Accurate prospective client intel, in the hands of a skilled business development team virtually guarantees a successful outcome. But clients today prefer to remain invisible, talking to Google instead of your agency directly. That's why successful agencies are leveraging the power of Content Marketing, Marketing Automation/Website Tracking Software and 2nd-Click Content to focus their business development efforts on truly qualified leads. Finding Today's Invisible Clients Requires A New Business Development Approach Once upon a time, agencies treated information about their approach to marketing as sacred. After all, information was power — it differentiated them from the competition. That’s why so many agencies created “proprietary” approaches and some went so far as to name and even trademark them.  Agencies believed that if they could force prospects to call and talk to a member of the agency team one on one, the agency could control the prospecting experience by carefully disseminating information in a way that would convince the prospective client to ultimately hire the agency or at least invite them to a pitch.  But, agencies, we have to abandon that point of view to stay competitive in the modern age of The Invisible Pitch. That systematic hoarding of information made sense once upon a time, but it’s totally obsolete in the search engine age, self-educating client age. Research shows that over 70% of these clients turn to Google or another search engine to begin their next agency search and they are more than 50% of the way through their hiring decision before they ever make contact with any agency.  But all is not lost. This new DIY agency search approach is actually a huge opportunity for smart agencies looking to replace their RFP habit with a [...]

  "Thanks for joining my network, Tom! I noticed you work for a recruiting agency. Have you heard about the NEW LinkedIn lead generation?? Let us bring recruited prospects to you on auto-pilot. If you would like to receive an infographic on how it works, please let me know and I'll send it your way. I look forward to talking to you in the near future, Tom, and hope you have a great day!" Have you ever received a LinkedIn Message like the one above? Don’t you love when people ask for the sale either as a first or second touch? Arggg. I hate those. People don't realize that you only get one chance to make a LinkedIn impression. But beyond that, it shows that so many people still don't understand the difference between Reaching and Connecting. More importantly, they don't understand how the difference is costing them potential sales. So let's talk about the difference and how it can power up your agency’s biz dev efforts. Reaching vs Connecting With Potential Clients The person who sent me the message above, who must be using his/her fancy pants software, has reached me five times in the last month. But he/she hasn't connected with me even once. Which begs the question, what do you really get when you reach a potential client? Nothing. Sure, you get to check a box in your CRM. You get to report that you reached that client the agency has always wanted to work with at some point. But if you reach them and they don't respond, did you really reach them? Did you make an impression? Did you start moving them down the Propinquity Pathway? I'd argue no. Chances are [...]