Brand Central Station

What are the attributes that makes one person a better account manager than another?  I’m sure there are plenty of managers out there with their own “picture” of a great account manager candidate, but based on my 20+ years’ experience, here are some of the things I think make a difference: (more…)

I’m not sure why clients never understood this … but when it comes to getting the best out of their ad agency or PR firm for the least amount of money, clients turn from being “marketing partners” into “general contractors from hell.”

I an’t tell you how many times I’ve received RFP’s from clients that read more like a purchase order for gravel than a request for our best thinking on a tough marketing assignment.  I’ve always wanted to respond: “Thanks for the bid request – we have a sale on four-color ads this week but we’re a little short on brochure ideas, can we arrange for a two-for-one swap?”

Now comes a study commissioned by Jones & Bonevac that reports at least 30% of marketing agency staff time is ineffective or wasted due to poor communications from their clients.

See, it was just as we suspected … it’s all the clients’ fault.

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No, it’s not the latest iteration of Mad’s classic “Spy vs Spy” comic drama.

When it comes to advertising creative, it doesn’t always have to come down to an “all or nothing” proposition, does it?  For small and mid-sized businesses especially, the hard reality is that many times the design, content and sometimes finished production of a  piece needs to be done in-house or it won’t get done at all.  Some agencies look the other way, some get all “high and mighty” about it.

Here’s the reality: it’s gonna happen, get over it. 

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This is from a great post directed to freelancers on the Freelancefolder blog.

Freelace writer Laura Spencer provides a list of 45 questions for every freelancer to ask a new client (the entire list is posted after the jump).  Looking over that list, though, it occurs to me that many (if not all) of these questions are relevant things for an account manager to ask an agency – or internally – for a marketing manager to ask a new “client” inside their own company.

Some of these questions might be considered a bit mundane.  In my experience, new client relationships are often filled with the excitement of the “win” for the agency and the high expectations of a client who has been wooed by great creative and charming personalities. 

Questions like “Which is more important, quality or speed?” seems to have the potential to take all the romance out of the relationship right away.  (Double entendre intended.)

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If you’re like me, nearly every e-card you receive this year will either end up in your Spam folder or all of the images will be blocked by your email client (I use Outlook).  Instead of downloading images and dealing with the various “cyber-security” issues associated with these emails, I usually just note who sent the mail and then send it to the trash.

I have no idea how many clever Photoshop examples, flash games or silly photographs I’ve missed over the years.  But what’s more interesting is to think how many of these senders think they’ve made a positive impression on me when, in fact, they’ve made no impression at all.

This may be one of those times when going “old school” is the best rule. 

Alan Underkofler writes a blog dedicated to “following up” with customers, prospects and the other people who are important in your business life.  Throughout the month of December, he’s been trying to reinforce the importance of sending Holiday Cards to your contact base.  In fact, last week, Alan reminded us that it’s still not too late!

If you happen to be one of those thinking “it’s too late to send holiday cards at this point” or “does sending holiday cards really make a difference in my business?”, I would encourage you to consider recent research by Hallmark:  Hallmark found that businesses say they use greeting cards as a “kind of investment in their business…  They’re investing in customer relationship with the hopes that it will pay back”.  The company has conducted research that found at least half of customers who received holiday cards from businesses say they are more likely to continue doing business with that company versus another one. 

Alan recommends using an online service called SendOutCards which allows you to upload a contact list, select a card, type in a personal message and then have your cards in the mail the next day.

My business partner and I have a meeting with a client today.  We’re going over marketing and media plans for 2009 and talking about a whole host of issues related to what we accomplished this past year and where we’re going in the next.

But when I talk to some of my friends who are either freelancers or own their own small agencies, they’re too busy scrambling to get work done for this year to even think about sitting down with clients and talking about the year to come.  And that’s a major problem.

As I mentioned in my post on Marketing in a Recession, you have to make sure your happy customers are exactly that: happy.  And that’s because the 80/20 rule quickly turns into a 90/5 situation.  The economy will force more of your eggs into a smaller basket – to not take the time now to make sure that basket belongs to you is foolish.

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On-going education is a vital part of any professional growth plan – and that’s especially true for marketers, PR flacks and ad folks.  After all, aren’t we supposed to be setting the cultural bar for the rest of society?

Scary thought, isn’t it?

Well, now is a good time to consider how you’re going to stay sharp for clients.  PRWeek’s Next Conference (scheduled for next week in NYC) looks to put people in touch with various “thought leaders” in the world of digital marketing and online spin-meistering.  The best part, though, is it looks like there’s still room to get in to the conference.

Here’s the line-up (from a recent promotional e-mail):

• A Q&A on the economics of publishing with Bob Nolan, managing partner of Halyard Capital (new speaker)
• Predictions about what’s coming, from experts like Tom Arrix of Facebook (new speaker), Steve Rubel of Edelman, Peter Kim of Dachis Corporation, and Evan Neufeld of ComScore
• Roundtable conversations covering word-of-mouth marketing, and taking risks on the digital frontier
• Keynote on the future of digital media by Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal
• Killer content, covered by Bonnie Fuller, trendspotter Marian Salzman, and Michael Zimbalist, head of R&D at The New York Times Company
• Lessons about how top in-house teams like IBM are organizing for success in the digital world
• A model for the next generation in PR leadership, including digital know-how and media expertise.

We won’t be able to make it, but would love to hear from some PR and marketing folks who manage to attend.  Be sure to make your reservation today.  Or e-mail pilar.mustafa@prweek.com with a question or two.

One of the greatest challenges (and most fun thing) about being an account manager is that clients often look to you when it comes to growing their business. They want answers to their questions or, at the very least, suggestions on what to do next.

And the one thing they don’t want to hear is that everything they’re planning to do looks great and you’d be glad to implement it for them.

(Aside: I used to work with a creative director that called AE’s who just nodded in agreement with the client and brought the work back to the agency, “parrots” and had a picture of a pirate with a big, nasty parrot on his shoulder. I knew when I was in trouble for being too complacent because my name would be pinned to the parrot.)

As a point of fact, you owe it to your client to think about all the markets that hold potential for them. If that requires a little extra research (whether it be reading or actually spending time in the community), that’s a small investment to make in a relationship. Exploring the possibilities presented by ethnic or minority markets is a great example.

Once you understand the media landscape for various ethnic groups, you should begin to see the potential for opportunity. Broaching the subject with your client, however, can be a tricky proposition. Here are some tips on how to do that:

1) Collect market information from the client that would help you identify the nature of the relationship they currently have with a specific minority group.2) Investigate the market potential online. There are plenty of online databases and resource groups that can provide insights into almost any aspect of the major ethnic groups in the USA.

3) Talk to/interview a handful of people that fit the ethnic profile of the group you’re interested in. Try to capture, in their words, why your client’s product or brand is important to them.

4) Prepare a presentation that explains the differences in perceptions and perceived advantages of your brand (and, ideally, the competitions’ brands) from the point of view of the ethnic market(s) in review.

5) Find allies (other agencies, freelancers, journalists, etc.) who accurately represent the point of view of the customer. Make sure they’re integrated into your team.

When you present your findings and recommendations, be prepared for a two-part reaction. At first, the client might seem interested and gracious – at least in the presence of guests. After your allies leave, though, be prepared for the hard questions to come out.

Clients who are comfortable with the white, mainstream media, are often uncomfortable with considering ethnic marketing opportunities. Ironically, the initial reaction (and it’s more common than not) is that marketing through ethnic media or with customized messages is “pandering” to one group or another. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

You need to point out the benefits of cross-cultural branding and the application of the same principles inside our own country.

Despite their own discomfort, clients will take your recommendation under consideration. Be prepared to play a waiting game on this kind of opportunity, but keep bringing it to the forefront – especially if a competitor takes advantage of the opportunity before your client.

The sooner you can get your client thinking about the entire market, the better your client will fare (and the more work for your agency and its partners).

Very often, when it comes to presenting out-of-the-box, creative thinking to clients, the biggest sales job has to happen inside the agency.

It’s a shame, really. Clients love to see innovative thinking but many times the folks that work back at the agencies (both PR and advertising-focused) get into a project mindset that is great for getting work out the door but not so good when it comes to generating the next big idea. Clients often refer to creative burn-out as a reason for initiating new agency searches.

The benefits of unsolicited innovation for a client can be difficult to define on the P&L and even harder to find with the account team. Creating new advertising campaigns, conducting unsolicited research or pestering vendors for new ideas or special deals takes time and effort. An effort that is often minimized or overlooked entirely by the account manager.

It’s tough enough to do the work; to do it with very little information, no client input and limited resources is almost impossible. To then have the effort dismissed by an account executive is often the final straw. The only consolation for those team members who get diss’d is the realization that AE’s who commit this error against the account team are hurting themselves worse than they can imagine.

It’s time to turn this situation around and lead the team to victory.

Account managers first have to understand the value of having a client perceive the account team as interested, engaged, passionate and knowledgeable about his business. The easiest – and best – way to do this is to present new ideas, concepts, research and programs to the client for his review and comment. There shouldn’t be a separate charge for this service. If you manage your budgets right, there should be plenty of opportunities for the team to think about the client’s future and then use available knowledge assets to conceive possible executions.

The account team has to recognize the value of having a client who is convinced of their interest, passion and knowledge of his business. Clients who love their agencies don’t leave them. And with an average shelf-life of 3 years, any client who is happy with the nature of the partnership he has with his agency is likely to stay past that deadline. That spells job security and more for all the members of the account team, not just the AE.

Initially, unsolicited ideas should be presented to the client as a teaching opportunity. Present the ideas to the client with a request to learn why it is or is not a good idea for him. This soft-sounding procedure will help you identify where the client sits politically inside his organization as well as how much the client knows and understands about the state of his industry or profession. This is a border-staking expedition and everything you learn about the client (i.e. his likes and dislikes, his areas of interest and expertise, the budget and political challenges he faces) should be relayed to the account team for future reference.

As time goes by, the ideas and concepts generated by the account team will come closer and closer to the strategic goals of the client’s organization and (hopefully) will fall within the client’s expectations of budget and production timelines. That’s when, as the account manager, you’re able to start making the change from just presenting the work to selling the work. If you do your job well, new ideas will create referral opportunities for you within the client’s own organization. That business expansion strategy can be both profitable and tremendously satisfying.

Both to the client and to your account team back at the agency.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to tell a client: “I know you know the answer to this question, but we really need to hear it from the customer to see what they actually know and understand.”

In fact, in my experience, this has been the single, largest impediment to market research when it comes to “selling” the service to a client. They just don’t want to do it because they don’t think they’ll learn anything new. The fact is, usually, just the opposite.

But let’s take a look at the objection and figure out the best way to make your case:

First off, clients are often in the position of having all the answers when it comes to dealing with account managers – especially new ones. Decisions and requests made by the client often go unchallenged early on in the relationship which may be respectful but often creates a bias that can work against the AE later on in the relationship.

The best thing to do is to concentrate your questioning in three specific areas – at least early on in the relationship with a new client. Keep them focused on the three areas where they have the most influence and, as you’ll soon see, concern: project scope, budget and deadlines. If a new account manager is to get off on the right foot with a client, the AE has got to become a “credible expert” when it comes to making and keeping promises related to what work will be done, when it will be done and how much things will cost.

These three things are vitally important to a client for one, simple reason. Failure in any of these areas reflects directly on his or her ability to manage the account manager and the agency. These are, in effect, personal performance standards. Failure to perform could be cause for termination – of the agency, the AE or the client!

As an account manager, you have to establish your credentials and credibility in these areas first before you can start digging in to the issues that will lead to opportunities for insightful market research that could make a difference to your client’s brand.

Once the client is comfortable with your ability to perform on the things that matter most to their job security, you’ll find you have an opportunity to start thinking “proactively” about their business. And that, eventually, leads to a realization that both the client and the agency need to know more about the client’s customer than what is readily available at the client’s office.

In fact, it’s during this second step – getting to know the customer –where an account manager can create a long-term bond with a client and make the move from “supplier” to “counselor.”

Start first by investing some time and effort of your own into getting to know the people your client needs to convince. If you’re working on a consumer product, use the product yourself or visit the retail locations where the product is sold. Once you’ve seen the kind of people who use the product, find some friends, family or neighbors who “fit” the apparent demographic of the customer. Ask them why they would consider using that product, what it does for them, how it makes them feel.

Similar insights can be gathered on B2B clients, as well. You might not be able to spend time with members of the target market, but you can certainly call trade associations and magazines and talk to people who are intimately involved with the business. Take notes and try to put yourself in their position. Try to understand and identify the possible obstacles that might stand in your client’s way when they try to convince the customer to buy.

These insights, no matter how crude, are vitally important to your long-standing relationship with the client. Because you took the effort to get to know their customer, your stock will go up with 99+% of all clients. (The other 1%, we’ll deal with in another blog post.) The quality of the insights you share will have an effect on the client, too.

If you’ve been an astute, observant student, you are bound to make some observations that are valuable to the client. This breaks the ice so you can enter the third, and final, piece of your argument in favor of market research.

As soon as the client realizes that you might know more about his customer than he does, his attitude will change (usually for the better). If you can show how this knowledge can be used to create both a manageable project (where you have already established your credibility) and an expected result (to determine “return” on the marketing investment), you’ll be a star.

More importantly, you’ll be at a place where both you and your client have a better understanding of the value and importance of market research.

It sounds good, but it isn’t easy. It takes a combination of technology and technique to really be an effective, collaborative worker.

Corporate leaders we interviewed said that their companies offered very little training in collaboration but they try to hire individuals who demonstrate an ability to work well with others. “The ability to build and foster relationships is a trait that we look for in new hires,” explains a senior marketing executive at a national hospitality company.

“Collaborative skills are in short supply in most new hires,” says consultant Peter Davidson. “It’s a fundamental skill going all the way back to learning to share as toddlers.” But companies seem ill-prepared to continue developing that skill in the workplace short of providing new technologies that are supposed to foster collaboration.

“I’m a sort-of new hire myself,” claims Jinal Shah a recent college graduate, new employee and blogger living in the Northeastern US. “However I wasn’t spoon-fed. I was just thrown in and I learned my way quickly.”

While some companies provide mentoring or buddy programs for new hires, others leave assimilation into the corporate culture up to the new hire. The result can be a stifling of creativity and intimidation when it comes to collaboration. An executive currently working inside one of the top three auto companies responded to our inquiry on this matter with the following insights:

“There is an awareness that new hires will not be “accepted” by the old guard, but 110% of the burden is placed upon the new hire and no attention is placed upon changing the worst aspects of the old culture.”

So, as tough as it is to bring in new employees with strong collaborative talents, how do the best companies go about leveraging the skills and abilities of their human resource? There seem to be some common themes in the businesses we interviewed:

1) Knowledge and information was transferred from text-based repositories to more interactive medias (i.e. a wiki or some other interactive database structure) that provided both access to the information and the ability to add/modify content on the fly;2) The transformation to a project management scheduling tool that was both web-based and interactive, allowing workers to set their own production schedules, share information, etc.;

3) Clear and objective direction from managers tasked with keeping “the big picture” in full view and instructed not to worry about the small stuff;

4) Active engagement by management when things went astray – including the disciplining of team members who could not stay on task or get jobs done on time – in essence a higher standard of accountability;

5) The development of trust between all members of the collaborative team and between the teams and management, thereby avoiding devious politics and micro-management;

6) Benchmarking and measurement of results to use for constructive feedback.

Interestingly enough, most of the innovations required to create a collaborative workplace involved changes in behavior (by both employees and management) and were not, necessarily technology-reliant.

Maybe there’s a greater lesson to learn here?

Clients can be horribly indecisive. Is it that they’re never entirely sure of what they want or that they’re not entirely interested in working with you right now? You don’t ever really know.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough … there’s nothing worse than thinking you have reached an agreement with a client on an assignment only to find out you don’t know everything you really needed to know. (Note: some creative types consider this a kind of sport, especially with first-year account managers.)

The result of your ignorance can be missed deadlines, increased budgets, pissed off clients.

How do you avoid this problem? Essentially, what you need to do is get a more objective understanding of what the client is trying to accomplish. Understand the strategy behind the request, first, and you’ll find it easier to provide guidance to your team members and to identify potential additional business for down the road.

The strategic visioning process, outlined on our BrandCrafting blog, works for corporate and product brands alike.

Here are some things to keep in mind when working with a client to set their “vision” for a project or account:

1) Understand how the client defines “success” – get them to discuss success on their own terms. How are they going to know if what they spent was good for their company? Who needs to be happy with the outcome? What are the long-term benefits of a continued relationship?2) Part of having a clear vision of success is being able to identify (fairly accurately) the financial benefits of success. Once a client can objectively identify the financial outcomes of a successful effort, they can objectively identify a budget to spend in order to generate the anticipated “return” on their investment.

3) Work with the client to describe their “vision” from the point of view of the customer/end-user. Are there any insights that result from this conversation? Can you identify any measurable actions that might help you set performance metrics down the road?

As you can probably tell, a discussion with a client on this level will require account managers to be better prepared and educated on the nature of the client’s business, their customers, competition and media. It’s well worth the investment, though, since these kinds of conversations successfully position your firm as a strategic partner rather than just a vendor.