The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Hi everyone. My name is Chelsea McLaughlin and I'd like to welcome you to RGD's Business Series Webinar, Marketing Your Design Firm, presented by JP Lacroix. A visionary design thinker, JP is always one step ahead of the curve. His involvement as a board member with the Packaging Association of Canada, Design Industry Advisory Committee, Retail Council of Canada, the Canadian Marketing Association, Signs Canada, the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, and the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, has enabled him to assist clients in identifying the leading packaging, retail, signage, way-finding, and retail trends that affect their operations. JP has been the president of Chicoutimi Lacroix since it opened its doors more than 20 years ago. During that time, JP has grown his company into one of the most respected and sought-after multidisciplinary design
agencies in the world. Along the way, he has developed a reputation as a true innovator and first-rate problem solver, with expertise in providing clients with unique results-driven solutions for their product and service needs. Before we begin, a few reminders. If you have any questions, please submit them using the Questions tab in the webinar control panel. Also note that questions can take a while to come through the system and are more likely to be addressed if submitted during the presentation. Questions that come through will be collected and answered by JP at the end of the talk. We also invite you to interact with us on Twitter by tweeting during and after the broadcast using the hashtag RGDWeb. So welcome, JP, and thank you very much for coming. If you're ready, I will turn it over to you. Thank you very much, Chelsea. It's Jean-Pierre, and hopefully everyone can hear me. So, yeah, this is, I believe, a fairly relevant topic to
all of us. And, I just got to preface before I start with the presentation to say every firm is different. The type of clients you may have are different to clients we may have. Your need for new business may be different. So I just want to coach that what I'm presenting to you is based from my perspective, been in the design business for 37 years, 25 at Chicoutimi Lacroix. So, you may have a different perspective. I'm hoping, though, that at the end of this session, that I was able to hit a few points that you may not be considering and I look forward to your questions.
New business is really a challenge, I would say, for most firms. Very often I go to conferences, RGD's conferences, Design Thinkers conference, and you talk about new business and a lot of people say, "Well, I thought selling is a bad word. I went to school to learn to be a designer and I really didn't go to school to learn to sell." And we're going to talk a little bit about that. The other question is that business is all about growth. It's all about either growing from the quality of the work you're doing and the type of projects you're doing, or growth from a standpoint of studio size, number of people. And really you need to ask that question before you start doing new business. The other one that we're going to help you define is, are you positioned for growth? How are you defined in the marketplace? Do you have the right processes and tools? We're going to spend a lot of time on this.
And culturally within your organization, do you have what it takes to win, to grow the business? And ultimately, where a lot of people get discouraged is what should you expect out of your new business approach and initiatives in the marketplace. So let's go through. We're going to go through each one of these. I'm going to walk you through them. We're going to talk about it and then, by all means, please ask me questions.
I coined a phrase a long time ago that design is a leaky bucket, and what I mean by that is that we're really a project-based industry. That means no matter how great your work is and how great the relationships with your clients are, once that project ends, you do a major rebranding program for a bank or a new packaging program for a client, when it's over, it's over. And they may love you dearly and they may be willing to use them as a reference, but at the end of the day, it's over. And so we really need to understand that we need to constantly be looking for new business. Here's some quotes that people have said, "I don't need to grow." I've had situations where people have said, "Do we really need to grow?" And that's a fair question, but here I'll give you an insight. If you are not growing, you're on your way of dying. There's no midpoint of staying stagnant. You're either growing, either through quality of the work, the
type of clients you have, or actually you're going out of business. And a great friend of mine, Peter Dixon, once said to me, he used to be at Lippincott Mercer, that most design firms are six months on the fringe of going out of business. And he was really talking to the fact that new business is a critical part of sustaining your competitive advantage, but also growing and being viable in the marketplace.
So why is that so important? Why is leaky bucket such a big issue? Well, typically if you look at your revenue source, you'll probably note, and this is a good exercise you should do. You should take a look at your revenue source and find out how much of your business are reoccurring and how much of it drops off because it's project-based. On average, 15% of business is non-reoccurring. Doesn't mean the client's not reoccurring. It just means that that project is now over and the cycle of a new project may be six or eight months or a year down the road. 20% to 30% new business is required to just keep on growing at a 10% rate. So if you're looking at 15% to 20% of your business dropping off every year, you're going to need 20% to 30% to maintain a 5% to 10% growth curve. We
can all agree that there's been a big shift on the client side to strategic sourcing where it's the lowest number wins. It's all about creating separation between the marketing, the people who you're going to be working with, and the people who make the buying We're seeing a huge rise of strategic sourcing across all our clients. That puts stress on your RFPs and also, it's really hard to pitch business when you don't have a relationship.
When we look, we've been in business 25 years. I've been running design agencies for 37. Our industry is cyclical, like it or not. And it's not actually based on the economy, although some industries are. When you look at the life cycle of projects and the life cycle of your clients, you should be looking at when you're at a seven year itch with a client, you may want to look at how sustainable is that relationship and what can you do to keep that relationship going? Because typically, the cycle is five to seven, and obviously our industry has been very commoditized. I look back now at our fees that we were charging 25 years ago, they were much higher than what we're charging today. So all that puts
challenges, and these are the questions you need to ask yourself. Do you have the finance to grow? Typically, when you grow your business, a new business is that vehicle to help you grow. There's about a six to eight month lag between the time you make your investment and you win those clients, to the time you actually can recover your investment. So when you're looking at a business like ours that's driven by cash flow, make sure that you're well funded when you're growing. Are you going to make the personal trade-offs to grow? And that, I would say, is the most critical question that you're probably going to need to ask yourself. Are you willing to work the weekends and evenings to drive that growth? Are you going to be willing to respond to the RFPs on the Saturdays, Sundays, and evenings while during the week you're doing your regular job? This is really important because if you're going to grow, there's
a huge time commitment and a personal commitment you're going to have to contribute to. Is your culture within your company willing to grow? You may, as an owner, want to grow your business. You may have three or four employees. But you'd be surprised how many of your employees don't want to grow. They don't like change, and growth means change. And then obviously, as you're developing your new business strategy, how do you define big? How big is too big for you? And I think you really, when you start developing your new business strategy, need to look at these questions and answer them before you start anything. So let's start. That's kind of the foundation, if you like. Now,
it's interesting that we spent a lot of time providing strategic direction to our clients, positioning, recommendations, and how we can differentiate them in the marketplace. And very often we do a poor job marketing ourselves. And I'm going to give you some hints and guidelines. We've gone through this probably five times in the duration of our company. We have a five-year plan to review every five years. We update it every year and actually gone through an updated five-year plan last year. And the conversations I have with designers, the people on the phone, you're probably some of those that make the comment it's about our capabilities. Yes, absolutely. But here's the reality is the competitive set is pretty flat. In other words, every one of the firms on this line do great work. And talking about our capabilities is actually looking back. Clients are really not interested in your capabilities because there
are so many design firms competing for their attention. When I talk to clients and prospective clients say, "Hey, JP, you know what? You're call number 50 of design firms wanting my business. I don't physically have the time. So why would I hire you versus somebody else? What separates your company versus the competition?" And that's really the question you need to ask yourself. And it's not about capabilities, believe it or not.
It's about your value proposition. What's a value proposition? It's your unique capabilities. It's answering the question, why would somebody be willing to pay more for your services versus your competitors? What unique problem are you solving that your competition can't solve? What reputation or capabilities and end-client benefits do you have that would separate you? And this is all about focusing. A good friend of mine said, "You know, JP, it's all about
where you want to play, not what you're playing with." Where you want to play. Where do you want to play in the client's business? It becomes a very important factor.
So for us, a year ago, we said we invented the blink factor. We trademarked it 25 years ago when stores had 20,000 products. We said, hey, we own that instant connection with the consumer at the moment of purchase. And so we just brought clarity. We design compelling at purchase moments that connect in the blink of an eye. That allows us the opportunity to sell retail environmental design, packaging, corporate identity programs, employee branding. And we can say that with conviction and credibility because we own the blink factor. We know that that purchase moment is the most important for all of our clients. It's the problem that we're solving for them is to drive growth. And you need to ask yourself, how do you stack against these firms here? If I put your logo and your statement, would you be able to articulate in a way that's relevant to your clients? Here's just a cross section. Interbrand, creating and managing brand value.
They built reputation on evaluating brand value and through their research. Future Brand, we are the creative future company. They talk linking their name to what they provide. And you can see each one of these firms have kind of staked out. Some of them are kind of generic. Frog, who is an unbelievable design firm, says design innovation advances the human experience. Kind of generic. I don't know if the clients relate to that. But WATT, they repositioned themselves a couple of years ago. We are retail, which is very clever and very smart. They're no longer in the CPG business. They've focused all their attention to retail. So, questions you need to ask yourself, your unique selling proposition, is can you sum up what you do in a couple of words? If you can't, you should. You need to go back and work with your team and clearly articulate, we call it a brand essence, what you do in a couple of
words. We're basically designing emotional lightning. That's what we do. Now, if we were to frame what we do, we design emotional lightning. That's what we do. Can these words help define where you play? We play at the at purchase moment, right? Now, that could be a website where a consumer is buying or a mobile app, but the moment that consumer's trying to make a buying decision, we own that experience. Okay? Can you define what makes you unique in substantiating and supporting where you want to play? What makes your value unique to customers? What is that unique value proposition they're willing to pay more? And what customers are willing to pay more for those services? Have you targeted, defined your target group? Very important questions. Before you embark on any new business initiative, I know it's critical that you answer these questions. Spend a lot of time reviewing these and bouncing them off your
clients and understanding what resonates with them, your prospective clients, your suppliers. It's really important to understand what separates you from your competition because there's a lot of design firms seeking attention from me.
So once you've got that unique value proposition, your brand, what do you do with it? I think it's important that your messaging is consistent across all your marketing material. You typically as an organization, design firms do gap analysis, communication audits. You should do that on yourself, and where are the gaps in your communications that are not linking to your brand essence, your point of difference in the marketplace. Do you have a tagline? We had a lot of discussion. Whenever I talk to design firms, they say, "Oh, a tagline. That sounds like an advertising." Tagline isn't about advertising. It's not about marketing. It's about alignment. It's about aligning your entire organization to align to a single idea, and it's a reminder of that single idea on everything you do. Our tagline is, "Think Blink." Simple. Think Blink. Everything we do is about Think Blink. Is your value proposition relevant to your customers?
Again, you may have a value proposition that sounds great, excuse me. Award-winning design firm. Does a client really care about award-winning design firm, or do they care about a firm that's going to solve this specific challenge they have? Do you have an elevator pitch that all of your individuals in your company, it's a two-liner that can succinctly communicate what separates you from your competition and makes you unique in the marketplace. And have you taken all that in and integrated it in all your messaging? Again, these are questions that you need to ask before you start communicating to your customers. The worst thing you can do is go to the marketplace and communicate a fragmented message where there's a lack of clarity, where there's confusion about who you are and what you do because it just leads to missed opportunities. Things like, "Oh, I didn't know you were in that business.
We were looking for a design firm to provide these services. I didn't realize you provided those," or, "I didn't know you were an expert in this area." So those are things that you need to effectively answer before you start on your new business execution, which leads to creating demand and awareness.
This section is all about discipline. This is a very painful section, and some of you on the phone listening to this presentation will say, "Oh, yeah, great, JP. You staff of 55, large firm. You've been large for a long time." You need to understand that five years ago, for the last 20 years, it was only five years ago that we hired new business people. That before that, everything we did, I led the charge. And so this excuse of, "I don't have the time or resources," is nothing but just that, an excuse. And I think it's really important to understand the importance of new business. It is the lifeblood of your business.
A lot of firms, when I talk to them, they say, "I don't have a new business plan. I don't have objectives. I didn't define my target market. I can't articulate what makes me unique. I haven't identified my ideal clients and how I'm going to generate revenue from them." There's an old saying that says, "If you fail to plan, your plan is going to fail." And I think that's so true in new business, that you need to have a documented report that you go back to look at every month and every year. We have one, and we'll talk a little bit about that. So here's your checklist. Here's the things that you need to look at. If you're going to be serious about new business, you need to ensure that every one of these red ticks you have. Do you have a clearly articulated value proposition? We just talked about that. Is your website optimized? Do you have the right meta tags? Have you purchased the right words,
Google words? Do you understand who's visiting your website and why? Do you have an inbound website tracking system? Can you identify who's hit your website? Which companies are hitting your website? How often? How many pages have they gone through? Right. Do you have an integrated CRM program? In other words, do you track your database of new business contacts? Do you keep them up to date? Do you use them as a direct marketing social media platform to communicate to them on an ongoing basis to continue that dialogue? Is your social media active, or is it something you do once a month, or once every six months, or whenever you have time? Is it active? Are you socially engaged? Do you have an outbound marketing program? Outbound marketing program is once people hit your website or responded to a direct mail piece, do you follow up with them to have a conversation? Do you have a public relations plan?
You don't have to hire a PR firm. You're in the communication business. There's a lot of things that we have at our disposal, knowledge and capabilities that you could leverage. Do you have a dedicated new business person? Critical. You really need to have someone assigned to new business where that is their primary role. Typically, in smaller firms, that's the partner. You may want to look at your workload and how you can offload some of your responsibilities so that you can focus on new business. Is your organization focused on new business? Is the other one. Is everyone in the organization thinking about new business? Every time someone calls your office, is the receptionist understanding how important that call is and that could be a lead for a new business opportunity. And do you track your new business initiatives on a weekly basis? Do you track it monthly? Do you track it quarterly? Do you track it yearly?
These are all the check marks that if you're going to be an effective new business company, if you're going to be effective in growing your business, you need to have these all check marked. There is no compromise in this list. Any one of these items not properly executed, minimized, weakens your link to growth.
So this is my famous new business model. I've been preaching this. Some of you may have interviewed at Chicagoland seen me talk about this. I'm sharing with you because this is the crux of new business. Really, new business is about three buckets. Simple as that. Transfer clients, those could be six to 12 months. So you have a client and you're asking, "Listen, can we do work for one of your sister companies," or, "Can we do work for your parent company in the US?" If they said yes and they introduce you, it's between six and 12 months. And the reason that lag of time, it depends if they've already pre-assigned vendor, other design firms. Do they have a project available for you to work on?
The next circle is networking. We call those warm calls. Networking would be, "Hey, client, can you give me a referral to some of your network people? Can you give me an introduction?"
Or going to conferences and meeting people. Typically, those network initiative opportunities take 12 to 24 months. Then cold calling, it's 24 to 36 months. We just won a major initiative in the US. We've been following up with that individual for 20 years. So, the reality is if opportunities come knocking, if you're visible, if you're relevant, and if you're handy. In other words, looking for these firms, they don't have a lot of time. Clients don't have a lot of time looking in their Rolodex if they talk to you. If you're not in their inbox for the last three or more, four months, you're not on their list. And so it's really important to understand this because it leads to my next chart.
New business is about creating a pipeline. It's about understanding how many people you talk to. And you'll hear out there, there are a lot of people that say, "It's not about quantity, it's about quality." B******t. It's not how many people you have in your database. It's about targeting and focus. That's all BS. Yes, targeting and focus is important, but you need a pipeline, and a pipeline has an attrition factor. So this is based on 25 years. So outbound networking, which is giving people calls, they hit your website, or you read an article on the company, they're going through a transformation. There's some great tools. The last slide of this presentation will show you some of these tools. The chance of you winning a piece of business on that outbound is about 1%. One percent.
The next one is presentation, 10% to 30%. That's if you're invited to present, your chances of winning that presentation is 10% to 30%. Once you've written the proposal, depending on the number of candidates pitching that proposal, a proposal is you've already had a face-to-face presentation, your chances go much higher, 40% to 55% chance of winning. And that leads to wins, our general wins when we do all of those things, about 30%. So when you aggregate all those things, you need a lot of networking. You need a lot of visibility in the marketplace if you're going to continue to win business, because it'll come from places where you didn't think they were going to come from. People that you're talking to that are part of your mailing list will refer an article that you sent to them to a colleague, and it's that colleague that's not on your list that's going to be giving you a call. So it's very important to understand this pipeline.
And it's also important to understand that the closer you are in an in-person presentation, the higher the chances of you winning the business. The less interaction you have with those individuals, the fewer chances you have of winning that business. So the game of new business is moving from an impersonal relationship to an in-person relationship every time.
Here's another map that I'd like to share with you. This map really talks about where you need to invest your money. There are really two initiatives you need to look at. There is what I call sustaining activities, cold and networking drivers. And then there's driving activities, which are networking and transfer business. So those three circles you saw, this is how you sustain those. So inbound marketing is people hitting your website. It's also about public relations, RFPs, social media, online media. There's a list of activity. We're going to go through some of these in greater detail in the next couple of slides. I think what's important is 60% of your initiative and time, minimum 60%, needs to be on outbound marketing. We tend to gravitate to the inbound because that's the easiest thing to do. Social media, responding to RFPs, doing a bit of PR, you're managing your website. Those are easy things because you control them.
You really don't have a lot of contact points. You're actually not calling to ask for the business. You're managing things. You're implementing things. The tough part, again, remember my model, where the closer you get to an in-person presentation, the higher the odds of winning the business, is in your outbound marketing, and this is where most design firms fail miserably. And that's where you spend the least amount of your time, and that's where you need to spend the most. And that's attending conferences, both as speakers and speaking. It's asking referrals from all your clients. It's warm calls. In other words, it's leveraging the video webinars and the publication articles and the LinkedIn and the awards, leveraging that to have warm conversations with potential clients. And it's also about ongoing awareness and visibility through emails of relevant information. Sending emails about
wanting their business, they go in the trash. Emails have to be relevant to what your clients need. So let's go look at some of these. So let's look at online. Obviously, the site needs to be SEO optimized. There's all kinds of great tools. You should obviously look at Google Analytics and look at how you track. And you should compare your tracking of your website versus your competition to see how you rank. How many referring sites and fresh content do you have on your site? Google looks at that with a critical eye. How many of those referring sites are real sites? Not some of the stuff that you buy for $300 that Google has already figured out that that's not true referral sites. Keeping that content important and having that content meta tag, keywords that customers and clients are looking for are critical. You need to track your performance. We track it every week. Consider website tracking services,
and we'll talk a little bit more about those. We use a website tracking service. It's really important. We look at what sections of the website people go to, what information they download, when they download it, who download it. You should get your visitors to register their email address so that you can start building, especially in Canada now with the CASL law. It's important for them to opt in and use your website as a great platform for them. And then obviously, all your content needs to be linked videos from Vimeo, YouTube, all of those, because they're, again, referring websites. They're also secondary websites that draw attention to your company in the areas that your readers, your potential clients may not be looking at. Right? So they may be going to Vimeo, but they may not be going to your website. And that Vimeo could drive interest on a webinar that you hosted or a white paper that you wrote.
SlideShare is another great tool.
Social media, we all do it. But I think the illness in our industry is that we're not consistent. We go to it once in a while. We blog once in a while. And if we do blog or post social media content, a lot of it's about the trip we're taking on our holidays versus it being content relevant to our clients. You need to keep that content fresh, and you need to have a pool of resources within your organization and maybe friends and colleagues, even maybe clients that will help you keep that content relevant. You need to actually post on other people's posts. So on LinkedIn, when you join those groups, are you responding to their comments? Are you adding comments? And are you going to these sites where your clients are going? It's great to be on sites where it's all about the creative industry, but if your clients are not going to those sites, you're taking all that energy and focusing in the wrong places.
LinkedIn is one of the great tools we enjoy. It's a great place to hire people. It's a great place to post comments, to join groups, and to follow. It also has outbound InMail tools. If you're not getting the attention of, especially in Canada now, you can't solicit new business via emails. It's a great tool to bring the attention your firm to LinkedIn members. They have the largest group of members within the business community. Obviously, Facebook has the largest, but not all of them are business people. And then obviously, we use tools like Hootsuite, which is an aggregator of social media where you can actually post one comment across multiple groups and multiple platforms from LinkedIn to Tweet to our own blog. And then Grapevine6 is a great tool that you should take a look at. It's another Canadian firm. It's a startup. It allows you a reminder. You get a reminder every day to send out tweets.
RFPs. Excuse me. Oh, boy, this is an interesting topic. I was gung-ho, I have to tell you, about four years ago, I was doing Mercs, Bidingo, Ariba, Alibaba, all of those great sites. And I found what a waste of time. Absolute waste of time.
Unless you know the individual that is initiating the RFP, unless you have the most outstanding relevant specific to their project, and unless you're the lowest bidder, a lot of those RFP programs are not going to lead. For the amount of effort you put in, you're way better to participate to an invite-based RFP. What I mean by an invite RFP is that you're already registered at a client's procurement department as a viable vendor or design firm. And every three or four years, they'll do an RFP to review all their vendors, all their design firms, and you'll be invited to participate. They already have a lot of information on you. You would probably have had ongoing conversations with these individuals if you've done your job properly with your CRM strategy. Those tend to yield a much higher rate of success. Again, you need to register with HC search firms. If you go to Google and do HC search firms, you'll see there's quite a few.
Some do charge for you to post your information, some don't. And then you should go to your clients and potential clients. Most of them have a procurement department where you need to pre-register in order to be considered for an RFP. I've just said, RFPs typically, I hate to say this, but most RFPs, they already have a shortlist of people they would like to work with. But if it's a publicly funded program, or it's a public company, through the scrutiny, they have to offer the RFP to a wide range of individuals. And that doesn't mean you're going to win it. And then finally, this is really important. You may have a template for how you write proposals. You do need to follow the RFP request to the letter. We have lost many RFPs when we started doing RFPs, digital RFPs, because we didn't have the exact sections in the right place. So it's really important to understand that when they do an RFP,
that the way they request the information is how you need to respond to them.
Video webinars. We have a thing called Design Lounge. I started that now five years ago. And for the first three years, I did it myself. Now we have a team that helps me support that. Videos are very powerful tools, and so is presentations in SlideShare. SlideShare is a fantastic platform. You get an email every month. It identifies how many downloads of your presentation were done, which ones are ranking the highest. Obviously, these are presentations. Our competition people here on the line are probably going and checking on us. That's fine. There are also presentations our clients are checking online, which is a great platform to promote ourselves cost effectively. Videos are a great tool to give reason for your prospect to have a conversation. Just calling them out of the blue and saying, "Listen, we'd love to do business with you," the immediate reaction, it's like if you go to a retail store
and you walk in, a sales clerk says, "Can I help you?" Your immediate reaction, even if you do need help, is no. Because change for a client is a lot of work. To change a design firm from one to the other is significant amount of work. The learning curve, the paperwork, the legal documents, the onboarding within an organization, that's a lot of work for clients. And most clients today are short-staffed. Your information needs to be clearly relevant, and it cannot come across sales pitch. I have to stress that so much. As soon as it comes across as a sales pitch, there's an automatic tune-off from the client. And then obviously, it's important to get your employees and friends comment on your post. So, build a network of people who think your posts are important and do well.
PR. I think there's nothing wrong in winning design awards. It is one of the great tools. That's why we rank it high on that list of activities. It brings exposure to your company. It highlights the creativity in your company. It's a silent salesperson for you. Absolutely enter awards, but make sure the quality of the work is great, that what you're showcasing, you're going to be proud of. You need to leverage white papers. I don't know how many of you write white papers. It's mandatory for everyone in the account team in our company to write white papers. We write about 50 of them, 25, 30 to 50 a year, either from tool books, guides to white papers. And then get publications. We have eight or nine different publications that we write columns for. Pick the publication that talks to your core target group and write columns.
Most media individuals have downsized their journalism department, and they're always on the hunt for great content, great articles, but it has to be relevant. Talking about the last project you worked on isn't relevant. Talking about a deep customer need that you've met and a trend in the marketplace is something relevant. Become an expert advisor to the media. So as you build your column, get the media to be calling you and asking questions about your sector. Enter key awards. We talked about the judge learning process criteria. Judging is a lot of work. I participate twice, sometimes three times a year in judging. And it's important because it's a great platform to see what kind of work is being submitted in these design awards. It gives you a sense of what the competition is doing and how they're doing It gives you a sense of what you should enter in future award programs. And obviously join association boards like the RGD
and associations where your clients go too. The most important thing of all of this is you need to go where your clients are going. You need to put articles and information where your clients are.
Up-bum, there's all kinds of conferences that you should be attending. Make sure they're the conferences your clients go to. There's free conferences. There's sponsorships where you need to buy an ad to public speak, and there's speed dating. I'm sure you've all been approached by firms that speed date. Cautionary note, they do work, but you have to be extremely careful which firm you're dealing with. Make the calls, leverage your CRM, and make those calls. Make calls typically at 7:30, 8 o'clock in the morning. Ask clients for referrals and keep your contact database relevant on an ongoing basis. That's your lifeline.
So moving on to that, do you have what it takes? We talked a little bit about, are you committed to growth? Well, very often, I'm too busy to do new business. I've even said that. It's a huge personal commitment to do new business. So here are some questions you need to new business. First of all, new business is everyone's job in the company. It's not just the new business person. It's everyone's job. Putting together presentations, being part of a pitch team, looking at new business resources from the standpoint of above marketing. By the way, you can outsource above. I call it
lead generating. You can outsource that service. There are some great firms out in the marketplace that can do that. You need to have a yearly plan. And then we meet every week on new business. I always say what gets measured gets done, what gets rewarded gets repeated. It's really important that you measure your new business initiative, how much money you put against it, how successful it is.
So people ask, new business reality is, I've been at it for six months and what gives? Nothing, I haven't got new business. I respond to all these online RFPs with no results. Not surprising. So what I'm going to share with you next is a chart. Again, this is 25 years of tracking new business in our company. The green is percentage of wins, and the blue is percentage of effort. What you need to look at on this chart is where the green outperforms the blue. Right? So online, in the last four major projects that we have, one of them came from our website. Strict website review. We're on the shortlist for a second one. If we win it, it'll come from... this green bar will get even longer. Social media, you can see we don't get a lot of new business from social media, actually very little from social media. But you need to be there and be relevant. Online RFP, same thing. But you can see the difference between online RFP and invited RFP,
significantly different. So just be careful where you spend your time. Articles in the media has driven a lot of new business for us. Less today than it was five years ago, with most firms are focusing their attention on media. Public speaking is another very effective, but it requires a lot of effort. Nowadays, you have to fund or sponsor your presentation. There's a lot of design firms all competing for presentations, so your presentation has to be knockout. Nowadays, most conferences are asking that the client and you co-present, that it's not just a design firm presenting, making it hard because most clients don't have time to attend conferences. Awards is about equal. The amount of time you enter an award, the amount of results you get out of it. Direct marketing is more work than delivering, but remember those three circles. It's filling that pipeline. Lead generation, which is hiring someone to
call and respond to website visits. A lot more effort than return, but it's something you actually have to do. Webinars, same thing. Conferences are about equal, and referrals, your client referrals, look at the power of that. So invited RFPs, public speaking referrals are very, very powerful tools that you should be looking at and maybe your businesses.
So I'm just going to end here at this slide and I'm going to ask Chelsea if she can open the lines for any questions. And what you see here are all the social platforms. This was a most recent release from one of our suppliers, RSW, and Mirin. Mirin is an online subscription-based new business service that you have great tips and advice on how to grow your business as a design firm or advertising agency. They have webinars. They have a yearly conference that's outstanding that would better help define or build on what I'm presenting here. But I'll stop here, and I'll ask Chelsea if she wants to open up the lines. We had quite a few number of questions come through, and the first one that came through, JP, is, did you ever fire a bad client? And if so, did you plan for it, i.e., find a replacement income beforehand or afterwards?
Yeah, we've done it on two occasions, and no, I didn't plan it. And one of them represented 30% of our business, and yeah, it was pretty scary. But we had to do it. We were losing, one of them, it was just culturally we were not a fit. But the other one, we were losing money on their business and they were unwilling to
allow us to make money. So we had to resign them because they were going to put us out of business.
The next question that we had come through was, how did you start to market your company nationally and internationally? Well, in the old days it was much harder because there was no social media. Today, we identify all the publications that our target group clients read, what social media groups they belong to, what conferences they attend, and we're there. We're there so that we can make in-person connections with these individuals. And that's how we grow internationally. That's how we've grown in the US. At the end of the day, it's all about visibility, relevance, and obviously fit. And the fit is all about you and your personality and the personality of your company, but it's also visibility of being there at the right place at the right time with the right frame of mind. When clients attend conferences, they're a little more relaxed. They're there to network with their peers in the industry, but a little more
predisposed, during a presentation break, to have a conversation with you.
Thank you. The next question was, which software do you use for inbound market tracking? And likewise, which CRM do you use?
So I could write a book on that one. We went through many, many CRM platforms. We're now with salesforce.com, and I would never move off of that because it's a platform. And we use Genius for inbound and outbound. So we use Genius. It tracks our inbound website visits, and within our database, it will actually tell us, if you're in our database, it will actually identify what part of our website you visited, how long were you on our website, what articles did you download, all that great stuff. And so we use Genius. It fully integrates with Salesforce, and it's a great tool. I've highlighted in blue here on the screen at the bottom right-hand side, Genius. There's a whole bunch of other ones. HubSpot we looked at. It's very expensive, but it's a great tool.
You can use Genius also for the email marketing. It allows you to do outbound marketing. It's a great platform. There's other ones that connect with Salesforce. It's up to you. I think now iContact does. I'm not a big fan of iContact. For prospecting clients, we use a list, LinkedIn, and obviously now we've moved to Lead411. It's much less expensive than the list. It's actually, to be candid with you, more current than we found with the list. But they're both great platforms. And the list is connected to Miran, which is a new business tool.
That's great. So the next question was, in your opinion with regards to RFPs, what changes when the where is a nonprofit and public sector? Is it still a waste of time based upon effort?
Any RFP is a waste of time if it doesn't meet the criteria it identified that you're uniquely positioned to solve that problem. That you, unfortunately, are the lowest cost provider for that service. That you have some kind of relationship. You know RFPs, they say you can't talk to the people within the organization, you have to talk to this individual. But there are people that you may know within your client base that know the people at that other company, and so making those introductions is really important. Excuse me. It's so important that you've had some kind of relationship. But ultimately, it's a machine, right? They have a rating sheet. It's very impersonal. It's done by a group of people. Some of them don't even understand the design profession. And they go through a rating sheet, and if you hit them all on the rating sheet, then you get hired or you get shortlisted for a presentation.
Thank you. The next question was, do you have any firms you would recommend for outsourcing lead generation?
Yeah, we did. I'll tell you a little story there. We started with Catapult. We did that three years ago. They're a great company. I have nothing but great... But you learn by your mistakes. So I'm going to share with you probably a $100,000 lesson for you. It's not about the firm. It's about the person that represents you within that firm. So the mistake we did with Catapult is I don't think the person that represented us, who was very talented, wasn't the right fit. She wasn't someone who understood design. So we currently use RSW. And we were smart. We went down, and we actually interviewed them like we would interview a new business person. We actually met. We asked them to present three people, candidates that would represent us. We interviewed all three. We picked a young lady who is dynamic and energetic. I have to tell you that we may not have won yet a piece of business, but we've done
about 25 presentations. But they're not new business. And if RSW is on the line, I apologize, but they're not new business people. They're lead generating, and they do a fantastic job of getting you in front of a client. What they can't do is write the proposal, and they can't put the presentation together. But they can definitely get you in the door.
JP, can you give an example of direct marketing you would do?
Well, we do it every two weeks. Direct marketing would be, there's the one that just came out, so if you go to SL Design Lounge, you'll see that we're hosting a webinar with the Canadian Venture Capitalist Association with Ellis Jacob, one of our clients It's being hosted next week on, I think on Wednesday. So that goes out. It goes out to within our database, we have about 11,000 contacts in our database. It goes to the relevant individuals in our database. And so that or a white paper. We've released a white paper that, or a toolkit, how to write a design brief. Those things go out, but they go to the relevant audience. There's no need talking about a package design briefing document, white paper to someone who doesn't do packaging. But it has to be content relevant to the client, has nothing to do with you. It can't be about you. It's got to be 100% about your client and their needs.
JP, how does your approach to direct marketing change in light of the new anti-spam email laws? Well, a couple of things you should be aware of. Design Lounge is a non-for-profit.
No, let me re-correct that. Design Lounge is a non-marketing thought leadership site. So we checked with our lawyers. That site is exempt from the CASL law because we're not selling, we're providing information. But still then, we have submitted forms. There's an online form that you can register, and there's also an email blast that went out before July 1st. And we re-registered about 50% of our database. There's 50% that didn't re-register, and unfortunately, we're not going to be able to talk to them unless they come back to our website and re-register.
And the last question that we had come through was, did you find success with LinkedIn groups? And if so, what determined if the groups were successful?
We haven't found success in LinkedIn groups. I can't do a correlation whatsoever between LinkedIn and new business. That's why when you look at that chart where it talks about where you put your effort, it's not high on that list. What I use LinkedIn for, and it's here on this page, is for prospect contact list-building services. I use LinkedIn as a way of building my list. I use LinkedIn as another contact point if I need an introduction. I may have a client on my LinkedIn network, and I notice that my client is connected to someone I want to talk to. I may ask my client for an introduction, which is an easier referral platform than asking my client to write a referral letter. So that's how I use LinkedIn, but I have to tell you, I have not equated ever LinkedIn network to new business results.
Thank you very much. We just had one question about a clarification about what is white paper.
Well, if you want to know what a white paper is, go to www.sldesignlounge.com. There's a button at the top that says white paper, download one, read it. Basically, it's a thought leadership document that talks about a relevant key issue clients have.
Perfect. And JP, is there anything else you want to add before we wrap things up?
When RGD asked me to do this presentation, I came with it, I was reluctant, because what you're benefiting from is 37 years of really doing new business. That's my core passion is new business. And then I said, "Do you know what? I can show you all the information you want. If you're not committed to new business, if you don't put the time aside for new business, if you don't make the effort in new business, all this knowledge is for naught." And that's why I felt comfortable sharing this information, because as much as knowledge is power, if you can't execute the plan, if you can't commit to the time, if you can't put the effort. And let me put the context of the effort for you. If you're not working every weekend on new business, if you're not working every night on new business, you're not doing new business. That's the level of commitment you need to get the flywheel flying, get the ball rolling. It takes a lot of energy, mom, to get that
momentum going. Once the momentum's going, it's much easier to keep it going. But to get that flywheel flying, it takes an enormous commitment on your part to make it happen. It can't be a part-time job. And I would say most design firms, it's a part-time job.
Well, thank you so much, JP, for hosting today's webinar and for sharing your tips and tricks on consistently growing a design-focused business. We really do appreciate you taking the time to present this content to us today. So thank you very much. Thank you. Have a nice day. Before we sign off, a quick reminder. RGD organizes regular free virtual events for our members. On Wednesday, July 23rd, Jeannette Hanna, the co-author of "Iconica: A Field Guide to Canada's Brandscape" will host a webinar that provides orienteering tools for navigating changing climates of brand assignments. And on Wednesday, July 30th, Andy Epstein, the co-founder of InSource, will host a webinar on common difficulties and the relationships between in-house teams and their clients and discuss strategies and tactics to address those changes. We'd also like to remind you that every year, RGD invites submissions for the Social Good Design Awards.
The deadline to submit graphic design projects done under the theme of communication design for social good is Friday, July 25th. Please visit rgd.ca for more information. This concludes today's webinar. Thank you all for your participation.
Bye, Chelsea
