Why One Consultancy Launched a Premium Subscription for Agency New Business Leads

Pitching a self-storage company was a new one for Basic/Dept’s vp of growth, Asher Wren. 

Once an agency onboards a new client, it’s common for strategists to conduct market research before responding to briefs. New business leads like Wren do the same thing when preparing to pitch prospects, but often under tighter timelines and with limited information. 

Wren needed to incorporate market research into a pitch presentation that would resonate with the storage prospect, but finding good information on storage unit trends was a hurdle. Tracking down reliable data is an often expensive endeavor, considering a single report from Forrester Research and its competitors costs several hundred dollars or more. Commissioning custom research is even more costly. Plus, it’s time consuming. 

Wren is one of many agency new business professionals navigating a multifaceted, challenging, lonely and high-stakes role with no playbook to reference. 

“New business is an island,” Simone Oppenheimer Mandel, co-founder of the agency search and growth consultancy NBZ Partner, told Adweek. 

Earlier this month, the consultant and her co-founder, Rachel Segall, launched a premium subscription service for new business professionals called NBZ+. It’s one of few resources new business leads can turn to for support when times get tough, or when they need to crowdsource a quick answer to a hard question. 

An accessible resource for small shops

Like Wren, many new business professionals indicated to the consultants that compiling the research necessary to present to prospects is one of their biggest pain points.

“Something that I was surprised rose to the top as a major pain point for agency new business people [was] getting research or insights quickly to help create an inspiring, engaging presentation to a prospect,” Oppenheimer Mandel said. 

NBZ Partner tracked down research for Wren, including insights such as the criteria people look for when choosing self-storage options and which consumer cohorts might be looking for self-storage in the future.

While the self-storage pitch is still ongoing, gaining access to the right data helped Wren and his team approach their presentation confidently.

 “We put together a really nice partnership with a research partner that can help us [provide] really quick-turn research. Three easy questions submitted by the agency, and you can get gen-pop answers,” Oppenheimer Mandel said. 

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.

Now, more than 50 new business leads across top agencies are eschewing the concerns that used to preclude them asking for help. In the NBZ-managed Slack channel, they’re opting to learn from peers and develop camaraderie while side-stepping those sensitive details. 

They’re even sharing resources like research reports and downloadable presentation templates.

“[NBZ Partner] is really just connecting people that previously saw each other as competitors, and instead creating community,” said Bennett. “I think people used to be scared of talking to [peers] at other agencies, but what we’ve found is that there are so many great learnings.”