. The author and speaker Geoffrey Moore articulates Strategic Points of Control brilliantly in his books Crossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity. See example Illustrated below where we address and create engagement strategies that talk to building Competitive Advantage, developing your people to be more effective, and delivering efficiency through your systems.
2. Understand the maturity of the Customer Experience practice of your buyer
Mike Davidson the former VP of Design at Twitter recently tweeted/blogged on Design Driven companies and within his post graded a spectrum of 5 archetypes as follows:
- Design Hostile
- Design Ignorant
- Design Agnostic
- Design Interested
- Design Driven
Thanks Mike for being the catalyst for this post. There is little point arguing the archetypes, they are perfectly fine for making my point and sharing the importance of this layer in the approach. As an aside – isn’t too much energy spent arguing language/semantics in Design?
The point is you need to understand where your target buyer is in this range and it will assist you in contextualising your engagement strategies.
Clients with a mature practice need a very different story of your service offering/engagement strategy than those who are at the very beginning of delivering design that people will love.
3. Talk to your buyer where they buy
Ok, this is obvious and the basis of the entire media buying industry. Fish where the fish are. Knowing that your website is likely the place your customers come to after you’ve made contact or shared some pearls of wisdom is a good learning. It’s actually better that way. In fact being able to seed relevant content into the places they make their buying decisions and track where they end up in your content gives you important data to know if what you’re saying is resonating. You know this of course. However the art of knowing where they make those decisions, is by learning from layers 1 and 2 above. Noting buyer activities usually fall into one of the following
- Company relationships
- Personal relationships
- Web searching
- Conversation
- Local knowledge
- C-Level recommendation
- Sales relationship
- Contextualised content
4. Now build a connected sales model
Taking all 3 layers above into consideration you can build a model for your needs.
Who
Understand your target buyers in detail. Use a mix of instinct, intelligence, networking, trends and experiences to build a picture.
What
Understand your Design offering overlaps the unique elements of all strategic points of control. Consume external publications from your buyer and create a library of sources for education.
How
Develop a unique customer led sales approach and understand how it differs from the traditional offerings in your marketplace
Systems, people and processes
Understand the skills and passions of your team. Create and harmonise a suite of unique tools that help with your deals and provide platforms for engaging your direct buyers and other influencers within your buyers organisation.
Of course the final piece is being empathetic and emotionally intelligent. I can’t help with that. That’s you. What I will say though is that we believe ethical people and companies will win in the end if they don’t, no amount of sales thinking will save the human race. Let’s try to make the world a better place. And you deal makers out there are responsible for the beginning of that. Say no to the bad deals. We don’t need anything that isn’t contributing in some way to a sustainable human future.
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