by Jared Belsky
Fact: If you find yourself saying, “That is too yellow,” or, “That copy has no hook,” or, “Those keywords will never work,” or, “Those graphs just don’t grab my attention,” or, “Why is this deck so darned long?” count to ten and try a new way because you are failing yourself and your team.
Tip: Try these responses instead:
“That tagline does not highlight or maximize the brand Reasons to Believe (RTB).”
“That analysis was very cool, but I am afraid it won’t answer the current brand problem of margin loss that this client is dealing with.”
“I wish we could experiment with all those keywords you have suggested, but the brand guidelines run counter to that. How do you suggest we bridge that gap?”
“I wish we could get in all those graphs and exhibits you created, but we need to remember this client has a custom that decks should be no more than ten pages. Let’s work to adapt to their brand of information review.”
In short, make it about the client’s brand and the client’s style—so use specifics to describe potential issues—and never attack the person, which leads to the next principle.
Focus on the brief and the challenge, not the person.
Context: Teams often take a lot of time to settle on a brief. The brief in the marketing services business is meant to be both a compact and a North Star. It is meant to be a short summary of what you are trying to achieve with a given campaign or initiative and then what has been agreed upon between client and agency. However, we often see a situation where all the parties spend days on landing a brief but then fail to use it as a true North Star. When this happens, situations devolve into commentary about individuals on the team.
Fact: SMEs need to remember where their work leads to. When work goes off the rails, re-share the physical brief/email/stimuli and just circle the relevant part. Take the personal out of it and focus the debate on the brief and away from the person.
Tip: Try these responses instead:
“The brief we agreed to had ‘value’ as a key construct, yet 80 percent of this ad copy does not mention price or value. Can you help me understand how you see your work landing the ‘value’ element of the brief?”
“We agreed as a team to make conversion yield a focus this quarter, yet 85 percent of the ideas on the list are about brand awareness. The brief we are all working from, approved by the client, really demands our focus be on conversion, not awareness…fair?”
Envision
Context: Your role as a leader is to help your team see a vision for a better tomorrow. They need to see how you see the account being run a year from now. Are you producing better work as a team and tackling meatier assignments? If so, how do you propose to actualize them? Just like in politics, if you don’t show a vision, then others will imagine one that is inferior and at best distracting to the real mission.
So envision for the good of your team.
Fact: If there is nothing to envision, and no North Star guiding you, then your team is not working toward anything specific or unifying. This might mean the team is not working passionately.
Tip: At the start of every year’s planning, have a North Star meeting. This is your opportunity to shine as the Great Client Partner. It’s where you help folks see where the brand and the remit can go. How do you propose to move the relationship to be exponentially bigger, global in nature, and retained in terms of resources?
Are you making work?
Context: SMEs get frustrated when they perceive that a client leader is making work by ignoring the 80/20 principle. A Great Client Partner will work hard to make sure their team is doing the work needed to win and not a single minute more. A brilliant client leader will work to make sure the SME is on the phone or in the room when the client ask comes in, so that (1) they can hear it directly and (2) they can feel the accountability of hearing a request firsthand.
Fact: Make sure you are always driving revisions/improvements based on client needs, not your own worries or your own fear. Account people who make work for the team but don’t understand the difference between “essential” and “important” can never lead for a sustained period of time.
Tip: Try saying this (for example, to your analytics partner on the team):
I know this is a third revision, but the last forecast did not account for seasonality, which called into question the rigor of our forecast. As a team, we can’t let that happen, or it will mean diminished stature in the client’s eyes for years to come. This is a critical business item, folks.
Three Habit Changes
In your feedback delivery, practice focusing on the specific factors relevant to your client. Get used to referring to your brief and the client’s mission instead of calling out a team member or stating your opinion.
Take time out of your workweek and jot down a North Star that you can guide your team by. Envision where you want to go and how you’ll get there and put something on paper. It doesn’t matter how fully fledged the idea is at this point. The important thing is that you’re thinking about it and moving toward it.
Eliminate “I feel” and “I think” from your feedback vocabulary.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM being a leader who gives feedback from a “feeling” perspective, TO a leader who gives feedback via objective, fact-driven vantage points.
Lesson 13
13. Run the Meeting. Don’t Let Meetings Run You.
Meetings are the worst sin in the advertising and marketing services world. On any given week, 10 to 50 percent of an employee’s time is spent in meetings. They are very expensive, often poorly run, and tend to create a lot of frustration. A Great Client Partner runs a great meeting. There is nothing natural about knowing how to run a great meeting, so please consider the following steps.
Clear Agenda, Distributed in Advance. The best meetings have agendas. Agendas do not need to be complicated, but they should list the top three goals of the meeting in a prioritized order. For example, an agenda for your weekly status on a typical account might look like this:Review past week’s campaign results—How were the results last week?
Focus on hurdles and how to get over them—What is blocking us from success?
Team check-in—How are the core team members doing?
(Note that this agenda is neither too specific [confining] nor too vague [wasteful and rudderless.])
Well-chosen attendance list. A lazy, weekly status meeting that runs for an hour can cost north of $1,000 in billable time. That is time theft. The Great Client Partner will be polite, yet ruthless about the attendance list. The notion is to include only those who will contribute or who need to hear the information directly to do their job. Resist the notion to include folks in your meeting so they stay in the loop. As a golden rule, also look to avoid duplication. If you have a media supervisor in the meeting, then it is not typically critical to invite a media manager or media director. Have that one representative share the information if possible.
Announce the purpose of the meeting at the start, as a ritual. A small ritual that can go a long way is to start each meeting by announcing the purpose. This provides orientation. Literally say, “Thank you all for being here. The purpose of this meeting is to align before we visit the client in Florida this Friday.”
Time. Let me say something controversial here. You should have no more than one single hour-long meeting per week. Let that be your most important, debate-driven meeting, but beyond that, most of your meetings should be thirty minutes in duration. The issue is that when a meeting is an hour, it provides no reason to be concise and organized. A thirty-minute meeting puts the emphasis on preparation.
Cut off distractions, but kindly. If your thirty-minute meeting’s stated purpose is “to determine the casting for the upcoming new business pitch,” then it is not acceptable for someone to take you down a tangent
around pricing. Tangents are natural. However, nature is not an excuse. Be better and avoid tangents.
Take a shy inventory. As mentioned in Lesson 11 (Servant Leadership), some of the best team members with some of the best ideas might just be painfully shy or uncertain of themselves. In a meeting, what tends to happen is that similar people’s voices get heard, and as a result, the best ideas do not come to the surface. Your job as the leader of the meeting is to find a way that the best ideas get heard. As you move through the meeting, do your best to take a mental inventory. If Sally, who is shy but skillful and insightful, has not yet chimed in, call on her and ask her to volunteer her thoughts. She will first want to stab you, but then will talk, and others will realize you are the type of leader who wants to hear from the many.
Use meetings to debate, not to inform (ideally). When I was in my early twenties, I used to think meetings were a time where I got to show off my wisdom and chops in front of eight or so of my coworkers. When I got to 360i, Bryan Wiener would often advocate that I send the deck or pre-work twenty-four hours before. His rationale was that a meeting should be about debate, and that everyone should already have the information prior to the meeting. If the first fifteen minutes of your meeting is to level-set, then 50 percent of your time, at best, is now available for problem-solving and debate. Insist on information being sent out twenty-four hours in advance of the meeting with an email:Tom, please prepare a two-sheeter for everyone around churn stats by account, trended by month, and send to this invitee group twenty-four hours before the meeting so we can make it as productive as possible.
Next Steps and Follow Up. Follow up. Make your follow-up timely, simple, bulleted, and ensure that each bullet has a date, owner, and deliverable.
Three Habit Changes
Review the points listed in this chapter before you schedule your next few meetings. Review them over and over until they are second nature.
Take a minute to talk to your colleagues about how they run their meetings. They might have some great ideas specific to your department.
Spend some quiet time looking over the roster of your meetings and think about how you expect (and hope) each team member will contribute.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM having runaway meetings, TO running meetings efficiently and effectively.
Lesson 14
14. See the Meeting Within the Meeting
“Jared, I think we were in two different meetings.”
—Jim Warner, former President of Razorfish and CBS Networks
Not too long ago, I was involved with a great team pitch for a major US retailer. Things were going exactly as planned. We had performed our introductions as scripted. We got through the credentials slides flawlessly, just as practiced. Each team member was getting up one after the next to take the prospective client through their expertise. One spoke nearly perfectly about search, while another talked about social media, and the last spoke about analytics. Each person was great. The majority of those on my team seemed pleased with how the meeting was going.
I was horrified.
Why was there such a difference in how we were perceiving the same meeting?
Simple. My teammates were focused on what was being presented, while I was focused on the faces of those receiving the information, the clients. By my measure, the faces of the clients each were a bit sullen and disinterested. They were polite looks. They were looking at our slides but were not engaged in them. I glanced at my watch and noticed we were averaging twenty minutes between any client question or interruption. The senior client had not been heard from since her introduction at the start of the meeting. In short, we were running a meeting, but the client was not with us.
At this point, I politely raised my hand, stood up, and said, “Let’s pause the meeting for a minute. These two hours are about you, not us, and we are not hearing enough from you in terms of your needs, your concerns, your worries, or your hopes. Let’s talk about those for twenty minutes, and then we can focus on areas of our prepared material that best maps to those needs.”
The client was surprised, but that soon turned to absolute joy. One of my partners grabbed a marker and worked the whiteboard while I played host. We had an enthusiastic twenty-minute session where we listed and categorized the client’s needs. From there, we created a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure methodology for the rest of the meeting. The meeting was a success in the end, and we went on to win the business.
The Great Client Partner is reading the signals the client is putting out there, be they verbal or nonverbal, obvious or obscure. The Great Client Partner often leaves a meeting with a totally different accounting of how that meeting went than anyone else who was in the room.
When I was in my early twenties, I was on the road while working at Avenue A with the president of our agency at the time, Jim Warner. We were spending time with a then up-and-coming job search site called jobsdirect.com. We were presenting to the CMO about our plans to drive revenue for their site and help them achieve their ambitions. We got in the car, and Jim asked me how the meeting went.
With the confidence associated with someone in their twenties, I said, “I thought it was a home run. We got through our content really well, and on time.”
Then I asked Jim for his two cents. Needless to say, he thought it was a poor meeting. “The client spoke for only 10 percent of the time,” he recounted. “The client asked only four questions. The client offered no buy-in signals that we were on the same page. The client was distracted in a number of ways.”
He leaned back in the car as we headed back to the office and said, “Jared, I think we were in two different meetings.” Jim was never rude; he was simply trying to underscore a point. That point is that the success of each meeting hinges on reading the room in a level of depth that most folks don’t focus on.
One of the ways to get better at reading a room and looking for nonverbal clues is by getting into the habit of evaluation. If you know what to look for and have your own checklist of questions, then you will eventually do this naturally. For now, here is a cheat sheet of sorts that might help you better understand how the client meeting you are hosting is really going.
What DO you see?
Are your clients taking notes? Or are they distracted?
Are your clients smiling? Frowning? Bored?
Are your clients asking questions? Or checked out?
Did someone’s body perk up on a certain piece of content?
What DO you hear?
Are your clients giving you indications you missed the mark?
Are your clients building on your ideas?
Are your clients using next-steps language?
Are you hearing blocking language?
What DO YOU NOT hear?
Are you hearing any excitement?
Are you hearing any buy-in signals?
Are you hearing trust?
Why are they not building on your ideas?
Three Habit Changes
Focus less on getting through a meeting and more on how the actual meeting is going by looking at nonverbal cues. Look for client comfort and interaction.
Don’t be afraid to go off script. This is not a Broadway show.
Ensure that someone on the team has it as their job to read the room while busy presenters are dealing with the content.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who thinks every meeting is great, TO a leader who identifies greatness as client engagement and has the tools to judge this accurately.
Lesson 15
15. Casting
“Just put a bow tie on me and point me in the right direction.”
—Eli Kaufman, SEM supervisor 360i
If you think about every great movie you have seen, you’ll realize it was driven by a script and actors. Not only does the actor need to
be great, with a great script to work from, but it has to be the right actor. Who else could have played Han Solo but Harrison Ford? As the client leader, you are the George Lucas in your little world. You have the power and privilege to put the right people in front of the right people at the right time with the right script.
There are tons of moments when casting comes into play, but for the purposes of this lesson, let’s focus on two situations: the pitch and the big meeting.
Casting for the Pitch
Your most important role as a Great Client Partner is casting. Don’t let your hang-ups or anxieties prevent you from being creative in your thinking. The right person for the situation might be a curious choice to others who don’t know the details of the work, the client, the setting, or the situation.
I recall a situation in which we were going into a meeting to win a large piece of Search and Analytics business. The client was very quantitative in nature, so we knew bringing five new business development suits to the pitch would be a death knell. Instead, we brought Eli Kaufman, one of our most amazing SEM minds but also a unique character (as he would tell you himself). We positioned Eli as the mad scientist of SEM. We did, as he requested, give him a bow tie to wear, and we set him up in his role. We won the pitch. Later that month, when the chairman of the company called me to tell me we won, he said, “Jared, we love your agency, but we think Eli is the key to our success—that mad scientist is just what we need.”
