Every engagement starts with a half-day kick-off meeting led by a senior member of the RSW/US management team. The goal is to gather as much information as we can about what your firm does, who you work with, and what problems you solve for your clients. We also plan ahead to determine where we want to focus our efforts, and what content/collateral you have/are willing to build. There are three deliverables coming out of the kick-off:
Following the kick-off meeting, your New Business Director will start studying the materials supplied by your agency (e.g. proposals, capabilities presentations, etc.), as well as your website.
After approval of the communications strategy, your New Business Director will start developing a call template. It’s not a script — it’s a guide that outlines the messaging strategies we’ll use to best position your agency in different situations. We’ll take you through the call template to make sure you’re comfortable with the messaging, and then have the New Business Director visit your firm for a full immersion into your agency’s work, culture, and personnel. The goal is for your New Business Director to walk away feeling like they are part of your team and fully equipped to begin representing you.
Following an internal download, the RSW/US List Development Team sets itself in motion. As part of our business development process for ad agencies, we have a database of over 80,000 marketing contacts and other decision makers, as well as access to a variety of other database resources, allowing us to build the cleanest and most targeted lists in the industry. Before your New Business Director contacts any prospect, the list team verifies each contact to make sure all information is correct. With marketers and other senior decision makers moving from job to job with a fair amount of frequency, it’s critical that we only work with the cleanest lists possible.
As part of every program, the RSW/US marketing team works with you to harness value-added content (either taken from a client’s existing blog or from non-competitive third party articles) that complements your New Business Director’s day-to-day outreach. These value-added emails (VAEs) help do a number of things:
As part of our business development process for ad agencies, marketing services firms, and PR firms, every 5-6 weeks we reach out to a new group of roughly 70 prospects (via/phone/email/social/mail). Your New Business Director prospects these companies politely and persistently for this 5 to 6 week period.
In addition to reaching out to new waves of prospects, your New Business Director also prospects the “clickers” and “openers” from the most recent VAEs (value-added emails). VAEs are graphic template emails that typically point prospects to thought leadership blog posts published by the agency. VAEs help us stay in front of everyone in the database on-going, so no one is left untouched.
Every day, your New Business Director uses website visitor tracking technology to track and prioritize the activity of leads (e.g. visits to site, activity on site, time spent on site).
And every day, your New Business Director gets a list of new hires, so if they see someone or a company that makes sense for your program, they will reach out to you to discuss going after that prospect.
Every week, your New Business Director will provide you with an update of the most immediate activity on your account. During this weekly call, your New Business Director will review past activity, upcoming activity and discuss meetings had or set to make sure everything is being done to help move prospects closer to close.
