A Year of Rainmaking: Pointers for New Business Success
What does our data from the last 12 months tell us about the best ways to proactively reach out and win new clients?
Direct outreach is an art - and can be quite tricky. What do you say, how do you say it (and when), how do you find who to say it to? And where do you even start!? So hopefully these pointers below might benefit any agency looking to grow via proactive, direct engagement.
The best day of the working week to reach out: Contacting people on a Wednesday will get you the most responses over the hours and days ahead. Fridays used to be pretty good on the phone before the Pandemic but are now the worst days to send outreach. So, compose it, but wait for Monday if it’s time sensitive.
The best time of day to reach out: 11am. This avoids the morning planning and meetings with a couple of hours still to go to typical lunchtimes. 3.30pm is the next best time.
The best months of the year to reach out: The most fruitful months for initial outreach for responses in the days and weeks ahead are August and February, closely followed by December.
The most effective interval between initial outreach and follow-up: 4 business days, unless a fresh reason to engage with them comes to light – in which case it could be a matter of hours!
How long to follow-up before starting from scratch: If your follow-ups and nudges are to no avail, we can see from the data that a fresh outreach with new insights after 1 month gets best results.
Sectors yielding the most opportunity (and the trends): This is Retail, with just under half being primarily online retailers. This is closely followed by Finance (44% of those open to discussing new agency support are banks and building societies).
Most popular target sector selection: FMCG (all categories) stands out as selected by most clients.
The best sector for rapid results (and the most heel dragging!): Our data shows the best sector for rapid results is Tech, closely followed by Apparel, with the median average time from initial outreach to meeting being just 1 day. The most heel dragging occurs in the Travel sector, where it took 23 days on average from initial outreach to meeting arranged with them.
The median average marketing-spend (Gartner/Nielsen) of those responding to outreach: This is £13.5m.
Best source of intelligence for yielding response: The most numerous and most accurate intel for reasons to engage with brands comes from Pearlfinders. The second is The Grocer, and third is the FT.
And lastly, for the information on these, and many other facts, you’ll need to contact us directly!
The most effective reasons to connect:
The most effective email structure:
The most effective way to set out an agency’s offer:
The most effective email conclusion/call to action:
The most effective word count:
If you would like some very experienced support to effectively engage with the brands you most want to work with (literally as I write this a client tells me they’ve just won work with Virgin Atlantic and Pizza Express from our outreach) contact Gareth Dixon for an exploratory chat.