Originally appeared on The Art of New Business
There’s one thing that your new business strategy is missing. It’s something that many of your peers do, you just haven’t had the opportunity to explore it for yourself. Now, imagine you had a way to harness the power of this missing information at scale. Not on a few brands that you manually track in Excel, but dozens – even hundreds – of prospects at a time.
Your peers don’t just imagine these new business benefits; they achieve them through Winmo.
- The experiment: If a social platform for business development professionals who shared similar prospects, would they share exclusive account insights, strategies, contacts, rumors and tips among themselves? In short, could actionable market intelligence be part of the share economy?
- The hypothesis: It could be, and it would be, if users chatted anonymously with like-minded business development professionals. In January, we launched WinmoTalk to empower Winmo users to ask questions and post answers in a social forum of peers, competitors, and complementary service providers. Agency business development pros not only uncover and share exclusive insights and leads with one another, but they’re also notified when someone starts a thread about one of their current clients or an industry in which they have clients.
- The social proof: Actionable market intelligence is a part of the new business share economy. The financial impact is immediate. In fact, that’s exactly what I heard last week. Seeking an “in” with one of her top-five prospects, she posted a thread in WinmoTalk. Within days of joining, she had what she needed and ultimately won a project a month later.
Why does it work?
- Information-share digital natives: WinmoTalk builds a tsunami of momentum within agencies, media properties, and adtech companies. Millennials, who began entering the workforce a few years ago, are the industry’s mainstream creators, curators, and contributors. They’re digital natives, so this is normal behavior for them. If you’re not among these digital natives, you might consider starting a thread to learn the ropes. As one customer told me, “It’s brilliant and easy. If you can use Facebook or LinkedIn, you can use Winmo and WinmoTalk.”
- A targeted yet diverse user base: If a social network only included agency new business pros, they probably wouldn’t exchange intel. However, the diversity of Winmo’s customer base, and the common prospect profile they share, create the right environment for digital collaboration. Our customers are agencies and marketing services firms, media properties, sports teams, large non-profits and adtech companies – each of whom target major advertisers for new business.
We’ve provided the new business tribe a virtual way to anonymously communicate and collaborate.
As Karla Morales of the Art of New Business says, “Stop selling and start marketing.” Great marketing for agency new business today is built on real-time information and insights. Millennials, the digital natives, identify a need, craft a solution, and find the right contact within minutes.
Last week, one of our larger creative agency clients said, “Just try it. Be a voyeur of the threads. Or if you’re bold enough, post a question you don’t think anyone would be able to answer about one of your prospects and see what happens. You’ll likely be amazed.”
This is the one thing you’re missing for new business.