New business agency conversion rates are often the subject of many a conversation with prospective clients; both our own and those of our clients. Manifest has made more than 10m agency new business calls. We monitor both our own and our client’s success rates, taking standard deviations into consideration.
We divide new business into what we call the “Upstream” process and the “Downstream” process. The upstream is everything that happens prior to the first face-to-face interaction with the prospective client whilst the downstream is obviously therefore everything that happens post first meeting.
Both processes have three steps and they are as follows;
UPSTREAM
Step 1 – Make a contact attempt
Step 2 – Engage with the prospect
Step 3 – Arrange a meeting
DOWNSTREAM
Step 1 – Meet the prospect
Step 2 – Submit a proposal / answer a brief
Step 3 – Win the business.
We know that for every 100 calls made, five prospects will be spoken to and for every five spoken to one will convert into a qualified meeting (see other post for definition of a ‘qualified meeting’).
For every three meetings our clients attend they should submit one proposal and for every three proposals submitted they win a new client.
We believe that our attention to delivering truly qualified meetings means that our (Upstream) conversion rates are not as great as those suggested by other new business agencies but feel this is justified by our clients’ superior (Downstream) conversion rates.
