Before they launched NBZ+, the consultants invited 50 new business professionals at top agencies to join a Slack community, which they capped at 50 people to control for quality and encourage dialogue. 

“We wanted to make sure [for the first six months] that we were testing it with the best of the industry. If people were not participating after three weeks, we kindly told them that we were going to remove them from the Slack [community],” said Oppenheimer Mandel.

After polling the Slack channel’s 50 initial members, the founders decided that a $500 monthly membership fee (with the first month free), or $5,000 for the year, would ensure most members need not ask employers for extra budget, or permission to join.

Few resources for new business teams 

Years ago, Lindsay Bennett, vp of communications and marketing at the Stagwell digital transformation agency Gale, completed a training program from U.K.-based new business advisory firm JFDI that helped her master the basics. Still, she maintains that she learned 90% of what she knows about new business on the job through “trial and error.”

Services like NBZ’s are relatively rare, according to Wren and Bennett, despite new business practices facing a plethora of problems that aren’t improving. Small and midsize agencies especially find new business is getting harder, with fewer opportunities compounded by marketers’ smaller budgets, according to recent research from RSW/US.

Agency training firm Mirren also offers new business training for account and pitch teams, and there is a now-growing cottage industry of small new business education programs that professionals can tap into.

But like Bennett, many new business leads learn from experience. Since business development job responsibilities, size, structure, titles and pay differ significantly by agency, aspiring new business professionals don’t have a central knowledge repository to draw from. 

“It’s one of the most high-pressure environments,” Oppenheimer Mandel said. “There is no official training or ladder for new business [professionals], like there is for strategy or account or creative [professionals].”

New business leads open up

NBZ+ is different from most existing programs because it encourages community and networking.

“Unlike NBZ, Mirren doesn’t offer that community aspect—the Slack channel, which I think is such a big part of NBZ’s value proposition,” Wren said. Mirren does offer a yearly conference that allows new biz leads to congregate in person for two days and discuss the issues they face.

The collective approach is rare because new business is inherently competitive. Networking with other agencies’ new business leads could threaten one’s competitive advantage, signal to competitors that a brand is distributing RFIs or even violate NDA terms.

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