Adding Value and Building Trust: 15 Steps to Better Biz Dev
Are you planning your new business strategy now? Or thinking about planning soon? Maybe you’re too busy to think about tomorrow? Wherever you are in the process, I’ve got you covered. Follow some or all of these 15 steps to better biz dev results. Mold and shape your plan to your agency between now and the start of the year. Work within the time remaining to draft a plan that you can execute on day one (or earlier, if possible) and evolve it as you roll into the year. Don’t overthink it or get overwhelmed. Just do it!
Most prospecting efforts fall flat these days, leaving agency owners and biz dev leaders frustrated and anxious about generating new revenue. Don’t keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Throw out the old playbook and try something new. Keep the playbook and mix new tactics with the old. Or improvise until you find traction. No matter how you approach it, follow these 15 steps to better biz dev. Stand apart from the herd by following these two mandates: provide value over selling and build trust before pitching. But first, let’s deal with the obvious.
Rearview Mirror
Before planning, evaluate how your business development performed this year. You may already have concluded the good and bad of the past ten months, but you may be missing the nuances of why. Going through this exercise now will help you remember the year with a fresh perspective, both the success and what needs improvement. A simple way to do this is to inventory your highs and lows and turn them into a SWOT analysis.
List your current year’s achievements and shortfalls. Review key performance indicators (KPIs), including outreach metrics, revenue growth, and profitability. Keep it simple. Did the agency meet its financial targets? Did you meet your targets? Score replies, conversations, meetings, proposals, pitches, wins, and losses. Identify and quantify the critical dynamics in each success and failure.
SWOT
Use the results in your SWOT analysis to understand where your business is strong and weak and how to address each in the year ahead. Stick to the top factors for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole, so limit yourself to the top five most impactful to your business development efforts. Share your SWOT with agency leaders to gain consensus. Remember, perfect is the enemy of progress.
Executive Summary
Don’t underestimate the power of an executive summary. It is the guidelines, guardrails, and storyline of your plan. Each section, every strategy, and all tactics must connect back to the Executive Summary, objectives, and approach it defines. Start by stating your vision or thesis. Acknowledge the shortcomings and list five strategies you will use to improve the weaknesses in your SWOT and five strategies, more or less, to mitigate the threats. Use the opportunities to drive your prospecting approach. And use your strengths to inform your tactics. These 15 steps to better biz dev will guide you.
State your objectives clearly, like these.
- Create awareness among targeted marketing decision-makers of the agency, its services, and its unique value proposition.
- Build trust and likeability with these decision-makers.
- Provide reasons why the agency is superior to their current agency or other available options.
- Stay top of mind, not an annoyance, until they need new agency services.
- Elevate the agency’s standing on the list, if not the first choice, as a new agency.
Positioning
Positioning means knowing your sweet spot and owning it. What makes your agency truly special? And don’t give me that “full-service, integrated solutions” schtick. Dig deep. What challenges do you solve better, more confidently, or more consistently than anyone else? How about industries or audiences that you know better than anyone else? Combining these differences can be your superpower.
Conduct an honest audit of your top work and most successful client relationships. Find the similarities or patterns. Perhaps you’re exceptionally good with challenger brands. You may be a small creative shop ideal for big CPG brands. Or you are skilled at turning boring B2B brands into revenue-generating machines. Whatever it is, identify your unique value proposition and build your entire strategy around it.
I’ve got a lot more thoughts about positioning. Here are two.
Prospect list
Use your insights to create your ideal client profiles. Then, research to build a laser-focused list of prospects that match those profiles. This takes time, so it’s essential to account for it in the process. Conduct a thorough analysis of your most successful client relationships. What industries are they in? What challenges were they facing? How did your work impact their business? Add these insights to your detailed ideal client profiles.
Target the right decision-makers. Who you reach matters more than how you reach them. Ensure your outreach targets decision-makers who have the authority and need to invest in your services. The more effort you put in, the better everything else will be. That said, balance your efforts with efficiency.
Research each company thoroughly. Find out as much as you can about their current agency relationships and marketing initiatives. Winmo is an excellent tool for actionable prospect intelligence, agency change triggers, marketing leader changes, vulnerability rankings, and more. The more data you have, the more personalized and relevant you can be. Scrutinize every choice. Is that company a realistic prospect? Do we have any probability of winning? Consider the hard questions now rather than in the post-mortem.
Messaging
Your messaging strategy should consider all channels and campaigns. What you say on LinkedIn, the website, other social channels, and in the press should all be coordinated, complementary, and consistent. The goal is to surround your ICP with your messaging to look vibrant, omnipresent, and engaging. Most importantly, craft messages that truly resonate with your prospects, not ignorable generic claims. Remember, value over selling.
Your messaging needs to grab attention and demonstrate value immediately. Lead with insights relevant to the prospect’s specific situation. Show that you’ve done your homework and understand their challenges. Relevant, timely, value- or solution-oriented messaging is next-level personalization and critical to avoid being ignored.
Focus on value and outcomes, not capabilities and accolades. Instead of rattling off a laundry list of services, highlight the results you’ve achieved for similar clients. Connect these results to the positioning and differentiation that enabled such success. Services are a commodity. Strategies and results are not. Use concrete metrics and case studies to build credibility and trust. If you don’t have specific results, focus on your involvement in the client’s overall success, since whatever you do contributes to those results.
Prospect Journey
Map your prospects’ most common journeys: cold outreach, referrals, and agency press. Identify the critical influence points along each journey and assign inbound or outbound tactics to them. One common one is the LinkedIn feed. List the top three impacts you want to make with that content: thought leadership, industry experience, and media expertise. Use those to guide all the content you create on LI. Do the same for each point of influence.
Inbound
Do a critique of your website. Compare and contrast it with five other better agency websites. Choose similar agencies in size, services, industries, and expertise. Note the top three positives and negatives that stand out in the comparison. Use those to prioritize website enhancements or when creating new pages or sections.
Audit all other content sources, including blog posts, downloadable collateral, cases, agency fact sheets, etc. Note the top 3 positives and negatives. Use those to guide the upgrade and improvement of content, particularly to reinforce the positioning and differentiation defined before.
Outbound
Cold email shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Supplement your email efforts with a multi-channel approach that surrounds your prospect. LinkedIn is a great starting point for commenting, sharing, and tagging contacts. Then, follow up with an email referencing the LinkedIn post you first engaged with. Do the same on X or TikTok. This multi-channel approach helps build rapport and increases the likelihood of a response.
A multi-channel, multi-touch approach helps get your message in front of your prospects in environments where they may be more susceptible to engagement. Mass generic emails are guaranteed to end up in spam folders. Instead, build a highly targeted list of prospects that match your ideal client profiles. Quality trumps quantity in 2025.
Take the time to research each prospect thoroughly. What are their current marketing initiatives? Are there any recent news or changes in leadership? The more you know, the more personalized and relevant your outreach can be.
A single cold email is never enough. Expert research suggests that contacts won’t engage until after 8 – 16 touches. Map out a series of thoughtful touchpoints across multiple channels.
- Personalized emails
- LinkedIn connection requests, comments, sharing, and prospect mentions
- Targeted content sharing via email or LinkedIn
- Event Invitations
- Even the occasional phone call
Stop Pitching–Build Trust
One of the biggest mistakes agencies make is pitching right out of the gate. Marketers don’t want to be bombarded with sales messages from agencies they’ve never heard of. Instead, offer value at the start of each interaction. Don’t just push for a meeting.
Show that you’ve done your homework and are responding to current needs with tailored solutions. For example, send a free, industry-relevant resource instead of leading with a sales pitch. By offering value first, you establish yourself as a helpful resource rather than just another vendor.
The Power of Results
Marketers have grown skeptical of agencies that make sweeping, unsubstantiated claims. In 2025, your outreach needs to provide evidence-backed results. This approach gives concrete evidence and adds legitimacy to your pitch. It also helps build trust in a wary audience.
Optimize for Mobile
Many marketers open emails on their phones, so design your email to be mobile-friendly. Keep your subject lines concise and ensure your email copy is easily read on a small screen.
Follow-Up Relentlessly
A well-timed follow-up can significantly boost your response rates, but it must be personalized and reference something relevant to the prospect since your first email. Good follow-up demonstrates attentiveness and relevance without coming off as pushy. Don’t give up. You never know what’s going on with your prospect. The best way to follow up is, of course, with value. Gear your follow-up strategy to enhance the agency’s perception and layer more examples and reasons why.
Track, Measure, Improve
Set clear KPIs for your new business efforts and track them religiously. Test different messaging, subject lines, and outreach cadences. Double down on what’s working and set aside what’s not. Notice I didn’t say throw away what’s not working. Those ideas may work under different circumstances, inspire another campaign, or remind you what not to do.
The most successful cold outreach campaigns aren’t static. Use open rates, response rates, and click-through data to continuously refine your approach. Monitor which gets more opens and adjust future outreach accordingly. Similarly, test email length or different value propositions to see which performs better. Likewise, test day and time, cadence, CTAs, colors, text or image, and anything else that impacts performance.
Remember, new business is a marathon, not a sprint. Stay persistent, keep refining your approach, and success will follow.
Networking For Real
If you are like me, you vow to network actively every year, and every year-end, you wonder why you didn’t. We all know warm introductions are gold, but how many of us actually put in the effort to nurture our networks? Make it a priority in 2025. Attend industry events, contribute to relevant online communities, and don’t be shy about asking satisfied clients for introductions.
Referrals and warm introductions are still the envy of new business. Make nurturing your network a priority in 2025. In-person is back and bigger than ever. Attend industry events, contribute to relevant online communities, and don’t be shy about asking satisfied clients for introductions.
Take It Away
2025 is your year to break through the noise and land the clients you want to work with. Ditch the cookie-cutter approach, get hyper-focused, and lead with value at every turn. With your 15 steps to a better biz dev plan in hand, get out there and make it happen.
Need more ideas?
There are a lot more posts that may get you unstuck, inspired, or give you confidence to take on the year by storm. Remember, time is ticking! Start planning now and get a jump on the competition.
Happy Planning!
If you need help with these 15 steps to better biz dev or are looking for new ideas to make next year your best year yet, we should talk. I always enjoy exploring what’s new, what’s working, and what isn’t. Find a time on my calendar, and let’s solve the world’s problems, at least the business development problems. If you like this post, give it a thumbs up, forward it to a friend, or leave me a comment. Don’t forget to sign up for my New Business Newsletter. While you are at it, let’s connect on LinkedIn.
#LetsGrow!
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