If you’re really honest with yourself, you’re probably laser-focused on the role pitching plays in your agency’s financial performance.

According to Jody Sutter, Owner of The Sutter Company, agencies usually focus too much of their time, energy and manpower on the pitch.  And while the pitch is important, it’s crucial that your agency isn’t devoting so much energy to pitching that it fails to focus on some of the other important tools for business development.

Ultimately, if your entire focus is on pitching as a business development tactic, you’re doing business development for your agency in the most expensive way.

What happens when you stop focusing all your energy on beating out the other 12 agencies pitching an account and start focusing on what makes you different and better than all those other agencies?

On a recent episode of The Innovative Agency, Jody Sutter, Owner of The Sutter Company, discussed the 4 business development personalities, why the pitch shouldn’t be your main focus, and why being a niche agency can be a good thing.

Jody helps agencies win the right kinds of clients, while also eliminating the chaos that is so often associated with business development.

The New Business Ecosystem

In small marketing agencies – those with between 5 and 75 people – it’s often the leadership team, CEO, or founder and partners that are the best business development resource the agency has.  In the absence of a dedicated senior business development person on staff, these agency leaders rely on their personal skill and networks to build the business.

To leverage their strengths, it’s important to put together a program that suits the talents of each individual leader, rather than to try to introduce tactics or programs that aren’t a fit for these talents.  

According to Jody, agencies have got to start looking at the pitching function as just one part of a New Business Ecosystem, that includes intellectual property, marketing, sales and pitching.

And ironically, in order to think broadly about business development as an “ecosystem” consisting of multiple elements in addition to the pitch, you have to narrow down your focus.

Finding Your Niche – Specialization

As crazy as it may sound, in order to think broadly about building your agency’s business, you’ve got to narrow your focus. Agencies with a specialized focus, in Jody’s view, do business development in a more cost effective way.  

You can have a generalist agency; there’s nothing wrong with that.  But the more general your agency’s focus, the more expensive marketing and sales are going to be.  You’ll have to pitch more frequently and you will compete against more agencies for the same business.

Having twelve other agencies that do what you do can also drive your price point in the wrong direction as you endeavor to explain why your similar service adds more value. The more focused you can be, the more you can speak the right language of your target clients and the easier it is for the right target clients to find you.

Jody’s approach to agency business development for small agencies blends the strength of an agency’s unique and strong qualities along with the specific business development personalities of the agency’s leadership team to grow the business.

The 4 Business Development Personalities

As your agency navigates through the business development landscape, and as you’re trying to nurture and feed those different business development personalities, it is helpful to understand the 4 different personalities that you will likely encounter.

The Hunter

The hunter has the type of personality that makes them who we traditionally consider a natural born salesperson.

The person for whom pursuing new people and relationships is second nature.

This is the individual who can flawlessly and effortlessly build a relationship or find common ground with just about anyone.  Someone who thrives on an abundance of contact.

The Promoter

Promoters are who you might think of as the “GaryVees” of the world.

These people are comfortable being “on,” personally and professionally, and don’t shy away from blending and promoting all aspects of their lives and work.

Gary is a fantastic example of this because his entire life is on display, both personal and business, combining to create a very specific brand.

The Communicator

These are the TED Talkers.  This person may not shine when communicating on a one-on-one basis, but thrives when delivering content or ideas before a group or on a stage.  They are innovative, creative, and excel in big idea situations. They may love being in front of an audience and are capable of making even complex ideas easier to understand.

The Thinker

Thinkers tend to be introverts.  Which is not the same as being shy or timid in business.

Being an introvert doesn’t negate you from being successful in business development.

Plenty of introverts are incredible at business development, but these are typically your people who focus on writing books, being creative, or developing white papers.  They are also tremendous creators of intellectual capital.

Leverage Success Through Personality Types

Sometimes there’s more than one personality in a person, and often there’s multiple personalities on a leadership team.  It’s important to see how all of those personalities are working well together.

As an agency owner, it’s important to have key individuals around you who supplement your personality well in order to develop a more complete team. It’s easy to hire people that are like us because we’re comfortable with our own strengths, but admitting that we’re not good at everything can help prompt us to seek out a team with diverse personalities.

Tell A Story

As human beings our brains can’t help but to engage when we’re being told a story.  Basic story concepts create structure for the intangible and the excitement of tension and release.  

Agencies need to tell stories because they are starting out from a position of disadvantage when it comes to selling their services and solutions on two levels:

1. They don’t cultivate a sales culture or sales operation.

As mentioned, most agencies this size don’t have a dedicated sales function or system, so ingraining formal sales training and skills isn’t a priority that is regularly addressed.

For agencies that are not comfortable selling or without well trained staff who understand the art or the power of good salesmanship, storytelling is a powerful business development tool.

2. What they’re selling is abstract. 

Agencies sell their ideas, the strategies behind those ideas, and the ways they plan to execute those ideas to solve a problem for a client.  This is hard because it’s, in many cases, abstract. It’s a lot easier to sell something tangible; a thing you can pick up and show or demonstrate.

Crafting your ideas into a compelling story can convey innovation and creativity to a potential client and bring them into the abstract.  This positions the agency as a partner who understands the client’s needs and desires, and that has the potential pathway to achieve them.  

Ultimately, clients are outsourcing part of their job to your agency, and they want someone who they can be in the trenches with.  

Address the 4 Key Fears

While it’s sometimes a lack of tools or tactics that holds an agency back in its business development efforts, Jody’s experience working with agencies is that many times it is fear that holds you back from taking the next steps to success.

Fears like:

1. Fear of missing out on revenue.

Your fear:  If we specialize, we may be leaving clients and revenue on the table.

Jody says: You’re missing opportunities because your universe is too big.  Trying to be everything for everyone is ineffective.

2. Fear that the team will be unmotivated.

Your fear:  It’s hard to recruit and retain talented staff.  If the team doesn’t like the direction, they won’t do the best work, or enough of it, or they’ll leave.

Jody says: You can recruit yourself out of business.  Decide first what the direction for your agency is, then find people aligned with that direction.  If they’re unaligned, gently help them to find another place or path.

  3. Fear of change.

Your fear:  Changing the way you sell, the types of clients you help, or the the kinds of work your agency does, is scary.  We don’t know what we don’t know, and it might not work.

Jody says:  All agencies experience this fear.  You’ve done this before. Rely on your experience and talent and you’ll succeed, adapting the learning along the way.

4. Fear of being an impostor.

Your fear:  Our agency may not have the right people or expertise to land that dream client, or to do the work once we do.  They’ll find out we’re “faking til we make it.”

Jody says:  Reverse your perspective and become client focused, thinking about the challenges they face to which you have a solution.  The client has just as much at stake as you do, and they want you to succeed for them. Show them how right they were to choose your agency.

Reverse things and become client focused, thinking about the challenges they face to which you have a solution.

This post is based on an interview with Jody Sutter from The Sutter Company. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Innovative Agency Podcast.

If you don’t use iTunes, you can listen to every episode here.