Transformative deals (and where to find them)

I help the agencies I work with to win “transformative” deals. Basically, getting a signature on a contract that changes the agency for the better.

How do we define a “transformative” deal?

One way or another, this client will force us to do something that’s out of our comfort zone.

• The revenue this contract represents is enough to make us behave differently. We will almost certainly need to hire. It might break some of the rules and policies we have in place (e.g. we said we didn’t want any one client to represent more than 20% of our revenue; or that one account manager shouldn’t be looking after more than £[amount of money]. Given that we probably shouldn’t be investing in deals that don’t have the potential to represent at least 5% of our annual revenue anyway, since they aren’t big enough for us to care all that much about them, then a transformative deal is probably going to be more than 20% of our annual income at this point
• The client expects a service we don’t currently offer. It’s probably not the primary service in the mix (since we’re unlikely to win a contract to do something we don’t have a track record in, unless we’re bundling it with other services), but we’ll need to think about what our approach to this service will be. Common examples will be when a client expects a single point of contact and we currently have a team of channel specialists who each stick to their own expertise; a new distribution channel for our content (perhaps a social media platform we haven’t worked with before); an expectation that we’ll be on-site but we’re currently remote; a desire to move a metric that we’re not used to measuring (perhaps we’re a performance agency that’s being tasked to improve brand awareness; or a creative comms agency that’s being asked to influence LLMs); a need to target a country where we don’t have boots on the ground
• Winning the deal needs us to change our new business process. We’re dealing with procurement for the first time; or we need to provide a forecast; or we need to win over some people in some departments we’ve never met before; or we have to offer guarantees. It’s tempting to say this is a one-off, but maybe we should consider that some of the deals we didn’t win in the past required these things and the client just neglected to ask us?
• The work we’ll do, or the brand we’ll do it for, will open doors for us. It’s a logo that will act like a magnet for similar brands; or it’s a campaign that we’ll talk about for the next several years

How to identify a potential transformative deal

• Go wide and go deep on the discovery call(s). When you’re talking to any prospect for the first time and you’re trying to determine whether you can help, don’t stop once they’ve described the problem. Keep probing: what else does this problem prevent you from doing? What have you tried that didn’t work? What else are you doing? What other problems do you have? Even when you have enough detail to fulfil your part of the client’s supply chain, you want to know what’s upstream and downstream and who else is in the mix. Ask them: “if we could help you fix that issue too, are you happy to talk about it?”
• Do your research. How much does this company spend on marketing? You can guess it’s 10% of their revenue; you can use the research tools available; you can just ask them. If this company could spend enough with yours to transform it, what might that look like?
• Say a big number. You know that your biggest client spends £100,000 a year but they don’t: ask for half a million and see how they react. Don’t anchor this opportunity to the lower spenders you have now; anchor it to the huge figure you hope they might represent. You can walk it down later, but once you’ve slid them the piece of paper with seven digits scrawled across it, everything else you say after is going to seem like a bargain (I don’t like to labour a point, but one of the first consulting clients I had, around 7 years ago, asked me: “how do we go from charging £5k a month to £50k a month?” - I replied “you add a zero”. They’ve quadrupled their staff to 120 since then, so I assume things are going well)
• Estimate your chances of winning. I use a tool to put some science behind our percentage chance of landing the client, but most agencies have some form of weighting to the deals in their pipeline. Are we pretty confident this could happen? Do we have access to the right people at the client’s side (and, ideally, a history of doing business with them)? Is our positioning just right and you think you match this prospect’s IAP (Ideal Agency Profile)? If we feel like we’re a good fit except for those few elements that test our boundaries, it should embolden us to pursue the deal
• The ask reminds us of the ones we’ve turned down in the past. We should absolutely be confident in saying no to clients who aren’t a good fit…but if we’re consistently asked to do [thing we don’t do], how many more must we turn down before we at least consider changing our approach?

What to do if we think we have a transformative deal on our hands

• Most of my readers are entrepreneurs (or, at least, have an entrepreneurial streak). You embrace change. You’re comfortable with (some) risk. You completely underestimate the extent to which your people are not at all like you. They hate change. They’re terrified of risk (even if you’re the one who’s taking it).
  First, you’ll need to listen to their concerns: you want a full list of all the things this client is going to break in the agency. Which processes aren’t up to the task? Which software won’t be able to accommodate their requirements? Which people do we need and just don’t have right now? Your people see these things as reasons not to do the deal, but in reality they’re just deficiencies that this deal will finally force you to fix.
  Second, you’ll need to sell this to them, in terms they understand. “It’s worth [amount of revenue]” isn’t going to excite anyone who isn’t on commission (and, on that subject, you might consider offering a discretionary bonus to those who help you to make it happen). “It will mean that we recruit [these people/people who can do these things]” is much more concrete. “It’ll provide these opportunities for progression” likewise. Think these things through and articulate them
• Identify the potential deal breakers and voice them to the client. You’re not a specialist in [service] - is that an issue? You’re going to outsource [this element of the service] - what would you need to do to make them comfortable with that? If it is enough to kill the deal, you want it killed off early, before you invest too much into it. These concerns should be voiced on the second phone call, in most cases: the first call is there for the client to explain to us what they need to happen; the second is there for us to discuss how we might make it work
• Plan exactly how you’re going to deliver. Let’s assume you have a team of smart people who can analyse the situation and prescribe the solution: they don’t need you to do that for them. They need you to find some experts to talk to about that service you don’t offer yet, so you can plan how you’ll add it to the mix. You need to line up a freelancer or two, knowing how they work; knowing how much they might cost; knowing that you can trust them
• Set about evidencing that you can do the work. When a six week old Rise at Seven had the opportunity to pitch to Missguided, Carrie ran a campaign for us that looked like the kind of campaign we’d run for them. If there’s some comparable work that you’ve done in the past; or work for a relevant brand; make sure you have a case study (and make sure it looks as slick as it can)
• Practice. Drop everything and get the work required for the opportunity done early; decide the team who’ll be working on it as quickly as you can; brief everyone thoroughly; rehearse (ideally with your non-executive director - or another trusted third party who wants you to win - present to give feedback). You want a calm, comfortable, confident team to turn up in every client call and you want the whole team to look like they’re in rooms like this one all the time
• Decide on your red lines in advance. Have they alluded to frankly horrific payment terms? Am I OK with that? Do they want you to fire one of their competitors from your roster? Do you need to open an office near their location? Whatever it might be, by definition we’re talking about something outside your comfort zone and you need to decide how far out you’re willing to venture. Decide soon, too, before you invest all the time: your people will resent you for making them pursue this if you end up pulling out over something you knew about before you even briefed them.
• Don’t over-invest too early. Your approach on the first call should still be “I don’t know if I can help you yet but, by the end of this conversation, I’ll be able to tell you if I think there’s a fit”…even if it’s Apple, or Disney, or whatever your dream brand might be. You are qualified out by default and the client must give you the right signals in order for you to qualify in (and your qualification criteria should not be wholly focused on firmographic information - even a great brand can give you a bad brief…or employ an a*sehole). Once you’ve got some degree of confirmation that you’re in a position to win the work then, by all means, go all in and kill it dead.
• Celebrate properly. In the most obvious case of “my steak is too juicy, my lobster is too buttery” in business development history, I can remember a Rise at Seven Friday all hands meeting where we announced that, since the previous week, we’d won deals with Xbox, Playstation, Taylor & Hart, made.com and House of Fraser…I’m not sure Luke Cope even cracked a smile. This deal (or, that week of deals) has transformed you. You have now emerged from your cocoon and should be behaving like the butterfly you just became. Throw a party (even if it’s a pizza party). Get everyone on a train to somewhere nice. Remember, you are now transformed and this is what your agency is now: the job isn’t to desperately hold onto this work, or milk the client for all they’re worth…it’s to start looking for the deal that’ll take you to the level after this one.