Tips on growing your research or insight company

Editor’s note: Paul Girffiths is the founder of Client Advocates. They help owners of MR and Insight agencies to “grow revenues by implementing proven growth strategies.” 

What would you recommend as a first step for someone who wants to begin growing their business?

You must have clarity about four key aspects of your commercial strategy.  When you can answer these four questions, you can develop a brand building and sales activation plan that will deliver growth. 

  1. Who is your ideal target client for your business? Be specific – geography, industry sector, company size, particular job titles, etc.
  2. What is the commercial issue or problem they have that you can help solve? Not a research problem, not a methodological issue, but something that impacts revenues or profits.
  3. What is your offer and how does that solve the ideal client's commercial issue? This is where you can mention what you do, but only in the context of how it creates value for the client.
  4. What is your value proposition? In other words, what makes you better than all the other suppliers that claim they can help your ideal target client with the problem they have.  

Many research companies struggle with a small marketing budget. What is one piece of advice you can offer them?

Be proactive and spend more. Brand building and sales is an investment in your business and while there is risk associated with investment, there is also return! 

Make sure you are consistent and resilient in the way you spend – little and often will give you a more long-term brand building impact than a big one-off splurge! And also consider that you can achieve very significant growth with very little spend. A clear brand building plan, targeting the right audience with a clear set of messages, material and content backed by a smart sales activation process can be highly effective at generating inbound and outbound leads. The audience should be both new and existing clients and you should reuse and repackage the materials and content multiple times. The activation process could be using LinkedIn and/or e-mail. 

Share one commercial strategy that you have seen work really well to increase budgets.

Build your marketing and sales technology platform.

You can do it for next to nothing –-by which I mean less than £1,000 per year –- with free or very rudimentary versions of CRM systems, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and some e-mail integrations.

Use this platform to leverage your content – brand build, activate sales and give the business belief that marketing and sales are productive and effective growth engines by bringing in leads.

And then ask for more budget to broaden the scope of what you are doing — throw in some webinars, a client event, more content, etc. –- so that you can up the intensity, maintain consistency and gain even more momentum.

What is more important for a small research agency: focus on the clients they have or focus on getting new clients?  

I think it’s a false dichotomy – you should do both.

What I have seen work most effectively is to combine your outbound brand-building and sales activation so that you are engaging with both new and existing clients at the same time. 

Whether you are communicating with new or existing clients, the channels you use to engage them are the same – you are going to use some mix of events, e-mail, phone and LinkedIn. And the commercial issues you want to show you help them address are also shared.

Most importantly, your objective is the same in both cases – build a sense of relevance, value and trust in your brand so that the client, new or existing, is willing to engage with you to solve their commercial problem or research issue.

Rather than run a sales activation campaign that only targets new prospects or a nurture campaign that focuses on retaining existing clients, run campaigns that address both.

For example, say you are an agency that already works with a number of high-street banks helping them with their customer experience and you want to target more clients like this.

Create an outbound sales campaign (using e-mail and LinkedIn) that:

  • Addresses key commercial issues they may have.
  •  Shows how you help to solve them.

Then target the campaign to both groups. For possible new clients, you show your relevance and improve your business salience in the minds of the decision makers – who when you subsequently ask for a meeting, are more minded to meet. And you also remind your current clients of your expertise and knowledge. This makes it more likely that when your account directors approach them to touch base, they are already considering including you in the list of agencies asked to tender for the next piece of CX.

Don’t limit your focus to either retention or acquisition –  it makes sense and is practical to do both at the same time.