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The 2016 Summer Olympics are officially over. But for two weeks, billions of eyes from around the world watched athletes attempt to break records and bring home the gold. What a perfect opportunity for marketers, no?

Many brands jumped on the Olympics bandwagon, leveraging its popularity for their own campaigns. Some of these brands created particularly inspiring campaigns, both to viewers and marketers alike — whether for the emotion they elicit, or for the reminder of exactly how to execute a remarkable ad or marketing campaign.

We rounded up the ones that tugged at our heartstrings as viewers, or inspired us to be better marketers. (Sometimes both.) Check out this list of 11 of the best campaigns from the 2016 Summer Games and what made them so great.

11 of the Best Olympic Marketing Campaigns, Ads, Commercials & Promotions This Year

1) Under Armour: Rule Yourself

The Under Armour brand doesn’t just value the success that comes from hard work; it values the hard work and 24/7 dedication that leads to that success. Their emphasis is on self-improvement and self-reliance — which is why they acquired the fitness tracking platform MapMyFitness back in 2014.

Under Armour’s ad campaign for the 2016 Summer Olympics perfectly embodies these deep-seeded values. It focuses on the side of athletic achievement that no one sees. For Michael Phelps, that’s the ice baths, cupping therapy, and 12,500 calories he has to eat every day. For an ordinary person, it might be taking the stairs, getting a full night’s sleep, or tracking your meals using their MyFitnessPal app. But the message is the same, and it’s a powerful one: “It’s what you do in the dark that puts you in the light.”

2) Proctor & Gamble: “Thank You Mom”

For the 2012 Summer Olympics, Proctor & Gamble created a campaign called “Thank You, Mom” that showed flashbacks of Olympic athletes from all over the world growing up and practicing their sport with support from their mothers. That same campaign is back again this year, featuring athletes and their mothers from this summer’s Games.

This year’s campaign shows athletes’ mothers helping them through times of stress, cheering them along, and supporting them. Notice the clickable link they added to the video that takes viewers to a web page where they can send a personalized thank-you note to their own moms. Take a look … and maybe grab a tissue.

3) Panasonic UK: #Superfans

Cheering on your country is a lot easier when you’re the one hosting the Olympics, as Great Britain did in London in Summer 2012. With the Games in Brazil this year, Panasonic, a long-time official partner to the British Olympic Association, wanted to help Great Britain keep up the fan-fueled momentum. So in April 2016, they announced a crowdsourced campaign called #Superfans, which invited fans of Team GB to post pictures on social media using the hashtag to encourage engagement.

“It is a great opportunity for us to share our passion for the Olympics as a company and to connect with consumers on an emotional level,” said Managing Director of Panasonic UK Andrew Denham. “This is why Panasonic’s heritage as a global Olympic partner is so important to me – it adds some real spark and colour to the brand.”

All the fan photos posted with the hashtag #Superfans was posted on a dedicated web page on Team GB’s official site, and Panasonic UK offered extra incentives like Twitter contests.

Watching @TeamGB today? Make sure you send your support using #Superfans for a chance to win a TV! http://pic.twitter.com/KgpbVGuL4W

— Panasonic UK (@PanasonicUK)
August 13, 2016

Here’s a sampling of the fan-sourced content on Twitter:

#superfans assemble @_GBHockey @TeamGB GB ON 🔥🔥🔥 🏅🏅🏅 HERE WE GO!!! http://pic.twitter.com/KAioxrnhWV

— Thomas Mairs (@TomMairs)
August 19, 2016

@PanasonicUK @TeamGB #superfans Go team GB we are cheering you on all the way! http://pic.twitter.com/VDDJstevCx

— Mazaroo (@stringer_marion)
August 16, 2016

Even the U.K.’s premiere parachute display team got in on the action:

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No…It’s #Superfans!

Thanks @RedDevilsOnline for your incredible support! #Rio2016 http://pic.twitter.com/nnnWfmHvX7

— Panasonic UK (@PanasonicUK)
August 11, 2016

4) Apple: “The Human Family”

What makes the Olympic Games so special? The elite athletic competition, yes — but also the bringing together of people and cultures from all over the world. And it’s that second part that the folks at Apple chose to focus on in their Olympics commercial.

The ad showcases beautiful photos and videos of people all over the world taken using an iPhone, and it’s set to Maya Angelou reading excerpts from her poem, “Human Family.” What a beautiful message.

5) Coca-Cola: #ThatsGold

Not all of us can be Olympic athletes — but the folks at Coca-Cola make the case that even ordinary people like you and me can experience the feeling of winning gold. To do this, they launched the campaign #ThatsGold, which they first integrated into a TV ad (shown below) with the “Taste the Feeling” campaign they launched in January 2016.

The Olympics commercial tied to the campaign is all about drawing a parallel between the thrill and excitement of winning a gold medal at the Olympics and the thrill and excitement of having a good time with the people in your life. They did a great job of drawing those parallels with compelling quotes and visuals, and nailed the ending with the line, “Gold is a feeling anyone can taste.”

In addition to the commercial, they set up a fully operational “real-time marketing” global hub in Rio that monitored the #ThatsGold hashtag during the course of the Olympics and created content around key moments in real time on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and more.

Chasing life and the podium side by side: #THATSGOLD. Congratulations to the Eatons! #Rio2016 http://pic.twitter.com/0lTwezQoH6

— Coca-Cola (@CocaCola)
August 19, 2016

6) Virgin Media: #BeTheFastest

Virgin Media is all about being fast, advertising their WiFi speed as “fast,” “superfast,” even “ultrafast.” So it comes to no surprise that they chose to pay tribute to Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, for their Olympics campaign this year.

Bolt set the World Record for the 100-meter sprint at 9.58 seconds at the 2009 Berlin World Championships in Athletics. To demonstrate what 9.58 seconds feels like, Virgin Media created an advertisement that strung together ten, 9.58-second vignettes that each cast light on a different part of Bolt’s life. The purpose? Both to celebrate Bolt’s spectacular accomplishment and to emphasize the importance of speed.

7) Airbnb: “Alternative Accommodations” Sponsorship

Back in March of this year, Airbnb became the first official “alternative accommodations” sponsor of the Olympics — the first time the Olympics has ever had an alternative accommodations sponsor, according to local Olympic officials. Why’d they do it? Mashable reports that when Rio won the Olympic bid in 2009, it had just half the 40,000 beds required for the games — so it was definitely a win for the city, the games, and Airbnb.

In exchange for an undisclosed amount to local Olympic organizers, Airbnb was included in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games’ ticketing platform by way of a specific landing page where customers were able to rent private homes and apartments in Rio. They also got a link to their site on the official Olympic website, along with calls-to-action encouraging people traveling to Rio for the Olympics to use the service for rentals.

Here they are in the first spot on the official Rio Olympics 2016 website’s homepage:

To help promote homes and apartments for rent in Rio, they created Rio-specific videos and content for their larger #StayWithMe campaign, which invites Airbnb hosts to post photos or short videos on social media to showcase their countries. Here’s one Airbnb published right before the Olympics started, in June 2016:

8) Chobani: #NoBadStuff

Goodness is a choice you make, claims Chobani with their Olympic-inspired campaign #NoBadStuff. From a literal standpoint, their campaign is about the good, healthy ingredients in Chobani yogurt; metaphorically, it’s all about having a positive attitude, working hard, treating others well, and properly fueling your body.

Their campaign has a few moving parts, starting with a page on their website where you can meet the U.S. athletes they’ve partnered with who embody the positive, hardworking attitude that defines their campaign. Each athlete’s story includes an interview about their biggest challenges, how they stay positive, their favorite meal growing up, and so on — along with, of course, a giant picture of them enjoying Chobani yogurt

Their campaign also includes a TV ad, content where U.S. athletes give advice on things like how to stay cool under stress, and — my personal favorite — a few limited-edition yogurt flavors inspired by Brazil.

9) Folger’s: “Coach”

“Olympic glory doesn’t just belong to athletes, and it doesn’t just happen every four years. It happens one morning at a time, and one cup at a time.” That’s the message coffee company Folger leaves us with in their commercial, “Coach.”

Instead of focusing on the athletes, the folks at Folgers used their ad time to focus on the coaches that help those athletes get to where they are. Specifically, it follows the relationship between a boy and the coach that helped him through every win, every loss, every injury, and every moment of glory before he was eventually chosen to represent Team USA.

10) NBC & BuzzFeed’s Olympic Parternship

NBC is known for doing a thorough job covering the Olympics, from its online live streams to its TV interviews with medalists. But their roots are deep in old-school media like cable, which isn’t the most well-used and attractive medium for the younger generation. That’s exactly why the folks at NBC decided to partner with BuzzFeed for the Olympics this summer, where they produced special Olympic features and posted them to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.

They sent “about a dozen” BuzzFeed staffers to Rio to create social media content, including a daily edition on Snapchat Discover, which is one reason this co-marketing partnership was a win-win for both brands. According to Steven Perlberg of Wall Street Journal, the President of NBC Olympics, Gary Zenkel, “wants to give BuzzFeed free rein to connect with Snapchat’s young audience.”

What kind of content did they produce? “The U.S. women’s gymnastics showed how friends have your back, like when they prevent you from texting your ex or have an extra hair tie,” wrote Perlberg. The women’s wrestling team destroyed watermelons. Swimmer Natalie Coughlin tested out waterproof makeup. The U.S. men’s gymnastics team took off their shirts, and readers were asked to guess the abs.”

Here’s a screenshot from a Snapchat Story featuring Olympic Swimmer Townley Haas, who showed off some tall people problems:

Image Credit: BuzzFeed/NBCU

11) Budweiser: “America is in Your Hands”

Nothing says “America” like a can of Budweiser — and I mean that literally, thanks to their campaign leading up to both the 2016 Summer Olympics and November’s U.S. presidential election. In May, Anheuser-Busch announced it would be replacing the Budweiser logo with “America” on its 12-oz. cans and bottles this summer. The temporary re-packaging was accompanied by their summer campaign, “America is in Your Hands.”

The campaign itself has had mixed reviews, with complaints mostly surrounding the brand tapping into the polarized political climate. But the campaign did help increase Budweiser’s ad awareness and purchase consideration, at least initially. A week after the campaign began, the company reached its highest purchase consideration level of 2016 (i.e., the number of shoppers 21 and older who said they’d consider Budweiser the next time they bought beer), although that numbers have dropped back down since.

Image Credit: STL Today

There you have it. We hope you found these examples inspiring. What other Olympics campaigns have inspired you, in 2016 or from previous Olympics? Share with us in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2012 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

My interest in smarketing best practices started when our Latin American sales team grew a ton in just a few weeks. Suddenly, communication between Sales and Marketing was much harder to get right. When we were a smaller team, I could meet 1:1 with each salesperson and talk about how we could help generate more (and better) leads … but that wasn’t scalable as we grew.

I needed help. To learn what other marketers were doing to work efficiently with their sales teams, I scheduled meetings with several members of our field and channel marketing team.

Turns out, each marketer I spoke with had great advice and processes to better work with Sales … but none of them had the same advice and process. To help share the information across our team and with anyone else new to sales and marketing alignment, I decided to compile everyone’s best practices into a blog post. 

So here it is: The best smarketing tips and tricks that my colleagues swear by.

10 Tried & True Smarketing Best Practices

1) Meet regularly.

Have an onboarding smarketing meeting with every new salesperson. 

In order to support Sales successfully, it is very important to share processes, resources, and best practices from the start. Use this time to get to know each other and share how Marketing will be supporting the sales team. If you have a large number of salespeople starting, hold a monthly meeting to set these expectations and field any questions new folks might have.

Attend sales weekly meetings. 

Attending weekly sales meetings allows marketers to know how Sales is doing with their quota and goals, and offer support when needed. Use this time to share the upcoming campaigns, content, and offers that Marketing will be promoting that week. Also ask for content ideas and recommendations for your future offers and blog posts.

Have a monthly meeting with sales managers. 

Marketing and sales managers should meet on a monthly basis to analyze results and evaluate their SLA. Important metrics to share are lead generation, MQLs, percent of leads worked, and lead-to-customer conversion rate. 

Attend events together.

Whether it’s an industry meetup group, happy hour in your office, or an organized conference — spend time together in a casual setting. Attending an event together provides you with a unique opportunity to get to know your Sales department outside of the traditional work environment. 

For the first time ever, we’re introducing a sales track at this year’s INBOUND event, making it the perfect opportunity for both departments to get out of the office for a few days.(Register now to receive a free Community Pass for your sales counterpart with the purchase of a All Access pass — or buy a VIP pass and get two free Community Passes.) 

2) Create a team email alias. 

Have an email alias that gets sent to both the sales and marketing teams. Use this strategically to share important information in both directions.

3) Have a content creation process in place.

Your sales reps are talking with prospects all the time and know what is getting them excited about your company. The problem is that a lot of times they don’t have time to write down this feedback. How can you help? Make sure to put together a process to gather this input.

Hold brainstorm sessions at weekly meetings.

Have a five-minute brainstorm session at a sales meeting to ask what content they would like to have to share with prospects or attract more leads.

Use a shared Google document to collect ideas and references.

Have a shared Google spreadsheet where Sales can add ideas or certain references for content creation.

4) Coordinate your content marketing campaigns with Sales. 

Marketers are constantly promoting new offers and content, so it’s important to keep the sales team up-to-date with these promotions so they know what recent offer their leads are receiving. 

Here are the basic steps for coordinating your offers with Sales:

a. Include your promotion on a shared calendar. 

Build a Google Calendar and add the date and time of your promotion (it might be an email, webinar, or social media campaign) along with the URL, the main talking points, and description of each offer. Make sure to invite your sales team to this calendar so they can see it on their personal accounts.

b. Email the offer to Sales.

Once your offer has been promoted and you start getting leads, you should email the sales team with the following information:

• Offer talking points. Include two to three bullets about the offer. Assume the salesperson hasn’t read the offer — what main concepts should they know when talking to prospects? Good talking points usually include: stats, business use cases, or “how to” advice.
• Lead views. Make sure to include the list of the leads your offer is generating so Sales can take action. If you have a CRM, you can easily generate views and share them with your sales team.
• A quote of the week. Similar to the talking points, including a more general quote that Sales can use on their calls can keep the conversations up-to-date. The best quotes are the ones that are data-driven and relevant, so try to include a recent industry trend or stat.

c. Build follow-up email templates for your promotions. 

Offers are a great way to generate new leads and re-engage old leads. Build email templates for your sales team to start a conversation. This email should be specific about the offer and how your company might help with the prospect’s interest. 

5) Help showcase your salesperson’s expertise.

Ghostwrite a blog post under your salesperson’s name.

Consider ghostwriting a post under your salesperson’s name. Interview them on the topic, transcribe your conversation, and turn that into a blog post. This can help the salesperson establish credibility and familiarity with their leads.

Get them to use social media.

If your salesperson is active on social media, then encourage them to share your company’s content. You can even write some lazy social media messages for them, so all they have to do is copy and paste them on their favorite networks. 

6) Make yourself (or another marketer) available for calls.

On calls, you can be very helpful by illustrating the business use of your product or service. So make sure you’re blocking off time every week — especially at the end of the month and the quarter — to jump on calls. 

7) Listen to calls.

Also take some time to sit next to your sales team and listen to their calls. This is a great learning experience that will help you get ideas for future content creation and how to build some of the follow-up emails of your offers.

8) Facilitate training if needed.

We all know our sales teams are experts in doing product demos, but sometimes there are specific use cases where they might feel they need assistance. Ask your team regularly if they have had some trouble with specific questions during their calls and facilitate training if necessary.

9) Organize sales enablement resources in one easy-to-access location.

Marketers work hard to create sales enablement resources such as brochures, company overviews, or presentations, but all that hard work goes to waste if your sales team can’t find (and use) them. 

So try to keep all your sales enablement resources in one shared place where Sales can easily access them. This location is a great place to host your campaign calendar, links to relevant offers, and specific content for a market or persona. 

10) Have fun and get to know each other.

Finally, some of the most important advice is to try to get to know each other as people. Organize lunches, outings, and celebrations, and just have fun. This helps build trust among team members and ensures that people feel comfortable leaning on each other for support.

Need help coming up with an outing idea? Check out this list of 17 fun ideas — from improv workshops to karaoke.

Purchase your INBOUND 2016 All Access pass today and get a free Community Pass (a $499 value) for your sales counterpart absolutely free. Or buy a VIP pass and get two free Community Passes. Register here. 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Every marketing team is overworked. We’re all looking for ways to maximize the ROI on our efforts. For many organizations, using a marketing automation tool and workflows can provide a quantum leap forward in marketing results.

Of course, implementing a market automation system takes some money and know-how, which raises the question whether the investment makes sense for any given organization. It may well for your organization. Don’t buy into the overhead myth and assume higher marketing costs are a bad thing for your organization. The increased costs can be the best expense you make if they’re going to increase your membership and donations.

But not every organization’s marketing team is ready for automation. If you’re not already set up to take advantage of automation’s potential, that’s when you spending money and energy without getting the return. Your organization has important work to do with its funding. It’s no good spending it on marketing automation before you’re ready to make the most of it.

Here’s an overview of what marketing automation is really about, as well as a checklist you can run through to determine if you’re organization is ready or has some marketing gaps to fill in first.

What Marketing Automation is Really About

Most importantly, don’t think you can sit back and “set it and forget it.” That’s a big myth. Marketing automation doesn’t do your marketing for you. It amplifies the processes you already have in place. So if they’re good processes – terrific! If they’re not so good this checklist is a great starting place for your team to start building its own content marketing framework.

Creating a good framework means you’ve got a reliable system in place for publishing valuable inbound marketing content. Content that will attract and generate a strong, steady stream of leads you can nurture along to become members or donors. If your current challenge is generating traffic as well as leads using your content, focus initially on getting your system in place, and creating the desirable, valuable content your personas will want. 

Then when you’re steadily getting new leads, and your team becomes overwhelmed trying to respond to them, that’s the time to step up into your marketing automation system more completely. Turn on those lead nurturing and re-engagement campaigns. Start testing one lead nurturing email sequence against another. Tweak. Refine. Improve.

Marketing automation done well means leads won’t get ignored. The best of them will also automate the personalization of the content that you send. This is where marketing automation can take you a quantum leap forward.

Marketing automation is about scaling all the great marketing you’re already doing, so it’s executing the campaigns you design at a pace and volume that your team couldn’t possibly do manually. But you and your team need to still be at the heart of it all.

So Is Your Organization Ready?

Go through these questions with an objective eye to gauge whether your organization could benefit now by implementing a marketing automation tool.

1) Are you generating a constant stream of new, qualified leads?

To realize the benefits of marketing automation, your database needs to be a good size and constantly growing. Furthermore, the new leads coming in need to be good fits to convert into members and donors. If your database is too small, automation will just overwork the leads that are there. People will start to feel spammed and you may well see your list shrink rather than grow.

For more tips on this first crucial step, check our our introduction to inbound marketing and lead generation for nonprofits >>

2) Does your team feel overwhelmed by the number of leads pouring into your database?

If so, you may well benefit from marketing automation to make sure all these leads get their due attention.

3) What emails are you sending manually right now? Do you have email series that can be put into an automated workflow?

To reiterate the main point about what marketing can and cannot do, it can’t make a blah email series to re-engage dormant constituents, that only has middling results, into a success. What it can do, is take a string of your best performing nurturing emails and put them on autopilot for you. 

If you want to improve the efficiency and automate your lead nurturing campaigns, marketing automation can help with that. If you’re content to send one-off emails on a campaign-by-campaign basis, then marketing automation may not add much value  for you. 

4) Are you engaging with leads, members, and donors across multiple channels?

The more information your marketing automation system can gather about the people in your database, the more it can do for you. This means that marketing automation becomes more powerful the more you already engage with people through multiple channels. It’s easy to think of marketing automation only as email, but that’s selling it short. You can automate workflows that rely on other digital channels both to gather intel and push out content.

5) Do you already have manual “triggers” you use to push out relevant content to leads?

A lead who visits your donor page a certain number of times. Or a member who downloads your most recent annual report. A lead who watches a new video about the organization’s work. These can all be triggers. Do you know when your leads take relevant actions? If you do, do you have a plan that you execute that’s relevant to the action the person took 

These are all steps that marketing automation relies on. You can tell the automation system what triggers to identify and what to do with them once trigger conditions are met, but you need to know first.

6) Got the content needed to support personalizing and scaling up your marketing efforts?

The triggers and data collection intel are all about sending the right content to the right lead at the right time.  So you need the right content that speaks to different leads who are at different points in their journey. You don’t want to send a solicitation letter to join your highest donor circle level on someone’s first download. Maybe send an invitation to join your newsletter instead.

If you need sufficient input (leads) into the marketing automation machine to make it work, you also need sufficient output (relevant content). Your team needs to be producing and publishing content that’s mapped to a lead’s journey so they can be successfully nurtured further down the path.

Getting Your House in Order First

Content marketing is a continuous growth process. When you first start with inbound marketing, you learn along the way what messages and formats get your audience to respond at different points in their journey. As you refine your content and the donor’s journey, you start building workflows and criteria that make putting new campaigns and content together more efficiently

The next step in this process is marketing automation that moves your workflows from manual to automatic. The timing to move to automation makes sense when you have a steady stream of leads coming in, along with list segmentations, and lead nurturing campaigns that are getting good results.

If you’re not there yet, don’t worry. Start working on the steps on this checklist. You’ll start to see great advances in membership and donor amount drives every step of the way towards marketing automation. 

A whopping 66% of agencies have no plan in place to develop new business. And among those who say they do have a plan, their strategy might not be as comprehensive as it needs to be to keep the sales pipeline from drying up. 

In fact, it seems like many agencies are leaving their new business development largely to chance. Agencies surveyed for the Mirren-RSW/US 2016 New Business Tools Annual Report frequently cited “keeping our eyes open” as one of their top new business development tools. Simply staying on the lookout for new business is not a complete business development strategy. 

So what factors contribute to a poor business development strategy? And more importantly — what changes can you make to get your agency back on track?

Here we go over nine new business development mistakes that commonly plague agencies and what you can do to overcome them.

9 Common Business Development Mistakes 

1) You don’t make new business development anyone’s responsibility.

We’re not going to sugarcoat it: The process of prospecting, pitching, and closing on new business can easily evolve into a long, grueling, and energy-consuming process. And your time and resources are understandably precious. You want to focus primarily on the clients in front of you, not pour time into a prospect that may not even work out.

But when no one is held accountable for new business and everyone is expected to just help out when they can, it will never really get done right. If it isn’t someone’s real responsibility, there’s no reason for them put it up high on their long list of priorities, or above client work.

A significant majority of agencies don’t have a single employee dedicated to new business development, leaving a critical gap in their ability to acquire new clients: 

Data from The Agency Pricing & Financials Report

Even if you can’t afford to hire an employee devoted entirely to new business development, your team needs to set aside time and resources to seek out new clients. To start holding yourselves accountable, develop an annual new business plan with goals in alignment with your projected revenue and growth. Once you start to treat new business development as the responsibility it is, rather than a casual side project, you’ll begin to see better results. 

2) You don’t know who you’re marketing to.

Do you know your agency’s ideal client profile? If the answer is no, you’re probably not targeting the right people in your business development efforts.

Remember that a net cast too widely will almost always come up empty. If you try to market your agency without targeting a specific demographic, your efforts are going to fall flat. You need to know who exactly you’re looking for and tailor your efforts to attract these specific types of businesses.

To get started, take a look at your current clients and write down the characteristics that make them a good fit for your services. Make sure your list reflects your clients’ actual characteristics, not just characteristics you wish they had. This isn’t a wish list. It’s a profile for clients who can realistically bring actual revenue and value to your agency.

Once you have a good idea of what kind of client you’re in the market for, think about what channels have been most successful in tracking them down. Consider pursuing those spaces more seriously as part of your overall new business development program.

3) You don’t know who your competitors are.

Yes, you have competitors. Even if you don’t often find yourself aggressively competing for clients with another agency, it’s important to realize that other agencies are more likely than not dipping into the same client pool as you. And you can’t compete with them until you know who they are and what they offer.

You don’t need a private investigator — just start with a simple Google search. Pretend you’re a prospective client and try searching for some long-tail keywords they might use when searching for a new agency. See what other agencies pop up, and take a good look at what they offer. Ask yourself: How does your own presence measure up? Are you differentiating yourself enough to really stand out?

Another straightforward way to get the scoop on your competition is to ask your current clients what other agencies they considered, or who they worked with before coming to you. This will start to give you an idea of your competitors and what you need to do to make your agency’s brand and offerings unique.

4) You talk too much about yourself.

Time for a reality check: 79% of marketers think agencies talk too much about themselves in meetings.

It’s no secret that agency people like to talk, but when it comes to pitching a prospective client on the benefit of your services, your part should be succinct, brief, and focused intensely on how your agency can specifically benefit the client’s brand.

As an exercise, try condensing your entire pitch into a short paragraph. If any piece of information feels even slightly unnecessary or gratuitous, omit it. This will help you organize your thoughts and distill your presentation into a more digestible chunk of information.

During the pitch itself, refrain from launching unprompted into any case studies or an extended history of your agency’s core beliefs — this is all information they probably already have on you. Remember that this is the prospective client’s time to ask questions and see if the relationship is a good fit. 

5) You don’t fully understand your prospect’s context.

It’s not enough to simply understand a prospective client’s direct needs for a project — you also need to make an effort to get to know their unique business and industry. This will give your pitch some depth and show the prospect that you’re serious about doing business with them.

Before the pitch, take some time to thoroughly research the client’s brand. For a deeper look into their particular point of view, you could even consider setting up a meeting or call to interview your prospect.

Try to understand not only what their business functions are, but what the climate of their industry is like. What are other people in their industry working on? Who are they competing against? The more you understand, the more relevant your proposal will be.

6) You don’t use a CRM tool to manage new business.

As any agency professional will tell you, time management and efficiency are absolutely key when it comes to staying on top of prospecting. But many agencies are problematically behind the curve in terms of organizing their existing and prospective clients. 44% of agencies don’t use a CRM, and 30% of agencies still use Microsoft Excel as their main CRM.  

Why wouldn’t you want a tool that can help your team get organized and stay efficient with fewer resources? New business development is often the last thing an agency is able to devote time, people, and money to, but a CRM can help you do more with less. Consider starting off with free or inexpensive project management software, like HubSpot’s free CRM, to see if  it can help your team stay on top of your new business goals.  

7) You don’t figure out why a pitch was rejected.

Sometimes a pitch doesn’t go quite as planned and the prospect turns you down. It happens to the best of us. But the biggest mistake you can make after a rejected pitch is to not solicit critical feedback about what exactly went wrong.

It might seem awkward at first, but understanding why a proposal was rejected is a vital part of building your ongoing business development strategy. Ask the prospect to identify specific areas of the proposal that really turned them off, and see if they’re willing to suggest any changes or things they would have liked to see. You aren’t going to find a better source of proposal feedback than someone who you’ve pitched to directly.

8) You don’t plan your follow-up strategy in advance.

After a meeting or call with a prospective client, you should have a follow-up plan already in place to maintain a connection with your point of contact and continue the discussion. Follow up is just as important as the proposal in securing new business, but most agencies fail to close the loop, leaving their prospects wondering if they’re truly serious about their business. In fact, 53% of marketers say that agencies aren’t sufficiently aggressive in following up after a meeting.

Instead of resigning yourself to waiting around, inspire some extra confidence by reaching out after the initial meeting with a brief recap of your conversation and next steps. This will help the prospect keep your proposal fresh in their mind, and give them the opportunity to ask additional questions.

9) You don’t know your own deal breakers.

It can be hard to remember during the hustle of the proposal process, but you’re there to qualify the prospect just as much as they’re there to qualify you. You’re on the hunt for profitable clients who will add value to your portfolio, and if a prospect doesn’t seem like they’d be a good fit, you’re allowed to gracefully bow out.

Make sure you have a solid structure in place to weed out prospects who don’t fit your agency’s ideal profile. You want to make sure that a client’s project would be a worthy use of your time and expertise before you dive in, so consider asking some basic qualification questions before you devote time to a full-scale pitch.