by Jared Belsky
This chart is essentially the life story of Tom the Turkey. In the simplest terms, it’s about a turkey who is very skeptical of the humans around him as he first enters the turkey farm, but over time, he grows fatter and happier. He gets lazy, loves being fed, loves his turkey friends, and ignores anything that signals a problem, like the fact that some of his friends are starting to disappear.
As days and years go by, his confidence is growing. He gets more food. He gets fatter. On the day right before his demise, he is technically at his peak confidence.
And then, boom: death.
What happened? Thanksgiving happened! However, all the key performance indicators were telling Tom the Turkey he was thriving. This happens to us all.
I was leading an account named Ancestry.com for a period of time as executive sponsor. I loved this brand (and still do). Our team was absolutely crushing the business goals. We were beating the forecast on volume (subscriptions) and also beating the forecast on efficiency (cost per subscription). Each quarterly business review that went by, we would travel to San Francisco, have a great meeting and lean back, pleased at our chart, which went up and to the right.
You know that chart? The one where volume is going up and up and up. We were certain we were killing it. Then, one day, out of the blue (or was it?), the client called me to tell me they were taking the work in-house to handle it themselves.
How did we not see this coming?
Well, two things were going on: (1) false positives and (2) not looking for clues. To the first guilty charge, we kept cheering our achievements on volume of subscriptions. However, results alone do not make a healthy partnership. We were not leading them enough, perhaps, in strategy, or thought leadership.
To the second guilty charge, I was simply not looking for clues. Each quarter that went by, the client was adding head count to their roster. An analytics person here, a search person here, a project manager there. We could have seen it, but we had blinders on. We were not looking for warning signals because there was so much good, and that was all we wanted to see.
To some degree, I was Tom. And as a good friend of mine, Anthony Martinelli often says in quoting The Godfather, “Tom…you’re out.” Indeed, Tom was out. Tom was getting steak knives.
What can the Great Client Partner in training learn from this? The lesson is simple: beware of looking at false positives. Look for what could be wrong or what could be better.
I would also offer up that you try and use the “Contract for Client-Centric Healthy Paranoia” at the end of this chapter. This is something you can ask those who you manage to fill out. It forces them to go through the exercise of thinking deeply about what could be wrong versus what appears to be wrong on the surface. It then focuses the person on creating new wins or thought leadership not in response to an issue, but in the spirit of getting ahead.
Three Habit Changes
Provide clients the chance to give anonymous feedback every six months via a report card.
Have internal healthy-paranoia sessions each quarter with your team where you purposefully look for what could be wrong versus just celebrating what’s going right.
Make sure the relationship is about more than just results (fleeting) and more about thought leadership. Thought leadership is enduring. It means your client thinks about you or your company when they need to solve a tough business challenge. It’s an elastic compliment. As the client changes, they still come to you to solve those thorny challenges.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who thinks things are going too well for there to be a problem, TO a leader who looks for subtle signals about relationship health when and where others don’t think to pay attention.
A Contract for Client-Centric Healthy Paranoia
Three things I or my team will commit to over the next sixty days to more aggressively and uniquely sniff out potential issues that might exist with my client:
1.
2.
3.
Three things I or my team will do to generate more thought leadership credibility and stay ahead of client issues, even though there is nothing wrong right now:
1.
2.
3.
Lesson 5
5. Prepare to Present
Public speaking is hard. If you’re not proficient at it yet, don’t let anyone try to make you feel better by patting you on the back and telling you, “It will come with time.” It won’t. It’s just hard. It requires practice and perseverance.
When I was twenty-seven and in the first year of my MBA program at Emory in Atlanta, I was part of a four-person team that won an Amazing Race-like charity drive where teams raised money for a nonprofit without having a single dollar in startup funds.
After a short moment of euphoria at our success, I learned I would have to present the story of our victory to over one thousand people at Emory during the ceremony. I got up to the podium, started to speak, and only a whisper came out. Shortly after, sweat came out…and continued to come out. My blue shirt betrayed me, and my armpits were clearly flooding with anxiety. To this day, I try and avoid blue dress shirts.
So now I was a whispering, sweating, nervous fool. It got worse—there appeared to be a vice on that podium, squeezing the life out of me. I can’t prove its existence, but I can tell you for damned sure it was pressing on my chest cavity and not allowing me to speak. I made my remarks short and rushed off the stage. I resolved to become an eight-out-of-ten in public speaking within five years.
The number one issue in terms of self-awareness for Great Client Partners is often the divide between how great they assume they are at being persuasive and how good they actually are.
How you communicate is critical to your job as a Great Client Partner. However, most client leaders simply wing it. Great leaders have the ability to change the trajectory of relationships, campaigns, brands, and teams with a thoughtfully prepared speech and presentation. For every important speech or talk you have to give, you should consider having a routine. A routine is a good way to condition yourself for optimal performance for these situations. Routines and habits help you develop until something becomes natural.
Here are six steps that have worked for me, for your consideration:
Step 1: Write an abstract—This should be a paragraph that encapsulates the essence of the presentation you envision giving. This abstract also has a dual purpose of aligning your goals with your constituents. Whether you’re presenting to a demanding boss or stressed-out peers, writing an abstract allows you to understand and agree on the essence of the presentation before getting to the outline, or PowerPoint.
Step 2: Write a bulleted outline—This piece of the process is literally typing out ten or more things that your presentation must do and in what prioritized order. These bullets should nail the key points you are going to try and make and note any supporting detail that you might have or that you might need to gather.
Step 3: The script—Write out a table that looks like the one that follows on page 55. This will be your full talk track, which is essentially what you plan to say during the big day, word-for-word, accompanied by your ideal visual that would populate a slide in your deck (see the table that follows; the “Script” column should be a specific script as though you could deliver the perfect words on the big day). This ritual has two purposes. First, writing this out in a Word document format allows for faster iteration and changes with your collaborators. It is interesting, but once you build a slide, you are less likely to make meaningful changes due to the cost of labor. Changing words on a page is far easier. Second, writing a script allows you to develop your true speech and talk flow, whereas a PowerPoint focuses you on visuals, and then you neglect the flow, often until it’s too late.
After you’ve done steps 1 to 3, it’s time to rehearse. These next three steps are all about movin
g you away from actually reading anything during your presentation and making you seem natural and freely able to respond to the challenges of the presentation environment.
Step 4: Practice—Take your script, read it, and rehearse it a minimum of seven times. Use a mirror for the first five and use a friend or loved one for the last two. If you don’t have anyone nearby, then film yourself—it’s just a way to add a bit of pressure and realism.
Step 5: Refine—Throw out that script and reduce each slide on the talk track to two “trigger bullets,” written on index cards. In other words, if the script you were trying to remember reads, “There are huge tailwinds in the internet advertising business as marketers shift budgets from linear television to Facebook, Google, and other data-driven options chosen for their target ability and accountability,” then make your bullets on your card simply read “tailwinds” and “shift to data-driven options.” This way, you can focus on those two areas, and the details will fill themselves in. If you continue to memorize your script word for word, then the minute you forget just one word, you will freeze up.
Step 6: Repeat—Practice a couple more times just with the index cards. Remember, you threw away your script, and you are in the flow now.
And now you are ready.
Script Table
Slide
Script
Visual
1
Welcome to our offices. Thank you for coming to learn more about our team, culture, and our offerings around data-reporting, dashboarding, and data visualization.
Picture of a CMO dashboard
2
Today, we will be discussing three key areas. First, we will focus on getting clean data. Second, we will discuss the data-visualization options available. Third, we will discuss how to weigh options across efficacy and cost.
Bulleted text highlighting the three key aspects of today’s conversation
3
Getting clean data requires proper usage of APIs as well as having someone on your staff with the ability to manipulate the data into a way that is organized correctly into tables.
Visualization of clean and structured data organized into tables.
One parting note just to reemphasize. There is a huge secondary advantage to writing out your talk in this manner of a grid, which is buy-in. Giving a big talk or speech is, by itself, already really hard. Risking nonalignment with your boss would simply be even more nerve-wracking. By creating a slide-by-slide script, you can share this draft early in the process. This is far more preferable to you thinking you have created some oratorical masterpiece which your boss has not yet blessed. This scripting grid will save you. Embrace it.
Three Habit Changes
Start off your next big talk preparation with a series of simple bullets on what the essence of your talk is about.
Utilize a script grid.
Get buy-in early from your boss or partners using your script grid so you can feel confident everyone is in the tent with you and cheering for you.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who communicates instinctually, TO a leader who prepares in a purposeful manner for each opportunity.
Lesson 6
6. Organize Effective Arguments
As an aspiring Great Client Partner, one of your main jobs is to advocate. To advocate for the work you represent, to advocate for resources for your team, or to advocate for more compensation from your client so you can, in turn, do better work. I have been observing how client leaders make arguments in the interest of advocacy for almost twenty years, and it occurs to me these arguments are often haphazard and very emotional in nature.
Learning how to advocate in a rigor-based manner is not easy, but there is a methodology. Next, you see the CRER formula: Context, Risk/Reward, Economics, and Recommendation.
Let’s take this methodology for a spin and use a very common situation for a client leader at a consulting company, agency, or any services or sales organization, who is advocating for internal resources to get a “sizzle reel” or video case study created. A sizzle reel is essentially a video of greatest hits which allows you to help the client see how much great work you have produced in a very exciting and positive light. They cost upwards of $10,000 sometimes (when you include soft costs), so the investment is one that typically needs approval by someone on the executive team. I chose this particular marketing request to role-play, because it is a very common request in our world, and many team leaders want to create these.
Here are two scenarios:
Before the “CRER” Methodology
Dear Jared, I have this killer idea to make a video for this upcoming meeting that will make it way, way better. It’s a very important meeting with a very senior guy. I think if we make this video, it will impress him and get us some more attention. We need to turn it around in four days, but it will be worth it. Trust me on this one. Let’s make the investment! #awesomevideo #comeonjared #sayyes!
After the “CRER” Methodology
Context/Executive Summary: 360i is finally getting in front of the SVP of US Acquisition, who only knows us in a very tactical way and has never seen our work in its most flattering light. As such, we want to share a five-minute sizzle reel with him to make Search, Display, and Analytics appear as big as we know them to be. During the last quarter, our margin profile was healthy, as was team morale.
Risk/Reward Profile: This is a $10 million client, and the meeting is with the head of the entire piece of business, which comprises $8.5 million of the total. There is an RFP coming in October. The risk is that he continues to think of us as small ball. The reward is the ability for him to see us as his lead thought partner who has driven their business in the past and into the future.
Economics: This video will have:$8,000 in hard costs (production, etc.)
$2,000 in soft costs
Ten hours of blended resources at $200/hour
(Note: This is 80/20 economics because it’s not tortured math. This is not getting into a more complicated breakdown of all costs, such as listing the production costs, for example. It’s not that understanding isn’t important—it is—but at times, that level of detail can delay or cloud the argument.)
Recommendation: I am asking for an executive sign-off in the form of go/no-go by Wednesday.
As you can see, the argument in the second example, after the CRER, is far more buttoned up and easy to follow, and an executive can more easily weigh in with an answer. Practice this and make it a habit, and you will find your ability to get decisions in your favor will increase.
Given that this chapter sits within the larger premise of improving your self-awareness, the true key learning here is that executives are very busy. Your clients or your own CEO has no time for long and complex arguments. They have to size up 500+ emails per day, use clues available to them, and make tough calls. Your ability to succeed will increase if you can get them exactly what they need, and no more, in the fewest number of words. The CRER format will remind you to focus on the key elements.
Three Habit Changes
Practice the CRER methodology every time you ask for resources.
Become proficient with 80/20 economics by understanding how money in your business is made, both in general and as it relates to you specifically, and where the costs are.
Work with your team to structure emails with CRER to clients when you are asking them for anything—from copy approval to green-lighting of a campaign—and you will find response time gets cut in half.
Your FROM → TO
personal goal:
FROM being a leader who makes an argument rooted in emotion, TO a leader that uses a simple and principled method for making an argument.
Lesson 7
7. Be Comfortable Talking about Finances
Words matter.
As a Great Client Partner, being thoughtful about your word choices is critical. It sets the tone for your team, but also decides how your team presents itself to the client. When it comes to money and financials, word choice is exponentially important. Humans are very awkward when it comes to money conversations. This discomfort is rooted in lack of education and practice. Thankfully, both of those issues can be resolved. First, let’s talk about creating a better service-industry financial vocabulary, and then let’s spend time talking through some common financial discussions you can prepare for in advance.
Here are some commonly used phrases that tend to be deadly if used incorrectly, and a few great substitute choices.
Offensive Finance Term
Danger of Word
New Term
Why?
Burning Hours
Creates a feeling that hours are tossed in the garbage or lit on fire.
Utilization, Pacing
