A small graphic design agency recently asked me how they can achieve an increase in inbound leads.  In the early stages, like many agencies, they built their business through word of mouth referral only. But now, they want to grow faster.  They want an opportunity to make more design pitches. They want more inboud inquiries and leads to follow up on.  Here are nine ideas to help you:

1. Align yourselves with companies that may have a more direct relationship with the customer (i.e. branding companies, marketing communications companies, PR companies, trade show booth companies, etc). This is essentially, a "channel to market". Many of these companies lean on design agencies for some elements of the work they do for their clients, and others are in a position to make direct referrals.
2. Set up a profile on elance.com and guru.com, and monitor design work requests.
   
3. Network - make sure at least one agency representative attends every business networking event to ensure your name gets out consistently, and begin building a local network.  But newtorking doesn't stop there.  Buy a book on networking and find out what else you should do to keep in touch with everyone you meet during your outings.
   
4. Do free design work for charities and not-for-profits and lean on the recipients for access to their networks and for referrals.
   
5. Identify business consultants of all shapes and sizes, and set up sales agency agreements which extend a referral fee or finders fee (i.e. 5-10%) for any business they may funnel your way. These folks are out networking just like you and often hear about design needs in the context of their own business pursuits. They'll be happy to make a few bucks by recommending vendors for all kinds of services.
   
6. Give something of value away on your website related to "design" in return for the contact information of the person requesting it (i.e. top 10 logo design guidelines) - over time you'll begin to build a list of contacts and your continued and consistent effort interacting with this list will keep your agency 'top of mind'.
7. Use special occasions and your design talent as an opportunity - example, create and virally market a cool electronic x-mas card the generates "pull" (i.e. people come to your site to download the card so they can send it to someone). This gets your name out into the community.
8. Hire a part-time or full-time sales or marketing/lead generation resource. Why not? He or she will pay for themselves in no time at all.
   
9. Get on the phone with past clients, make it a two pronged call - (i) customer service to see how they're doing (ii) to find out if they're aware of anyone in their network with design needs. If you do good work, they'll be more than happy to bring you to the attention of their colleagues. This doesn't always happen as "automatically" as you might hope.