David Ogilvy’s 20 unconventional rules for getting clients

Regard the hunt for new clients as a sport.Once you land new business, that’s when it’s time to become dead serious — until then — save yourself from dying of ulcers over lost clients. Approach the search for new clients with “light-hearted gusto”. Play to win but enjoy the fun.

Never work for a client so big you can’t afford to lose them.
Why? The fear of losing them, alone, will wreck your life. You will be unable to give candid advice, and “slowly become a lackey”. David Ogilvy once turned down Ford, saying: “Your account would represent one-half of our total billing. This would make it difficult for us to sustain our independence in council.” Landing your ideal client immediately may not be as great for your business as you think.

Take immense pain in selecting your clients.On average, Ogilvy and Mather would turn down about 60 clients every year. You too should be choosing clients before they choose you. The truth is first-class agencies aren’t in high supply. You have the power to select who you work with, so do it carefully.

Only add 1 new client every 2 years.You want to keep the clients you have. For life. That should be your #1 goal. And if you’re working with great clients and keeping them, then you’ll need only a few clients. David Ogilvy also discovered other reasons adding too many new clients hurt his business. Growing too fast led to hiring too fast. This led to not having well-trained staff. That led to diverting too much of his agencies best brain power away from servicing old clients and failing at keeping clients for life. Plus starting new clients off is often the most difficult work; because you’re building everything from scratch. So screw finding new clients, keep old ones.

Only seek clients with a product or service you are proud of. Unlike lawyers and doctors, professionals in the creative field can’t detach themselves from their work. If you privately despise your client’s product or service, you will fail. You need to have a personal fondness for the client you service before you can help them succeed.

Only accept a client if you can improve their existing work. Ogilvy was famous for turning down the New York Times because he“didn’t think (he) could produce better advertisements than the brilliant ones they had been running.” Don’t think you can create better work than what’s already there? Don’t take on the client.

Don’t take on clients whose business is dying. 
This can be tough when you need work, but if a client approaches you who you know won’t be able to stay in business, regardless of if they hire you, don’t take them on. It doesn’t matter how great your work is, nothing you do will make up for their deficiencies. You may be hungry for work, but the success of your clients, ultimately defines you. Your profit margin is too slim to survive a prospective client’s bankruptcy.

Only work for clients who want you to make a profit. Just because you produce results for a client doesn’t mean you will automatically see those profits come your way. Every client service firm treads a thin line between over-servicing clients and going broke, or under-servicing them and getting fired. Make sure your client’s understand that you too are making money — by helping them make money. Make sure they understand you are planning to take a percentage of their profit (however small). Don’t shy away from it and don’t pretend otherwise.

Don’t publicly pursue clients.
If a client announced they were considering hiring Ogilvy, he would withdraw his company from the race. His reason? “I like to succeed in public, fail in secret.”

Avoid contests in which more than four other agencies are involved.It’s way too easy to waste your time in meetings. Especially when you’re on the shopping list of every prospective client. You have other fish to fry — the fish of your current clients. Ideally you wanted to be courted by clients who have no other prospects in mind.

Getting new clients is a solo performance. The person who decides to hire you is almost always the top decision maker at the company. David believed, “Chairmen should be harangued by chairmen.” Additionally, he felt having too many people on sales calls caused confusion. That’s why singularity is an important ingredient in winning accounts.

Remain flexible when selling clients.It’s OK to rehearse for sales calls but David hated speaking from prepared text. A slide deck or written text locks you into a position which may become irrelevant during the meeting.

Tell prospects about your weaknesses.
David picked this up from antique dealers. He realized that when a dealer drew your attention to a flaw in the furniture, he almost always gained your trust. If you do this too — before the client notices your flaws on their own, you will also gain their trust. It will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.

Don’t get bogged down in case-studies or research numbers.
These things put prospects to sleep. “No manufacturer ever hired an agency because it increased market-share for somebody else.” Clients care about themselves, talk about them.

Explicitly tell clients why they should hire you.The day after a new business a new client meeting, David would send the client a 3-page letter on why they should pick him. Today you can send an equally brief email to help clients make the right decision.

Don’t pay an outside source a commission for new business.David Ogilvy believed the type of clients this brought in weren’t worth the trouble. Today commission-based lead finders include recruiters, head-hunters, and even other freelancers.

Beware of clients who have no budget but a great idea. Even though they might become huge if everything goes well, it’s more likely that things won’t go well. Servicing these companies will be expensive for you and very few of them will ever make it worth your while.

Don’t underestimate personality. The difference between client service firms is not as big as we like to believe. Most can show they produced results that increased sales for some of their clients. Very often the difference in new business depends on the personality of the head of the agency. Know you will win and lose some clients because of your personality.

Fire clients at least 5 times more often than you get fired. 
Always do it for the same reason: if their behavior erodes the morale of the people working on their account. Do not allow this from any client.

Use what you specialize in to find new clients. David Ogilvy created ads selling his ad agency. You should dog-food your own service too. So how does your work help clients? Can it help you in the same way? For example, do you help them find customers by creating content? Create content for your agency. Do you do graphic design? Create infographics for potential clients. The trick will be to not just make thing that you like or impress people in your industry, but to make things that impress potential clients.

Beyond Goldman Sachs: the nasty culture

Greg Smith's portrait of Goldman Sachs is shocking, but investment banks treat their clients as poorly as they do their staff

• 
• • Joris Luyendijk
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 March 2012 14.32 GMT

In his resignation letter, Greg Smith described the environment at Goldman Sachs as 'toxic and destructive'. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

The resignation letter on the New York Times opinion page today by Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith is shocking. But dozens of interviews with people working in finance in London over the past months for the banking blog suggest that it's not only Goldman Sachs where clients are treated like "muppets" getting their "eyeballs" ripped out. And it's not only clients that are exploited. Investment banks treat their own employees exactly the same way.

Investment banking breaks roughly into two main areas: the financial markets that Smith was working in, and deal-making such as mergers and acquisitions. This is how a young banker in M&A at a major bank described his experiences:

"There's this idea of bankers, especially in a prestigious sector like M&A, as very sophisticated and civil. But you do hear things like 'We're gonna suck this client dry.' … When we'd discuss a pitch or potential project with the team, nine out of 10 times the first question would be: 'Where's the "fee event"? How can we make money from this?' I mean, I understand banks need to make money, but you can't think of yourself as 'trusted adviser' – the big term in M&A – while at the same time putting your own fee first?"

Or listen to this risk and compliance officer at another major bank:

"I remember in my first few weeks I sat down with one of the structured products guys. He was selling so-called PFI deals, where local authorities buy a complicated financial instrument to pay for, say, a hospital. I asked him: where's the benefit for the local authorities in this? He was aghast. "What are you, a socialist?""

Smith's letter is ultimately about loyalty between a bank and its clients, and the alleged lack thereof at Goldman Sachs. This word "loyalty" comes up in many interviews, but mostly when people describe their relation to their own bank. Here's a head of marketing at a bank in the City: "Anyone here can lose their job at any time. One moment you're working on a project, the next you're hugging and saying, 'Well, bye' because the other has just been made redundant and is being led out of the building by security."

That's right. In most financial firms you can be marched out of the building by security at five minutes' notice. Your email is blocked, as well as your phone and your security pass, and there you are, literally on the pavement as you wait for someone else to collect your personal stuff from your desk. An IT consultant with another bank said: "People just disappear. They're called in, fired and led out. And you don't get info on who has been made redundant."

I could give many more quotes like these. In fact, almost everyone in finance has a redundancy horror story to tell. This banker recently got "the call". Looking back, she said:

"I may have been overly loyal to my dysfunctional family – the bank I worked in. I was making £80,000 a year, not including bonuses – though bonuses were negligible in the last few years. I could have made more, probably, had I done what many do: change jobs every 18 months to two years. Come in, make an impact, and move on … This summer I turned down a pretty awesome job, as I was dedicated to my bank. I am not sure if this is a female thing, to be overly loyal, but it's definitely a mistake I'll never make again."

There is no reason to feel sorry for people in investment banks, and I've met very few, if any, who want our pity. They enter the sector of their own free will, they earn well (though rarely the "telephone number bonuses" you read about) and nobody forces them to stay. But people working in banks are on their own and their employer has zero loyalty to them. One wonders: how realistic is it to expect investment bankers to treat clients any better than they are treated themselves?

Public relations companies and law firms work without declaring who their clients are!

Smoke and mirrors: how the tobacco industry hides behind lobbyists

PR firms and lawyers campaign without revealing clients' identity

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
 

Saturday, 3 September 2011 in The Independent

The tobacco industry is covertly using third-party companies to lobby against smoking restrictions and to gain access to health documents held by public organisations.

Public relations companies and law firms are working on behalf of anonymous multinational tobacco companies without declaring who their clients are, according to an investigation by The Independent.

The third parties have refused to confirm they are working on behalf of tobacco firms when they make freedom of information requests from universities and other public bodies, even though the third parties are demanding more openness from their targets.

The public relations company Bell Pottinger and the London law firm Clifford Chance have both requested information from public organisations without making it clear they are working on behalf of tobacco firms.
The Irish PR company Hume Brophy has also carried out a lobbying campaign against the Government's ban on cigarette displays in shops on behalf of the National Federation of Retail Newsagents without stating
that the campaign was being funded by the tobacco industry.

The Independent has established that Alex Deane, a former chief-of-staff to David Cameron, played a key role in attempts to use the freedom of information law against one public organisation involved in promoting awareness against the health dangers of roll-up tobacco. Mr Deane is a director of Bell Pottinger which earlier this year requested documents from a health-awareness organisation funded by the NHS, the Bristol-based Smoke Free South West, following a campaign it ran against roll-up tobacco, which is popular in that part of the country.

Soon after this informal request, Smoke Free South West received a formal freedom of information request for the same documentation from Big Brother Watch, a right-of-centre libertarian group founded by Mr Deane.

Neither Bell Pottinger nor Big Brother Watch declared to Smoke Free South West that they had held discussions with one another or with Bristol-based Imperial Tobacco, which is listed as one of Bell Pottinger's clients in the PR firm's website, and makes Golden Virginia rolling tobacco and Rizla cigarette papers.

Mr Deane was not available for comment yesterday; Bell Pottinger said he was on holiday. David Petrie, the Bell Pottinger executive who sent the email requests to Smoke Free South West, did not return calls. Daniel Hamilton, a director of Big Brother Watch, refused to confirm or deny that his organisation had been in contact with Bell Pottinger or Imperial Tobacco over the FOI request to Smoke Free South West. "We don't work on behalf of other groups. We only work on behalf of ourselves... We've got no formal links with anyone in the tobacco industry," Mr Hamilton said.

This week, The Independent revealed that tobacco companies had demanded access to confidential university research papers on teenagers' attitudes to smoking, as well as meetings within the Department of Health between government officials and experts on smoking and health.

Stirling University, which carries out research on behalf of the Health Department and Cancer Research UK, said Philip Morris, the makers of Marlboro cigarettes, was attempting to access thousands of confidential interviews with British teenagers.

The FOI request was initially made in 2009 through the London law firm Clifford Chance, which tried to keep the identify of its client confidential. However, under the Scottish Freedom of Information Act, which is slightly different to the English Act, a third party must name the client it is working for – in this case Philip Morris.

A spokeswoman for Clifford Chance said she could not comment on whether the law firm was carrying out any further freedom of information requests on behalf of tobacco companies. Under the English FOI Act, third parties can work on behalf of anonymous clients.

Hume Brophy, the Irish public relations company, admitted it was a mistake to conduct a parliamentary lobbying campaign against cigarette displays in shops without making it clear it was paid for by the tobacco industry. In a letter to Stephen Williams MP, John Hume, a partner in the company, said that it will not happen again.

Martin Dockrell of the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health said that the tobacco industry's use of "front" organisations was nothing new.

"Big Tobacco's dirty little secret is how they get others to do their dirty work," Mr Dockrell said. "Some front groups are pretty much wholly owned subsidiaries; some appear to be independent but tobacco companies pay the bills and pull the strings."

Former Cameron crony leading the fight for the smoking lobby
Profile
Alex Deane served as David Cameron's chief of staff when Cameron was shadow education secretary from 2004-2005. A Tory activist since 1995, Mr Deane is now a director of Bell Pottinger, the public relations firm set up by Lord Bell, the Tory peer. He was a founding director of Big Brother Watch, a right-of-centre libertarian pressure group that opposes state-controlled surveillance and what it sees as intrusions into civil liberties. He has opposed CCTV cameras, DNA databases, council surveillance and data chips in dustbins. Big Brother Watch also stoutly defends the rights of smokers to smoke in public places.