New business strategies for
small agencies.
Helping owners of small marketing agencies consistently and confidently win new business.
My mission is to ensure that owners of small marketing agencies are in control of their new business destiny. Most agency owners didn’t start their agencies because they love to drum up new business, and yet the success of their agency depends on it.
I help these agency leaders develop a sustainable approach to winning new business via coaching, consulting, and done-with-you models. I do this by applying the BUILD WIN SCALE© system, a step-by-step process I designed specifically to help small marketing agencies identify and activate their natural talents for sales and marketing, leading to a sustainable approach to winning new business.
Jody Sutter — career business
development professional.
I’m a career business development professional and my clients benefit from my years of experience doing agency sales and marketing. I’ve run large global new business operations for agencies like R/GA, OMD and Havas but I’ve also spent time on the front lines at smaller creative firms, generating leads and building relationships that led to new revenue.
I know what a challenge it can be to get the attention of new prospects and win the right kind of business for your agency. It takes hard work, creativity, and discipline. But it can also take an outsider’s perspective to help you see your greatest strengths and how to position them.
Equal parts storyteller and problem-solver, I’ll prescribe the right tools and techniques for your agency that get your prospects to say “yes”.
Jody Sutter
FOUNDER, THE SUTTER COMPANY
Personalized new business coaching and training for marketing agency leaders.
The Sutter Company offers personalized new business coaching and training for marketing agency leaders who want to pitch less and win more.
The BUILD WIN SCALE©
Accelerator.
Over the course of 16 weeks we guide agencies toward creating a New Business Operating System. This New Business Operating System will replace the unpredictability, unreliability and chaos that’s typically associated with agency business development with a path toward more reliable, predictable results.
The BUILD WIN SCALE© Accelerator is built around a simple but powerful idea: when you treat business development like a system, not a series of disconnected tactics, you create more stable, more scalable new business growth.
It’s not about the latest shiny tactic. It’s about aligning your positioning, your team, and your plan so that new business feels less like a grind and more like something you can actually get good at.
This is a step-by-step program equipping small agencies with a practical framework for turning an unpredictable approach into a repeatable, reliable process for new business success.
How Agencies Find, Nurture,
and Convert with Sutter
Here are some examples of how The Sutter Company has made a positive difference in the way an agency finds, nurtures, and converts new clients:
Turned a walk-away pitch into the agency's biggest win.
A partner at an agency in San Diego specializing in tourism needed expert guidance to help him strategize and work through challenging sales scenarios and learn what he didn't know. New business coaching with me fulfilled these needs and allowed him to make big improvements in how they pitch new business. More than once it led directly to generating new revenue for the agency.
In one case, the agency was asked to pitch a client that was ideal in all respects except for the budget—it was minuscule for what the client wanted to achieve. The agency partner was going to turn down the opportunity outright but, through coaching, he was encouraged to have a conversation with the client and even got a strategy for leading the call. Not only was the call successful, but it also resulted in the client tripling their budget and the agency winning the business.
In just this one example, the agency saw 15x the value in its investment in coaching.
Reset the strategy. Doubled the revenue.
A Fort Worth, TX-based agency was at an inflection point. They had restructured their management team and wanted to press the reset button on how they approached business development. After the first strategic working session with me, they told me they had immediate clarity on where their sales and marketing strategy needed to go.
But the proof is in the results. By focusing agency leadership on selling more strategic, higher margin products and keeping them on track with a realistic, step-by-step approach, the agency had more high-value, long-term clients and revenue was up over 100%.
Traded chaos for a process that converts.
A public relations firm in Melbourne, Australia was tired of their haphazard approach to business development. They didn’t have control over the prospective clients they were attracting and lacked a clear process to nurture leads, resulting in fewer new clients wins and falling short on their growth goals.
After joining my New Business Accelerator program, they were able to define their value proposition, develop persuasive messaging to the right ideal clients, and successfully engage prospects throughout a buyer’s journey. Within the first three months of working together they saw tangible improvements in the effectiveness of their new business activities.
By the end of the program, they had won multiple clients by following the process.