Figuring Out How to Attract New Business

From the breakfast presentation.Courtesy Door Number 3. From the breakfast presentation.

Branded

An insider’s guide to small-business marketing.

We recently took a step back to look at the clients we have on our roster and how they got there. Interestingly, the majority did not enter our stable via our outbound marketing efforts, our list of targets to go after. Why was that, we wondered. A recent new business initiative may have provided the answer.

A creative director at our agency, Taylor, is also in charge of our intern program. He recently learned from a neighbor who works at a popular Austin-based fast-food chain, that the chain’s restaurants were struggling to develop interest in their relatively new breakfast offerings. Taylor teed up the situation into a real world project for our crop of interns (no running out for java here — we try to give our interns real projects).

Taylor asked the interns how the restaurant group could increase its morning sales, and they sprang into action. They staked out the restaurant during the early morning hours and captured video of the drive-through traffic. They also took video of competing quick-service drive-throughs. We found that for every six to 10 cars going through the competitors’ drive-through, there was only one going through our target’s. This would be a nice challenge.

The interns worked on creating in-store promotions, table toppers, point-of-purchase posters and ads to cross-sell breakfast offerings to customers who frequented during the lunch and dinner hours (the interns also ate lots of breakfast sandwiches). Taylor shared our interns’ progress with his neighbor, who then shared the information with his management team. The managers, in turn, expressed an interest in seeing what was being cooked up at our agency.

With that, the intern project was elevated to a full-on new-business pitch. There were a couple of over-nighters as we prepared our creative for a meeting with their team. Social media initiatives were planned. Creative executions were blown out and polished. Lots of hours were spent on this initiative.

The meeting day came and the restaurant chain brought in its top executives and an outside consultant. Our staff and interns took turns talking about customer insights and strategies, sharing the work and narrating videos. We served up tactics to build awareness through their existing lunch and dinner customers: posters with campaign themes, artwork on burger bags and napkins that cross-sold breakfast offerings and some fun social media strategies to further engage and deputize their loyalists. The restaurant executives nodded their heads at the right moments, laughed, took notes and said things like, “We were just talking about doing that.” All in all, a really good meeting, it seemed. I followed up with an e-mail telling the president how much we enjoyed getting to know his stores and his people and explaining how passionate we were about helping them with some ideas. The response? Silence.

Maybe our picture of the flattened breakfast sandwich and the 15-minute waits for the meal offended them. Maybe. But what I think really happened is this: While we determined that we would love to work with this Austin institution, our desire didn’t meet up with its needs. Turns out, the head of the company is a former ad man and, yes, it already had promotional plans in the works. If the needs do not align, you do not have a transaction.

This experience crystallized for me that it’s often better to have customers find you than vice versa. It goes back to human nature and how we all learned (or should have learned) everything we need to know about successful sales from dating. Simply put, it works better when people come to you. Most of the time, what happens when we make that first move and tell people that we would really like to date them? Ice cream doesn’t disappear as fast. This is especially true with certain members of our species, the true hunter-gatherers who are often decision makers in companies. Take away the sport of hunting and they often lose interest.

Moving forward, I’m going to start envisioning our staff’s time as dollars. Yep, it’s always been that way, but I haven’t been thinking of staff hours in those terms because overhead is kind of always there. I’m reframing our new-business initiatives this way: with hours constituting dollars, which business opportunities are the best ones to invest in this year?

How do you make sure you pursue the right opportunities?

MP Mueller is the founder of Door Number 3, a boutique advertising agency in Austin, Tex. Follow Door Number 3 on Facebook.