About US
Experienced People Asking Smart Questions.
We love to do the thing our clients hate doing most and do it better than they ever imagined possible.
Our role as a new business agency is to unearth opportunities for our clients within the companies they want to work with and get them in front of the decision maker for their service .
The Manifest new business team are rightly recognised as the crème de la crème of agency new business lead generation and will tell your story with passion, eloquence and conviction
Our techniques are channel agnostic, disruptive and engaging. Our results astounding.
Our clients expect, and our team delivers, 100%.
Experienced
The average tenure of an account director at Manifest is five years and several have been here more than ten.
Knowledgeable
A pre-requisite for a job at Manifest is a background in either an agency or client side marketing department.
Persuasive
The power of persuasion. The dark art of making another see things your way through the use of language.
Passionate
You are passionate about your agency; we get it and you can be sure we will be as passionate as you are.
Our focus
We are a new business agency. We specialise in helping companies within the creative and marketing services industry win more new clients by arranging new business meetings for them with the decision makers for their service within the companies they want to work with.
The channels we use fall into three categories: Broadcast, Listening and Narrowcast.
Broadcast
Your PR, SEO, AdWords and social marketing, together with your reputation and networking, will drive prospects to your website. We would suggest using LeadFeeder or LeadForensics to track these website visitors. You may also want to undertake email campaigns to further drive inbound web traffic and we can help here with provision of data.
Listening
We will research the companies, brands and individuals we will be targeting for you using LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, current affairs websites and news sources. Using this intelligence, we will tailor niche messages to each prospective new client to make every approach sound like the only one that matters to your agency.
Narrowcast
What is the best and most appropriate channel to use to get your proposition and the niche message we have developed noticed by the prospect we are approaching? Some companies and marketing teams are best approached by email, others are more likely to warm to a personal telephone call and others a well written letter or social approach.
LATEST NEWS
Our thoughts on the agency new business landscape and some other insights that we hope you will find interesting.
Trust Building
A lack of trust can prevent you from warming up your leads – a potentially fatal consequence that will likely lead to a deterioration of the business relationship, hindering it from progressing positively which is why trust building is so important for agency new business. Fortunately, there are endless ways of preventing or at least[…]
The Secret to Winning New Business
Want to know the Secret to Winning New Business? Most agencies focus on the pitch, the show, the capabilities presentation. This is putting the spotlight on the wrong place. By then, most of the really important decisions have probably been made. The really good agencies win early: the pitch merely confirms a decision. There are[…]
Telephone Sales Pitch
Someone mentioned the other day the similarity between jazz and the perfect telephone sales pitch. In jazz the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice. Depending upon the performer’s mood and personal experience, interactions with fellow musicians, or even members of the[…]
How To Win More Pitches
Want to know how to win more pitches? be the ONLY agency pitching! Here we are again on the brink of another autumn of reviews, pitches, RFI’s and tenders. So, what can you do to gain an advantage in what is a VERY competitive marketplace? Well, for one thing, you could try selling your agency[…]
Kalarhythms and Interpersonal Style
We came across this article about Kalarhythms and Interpersonal Style on a website and thought you might find it interesting. It takes us back to our “Spark and Torch” training!! It explores how different personality types need to be sold to in different ways. Agency heads often ask me “what should we present?” or “should we submit[…]
Agency Positioning
As a leading new business agency, we have been helping agencies of all shapes and sizes to articulate their agency positioning and proposition in a compelling and differentiating way. One thing we have learned is that quite often agencies just don’t understand their brand well enough, sure, they can say what they do and why[…]
Tell Your Client These Things
You should all tell your client these things. The MD of a PR firm sent me this – his view on ten things PR agencies should tell their client, but would probably get them fired… 1. The main reason journalists aren’t covering you is because the proposition’s crap. It has no clear differentiators over its[…]
Stalling Agency Growth
The Problem Stalling agency growth is an issue many of us encounter and can, if you are scaling for sale, become a very real concern and cause of much hand wringing. “Why is it …” we were asked the other day by a new client “that so many agencies of our type grow quite spectacularly[…]
Face-to-Face New Business Meetings
Whilst reading The Globotics Upheaval by Richard Baldwin I was reminded of just how important it is for agency new business people and heads to resist the simplicity and convenience of the conference call and opt for face-to-face new business meetings. In chapter 9, Globotics Resolution: A More Human, More Local Future, he explores the[…]
Patience Is Key in Agency Business Development
Here is a tale all too familiar to anyone who has worked in agency business development for any length of time and one that still shocks me to the bones even today. At the back end of last summer we arranged for one of our clients to have a meeting with a major UK entertainment[…]