Being good at what you do and delivering on your promises might just be your biggest marketing superpower

Creating new customers is hard

Thanks to a heady mix of technology, data privacy regulations and the ability of buyers to develop their own knowledge and serve themselves when they want to, it’s become really hard to find and attract new customers.

Fortunately, some things in life don’t change as quickly as technology. One of those is the value of doing a good job for customers.

Our experience as a start-up

Like most start-ups, back when Newton Day started in 2019, we didn’t have much of an ‘opportunity list’ to go on. Basically, there were a handful of business leaders that collectively we knew and could reach out to, but many of these already had a B2B marketing agency of some sort. What we needed then was to find new accounts.

I’ve always believed that the best way to grow sales is to do something right and then repeat at scale. Applying this same logic to our own challenge, we won some small accounts and decided the best next step was to package up what we were doing into services and try offering that out to others. But we didn’t try to grow too rapidly. Instead, we set out our ambition to always do a good job and set a high bar on two things: quality and value for money.

In pursuit of new business, it’s these two things that most often get compromised. Simply put, you can’t invest in winning business while your resources are committed delivering. And shaving out time, for many service-led businesses, means delivering work ‘to a standard that the customer is happy to pay for’ rather than investing that extra chunk of time to do a stand-out job, and commit resources to servicing accounts, tweaking work already done, going back to previous work and collaborating with clients to make it more useful.

Our fanaticism at Newton Day for quality comes back to what we call the ‘Apple principle’—which when you consider our brand comes from the moment Sir Isaac Newton had an apple allegedly bounce off his head—is kind of ironic. Anyway, our Apple principle is this. We know the tech company Apple is awesomely good at marketing and designing products to fit their customers passions and ambitions. So, if you can’t imagine the Apple company accepting the level of quality you’re offering, DON’T SETTLE FOR IT. Try again, and find a better way.

Amplifying your word of mouth

We’ve been lucky. We’ve won excellent customers who ‘get us.’ We want to be an extension of their team and work collaboratively as part of their business. Our customers understand this. That’s why our partnership works for them and for us. If we were constantly running out proposals and quotes, it would kill our productivity (and to be honest, it’s not much fun).

Even so, were we to sit back on our successes and not amplify our fantastic case stories (i.e. our customers) to others, we wouldn’t have grown anything like as quickly as we have.

Any business needs to promote its successes to really leverage them, but it’s worth it. Having your customers promote you through word of mouth becomes much easier for them if you equip them with some smart sales tools. In our case, we love client video testimonials—you will see them on our website.