The Marketing Agency Blueprint Part 15

Every agency, no matter its size, can benefit from having a formal system in place to manage its new business development efforts.

Concentrate on creating a sales system that meets your current needs for lead generation, and is scalable with your long-term growth goals.

Agency leaders should have 24/7 access to lead volume and opportunities in order to effectively forecast workflow, staffing needs, and revenue.

Agencies need a reliable CRM platform in which they can post activities, track opportunities/deals, and segment leads based on their position in the funnel.

Selling is both an art and a science, which requires experience and education, as well as an intimate knowledge of the agency.

You are always selling. You are selling an idea, vision, service, agency brand, personal brand, and belief that your firm is more capable and qualified than the next one.

Your account teams are your most valuable salespeople. Their performance, behavior, and ability to build strong client relationships determine if an account stays or goes and whether clients provide referrals and testimonials.

Tech-savvy agencies are able to gather and leverage lead intelligence at every stage of the funnel and use that information to enhance their nurturing efforts and dramatically improve conversion rates.

Defining and building marketing and sales strategies around buyer personas enables agencies to better target communications and content, while improving lead generation and conversion.

The agency that comes to the table more prepared and confident, and demonstrates a greater understanding of the lead's business, has an immediate advantage over the compet.i.tion.

You can consistently earn referrals by keeping your agency in the minds of current clients and building a reputation based on proven performance, loyalty, honesty, and innovation.

Content marketing is the premier lead-generation strategy available to agencies today.

Effective proposals demonstrate that you clearly understand your prospect's needs and goals and have the knowledge and capabilities to positively impact their business.

The prospective account manager/lead consultant, not the salesperson, should be dictating the preliminary strategic recommendations and appropriate service package or retainer that will be featured in the proposal.

Chapter 7.

Commit to Clients All clients are not created equal.

Build Relationships and Loyalty

The strength and stability of your agency is directly related to your ability to retain and grow accounts. Loyal clients lead to higher retention rates, greater profit margins, more predictable cash flow, and stronger referrals.

Everything laid out in the Blueprint to this point-value-based pricing, hybrid services, top talent, a scalable infrastructure, an Inbound Marketing GamePlan, and a powerful sales funnel-puts your agency in the position to build loyalty. Now, it is time to commit to your clients, deliver on the promises you have made, and make a measurable impact on their businesses.

The need to build strong client relationships must be ingrained in an agency's culture. From day one of their training, agency professionals must understand the importance of each client and the financial impact retention has on sustainability. Employees should be 100 percent focused on the happiness and success of their clients.

Create Value Push yourself and your agency to create as much value as possible for every client. Become indispensible through your hard work, insight, consultation, services, expertise, friendship, and professionalism.

Treat them as partners, and take a pa.s.sionate approach to their success.

Hold your team to the highest standards of performance.

Bring innovative ideas to the table.

Publish and share blog posts relevant to your clients' challenges and opportunities.

Commit your account team to continually advance their knowledge of clients' businesses and industries.

Take a Personal Approach Create deeper connections with your client contacts. Do the little things that build relationships, and take the time to show them you care about their successes, both on the individual and organizational levels.

Know what matters to them-family, hobbies, and personal interests-and never lose sight of the fact that they are real people, too.

Recognize milestones in their lives with personal notes and handwritten cards.

Use your agency's customer-relationship-management (CRM) system to keep track of calls, communications, meetings, and notes.

Connect through social networks to stay in touch with what is going on in their businesses and their personal lives.

Make every client feel like the most important client. Never appear too busy with other clients to help them.

Keep your leadership team connected. Agency executives should regularly be thinking about and communicating with client contacts, especially if they are not involved in the day-to-day account management.

Seek opportunities to make your client contacts look good, and help build their careers.

Send personal communications to clients when you have published or found content of interest to them.

Be Open and Honest Your clients should trust you, and you should trust your clients. For this to happen, you must be genuine. Tell your clients when something is not working out, and let them know when things are going really well. If you communicate openly and honestly, they will be more likely to be open and honest with you.

Listen to Their Problems, and Respond When Appropriate If clients are unhappy about something, listen to what is bothering them (even if it is not something you caused or have control over). Then, if you can, devise a solution to fix it. Sometimes, just being there to listen is enough to calm frustrations.

Do What You Say You Will Do Keep your promises. There is nothing worse than thinking someone is going to do something, only to be disappointed. Be someone your client can count on.

Admit When You Are Wrong, and Apologize Face it. Eventually one person in the relationship is going to make a mistake, no matter how hard you both try not to. If it is you, own up to it. Admit you were wrong, apologize, and make it up to them. Your client will appreciate that you took responsibility for your actions.

Go Out of Your Way to Make Them Happy Show you care in your everyday actions. Keep the little things in mind with your clients. E-mail them interesting articles, wish them a happy birthday, take them out to lunch, or introduce them to like-minded people. Go above and beyond their expectations for customer service.

Stay on the Edge Remain at the forefront of innovation and technology. As discussed in Chapter 2, marketing agencies that are immersed in technology are able to continually increase efficiency and productivity, evolve client campaigns, and make strategic connections of seemingly unrelated information.

Share technology news, trends, and innovations through your agency social networks.

Publish content on your website demonstrating how advances in technology are impacting the marketing industry.

Push your account teams to continually integrate new technologies and ideas into client campaigns.

Tell your clients about technologies you think would be valuable to their businesses.

Invest in Talent The greatest value you can bring to clients is staffing their account teams with A players. These professionals are a.n.a.lytical, confident, creative, detail oriented, highly motivated, and strategic-all traits that consistently translate into success for your clients.

Hire the best.

Provide advanced training and education that accelerates their development.

Build reward programs that recognize team over individual success, and put a premium on retention and growth of accounts.

Develop professionals who are committed to efficiency and productivity.

Build Connections Extend your reach and influence in the places that matter to your agency and your clients. Be proactive in creating and nurturing connections now for you and your clients. Do not go looking for new contacts when you have something to pitch or sell.

Attend networking events.

Join clubs and a.s.sociations.

Partic.i.p.ate in Twitter chats and online forums.

Share your expertise on Q&A sites, such as Quora, Focus, and LinkedIn Answers.

Diversify Your Relationships Look for opportunities to expand your connections within client organizations. If you only have a single contact person, and that professional leaves, the account can be at risk. However, if you have built relationships with multiple contacts, then you have a far greater chance of retaining the account.

Understand the organization's dynamics, including key decision makers and how agency partners are evaluated.

Be willing to invest nonbillable time attending client events and partic.i.p.ating in meetings, if it means you will have opportunities to make valuable connections.

Seek opportunities to work with multiple divisions of larger companies.

The Client in Residence (CIR) As your agency expands, account teams are pushed to their limits to deliver on expectations and priorities. At the same time, senior leaders, who bring invaluable knowledge and experience to accounts, are pulled away from client services to manage growth.

No matter how talented your account teams are, it becomes easy to lose sight of the big picture. Sometimes agencies can go days or even weeks without taking an objective look at their efforts, and considering things from the client's point of view. However, these sorts of insights can be essential to building stronger, more profitable relationships.

One possible solution is to create a client in residence (CIR)-a senior agency leader charged with a.s.sessing accounts from the client's perspective. These client advocates ask the difficult questions, challenge campaign strategies, push for improved results, scrutinize time and billings, a.s.sess the account team, and critically evaluate the agency's value and contributions-all so the client does not have to.

The CIR considers factors affecting the client each day-meetings, communications, management, budgets, staffing, expectations, and demands-and looks for ways to make their lives easier. In small agencies, it may be the CEO or president who functions part-time as the CIR, whereas, in large agencies, it may become a full-time position, overseeing dozens of accounts. Here is a look at possible CIR responsibilities: Sit in on client calls and internal strategy meetings.

Monitor account activities to gauge efficiency and productivity.

Review monthly client a.n.a.lytics reports to look for gaps in a.s.sessments.

Lead internal brainstorming sessions to bring creative and innovative ideas to campaigns.

Teach young professionals the inner workings of client businesses and cultures.

Provide feedback on the style and tone of agency communications.

Challenge account team members' strategic recommendations and thoughts.

Question invoices and budgets.

Explore opportunities to enhance service levels.

Advocate for client interests and needs.

The Significance of Systems

Prototype hybrid agencies, specifically disruptors, are driven by systems. They are built on adaptable infrastructures that enable them to evolve more quickly than their traditional agency brethren.

The systems create standards and stability, while providing autonomy to account teams and managers. They are designed to increase efficiency and productivity, encourage creativity, accelerate innovation, and push professionals to realize and embrace their potential, all of which produce higher performance levels and more satisfied and loyal clients.

In the following sections, we will examine three core systems that have significant impact on client loyalty: career path, account management, and agency management.

Career Path As I have stated numerous times, talent is your greatest a.s.set as an agency. Your ability to attract and retain A players directly affects your client loyalty. These professionals are highly motivated, career-focused individuals. They need a system that defines t.i.tles, responsibilities, pay scales, bonus structure, performance metrics, expectations, and opportunities.

Like everything else in your agency, career paths should be flexible and adapt as needed to maximize your talent and deliver the greatest value to clients. The career paths establish how your organizational chart is structured, and they lay the foundation for how you construct account teams. Therefore, they are essential for every marketing agency that plans to recruit and develop talent.

There are endless ways to build your agency's organizational chart, define your career paths, and construct your account teams, and they continue to change. For example, in June 2011, Interpublic Group-owned PR firm GolinHarris announced plans to do away with its traditional pyramid structure and introduce four new t.i.tles-catalyst, strategist, creator, and connector.1 According to the New York Times, "The reorganization is primarily meant to transition employees from working as generalists to being designated as one of four types of specialists."2 When I first developed PR 20/20's career path in 2005, I felt that clients too often left agency professionals out of high-level strategic discussions, and tended to view them more as pract.i.tioners. I wanted our professionals to be seen as strategists first, so I chose to move away from the standard "account executive/supervisor" t.i.tles. Instead, I created a career path with three primary t.i.tles-a.s.sociate consultant, consultant, and senior consultant.

As we grew, we added management positions responsible for the agency's operations and advancement, specifically in the areas of human resources, finance, and marketing, but these core client-service positions are still the basis for our career path.

Our account teams, whose primary responsibility is the retention and growth of core accounts, consist of group managers (senior consultants or higher), account managers (consultants or senior consultants) and support staff (a.s.sociate consultants and consultants). We continue to tweak our system, but I hope that sharing the basic framework gives you some perspective on one approach that may be helpful in defining your career path.

Following is a snapshot of our primary positions. a.s.sociate Consultant is an entry-level position, ideally suited for professionals with 0 to 3 years of industry experience. a.s.sociate consultants are primarily producers-meaning that their primary task is to provide revenue-generating services to clients-and students, developing the skills necessary to advance to the consultant level.

a.s.sociate consultants are forecasted to log 120 to 140 client-service hours per month, and are expected to invest significant time and energy outside regular business hours to advance their knowledge and capabilities.

Consultant is a midlevel position. Consultants generally have 3 to 7 years of industry experience, and have displayed the potential and desire to advance to senior-level positions. Consultants are primarily producers; however, they have increased account-management (manager) responsibilities, and they are actively involved with business development and agency initiatives.

Consultants have demonstrated advanced strategic planning and consultation competencies, and they have a proven performance track record. Consultants and senior consultants are usually the primary day-to-day contacts on core accounts. Consultants are forecasted for 100 to 120 client-service hours per month.

Senior Consultant is a senior-level position, commonly for professionals with more than seven years of industry experience. Senior consultants have demonstrated advanced competencies in all relevant areas, and they are viewed as builders, innovators, producers, managers, and leaders. Top senior consultants commonly fill management roles within the agency, so their forecasted client hours range from 80 to 100 per month.

Group Managers are senior consultants who manage a collection of accounts. They are responsible for the growth and management of all accounts and personnel within their group. Group manager responsibilities include: Complete monthly group client-hour forecasts.

Conduct annual staff performance reviews.