The New Business Dingo

I finished a call last night with one of our most successful clients, and during the call the CEO asked a very interesting question,
“Why are we seeing more success with Catapult than your average client? We appear to be exceeding the norm curve.”

Now, of course I’m thrilled to be asked the question, and my initial response was to suggest that the higher levels of success are due to a highly defined offer and positioning to the target audience, ongoing planning, and the consistency of messaging and relationship development being driven by the business development team.

But it’s more than that. It comes down to their agency, (more importantly our direct day-to-day contact at the agency) being able to match our sense of urgency. A mutual understanding that new business development is all about creating a sense of urgency, and moving that sense of urgency to your prospect, as we all have goals to meet within a defined timeline.

The ad agencies that thrive in today’s new business development economy are those that can shift their cultures from the slower pace of business-as-usual to urgency. Because of this, I have made “Urgency” our annual theme for 2010. I want this attribute to purposely permeate every aspect of our culture, and that of our agency clients.

But first, we have to understand it.

To create a sense of urgency, we must do four things well:

1. Activate. Like many larger organizations, we do lots of analysis. Obviously, this can be helpful. No one wants to go into battle without a carefully thought-through battle plan. But as everyone knows, analysis can easily lead to “analysis for analysis sake.” When this happens, the organization becomes paralyzed.

Often the real issue is courage. The point of absolute certainty never comes. It is foolish to assume that it does. Instead, urgency requires that we activate quickly: Make a decision. Get off the dime. Do something!

As the old adage goes, “it is easier to steer a moving object.” If you’ve made the wrong decision, you can adjust. But if you wait too long, you miss the opportunity entirely.

More than ever, people want fast decisions. Speed can be a competitive advantage. But this requires leaders who are willing to activate and get themselves, their teams, and their projects into motion.

2. Accelerate. Urgency requires more than activation. Yes, you have to start quickly, but you also have to keep things moving. Getting a project green-lighted is only the beginning.

There are hundreds of impersonal forces (and some personal) that will conspire to slow you down— approvals, other departments, processes, committees, budgets, etc. Some of these things are necessary—but not as many as you think or the agency would like you to believe.

It's the nature of bureaucracies to become self-serving. When they do, the process becomes an end in itself. As a new business leader, you have to fight this. You have to identify obstacles and remove them. You must keep the pedal to the metal and keep things moving. If you don’t, inertia will take over and your agency new business process will die.

3. Achieve. Cultivating a sense of urgency is all about producing results. All the stuff that it takes to produce results—agency PR, outbound campaigns, social media, relationship building and even cold calls, RFP’s, contracts, committees, and budgets—are not an end in themselves. They are only the means. If you do all this and don’t accomplish your goals, you have lost.

Too often people think that the objective is to complete their task list. If they do so, they think they have actually accomplished something. This is not necessarily the case. Tasks are a necessary but insufficient condition of achievement.

My goal at Catapult New Business is to create a culture that is outcome-focused rather than task-focused. We have a methodology and process to produce the results, and metrics to measure how we get there, but at the end of the day, we have to produce! We need to stay focused on the what and give our new business people room to decide the how.

4. Assess. Urgency does not rule out assessment. In fact, it demands it. If we are going to get faster at producing results, we have to assess what is working and what is not. We must then eliminate the waste.

Everything should be questioned in light of whether or not it impedes or facilitates the outcome. Does a meeting enable us to move more quickly? If so, great. Call a meeting. But so often we call meetings as a way to procrastinate the decision. Then a single meeting begets more meetings. Before you know it, you’ve built a slow, lumbering bureaucracy yourself and that is the end of new business.

The only antidote is to this is to eliminate everything that does not facilitate the desired outcome. Our job as new business leaders—as opposed to bureaucrats—is to remove the obstacles and give our new business team the best chance of achieving their goals and ours.

What specifically can you do to create more urgency? Try these:

- Walk faster—show some hustle.

- Respond faster to emails and voice mails. Don’t allow yourself to become 
  someone else’s excuse for not getting their work done.

- Get to the point quickly and insist that others do the same.

- Keep meetings short and on-point. Always insist on an agenda.

- Eliminate every piece of paperwork that doesn’t facilitate a specific 
  outcome. My motto: “When in doubt, throw it out.”

- Be quick to change tactics. If something is not moving you toward 
  your desired outcome, do something else. 

- Do it now!

It’s easy to see a lack of urgency in others, but can you see it in yourself? What else can you do, beginning now, to create a sense of urgency in yourself, your new business department, and with your prospects?

How have you aligned your sense of urgency with prospects?