Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - Agency & Client Alignment

Clients and Agencies are different animals (excuse the pun)!. In a sense it's a little like Sales and Marketing - they are not used to walking in each others shoes. This general misunderstanding of what clients expect (or hope for) when they meet an agency results in significant opportunities to create additional revenue being left on the table

I am in the unusual position of having spent most of my career client side, but now find myself selling consultancy services to clients. But I've also had the opportunity to work with several marketing agencies and more recently provide them with more of a client-side perspective.

I use the term "Agency" loosely. These days everybody wants to sell to the Marketing department. As well as media agencies, marketing agencies we now find ourselves increasingly in conversations with various shades of technology supplier, all hoping to relieve us of our marketing budgets with promises of astonishing ROIs (always amusing, since most agencies don't even have the visibility of the sales pipeline in order to even measure the ROI!)

Over the years I have had the pleasure of working with some great agencies and some great people within those agencies. Just to be clear - I do mean YOU. However I've also worked with a number of distinctly average people from both great and average agencies. For clarity - yes, I mean THEM! I also used get approached on a very regular basis by agencies wanting to get 30 minutes in my diary to explore how they might be able to help me.

So let me give you a few personal observations on my experiences in dealing with agencies of various shades over the years. If you are client side and can add some further observations, I'd love to hear from you. If you are in an agency, I'd be delighted if you want to get in touch - perhaps I can help...

(BTW - as I write this I am currently updating my iTunes library. That explains some of the headings and pictures)

That's Entertainment

I used to despair when I looked at my calendar for the forthcoming week. I would protect a few hours to get some of my work done, but otherwise my day would be a succession of meetings and reviews with various stakeholders (mostly outside of the marketing function), conference calls, reviews and managing the odd crisis. All very internally focused. I had a 90 minute train commute into the office and that was my only way of keeping on top of my email. Gosh how I miss it all :)

One of the only things that kept me sane and fresh was interactions outside of the company - with clients, at conferences, or with agencies. But time was very limited so the default response to any approach had to be - "sorry I can't make a meeting, but if you want to send me something I'll probably ignore it". 

Entertainment? Perhaps that's not how you want to be seen - but in that case you had better demonstrate that you're merely an interval between meetings.

That Don't Impress Me Much

Most initial agency meetings went down a familiar path: Initial chit-chat, followed by presentation of the agency's credentials deck, followed by a loose "so how could we help you" conversation.

I rarely felt this was a great use of my time. I wanted more than credentials. I'm not silly. I know that you will put, for instance, the Coca-Cola logo in your credentials even all that you did was design an internal email header 10 years ago. I get that - would probably do the same. That's why I'm not impressed. Oh and  by the way - my business is nothing like Coke's, so only focus on relevant client stories.

Think!

My recommendation would be to move past all that stuff really quickly. More positive meetings occurred when someone did something that made me realise that this was not just another agency, and made me want to explore further. Think about the following:

• What make you any different from every other agency I've seen this month? I'm looking to make a quick decision on whether we will ever have another meeting. No matter how affable I may seem - I've not invited you in for a chat.
• Can you clearly articulate the breadth of your agency's capabilities? I want to have relationships with as few partners as possible. That means I want to see understand what you can do beyond some nice creative. What value can you and your colleageues add to help ease my business pains. Otherwise I think you are just another creative agency, and that you are the only talent there.
• Have you come to the meeting with a provocative point of view on something I really care about? Do you know what the key challenges are for a business marketing leader today? Have you researched to get a sense of my particular challenges and focus areas? Do you have specific capabilities that could help me address my key challenges? Do you share the passions I do?
• Will you disagree with me? I don't want an agency full of yes men. That simply means you will do what I want rather than what is right for the customer/market. If all I wanted was resource, I could have secured it much cheaper than talking to you. I want someone who has opinions and real insight - not just telling me what they learned in a 5 minute Google search.
• Will you educate me? I like to learn about new approaches that I haven't previously considered. Give me a fact or two that I might be able to use into one of  my next meetings. 
• Can I talk to your clients? I was always keen to engage with other people in a similar position to myself on a peer to peer basis. If you can make some connections for me I have an immediate reason to start building a relationship.
• What are the next steps? I used to be constantly surprised at how many initial meetings ended with a limp "I'll call you again in a few weeks". What are you going to do next? What do you want me to do next?  

Don't You Forget About Me

Of course the meeting is just the first step. Just as important is the follow up and progress against the key actions - don't let all the hard work to secure that meeting simply fizzle out. 

That's my take on it based on my years in client side marketing leadership roles. If you can demonstrate that you understand my world, have a confident perspective upon it, and can offer me something tangible to progress the discussion - then you are already ahead of the pack.

What's your views on the gap between agencies and clients in those critical first meetings? I would love to hear from you.

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5 Steps towards Customer Intimacy through Marketing Data

All of a sudden it's very trendy to talk about data and analytics. Of course there's very good reasons for this - the data that you capture potentialy provide an enormous amount of insight about a client's actual and likely behaviour. However most of us are failing to capitalise on this potential.

Whilst it's very easy to get excited by the latest software technologies that promise to revolutionise our marketing worlds, a simple truth remains: Unless you focus on the basics of your marketing data, no end of automation or predictive analysis is going to deliver the improved results you have promised.

The bad news is that your data is probably in something of a mess. The good news is that most of your competitors data is in a similarly poor state. It simply hasn't been a focus area for marketers until relatively recently - but now, as our industry re-learns that marketing is all about serving customers, we are starting to revisit what we can learn from the signals that our clients and prospects are already providing. And they do this every time they engage with us, talk about us, buy from us, ignore us or even complain about us.

Last week I participated in Marketing's B2B Marketing Transformation conference in Hatton Garden, London, along with some excellent speakers from Google, Dell and SimplyBusiness to name three.
I outlined a 5 step approach to getting your arms around your marketing data:

1. Capture the Right Stuff

It starts with capturing the data that will help you serve your clients better. Are you gathering insight about their interests, the people who influence them, the places they look for insight?

And if you are currently looking to identify new strategic investment areas for next year, you had better ensure that the data that you are capturing will help support that strategy. It is also important to have a good dialogue with the sales function so that you can minimise the amount of useful data that is being recorded on individual laptops rather than being shared for the common good. The same applies to external list purchases - you should never buy in a new list without figuring out how you are going to integrate it with the rest of the data that you have.

2. Organise it to be Useful

In order to be usable for analyis or outbound marketing activity, you will need to structure the data so that you minimise the amount of unnecessary variation. Creating a data dictionary is a good place to start to see the scale of the problem. This is simply a table of all the available fields along with all the potential values for each field. Then you can start to introduce standardised fields for key areas such as job roles, territory assignments, country etc. For example, you may want to group Marketing director, VP Marketing, CMO, and Head of Marketing all under a single job role of "Marketing Leader".

Remember - it's an order of magnitude less expensive to capture data correctly at the entry point than to resolve and correct later. Examine your forms and other capture points - ensure that you use dropdown menus to minimise data capture errors/variance and use mandatory fields if there are specific fields that you will need later on for targeting and analysis. All this would be second nature to a systems person - but most marketers today do not have any background in systems.

Increasingly people are starting to look at Social Signon systems as way to ensure that (normally correct) information from LinkedIn etc is shared, without the need to present further forms. After all, 88% of us admit to having deliberately submitted false information into a contact form - I guess the other 12% just don't admit it!

3. Fill in the Gaps

The client is not the only source of information - and we all have a loathing of long contact forms. We can supplement the data we've gathered with information from 3rd party sources such as D&B, Experian or Jigsaw.

Furthermore, integrating with data from social streams is an emerging area of marketing data enrichment. And don't ignore any opportunities to augment your data with useful insights from your customer service systems or from your channel partners.

4. Get Creative

In my corporate career, I was frustrated that the dialogue between the marketing program teams and the data analysts was only ever along the lines of "Give me a list of all the IT Directors in the Finance Industry". Too late and too dull.

Instead of basing our outbound campaigns purely on demographic and firmographic data, you will get much greater ROI if you combine that with behavioural insight - have they declared specific interests via some form of  a preference centre; or have they already displayed an interest in the particular topic by their engagement in a previous activity? The big learning I took away from those experiences was that it's never to early to involve the data analysts in the campaign planning process - you will almost certainly make your campaigns more effective and less wasteful.

5. Keep it Clean!

In an ideal world you would be able to go to a dashboard that gives you the key metrics around the health of your marketing data whenever you choose to view it. However in my experience most people don't have this luxury yet (although it is a feature of several marketing automation platforms). Therefore some element of a database audit is required. Sound scary? It really isn't. It starts with looking at the completeness of key data fields (ie is there data in them or not?) and then looking at the validity of that data (ie is the data any good or are the name fields full of "Micky Mouse"?)

For many, an audit might be the first place to start on your marketing database journey of discovery - at least it will inform where you have the greatest challenges.

And how often should you be auditing your data? Ideally it should be a constant part of your management system, but at the very least it should be done whenever there is a significant change in the business - eg a change in strategy, an acquisition of another company, a change in the pattern of marketing results, or a significant spike in opt-outs.

Love your Data in 2013

The bottom line is that we are all trying to get closer to our customers. This means that we need to looking more closely at the data that we have about them, and developing our skills to turn that into analysis and insight and ultimately revenue.

The full presentation from the conference is below. What's your data resolution for 2013?

Leveraging your marketing data from Pete Jakob

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