James Welch is a New Business Guru who has worked with and for Agencies in London, Singapore, Sydney and Dubai. Here he discusses with Darren the state of New Business and Business development across the multiple markets he has experienced and gives advice on what works and what to avoid when developing and implementing a business growth strategy in your agency.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing and today we’re sitting in the beautiful winter sunshine of London town and I’m catching up with a good friend and a long-term friend, James Welch who is probably better known as a business development guru from around the world. Welcome, James!
James:
Hi Darren, good to see you here in London.
Darren:
Actually, you’re better known as the master networker, aren’t you? I don’t know how many times you’ve connected me with interesting people that you’ve met along your journey.
James:
Well I remember the dinners that we used to do in Sydney when I was living there and I think most of the people who had dinner with us at those tables have ended up either working for you or being a client of yours at some stage so I think we should work out some sort of percentage on that, shouldn’t we?
Darren:
Always looking for the angle. And that’s probably one of the things that’s made you such a good business development person, isn’t it? Because it’s in a way a dual objective. One is to grow the business but not necessarily just going straight out for the money.
James:
Well you’ve got to add value. If you don’t add value regularly, you end up like a Moroccan carpet salesman and you’re just trying to make as much money as you can off that tourist on that one trip. But in the service industry, we’ve got to add value the whole time and that’s one of the things that’s been interesting so since we met twelve years ago in Sydney, it’s been interesting having a look at how things work in different countries over the last few years.
Darren:
You started out in London, you were born and grew up in the UK. But I remember you had a very big job as new business or business development director across Europe before you came to Sydney. Just give us some background.
James:
So I was working first for the new media agency as it was in those days, Dentsu Aegis Network’s Vizeum, that took all of the Carat second string agencies and turned them into their own network. And that was an interesting eye-opener because they would call themselves the magicians of memory, the chemists of conversation and campaign we were just saying, why don’t you call yourselves the wizards of wank?
The MD of the office then said, “How do we go to market when you know, the press is already making fun of us?” So it was looking at how to just let people know that you’ve got something fabulous and you’ve got a story to tell and you can still do the basics.
So having the table stake entries of we can deliver the day job but also having something better and above and beyond. And I think the British agencies taught me a lot by showing how they can do the basic and go above and beyond and working with the team at Y&R, after Vizeum before I came out to Australia was a European role looking at how you have the three different functions of new business.
You’ve got the new new business where you’re going out and pitching and then you’ve got the other side of things which is the working with current clients just to up-sell, cross-sell and add value and be known for adding value and the third thing was conversion of pitches because everyone is always pitching. If you win one in four, then that’s not great. You should be doing better.
Darren:
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to sit down and have this conversation because over the years we’ve talked a lot but I don’t think we’ve ever had a chance to really sit down and talk about pitching because you know, from my perspective, I worked in agencies as a creative person and I worked on a lot of pitches but in the last almost twenty years, I’ve been running pitches and seeing pitches that are being sort of rolled out around the world and so I was really interested to get your perspective. So from Y&R, you came down under. Why?
James:
Came down because frankly Y&R shut down. It’s a European new business function so Marcus Brown who I was working for at the time went off to go and run their Geneva offices and I thought, rather than look elsewhere in the Y&R network across Europe, I would jump down to Australia having the Aussie passport. It was an opportunity that I could take so I did. I thought I’d go for six months, stayed six years, met a girl, got married, had a kid and all that kind of thing.
Darren:
That’s so sweet.
James:
I know. It was a fabulous time but the difference was the new business function isn’t a structured function in Australia, so the MD does it all. He runs the business, he’s making sure the payroll is happy, he’s making sure that the clients are happy, and he’s supposed to be the great networker who’s out there making sure that everybody wants to work with his agency.
Darren:
That is such a great observation because the Australian market does not realise how under developed they are as far as new business goes. So I’m so glad that you’ve actually been able to articulate that.
James:
Well the thing is, it’s seen as a cost, “Oh we can’t afford a new business person”. But the new business person should pay for themselves. Admittedly in adland, like in advertising technology, all of the sales guys there are very based on sales and commissions.
Darren:
Yes.
James:
But in adland nobody works on commission, it’s always salaries and you get a bonus and if you’re lucky it’s a months’ salary at the end of the year type thing. And that doesn’t make any sense. Business development has got to add value and I am, I recently did the Mark Ritson mini MBA Marketing Course with Marketing Week.
One of the lines that he uses when he goes in to pitch a new idea and the client doesn’t like the idea he goes, “Look, I’m here to make you money and if you don’t want it to make money, then I won’t have to run it like this”. And that’s how the new business function is, it’s a performance marketing role rather than anything else.
We call it business development or new business but it’s very much performance marketing. So how do you go out there, market your business and then put dollars to the return that you can have on the investment of that person’s salary, but you have to let them do things their own way, create the collateral they want to do. At Trinity P3 you have regular and fabulous – I say this just for you – content the whole time.
Darren:
I love you too, James.
James:
But it’s important to be out there and some of it has to be stuff that sticks with your audience. And if we can’t market ourselves, then as agencies, then something’s going wrong. People say that architects live in half-built houses and cobbler’s children have no shoes. But frankly, for agencies that’s bollocks! You’ve got to be able to be good at positioning yourself in the market, you have to have regular content.
Darren:
So one of the things I’ve found with the Australian agencies and I’ll be interested in your observation here, is that when I say to them, “You need to market yourself, you need to position yourself and you need to communicate that value proposition as part of your new business”, they really struggle because they want to be everything to everyone, and they’re scared about having a positioning because suddenly it could possibly not be what the client wants.
James:
I think that that speaks for itself because everybody knows that agencies are fabulous, buy n large, at helping their clients position themselves perfectly and you can’t be all things to all people at all times. You can be known for one thing, but you can also use that to build across other places. I think what it is, it’s just getting out there and it’s not what you just said, I think it’s just laziness that they don’t have, they can’t make time, because they’re too busy on the day job to get out and position themselves and do everything else for themselves.
It’s clear that when you look at the way big agencies are winning business now, it’s not about their agency, it’s about how they position themselves to the client that they can help that client make money. And therefore, they will work closely with the publishers, they will work closely with other agencies that specialise in other parts of the marketing mix of the promotional side of things. That’s where we need to help the other agencies see that that’s the way forward and it’s not just the big agencies run out of New York, London or Zurich, everybody everywhere has to be able to collaborate.
It’s the collaboration of the agencies that is structured to create integration of the story from the client’s perspective.
Darren:
Because one of the things you just said before about the lesson from Y&R, the idea that there were three parts to new business, it’s really interesting how often people measure the success of a new business or business development person by how many pitches they win. But in actual fact, there’s more measures to success than just the pitches, isn’t there?
James:
I think the most important part of those three points is the farming of the current business and I think it should be measured purely on how we’re helping the agency create more collateral, more content that talks about the expertise internally that first the current clients embrace and therefore revenue goes up, and then secondly, they get noted externally through PR and other marketing means and thirdly, it’s the pitch-winning rate and the dollars associated to those pitches
Because it’s quite often you win a pitch, not on your fabulous experience but you win it because you were cheaper than everybody else. And if that’s how you’re winning all your pitches, you’re not making money on those clients to begin with. So it takes some time to win a client and then make money on that client because you do have to be outrageously competitive in years one and two until they start to trust you and say, “Okay we can spend some more with you”.
Darren:
Winning pitches isn’t about actually the pitch itself, is it? You know, there’s two ways of winning a pitch. One is that you actually win the pitch before you even get to present to the client, and the other is you have to work really hard to catch up because it’s landed in your lap as an opportunity and then you have to convert it. And you must’ve experienced both of those.
James:
I think there’s another element to it, it’s having the cliché, the traditional expression of the chemistry. I think the chemistry doesn’t just come from being the brightest or cheapest, it comes from listening and really understanding and having done the right research at the right time and being engaging in the meetings. I’d rather position it as that rather than any other way.
Darren:
I guess what I’m talking about is when you know, as a pitch consultant, you come to an agency and you say, “Well there’s an opportunity to pitch”, but if you’ve already been out and made contact with the clients, those potential clients who are now asking you to pitch, you’ve already given yourself a bit of a start on your competitors in winning that pitch, haven’t you?
James:
Also, the brand is the story that other people are talking about you. So what’s your reputation in the market. The pitch that I worked with your colleagues on at the end of last year, beginning of this year, was very much looking at how that brand, a famous global brand, could start a new product across the Middle-East where I’d been working at that time.
And it was interesting to hear how some of the agencies when they heard about who the client was, presumed it would go straight away to the incumbent of a different division. They got a head start, but they’re not a given. This is a new product. And they go well, and they start to explain themselves and how they are in the market, it is totally their perspective rather than the perspective that I’d heard from these particular agencies elsewhere in the market.
So I think it’s understanding how you perceive yourself as opposed to how other people can perceive you and to address that consciously with the content that you’re producing. You want to be known for this. And if you want to be known for a thousand things then you have to produce a lot more content over a much longer period. It’s just a marketing, communications plan.
Darren:
Because people do business first of all with people that they know and secondly, with people that they like, isn’t it?
James:
Do you remember the Adam Morgan’s book, ‘Eating the Big Fish’?
Darren:
About challenger brands.
James:
About challenger brands. Well one of his comments in there was, “People don’t buy pyramids and onions”, talking about the brand strategy, “People buy people”. And so because it’s B2B business in the service industry and agency land, we’ve got to recognise that. But we also have to recognise that talking of agency land, it’s changing.
Darren:
Yeah. Absolutely.
James:
So, I mentioned Ad Tech earlier. So I worked a lot across Asia Pacific.
Darren:
That’s right, because after Sydney, you moved to Singapore.
James:
Working for a WPP programmatic trading desk outside of Group M, I say that because it wasn’t Xasis at the time. And we had a fairly transparent model, I say that because programmatic has never been as transparent as it should be.
It was an interesting time and it was all about education. And so my sales technique wasn’t to sell anything to anybody, it was just to explain what we can do with programmatic as opposed to what other people are doing with programmatic and therefore the differences. So you know, I never said it, but I always thought we ripped off our clients less.
Darren:
In a way, you say it’s education, but you needed to educate clients because up to that point, programmatic pretty much, and in many places still is, a black box where money goes in one end and supposedly ads are served out the other. So to actually educate people, if not about how that black box works but what you can actually achieve by using that technology the right way, was a really important thing to do.
James:
It’s like explaining the difference between the old PC and the old MAC, and it’s just to say that actually one’s just a lot easier to use and it has quicker solutions for you.
I think that’s the way forward is just to explain the benefits and if people want to know what’s under the hood, now in the land of programmatic, people are explaining how it works and how they need to make money on it and how everybody can make money on the idea of programmatic and it’s through understanding audiences and the data.
I know a lot of different marketers find the word ‘data’ difficult because it’s something that’s a bit too technical for them but if you asked them to talk to you about their audiences, they can talk until the cows come home. So if we just stop talking about data and start talking about audiences and how we can target them better, faster, cheaper, more accurately or less accurately if we want to do just a broadcast campaign, then that’s going to help everybody understand what we can achieve today. So I think that, oh, you don’t sound convinced.
Darren:
Look the only caveat I’d put is I think data properly used helps you get a much clearer supported view of who your audience is. And the reason I say that is marketers love talking about their audience but often the information, the data, proves that their view of their audience is very different to who their audience actually is.
I get your point about data scares people because it seems like something that’s impenetrable. But I have to tell you, when I’ve worked with data scientists, these are the people that take the numbers and turn it into an articulation of the findings, you suddenly get such a rich view of customer that you may not have had before.
Everyone walks around in marketing with this perception of who their customer is and it’s based on personal experience anecdote and probably quite a substantial amount of ego. And data, for me, is the part that proves, disproves or shapes the way that you can start to see your customer.
James:
Well if you’re in the States and you’re trying to sell sports shoes online and you think these are perfect for the 20 year olds, you know, cool, young, women.
Darren:
Hipsters.
James:
Whatever the audience may be, and you find out through the data of the online purchasing that actually it’s middle-aged people are wearing them to go for their early evening strolls and it’s not the cool kids wearing them down the fashionable streets, then yes, you can see that. But at the same time, do you want to just make money, or do you want to reposition your shoes? And it’s working out the strategy. So Tony Robertson who passed away recently, I don’t know if you know him from Red Spider?
Darren:
Yeah.
James:
I worked with him in his team in Sydney and he had this lovely one slide that said, “Advertising can only go wrong in three places; strategy, idea and execution”. And it’s a great line and it’s something everybody should know.
I think when you come out of university and you went for your first interview, it was the thing that I’d read somewhere and it was the thing that I’d always do is make sure that you had, for every, “What’s your favourite advertising campaign?” Well, and then you’d describe it because of the strategy, the idea and the execution. And you may not be right in the strategy, the idea and the execution but at least you understand the principle of it.
Darren:
Yeah.
James:
And I think that gets lost a lot today because people see the shiny thing over here which is very tactical, it’s the execution.
So we need to be on Facebook. Well, hang on, what are we trying to strategically improve? And the great big idea happens and then we find a way to shoehorn it onto Twitter because we think, rather than going, “Okay, what’s the business objective and what’s the audience objective and how do we get there?” And the agency strategists will be hammering that through the rest of the agency, but somebody knows that we need to have an Instagram presence for this because the client likes Instagram, they are very active themselves.
Darren:
Tactic, tactic, tactic.
James:
Then they try and chew on it back into the other points and is it the client’s fault, is it the agency’s fault? It’s all of our faults. We all have to think, take a step back and go, does this make sense or are we just doing it for the sake of doing it? And coming back to, “Will it make money?”.
So I think, I’m a fan of the expression, ‘performance marketing’ I said it before about new business. But all marketing has to perform. It may not be about financial performance, although the CFO probably disagrees with that. It has to be about something.
So working out what that performance is, and did we achieve that? That’s something that we need to remind ourselves a lot more. And coming back to the original point of agency business development, is it performing and back to your point, what does performance look like for the different stakeholders?
Darren:
I think it’s a good point because agencies especially mention that they’re transforming. So you mentioned before that agencies are transforming and one of the things that agencies need to start to do is think of themselves as a business and as brands and start to have a positioning in the marketplace because the first thing I notice is there’s way too many agencies and secondly, if they’re not standing for anything, they largely stand for nothing.
So to your point, I mean, the role of performance marketing for agents, for agencies, has become really important.
James:
The agencies that we know and love have been around for a very long time and they’ve built their own brand and that brand is hard to break until the agency breaks itself because it’s not making enough money.
Darren:
Wunderman Thompson?
James:
I think Wunderman is a fabulous brand and I started my career out at JWT so I’ve loved JWT from you know, yesteryear. And they’ve not done well recently and I think Wunderman will do a great job having the above the line team but did it need to be shoehorned together and as many people have noted, the brand Wunderman Thompson isn’t the most creative or innovative. Let’s hope they create enough collateral to make it come across as innovative.
Darren:
Well give a meaning and create a desirability for clients wanting to work there, work with them.
James:
But again, it comes back to the new business team who are often quite young, junior people who are enthusiastic, gregarious and need more structure and perhaps even training towards it, towards what they’re trying to do and realising that new business is a sales and marketing role.
So, I should go on and plug Marcus Brown from my Y&R days because he’s just set up a business that does just that. It helps set up training programs for agencies and it’s not just the new business team because it’s everybody’s business. And the second side of it is making sure that you’re going to win the pitch and give yourself an advantage to winning pitches because it’s about bringing your brand to life in the pitch.
So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for agencies to create more brand and they can learn a lot from Ad Tech companies who spend a lot of time and money making sure they’re at every event and everybody knows what they do and why they do it and how they differentiate from their competitors so that they can be used. A
ll the management consultancies, nobody really knows how PWC and Accenture differentiate themselves internally but externally, they are really getting out to try and talk to people about how they can do all of these different services and they’re talking at a very high level to the right people in the right place and they’re opening doors that agencies can’t open yet buy n large because they’re not talking to the Marketing Managers but they’re talking to the Chief Execs and the CFOs.
Darren:
Much higher up the hierarchy.
James:
But it’s still a marketing job, it’s B2B marketing and knowing who your audience is and where you’re going to make money in the long run and I think that’s something that the agencies can start to learn from. Or the consultancies are going to continue doing what they’re doing in Australia, perhaps better than anywhere else right now which is cutting the grass of the agency landscape.
Darren:
Now, on a personal level, you spent how long in Singapore before you moved to Dubai?
James:
Just under three years it was, loved Singapore, loved Asia. God it’s an exciting part of the world with some really talented people really doing some amazing stuff and some really untalented people making amazing amounts of money not knowing what they’re doing. So there’s opportunity for everybody in Asia Pacific.
Darren:
And then the Middle East, what attracted you there? The warm weather or the opportunity?
James:
One step closer to Europe to drag the family back. What enticed me to the Middle East was the fact that there’s massive opportunity there. There’s a changing landscape from an agency side where a lot of the old guard have retired quite quickly over the last four or five years and got new managing directors in place in the agencies which is a fabulous revitalisation of the marketplace.
The agencies are really starting to look around the globe to see how they can do things better, faster, quicker and add value. I think the marketers, there’s a handful of marketers who are really looking to do things very differently and I’ve met a lot of great marketers who are starting to re-evaluate the point of having these agencies and do they just go straight to the Googles and Facebooks of this world because they have a stronger B2B brand in the Middle East than a lot of the agencies apart from the ones that normally win all the awards at the events.
Darren:
It certainly is an interesting and emerging region creatively because you’re seeing cultural changes, you know, Saudi Arabia is starting to open up with women driving and they’ve started showing films, movies, the whole region has all of these signposts. In your time there, what was a distinctively different thing about business development and what was something that’s exactly the same around the world?
James:
I found myself in the Middle East working more with advertisers than agencies. That’s why I stayed over the five years because there was change in the agencies because there had to be. The advertisers were looking for better performing marketing and you know, how to get ripped off less.
As I said before, that was an expression that came to mind while I was in Dubai, because one of the advertisers said to me, “I think we’re not getting great value from our agencies” and even though they were being audited and they were doing the right thing extensively, they didn’t feel they were getting the right service and I think that it was because the agencies weren’t trying to adapt as quickly as they felt they needed, as quickly as they should, because they were still doing an okay job and nobody was asking anything new of them.
Darren:
Nothing was broke, so why fix it?
James:
So the market has really changed over the last few years and it’s exciting to see how that’s changed. In a way, it’s a pity to have left just now because it’s really picking up and in the marketing society which we set up over there, they are really seeing new conversations coming to the table from the side of the marketers locally and internationally, new people coming into the market.
And I think that’s a great place to watch out for, seeing what comes out of there and creatively some of the best work globally is going to be coming from that part of the world because I think they can leap frog over some of the legacies that the rest of the world has to worry about.
Darren:
Yeah. And now you’ve come back to London?
James:
London. Back home. It’s been a long time. It doesn’t feel like home this time because I’ve come back with a new family so it’s just the next step in the adventure. The market’s exciting. There’s so much happening. There’s so much insecurity in the market.
Darren:
Uncertainty.
James:
Well there’s that Brexit thing. There’s also a massive amount of talent in the market which is trying to develop things digitally, helping to explain what we can do better in the way of audience, changing the way audiences see brands and audience measurement and I think that’s where I’m going to be focusing my time from now on, is really helping people look at the data that is available today and understanding how those audiences can do things differently if we can persuade them with the right message and the right content regularly, whether it’s a B2B audience or a B2C audience.
Darren:
So from your experience across all those markets, and they’re quite different, what are the things that have really reinforced for you about what it takes to develop a business, to actually build a business, to drive new business, to drive revenue, to be successful?
James:
So some sales smart ass once said, “You’ve got two ears and one mouth and that’s what’s most important about sales”. I think it’s the listening side of it and listening is not just from conversations with individuals but also listening to what works and what doesn’t work in iteration.
So the speed to market used to be when something happened in the news, you’d have the funny advertisement in the newspaper the next day. That used to be a lightning fast reaction. Today, obviously, it’s way faster than that. You can automate that with dynamic creative, you can do all sorts of wonderous things with technology, but it’s working out how to pre-plan, just as before, prior preparation is a vital part of it.
That’s where the great businesses that are adapting quickly are and have the process in place to be able to adapt quickly, they are the ones that are doing great things going forwards and it’s the managing directors of those businesses that are starting to think about change management internally so that you can adapt for the external markets.
So it is being well documented that agencies need to change internally and they are, but are they changing fast enough? Are advertisers and marketing departments changing fast enough to be able to do things correctly here? I saw in a client I was working with in the Middle East, a large digital transformation project taking place but there was no change management process put in place for that and that was then realised afterwards and that was when I was coming in to say actually, they went out to go and find people to help them understand internally what did digital marketing mean? What is the new CRM system going to mean for all the different people and all the different markets?
Darren:
It’s interesting isn’t it because businesses are so focused these days on innovation but often overlook the need to evolve the underlying business to support the innovation. I mean, innovation, ‘innov’ itself says to move forward, to take quantum leaps in the way you do things, the way you deliver the services you deliver, the products you make.
But you have to also at the same time, not necessarily innovate the underlying infrastructure, but evolve the underlying infrastructure to support that future state. It’s a bit like the military, they’d say, “Right, we’re going to get to this point tomorrow”. Well, you have to also organise that all of your supplies will be arriving there soon after you do otherwise you end up stuck out in no-man’s land with nothing to allow you to move forward.
James:
As the direct marketers of yesteryear knew more than anybody else when it wasn’t cool to be in direct marketing which now in the digital world is under a different name, it’s the cool place to be. It’s about pre-planning, thinking of all the different options and scenarios that are coming, scenario planning, and thinking about the ‘what if’.
With that wonderful agency that went bust many years ago, “What if?” which is a pity because it was a fabulous place and I’d have loved to see how they could have evolved and thought of their own “What if?” scenarios. It’s important, everyone’s changing, even the Facebooks of this world are being heavily criticised for not changing fast enough.
We need to be more nimble and to work out how to do that, and that costs money but then coming back to the scenario planning, well what’s it going to cost us upfront to the value that that is going to create for us to do it? We need to be wiser as to who to put in place, where and when so that we can make more money in tomorrow’s world.
Darren:
Now, I’ve got more of a personal question of a personal perspective that I want from you which is, you are a person who for me is very good at building relationships, building networks of people and friends and contacts. Is there a difference, culturally, in doing that from Sydney to Singapore to Dubai to London, or is it really that human beings are all very very similar?
James:
Everyone across the globe has similar, similar slash selfish outlooks and I think it’s about how to appeal to other people’s selfish outlooks so what do you like and what do they like to? That’s just the Venn diagram of I like this, they like that, let’s talk about the stuff in the middle but I’ll learn a little bit about the other stuff too so that I look like I’m actually interested. God I sound shallow. But what I found working in different…
Darren:
But what you mean is, find the commonality.
James:
Yeah.
Darren:
Find what it is that connects you and then build on that. And all human beings are the same?
James:
Ah, no. All cultures are very different but fundamentally individuals, if you look at that principle, it’s what they find interesting and what I find interesting adapts in different markets. I think there are different ways to understand people’s approach and the cultural approach and the things you can and can’t talk about and understanding that some people will respond to you quickly and some people very slowly.
You know, you were talking earlier before we went on recording about the Swiss German approach and the British approach and how Brits like to keep things to themselves a lot more than the Swiss Germans who’ll just be straight open and quicker to get to the point from a business perspective. I think there are the clichés about different cultures and the jokes about the different cultures. I think it’s to be aware of those clichés and work out for yourself market by market, which clichés are valuable to understand and which ones are just good for a joke and nothing beyond.
Darren:
Yeah. So I’ve just noticed the time. Thank you, James, it’s been great catching up and having this conversation.
James:
It is lovely to catch up with you on this side of the world, Darren.
Darren:
So but before we go, where next after London?
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