24 Apr

Agencies should be more interested to be more interesting

Hello you.

Thanks for stopping by the Ingenuity blog, what brings you here? Did you know our blog is new? We’ve only had it a few months but it’s great to see visitors like you here.

Are you from an agency? Or a brand? Or elsewhere? Either way, we’ve tailored content to you and the challenges you’re likely to face in your organisation.

Although I can’t know who you are as a reader, or why you chose to read this post today, I’m dying to know. Harriet Lowe and I have put a lot of work into the creation of this blog and we hope it’s serving its purpose. We are genuinely interested in you as a, at present, nameless visitor number in our Google Analytics, and in the coming days we’ll scrutinise the numbers in an effort to make this blog ever more valuable for people like you.

This interestedness is what drives me, Harriet and everyone else here from the data, insights, events and lead generation teams at Ingenuity to the PR, Content and Media Relations teams at Acuity. We’ve been talking about this a lot lately, particularly as we’re mid-way through analysing the results of over 160+ video interviews with brands we conducted as part of our forthcoming Market Research Report.

Whilst this should (hopefully) be of no big surprise to you, we recognise something prevalent across all of the work we do with agencies. Whether it’s advising on the perfect creds decks, developing an agency proposition, crafting an excellent new business email, writing valuable whitepapers or even on the calls we make to cold prospects, the one thing you really must do is…

Be interested.

It is, of course, far more complex than that, but in its most simple and raw form ‘Being Interested’ is one of the most valuable things an agency can do when generating new business leads – right the way through the sales process. This goes for both small boutique agencies and even more so for big network agencies.

It’s an attractive quality. Our human nature for each of us is to gravitate towards people that are interested in us.

This week, look out for the people in your office that ask you what you go up to at the weekend rather than ask ‘good weekend?’ The former question implies genuine interest, as it encourages an open answer whilst the latter usually gets the answer ‘yeah’ – now think about how you feel about the people that seem genuinely interested in you, I’d bet that you find them more interesting, and have more positive feelings towards that person as a result.

Now apply this philosophy to the whole field of new business and lead generation. In a recent ‘skills hack’, we met as a company to breakdown and brainstorm better ways to hold cold calls with prospects. The common theme? Ask questions. Questions that show genuine interest in what the person at the other end of the line has to say.

Some of you will be reading this thinking “yeah but what if you’re not actually interested in what the prospect has to say?” If this is the case, you’ve either got the wrong targeting, you’re the wrong person for that job or you need to work harder to find something you’re interested in.

So… I’ll wrap up with some actionable advice from some of our teams:

When creating content: Demonstrate your undeniable passion for the topic
When writing prospect emails: Express intrigue in them, their sector & their mission
When cold calling: Ask questions about their day, their role, their passions, their business goals
When writing your creds deck: Make it all about them, the brand, and keep your ego in check
When meeting a prospect: Ask, ask, ask questions!!! Be interested.

This is, of course, a very top line overview of what we’ve done inherently at Ingenuity for the past 10+ years and continue to do strategically as new business develops, but hopefully you find this of value and it will hold you in good stead to develop better business relationships and better connections moving forward.

By Tom Harvey, Business Director