1. Avoid disagreement in the c-suite – it’ll only add confusion to the brief
Mike Santoro, president of Walker Sands: Internal misalignment on the ideal marketing programme makes it extremely challenging for us as agencies to develop an effective strategy. If the CEO wants to drive leads but the CMO wants to prioritise brand awareness, the resulting programme will lack focus, especially if there’s limited budget because they won’t be able to make the necessary investments to drive results in either of those areas. Mutual agreement from key stakeholders on goals and KPIs is mission-critical for a happy and successful client.
2. Ensure briefs provide clarity on key business metrics
Roland Deal, president of Americas at DWA Media: We often receive vague or incomplete briefs that don’t allow us to produce proposals and pitches that align to the client’s needs. We recognise that clients may leave things vague intentionally to test participating agencies’ logic and strategy, but it’s important to have clarity and direction from the client on things like objectives, KPIs, spend, brand messaging, regional priorities and tactics.
Jonathan Pritchard, managing partner at Tangent: The biggest challenge for us is the context of the pitch. When the context isn’t clear, or the real problem isn’t well communicated, it can cause all sorts of problems, such as resourcing a project incorrectly. And we’ve often seen pitch documents that just don’t give the real story. It’s our job to try and tease out better objectives, and if clients want us to work with them as partners, the pitch process should involve a little bit more time together to try to flesh out the true brief.
3. Treat the working relationship like a partnership and not a transaction
Mike: We need to work together towards common goals for the programme to be successful. If the client and agency operate as two separate teams, then the agency becomes a vendor or a line item on the CMO’s marketing budget every month. This is the Achilles heel for an agency.
If we’re able to act as strategic partners, the relationship becomes mutually beneficial as we’re able to explore more creative ways to reach the client’s business goals. And to create a healthy partnership, it’s important the client pays on time and understands which requests are unreasonable. This demonstrates that clients value our business and reinforces a healthy partnership.
4. Specify how much budget you have as well as your commercial goals
Jonathan Pritchard: Clients can add a lot of value by revealing more detail around their budget. They can do this by being more upfront or explaining how much they want to make commercially and then turning this into a tangible objective. Once these tangible objectives have been set, the client can then explain how they want us to help them reach this number.
5. Be frank from the outset about your business challenges
Mike: One of the biggest challenges we face during the pitching process is a lack of transparency around the organisation’s wider business objectives. The ideal pitch process begins with an honest conversation about the challenges the business is facing. Sometimes it’s positive – the market might be expanding so fast they need quick results; sometimes it’s less positive – a competitor may be taking market share with an inferior product. If we don’t receive this honesty upfront, we can’t develop a programme that will most effectively meet their goals.
6. Share valuable information to help your agency partners do a better job
Paula Cunningham, client development director at JJ Marketing: The agency is the expert in developing a strategy and understands how to reach your audience as well as what messages will resonate with them. You, as the client, are the expert with regards to your product/service propositions and how well your previous activity has performed.
Share this information with the agency and let them speak to your sales team; the sales guys may have insight that’s invaluable, such as details on why a customer may not be purchasing a product or the brand in question’s particular strengths or weaknesses.
Mike: It’s also useful to provide measurement insights such as sales figures to help our account team define a strategy and ultimately add more value to client’s business. Or if a company comes to us looking to improve a weak sales pipeline we can look in Google Analytics to identify the source, whether that be a conversion problem or lack of inbound leads. We can then use that insight to develop a strategy that addresses the source of the issue directly.
7. Explain how your marketing goals align with sales and business goals
James Foulkes, co-founder of Kingpin Communications: We worked on a project recently where a client was launching a new solution and the marketing department wanted to create some noise around it – but the business wanted to add revenue to pipeline via their more traditional offerings.
By understanding both sides, we were able to create a campaign that hit both objectives. We achieved this by creating content centres that aligned the client to the subject they wanted to promote. Using a mix of third-party sites, programmatic and intent data about web users, we were able to deliver advertising at scale, guaranteed traffic, downloads of multiple assets and webinar registrations.
To find out which agencies are currently leading the way, download our B2B Agencies Benchmarking Report 2017
