Rebecca Caroe’s Designer Breakfast brunch on sales and marketing for small creative agencies was an energising and enjoyable session. Rebecca’s enthusiasm and knowledge of design businesses focused the learning and everyone went away with a pack of bonus material and a lot to think about.

To keep the momentum up, this group will continue to meet and work together both online and face-to-face so that the learning is used effectively and the new business activity is kept live. So often in professional development work, especially with busy people who run every aspect of their business themselves, the new learning is not put into practice soon enough and the opportunity lost.

After breakfast, the session kicked off with the five key phases of business development. Reviewing our new business strategy we were asked to answer 10 key questions on our organisations, working in groups. Time was tight and the pace fast. This didn’t allow for too much reflection and consequently, the key issues came to mind fast and not clouded by detail.

In the second phase we learnt seven different ways of finding prospects and designed our ideal customer profile, again working in groups.

In phase three, we worked on creating a new business strategy including developing relationships and sweating our marketing assets. In four, implementation, we learnt four discipline steps to make new business work for our each of us. Finally in phase five, we discussed our recent new business wins and learnt how to review out conversion rate – whether the pitch was won or lost.

Given new tools such as golden questions and hot calling, Rebecca challenged us with writing a marketing plan. “Just do it”, she said, “find your way of making time to do a plan. Put the things you’d like to do on one page. Keep a good database and record of conversations, get refreshing new things to focus on, find a good stream of leads, update the contacts weekly or fortnightly.”

To finish off, we discussed how participants would like to continue with what they had experienced during the morning, supporting each other and keeping up the momentum for themselves. As a new initiative, Designer Breakfasts will explore ways of doing this online on a regular basis. As always, we welcome input from participants and have an open-source attitude to input in developing and our activities as a useful and enjoyable resource for small design business.

Visit Rebecca Caroe’s blog on to find out more about new business practice and this Designer Breakfast.