by Jared Belsky
Refocuses the conversation on how the hours are being used, not that they are burning hot.
Small Client
Allows certain folks at the agency to believe the client is not important.
Growth Client
Allows you to reposition the client as one where you can be nimble and pilot new ideas and ways you work. There is no such thing as a small client.
The Great Client Partner, though, does not just have to focus on wording in front of their team; they also need to have some very difficult conversations around money with procurement, partners, and clients. That could fill its own book, so instead, I am going to select the largest and most common trap questions and deconstruct some very modern approaches to answers that create productive debate.
Most Common Procurement/Client Objection: Your rates seem very expensive!
What is going on? Procurement or your client is signaling to you that you are expensive. This is very common and could very well be true. In this economic environment, you will always hear this. It might be real (you are too expensive), it could be psychological (it feels your hand is always out), or it could be even bad information (as in the client just does not have ideal data for their objection). Whatever the case, perception is reality in the services business.
What is the issue? “Expensive” is a relative term. As the Great Client Partner, you need to find out how the client defines “expensive,” get better information, and ultimately try and steer the conversation to value. Value is a great topic around which to align. Value can be debated.
How the Great Client Partner deals with this question:“We are very comfortable that our billable rates offer great value to our clients, relative to the industry. We’ve benchmarked these against the 4A’s comp survey, and we know our people are much better and more expensive than the average agency. We are always happy to talk about value, team construction, overall FTE allocations by position, and work together to find the right team that can win and move the needle against the assignment that the client gives us. We would love to talk about value together. I would ask, kindly, if we can learn how you view us as expensive, though. Is that relative to the other agencies who work with you? Is that relative to a benchmarking survey you have? Can you help us better contextualize this? Do we have too much account and too little analytics support? Are we too senior with not enough junior support?”
By moving to these questions, you are working together with your client or procurement person to solve the real problem. This is not about tricks. You can’t trick your client or procurement. They are smart. They actually want to work with you and solve things with you, but first you both need to invest in understanding where you are coming from.
Beyond speaking to procurement, your other financial role as a client leader is understanding what levers you can pull to improve the health of the client. Many leaders make the mistake of assuming there is little they can do—this could not be more wrong (in a good way). See the chart that follows to understand the full nature of the levers available to you as the client leader to improve the health of the account.
The notion in this chart is that the Great Client Partner can indeed affect a lot of change, and that change comes in several buckets. For Revenue, this is your ability to either grow the business, or at least grow the health of the business, by smart Statement of Work creation, good team construction, accurate timesheet compliance, and being smart about investment work. For Unbillable Labor, there are going to be times when it makes sense to invest into the business and do a solid for the client but keep track of how often you do so and be thoughtful and rigorous in terms of how you justify when to go beyond the scope.
As the client leader, you also can control costs by being thoughtful and prudent about travel expenses. The point is, there is much you can control. I see so many client leaders upset about what they don’t control, but few realize how much of a difference they can make on practical matters.
Dealing with money and finance is a tricky thing for a client leader. On the one hand, you need to be a great steward of your agency business. You need to look out for your team, their hours, and the overall health of the business. On the other hand, you need to service the client and understand there are times when overinvestment is critical or when waiving a data-overage fee is just needed to preserve and extend trust. Financial management in the advertising world is not the same as being a CPA, largely because knowing what counts can be a bit more subjective.
There is a great Einstein quote that goes, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.” The point is sort of like saying, “Know what matters in your metrics, and know what matters to the client, and focus there.” Don’t worry about every single penny on either side to the point that it clouds your judgment. Be smart, but never be penny wise and pound foolish. Money conversations make, or more often break, relationships.
Three Habit Changes
Avoid ever using the word “profitability” around your larger team to focus on the work and team morale. Instead, use words like “client health.”
Practice procurement conversations before they actually happen by role-playing with a team member.
At the end of every month, find time to look back to see if you’ve used the drivers in the previous chart to improve the health of the client and teams you manage.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who is clumsy around financial vocabulary, TO a leader who is confident and purposeful.
Lesson 8
8. Don’t Protect Territory, Seek Productivity
“I would rather have a smaller piece of something bigger than a larger piece of something smaller.”
—Michael Cohn, Founder of Cloud Sherpas and Managing Director of Techstars Atlanta
I have begun this chapter with a quote from a close friend of mine, someone who is in the technology and start-up space. He was a founder of Cloud Sherpas, a company that had a great exit to Accenture, and then he became Managing Director of Techstars Atlanta. As founder of Cloud Sherpas, Michael had a tough choice. He could stay as CEO of his company, focus on territory and title, or he could bring in the people needed to get it to the next level and focus on productivity.
Michael chose the second, and he’ll always be an inspiration to me and others for that move. This was a choice of productivity over territory on the grandest of stages with so much at stake.
The good client leader is trained to grow their accounts. A Great Client Partner knows that growing your account means growing the client’s business. Further, it means that, on occasion, you might need to shrink your own remit in order to preserve your agency’s relevance, trustworthiness, and long-term ability to grow.
There was a very important client we worked with at the agency: AARP. They were a client for whom we did certain areas of performance digital media, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It was a very healthy relationship, and one that lasted for almost seven years. The senior clients were incredibly supportive, kind, and smart. They pushed us hard and raised our goals each year for traffic and quality of visitors, and each year our amazing team beat those goals. A very healthy relationship indeed.
I was executive sponsor on the piece of business (the accountable executive), so I remember it very well. As time went on, I began to understand that from the client’s perspective, we were viewed as incredible partners and custodians of their media budgets. However, as a content company, they began to realize they needed to invest more money internally on their own content destiny. They hired content and SEO experts to keep this very important area close to their business. As they staffed up, we could tell that something was changing in terms of how they viewed our SEO practice. They felt that our recommendations were strong, b
ut they realized their destiny was to own more of this in-house and to go with a different model. There were hints along the way, but we did not see them.
Finally, one day, the call came. In any services industry, you know this call. It’s the call where your client tells you something is not working out. It feels horrible every time. But if you use those calls as a learning opportunity, they can be instructive. This was no exception. My takeaway from my call with my contact there, Nataki, who was head of their digital operations, was simple. They were starting to feel that for this one service, SEO, the match was no longer there, and it was starting to spill over into the broader relationship. I asked her for twenty-four hours to think.
Nataki is a rare client who can deliver bad news in a way that still feels fair and compassionate. Still, it stung. After picking myself up off the ground, I talked it over with my team. What we all realized in that moment was that we had better fire ourselves from SEO in order to save the bigger and more important relationship. Sure, we could have fought! We could have showed where we had been successful for them, putting ourselves on probation. We could have doubled down on the team and resources, and put together an innovation roadmap or something sexy to demonstrate renewed focus.
Instead, we took a step back. We thought about mutual alignment. Alignment is an extremely important issue for a Great Client Partner. (There’s a whole lesson devoted to it later in the book.)
AARP, at heart, is a content provider. And content is the heart of SEO. It was easy to realize it was in this client’s best interests to bring SEO in-house. We also realized it was in our interest to be loved for what we did well for them. I called Nataki the next day, and we both acknowledged it was time to move on from this service line.
Nataki respected our self-awareness (win!), and our financial health on the account actually went up (win-win!) because we were no longer having to spend so many good hours chasing something where our efforts were not hitting the mark.
A Great Client Partner always thinks about true win-wins for themselves as the service provider/partner and for their client alike. A client services hack, who always provides a yes to the client—or worse, only fights for the agency—is missing half the picture. Everything should be judged by finding a win for both sides. It is always the case that there is mutual alignment to fight for which ensures the longest and most sustainable relationships.
The focus must be on productivity, not territory.
One Habit Change
Take stock in what is going really well in your relationship with your client. Don’t look simply to protect the remit. Look at what you can give back to forge long-term trust. At minimum, once per year, you have a natural time to review your contract and scope. Take the time, in partnership with your client, to evaluate each service you are providing and ask some basic questions:
Should I start doing something new? Should the agency be doing less of one service and lean into a service that is more aligned and better appreciated?
Should I continue or accelerate something I am already doing well?
Should we stop something we are not doing that well? Or should we try and figure out if we can salvage it?
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM being a leader who worships at the altar of self-preservation, TO being a leader focused on the bigger picture and mutual alignment with clients and internal teams.
Lesson 9
9. X + 1
When I have the chance to meet new employees, I always ask them two favors. The first is that they hold on to their newness as a secret weapon and be sure to help improve the company with their ideas. The second is what this chapter is about: delivering X + 1. X + 1 is a philosophy shift. It is about delivering X (what the actual request was) and then +1 (something more).
This is not a chapter about overdelivery. Overdelivery is nothing to be celebrated. Basic overdelivery simply implies you provided more than what was asked but with no indication of whether the juice was worth the squeeze. In other words, did the extra you provided actually move the needle? It’s more like special delivery that matters.
How did I come to this philosophy? This insight came from a mentor at Coca-Cola, Stuart Kronauge. I was working for Stuart on Fanta, when over the cubicle, she quickly asked me to pull case sales for Fanta TM for October 5, 2006. She had to run up to some big meeting and needed the data. So, I diligently went into the system and pulled the data and furnished the simple data point on the left, in the next chart (which is what I was asked for).
Stuart said a quick “thank you” and rushed off to her meeting. On her way back, she stopped by my desk and talked to me for a bit about what opportunity I had missed. She let me know, “You did what I asked for but did not help anticipate my need.” She went on to explain and remind me that a data point is more useful in context. (Funny enough, this is what my statistics professor always reminded me of, saying, “Point estimates are for suckers.”) She went on to say that case sales would have been more useful if compared by the same day, and then year over year, as well as trended by day for that week. This would then contextualize, in more richness, how Fanta actually sold on that particular day.
While this story is one I took away from my time at Coca-Cola, the lesson here translates very well to the Great Client Partner. Picture a typical scenario where the client asks you for a snapshot of results for the fourth quarter to share at their board meeting. Instead of just sharing quarterly results, be sure to compare to year-over-year fourth quarter results as well as Q1, Q2, and Q3.
The important point here, though, is that this X + 1 is the mentality to be in, and not just one that is about the presentation of data or results. A client might ask you for insights on a particular target segment, but perhaps you anticipate that it’s important to compare that segment against another option, so they can see alternatives or comparable targets. Train yourself and your team to think in terms of X + 1. That being said, don’t let the +1 be make-work or busywork, but rather smart, surgical, and helpful work.
While the story I just shared is about anticipating business needs, the Great Client Partner also works tirelessly to anticipate needs the client did not even know they had. These tend to be emotional needs. We forget, clients are people too. They have mortgages, they have kids, they have wives, husbands and partners, dogs, sick cousins, and neighbors whose trees have fallen on their houses. They have birthdays, celebrations, anniversaries, and promotions. They also have reorgs, mean bosses, and political landscapes.
For one of our favorite clients, we threw a huge thirtieth birthday party blowout. We had his picture transposed onto a cake and made top-ten T-shirts. For another client who loved jazz and dancing, we took her out to Lincoln Center for Dancing Under the Stars, in New York City. I remember that night very well. The client leader from our team was not much for dancing or public displays that could be embarrassing, but deep down, he really liked this client and cared about her as a person and a client. So, there he was, dancing under the stars.
For one client who recently had to lay off most of her team, we offered (at no cost) to help prop up her team for a period of time, while she dug out of the hole she was left to fill. For one client who was aiming for a very deserved promotion, we dug deep to help him get that VP promotion—and that became a rallying cry for our team. When he got the promotion, we sent him a card signed by our entire twenty-person team, and I can tell you we all felt like we got promoted that day.
The point is, getting to great requires an X + 1 mentality that covers the work and the emotion.
Three Habit Changes
Live X + 1. Every time you have an assignment, think about the ask, but then also about what you can do to add more depth of insight to it. Make X + 1 a mantra.
Make things more personal. How do you invest into a client such that you anticipate their emotional needs, not just the material needs?
; Start to think about trust as a bank account; if you plan to make withdrawals, you have to make deposits. And if you are in the agency business, it can’t be expected to be even. Understand that you should make more deposits than withdrawals.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM being a leader who merely does what is requested, TO being a leader who anticipates needs and looks over the horizon.
Lesson 10
10. Get on a Plane and Ditch the PowerPoint
One August we were having some challenges with a client. We had been with them for a decade. The relationship was extremely important. In the most accidental of ways, we had gotten a bit on the back foot. I was the executive sponsor on the business, so the buck stopped at my desk. My first instinct was to rally the team and come up with a forty-slide deck to share our genius plan to evolve our marketing program. To make that deck would have taken hundreds of hours and delayed us for weeks. Instead, I realized that the bigger issue than the work was that the trust was broken. Slides were not the answer. Time, listening, and trust rebuilding was required.
Instead, I got on a plane to see the client. I went without a PowerPoint deck. I just asked questions, gave some counsel, got some feedback, talked about the future, and tried to understand what was going on in the business. You don’t always need PowerPoint slides to make progress.
How did I come to this conclusion? What made me confident enough to leave the deck behind? Ultimately, I asked myself three questions I might recommend you think about as well:
Is the time (measured in weeks) it takes to create incredible content worth the risk that the delay causes?
