Client Outreach: March 2016

Our producers and associate producers dove headfirst into March Madness with a record number of meetings and new connections. Utilizing a three-pronged approach to expand and cultivate our database of contacts, the brands, publications, and agency outreach teams made some serious moves.

Publications: Meli is currently in charge of outreach and Claire spearheads our research efforts. With our list of consumer magazines, trade magazines and custom publishing companies pretty solid, Claire concentrated her research efforts on adding valuable contacts to our list of alumni magazines at major universities. Together, Claire and Meli sent out a total of 324 emails and made 259 phone calls. As a result, they were able to connect with 86 clients to tell them more about our members which led to 15 meetings.

One of those meetings was with the photo editor of Autoweek, who was thrilled to have James Haefner stop by to show his book…

My meeting with Jim went great! He is such a talent, and we look forward to working with him in the future! Thanks for setting everything up. I’ll be sure to keep in touch with any future photography needs. Thanks again.

Meli Ojeda chatting up clients in March 2016

Brands: The brands team hit our database hard, reaching out to the biggest and most valuable companies around the world. Morgan is in charge of brand research. When we’re doing that research, we think about the biggest companies in the world, the biggest regional companies around the U.S., the biggest companies in major countries around the world, and the biggest companies in all the major sectors of the economy. Researching brands requires more detective work than with publications or agencies because there are often multiple departments hiring photographers within any large corporation, and their job titles often offer little indication that they hire photographers. With Julia in charge of brand outreach, she and Morgan were able to email 316 people and call 186, resulting in 88 conversations and 16 meetings, including Wonderful Machine Portfolio Events (check out the blog post about those here) and one-on-one portfolio meetings with individual members.

Agencies: Alex and Sean are on our agency team. Alex is in charge of research. With a number of very extensive research tools at his disposal, Alex has been steadily adding valuable ad agency contacts to our list (alternately thinking about the biggest agencies in the U.S., the biggest internationally, and the biggest in the major metro areas in the U.S.) We are much more selective when it comes to adding public relations firms and graphic design firms, which tend to hire photographers much less than ad agencies. With 151 emails and calls, they connected with 28 creatives and scheduled meetings for our photographers in Austin, New York City and Greensboro, NC—including a meeting with one of our photographer’s long-sought-after clients.

Producer Sean Stone scored a meeting for photographer Jody Horton, who was excited to be put in touch with a new client he had previously reached out to.

I see a lot of great match ups in their lineup. And I actually reached out to them a couple years ago… but after trying a few times with calls and emails and never hearing back, I gave up.

That’s all for March!

Need help researching clients? Email our project managers.
Have feedback about the clients we’re promoting to? Email Bill.