by Jared Belsky
Does this client even care about their own business as much as you do? The answer, surprisingly, is both no and yes. Yes, clients care a great deal about their marketing investment and agency partnership. They want to succeed and want you to succeed. However, clients are not as focused on you as much as you are on them, simply as a function of time constraints and prioritization.
We have to realize that being a true partner means reducing self-orientation and increasing self-awareness. Self-orientation is simply the notion of being inwardly focused at the expense of your clients and team members. You’re self-oriented when you are thinking only about your profit and your deadlines and not thinking about all other parties.
The takeaway is not to be any less passionate about your work but rather to think about how you demonstrate empathy and in turn become smarter about how and when you communicate.
Think about emailing early or late in the day when your clients are less frenzied and better able to find time to respond.
Think about subject lines that make your requests clear and easy to respond to.
Think about getting buy-in (versus tell-in) for all timelines.
Think about your tone and if you demonstrate empathy.
Think about managing your own team’s paranoia such that urgency never crosses into anger or passive aggressiveness.
Mastering the significance of the two pie charts in this chapter is a practical and visual way to better grasp this truth of understanding where you stand and how best to maximize the client-agency relationship from an expectation management perspective.
Three Habit Changes
Understand how your client maps their day. Work to ask for approvals during their calmer hours (perhaps early morning) and work to engage in more important dialogue during business hours, which are traditionally done via appointment and better done early in the morning or at the end of the day.
Use subject lines effectively. “Action Required Please: Quick Approval Request” vs. “Let’s Talk about Creative Approvals.”
If you want to guarantee your client sees something, then send it FedEx overnight to their desk. People always open their own FedEx deliveries.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who obsesses about why a client is not returning calls or emails, TO a leader who empathizes with your client’s other priorities to get the most out of the relationship.
Lesson 2
2. Get Out of Your Ivory Tower and into the Stores
“Get up there into the rafters and pack down some fertilizer pellets.”
—Jon Rosenthal, Former President and Owner, Dynamite Plant Food
If you want the client to consider you part of their inner circle, don’t view their business through a detached, academic lens. Get to know what they do intimately.
The Great Client Partner needs to understand the product and the business they are dealing with in a very detailed way. They need to understand how the product is used and consumed—even where it sits on a shelf. Too often, marketers know about their client’s products only via paper briefs and larger PowerPoint “decks” (also known as slide presentations).
Further, to be a good marketer, the Great Client Partner must have a deep understanding of the logistics of the business they are trying to lead.
Pole Signs
When I was in brand management at the Coca-Cola Company, working on the Fanta business, I wanted to make an impact. I was assigned to work on our Out-Of-Home signage (or OOH, which refers to advertising that consumers see out in the world, as opposed to on their televisions or in their magazines) to ensure our pole signs were more cutting edge. I took this assignment on with the trademark relish of a stubborn Ivy League kid out to prove that his pole sign creation would most assuredly be the thing to reshape the entire Coca-Cola Company.
I started by creating a brief to develop the most amazing, most cutting-edge pole sign ever designed. Surely, I would be the guy to create the one pole sign that got people driving at fifty-five miles per hour past a gas station to pull in and buy a Fanta twenty-ounce because of my superior orange color choice. With optimism, I pushed forward, and we found a vendor that would make a bright orange, glow-in-the-dark, glitter-based OOH masterpiece that could go on the poles at the gas stations, ensuring Fanta would stick out.
Flash forward about six months. While still working at the Coca-Cola Company, I was lucky enough to take two weeks in the field working in West Philadelphia, where a ton of Fanta was sold. I was riding along in this huge Coke/Fanta truck with the driver, a good-natured, straight-shooting guy I’ll call Gus. We drove his route, and I did my part to lift six-packs of Fanta in the blazing Philly summer heat. I was really just trying not to embarrass myself as my small arms got lost in the shadows created by Gus’s huge biceps.
Since I was doing my best, I got the sense that I was earning a bit of Gus’s respect, even if it was through sympathy. In the second week of my ride-along, we passed a gas station that—sure enough—featured a pole sign of my genius creation.
Gus said, “You see that, Jared? That’s what I was talking about. Advertising folks never think about the damn logistics or the real-freaking-world. They’re always up in their ivory tower.”
Gulping, I asked what he meant. Sure enough, he pointed at this pole sign that was now completely weather-beaten: muted orange, dull, the words barely visible.
“Jared,” Gus said, “do you know what’s outside?”
I said, “Uh, I don’t know what you mean.”
“What’s outside is weather, Jared, all sorts. Sun, rain, and wind,” Gus laughed in my direction. He went on to explain that pole signs need to take into account that weather, and that any brand guy who had logged the right time in the field would have understood this. The point is I simply did not spend enough time getting dirt under my fingernails to understand how the business runs. I should have gone out to look at gas station pole signs, understand weather effects, and really appreciate the physical world.
After Coca-Cola, I worked with a friend in the fertilizer business to try to upend Miracle-Gro. We saw a huge opportunity to design a more beautiful bottle than the old functional bottles we started with. We thought there could be beauty in these new bottles. As head of marketing, I was lucky to have a very supportive owner (and now friend) named Jon Rosenthal, who encouraged me to make unique packaging that really popped. With the help of a great team, we did indeed achieve that, as you can see in these before-and-after shots.
Incorporating a unique bottle shape, full coverage with the label, and bright, illustrative plant photos went a long way to making the packaging more beautiful.
But beautiful should have been just one part of the equation. Turns out that fertilizer goes through hell at a Home Depot. It sits in one-hundred-degree weather in Arizona and thirty-degree weather in Alaska. It gets nicked by pallet lifts and mashed under the weight of huge bags of grass seed. Long story short, the ink we ended up sourcing did not hold up under the stress of that weather, and the plastic could not take that sort of impact. Six months into the sales season, we had a lot of damaged product we had to take back or replace. Jon reminded me about the value of getting up in the rafters and packing down fertilizer, which meant I had to get dirty to understand the industry and the conditions.
I probably spent one hundred hours that next year volunteering at greenhouses and garden centers with Jon as my inspiration. I got to really understand the business, and this changed my viewpoint forever.
The importance of immersing yourself in your client’s business is a lesson that can be learned. But if you went on a factory tour a few times and maybe had to put on safety goggles—don’t kid yourself. That’s not immersion. You know it when you do it right.
Three Habit Changes
Get out into the field. Live near your product’s point of sale. Do you know how it does in the e
lements? How does it ship? What does it do on the shelf?
Before ever releasing a product, make sure you speak to people in the field. Go to your Publix, your GameStop, your Home Depot, or your convenience mart and speak to the folks in the stores, at the cash registers, or to the folks packing out the box store at two in the morning. You will learn a lot from these amazing people.
Volunteer for a while—whatever time you can spare—to really experience what things look like for your client’s products at the retail level. A client leader I knew actually got a job bagging groceries at a supermarket for a month to gain information on how things looked at the store level.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM being a leader who gives commands from a point of academia and Excel sheets, TO being a leader who spends more time in the stores, with your customers, in the field, and in the factories of your clients.
Bonus Habit Change
Bonus: Field Awareness Exercise
Check your team’s awareness. Administer this quiz to your extended internal team. For anyone who gets less than 90 percent correct, you should assume they don’t know nearly enough about your client’s business for you to truly earn the right to call yourself a business partner. If you are the leader of your team, copy the chart below, print it out, and start off your next meeting by administering this fun little test. The scores are not the point; what matters is that you can now engage your team in a dialogue about how well (or poorly) you collectively know of that key client about whom you thought you knew everything.
Question
Answer
How does your client make their product or execute their service?
How does your client make money? What is the value stream on both sides of the ledger (costs and revenue)?
What does it take for the product/service to arrive at store/web?
At street-level (if applicable), what are the top three challenges they face?
How is their competition hurting their business at the street level? What is happening at the shelf-battle level?
Have you attended at least three of the four quarterly conference calls this year?
What is the biggest threat to your client’s margin?
Do you understand (truly) how the entire sales process works from start to finish?
Lesson 3
3. The Statement of Work Is Not the Bible
You are a privileged custodian of your client’s time, work, and assets.
At the heart of the time-management debate lies a critical misunderstanding, which becomes the cancer that erodes so many great client-agent relationships. This concept is about who owns the hours. It’s easy to think that since the agency manages the projects, the agency also owns the hours—but actually the agency is merely the steward of those hours. The time was purchased by the client, who now fully owns them.
Really the core issue here is trust. How will you handle the client’s hours? If you have ever been around a creative agency or consultancy, you will frequently hear phrases like, “They are burning up our hours,” or, “Don’t they care about how I use my time?”
It’s a fair question and one that the Great Client Partner should have a good answer to. That requires leadership, and as it relates to time, there are three areas to lead in:
Help your team understand that the hours belong to the client and they are the custodian.
If you treat their hours like your own personal money and ensure continual alignment of interests, you will do great things.
Treat each hour like an investment unit. Be purposeful. If purpose is your North Star, then having healthy conflict with your clients will be welcomed.
Managing Time as It Relates to the SOW
The best advice I can dispense here is to understand the Statement of Work (SOW) that you have in place with your client is the source of most poor behaviors. Too many people look at a SOW like it’s the Bible when it should be treated like the Constitution. The Bible (regardless of your thoughts about it) was written thousands of years ago and cannot be changed. The Constitution, by contrast, is a document that was meant to be amended, changed, debated, and argued about by humans.
Often, you write your SOW when you know nothing about your client. Too often, what I see are relationships governed by SOWs drafted during your courtship years when you knew nothing about each other’s goals. Or, more specifically, drafted right after a pitch when your knowledge of a client’s business needs hovered at around two on a scale of one to ten. But a SOW can even be misleading in a mature relationship.
I once saw a SOW that existed to govern a social media relationship. This was in 2012 (the very early days of social media, so excuse the quaintness of this story) when the vanguard was to gain maximum followers and fans. I have altered the numbers below for simplicity’s sake, but they still exist to prove a point. Let’s just pretend this was a $600K annual SOW to help manage social channels. It was for the management of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, on the assumption they were of roughly equal importance at that moment in time to this particular client. Some fourteen months later, we woke up when we got a call from the client, who asked us, with some hint of aggravation, “How many Twitter followers do we have?”
My face got red as I realized the answer was a measly 138 Twitter followers. In other words, for a good deal of money, we were creating content and doing hard work that spoke to only 138 followers. The original intention was not the issue. The issue and the shame were in not realizing this much earlier and suggesting a change in the SOW that would represent a better match between costs and value to the client. You see, the failure was not having only 138 followers (that was a channel issue), but rather, we did not bring this to their attention as the wrong prioritization of their investment dollars. In this example, the team lacked self-awareness. The team had their heads down working so hard on the task at hand that nobody stopped to ask the larger questions. Self-awareness requires the deft ability to pause and ask questions as to how your actions fit into the bigger picture and how they are being perceived. I asked the account director at the time, and she truthfully commented she was ensuring we lived up to the SOW and our commitments. Her honesty, her hard work, and her commitment to the client was not in question. The lesson was that she let the SOW be the tail that wagged the dog.
A Great Client Partner owns the SOW and can use it, bend it, and shape it over time. A Great Client Partner stewards the SOW, questions it, and ensures it always provides mutual wins for both the agent and client. A Great Client Partner in this situation recognizes the SOW is not in rhythm with the needs of the moment and offers to change and evolve it as needed. In this example, we should have focused more of our resources, dollars, and time on the channels that were working and should have suggested we pause work on the Twitter account.
Ultimately, all the right behaviors start with realizing you are the custodian of your client’s hours. As a leader, you might be challenged to find some sort of way to turn this knowledge into a rally cry. At 360i, we did this by summoning wisdom from the late John Wooden, the famous basketball coach who framed it as “don’t mistake activity for achievement.” Too often in the services business, we are proud to show off our checklist of all the things we have done. Too often, it is just a list of things. Demand that you and the people you work with understand whether or not those are indeed needle-moving things.
Three Habit Changes
Vocabulary change: never call them “your hours.” They belong to the client.
Look at your SOW every six months or so and find ways to proactively amend or adapt it. Make this a ritual you do with y
our clients. If nothing else, have a healthy discussion with the client about what’s working and what could be adjusted. Don’t let the SOW ever become toxic to your project.
Do a benefit analysis. What percentage of the retained hours in the past three months were geared toward achievement versus task completion?
Your FROM → TO personal goals:
FROM a leader who lets the paperwork (contracts, SOWs) in their relationships guide the output, TO a leader who focuses on what moves the needle and makes that their true north.
FROM a leader who values activity, TO a leader who values aligned achievement.
Lesson 4
4. Healthy Paranoia Will Drive You to Succeed
One of my favorite stories that I have applied to my career and retaught countless times comes from a very quantitatively oriented economics book called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The story is about a turkey.
