One of the biggest bottlenecks in many agencies is that the agency owner is the only person who can develop strategies for clients or new business pitches. As you know, this causes a host of problems, not the least of which is then the agency owner can’t focus on doing his/her job. Most owners feel stuck – believing that strategic thinking is not something you can teach. But what if you could?
Adam Pierno has a long resume working with well-known agencies and brands. When his experience on the creative side led to a realization that there was no methodology that could help agencies bake strategic thinking into their business model, he put his research and experience into authoring two books on the subject and now helps agencies looking to enhance their strategic approach.
In this episode of Build a Better Agency, Adam and I talk about the necessity to expand an agency’s strategic thinking beyond one or two people. We look at specific ways to do this that can empower your entire team to think strategically. We also discuss the errors many agencies make in communicating strategy to clients and prospects and how to leverage strategic thinking as we begin to move beyond the pandemic.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- How to infuse strategic thinking throughout an agency.
- Different ways agencies can approach strategy.
- How to soothe the conflict points that can develop when strategy expands to the who team.
- Specific ways agencies screw up strategy during a pitch.
- The need to create a story connection between the strategy and the creative.
- The place for strategy in pitching.
- The importance of having a captivating storyteller share the strategy.
- How to help a team become better strategic thinkers.
- The need to document the steps of your agency’s strategic thinking.
- The secret to making clients want to stay with your agency as we begin to move into the next normal after the pandemic.
Over the last couple of years, many agencies have started reaping the benefits of embedding an account executive in a client’s office. By that I mean someone from the agency team literally has a desk or office in a client’s business for a set amount of time every week. This trend was growing prior to the pandemic and actually held its own during the work from home period of 2020. Now that more agencies and clients have returned to the office, this becomes a very viable option again. In this episode, I want to talk about what this means, how to do it well, and both the risks and value of doing it.
As an agency owner, your brain might jump to several potential problems that make you leery of such an arrangement. Truth be told, there are several benefits for your shop and your client. If done well, this can be a huge win for you.
It takes a bit of a learning curve, as well as putting the ideal employee with the right client. But, when done correctly, you create a really great hook that makes it nearly impossible for a client to consider taking their business anywhere else. In the process, as the agency owner, you cultivate a better, stronger, more connected relationship with the client organization.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Why clients love embedded employees
- How embedded employees guarantee that business’s growth
- The dark side of embedding employees
- How to protect yourself from having the employee poached
- Ways to help your embedded employee stay loyal to the agency
- The ideal employee to embed in a client’s office
- The benefits to the agency of having an embedded employee
“Without exception, embedded employees are able to grow that book of business.” @DrewMcLellanCLICK TO TWEET“You want an embedded employee to remember where they work and where their loyalties lie.” @DrewMcLellanCLICK TO TWEET“An embedded employee should be someone who bleeds the agency’s colors.” @DrewMcLellanCLICK TO TWEET“This is an opportunity for you as the agency owner to cultivate a better, stronger, more connected relationship with the business owner or CEO of the client organization.” @DrewMcLellanCLICK TO TWEET“You are setting a really great hook with an embedded employee and it can be a fantastic thing for both the client and the agency.” @DrewMcLellanCLICK TO TWEET
Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
- Email: drew@agencymanagementinstitute.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/drewmclellan
- Website: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/
Tools & Resources:
- My Future Self Mini-Course
- Sell with Authority (buy Drew’s book)
- Facebook Group for the Build a Better Agency Podcast
About the Author: Drew McLellan
For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops, and more.
- Leading agency owner peer groups
- Offering workshops for agency owners and their leadership teams
- Offering AE Bootcamps
- Conducting individual agency owner coaching
- Doing on-site consulting
- Offering online courses in agency new business and account service
Because he works with over 250+ agencies every year, Drew has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written several books, including Sell With Authority (2020) and been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
Who is responsible for keeping the agency’s work on time and on budget? That is an oft debated topic among agency owners. At AMI we believe that a specific role (Project Manager, Traffic Manager, etc.) to keep everyone and everything on track is a luxury if you have fewer than 10 employees and by the time you’re at 15-20 employees, it’s usually a necessity if you want to keep your team and clients happy. But who you hire and how they go about implementing a traffic system is a challenge many agency owners struggle with.
Ben Aston is a self-taught digital project manager with over 15 years experience in the agency world. Realizing how difficult his own learning path was and how few resources exist for those interested in developing these skills, he turned his focus to training others on how to develop the craft of project management.
In this episode of Build a Better Agency, Ben and I talk about what a project manager does and how this role will help grow your bottom line. We get into the nitty gritty of what makes for successful project management, including defining the skills for an ideal project manager, injecting flexibility into planning, reframing time tracking, and solving the problem of the dreaded “scope creep.”
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- At what size agency would a project manager make sense
- What skills creates an ideal project manager
- Why project management is such a challenge for a majority of agencies
- How to recognize project management issues
- The necessity for creative and craft briefs
- Solving the problem of “scope creep”
- How to inject flexibility into project planning
- Defining negative scope
- How to create effective templates
- The need to reframe time tracking
- Best practices for successful project management
The reality is, we spend so much time thinking and worrying about business development, and in most cases that exuberance is not really matched with the same level of excitement for our existing clients. Which is crazy because we all know that clients get much more profitable the longer we keep them. Despite knowing that – we keep making the same mistakes and jeopardizing our most important client relationships. What if we could avoid those mistakes?
Stacey Singer has a great love of how agencies combine business, creativity, and psychology. She has worked in agencies large and small and now she devotes her expertise to helping agencies build amazing client relationships that really hold up, even when things get rocky.
In this episode of Build a Better Agency, Stacey and I discuss why paying attention to existing client relationships is even more important than pursuing new clients. She walks through the need to try to imagine your relationship from the client perspective, as well as specific but seemingly small things she has learned that can sometimes damage that relationship.
We also dive into the need for a client satisfaction analysis, as well as why putting the client first doesn’t automatically mean blindly agreeing with whatever they ask for. Sometimes telling the client “no” leads to a stronger relationship.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Specific ways agencies mess up the client experience
- The need to see the client experience from the client’s perspective
- Simple ways agencies undermine trust with clients
- How to get a response from challenging clients
- The importance of explaining the implications for actions
- The error in interpreting client questions as an indication of a lack of trust
- The need for clear service standards
- How an exchange program with a client can be incredibly insightful for both sides of the relationship
- The danger in letting your agency needs seep through to the clients
- Why being invested in the client beyond just what your agency can offer can lead to more business actually
- How to tell the client ‘no’ but have it sound like a ‘yes’