Do you ever find yourself falling into an archetypal role with your friends, your family or when you meet a new person? Maybe you’re the oldest sibling, so you constantly play the role of the responsible third parent to your younger siblings. Maybe you’re the adventurous one in the group who pushes your friends into an impromptu weekend trip on Friday morning. Our instinct is to utilize any preexisting perspectives or biases around a topic and settle into our predetermined lane. This is especially true when it comes to company’s choosing a marketing partner, entering into a “sales process” that comes with predefined roles.
We on the agency side become “the sales person,” the pushy and enthusiastic character that ultimately will do and say what’s required to close the partnership. You on the client side become the defensive minded prospect, tasked with poking holes in the arguments of the seller, defending the budgets and needs of the company, and approaching the entire process with a healthy skepticism. Around and round we go, both acting on our instincts and perpetuating the needless tensions between sales and clients.
The Current State of Agency Sales
This dynamic is just one of the factors that have made winning new business a precarious task for agencies in 2024. The cost to the agency to attract new clients is skyrocketing, according to the 2023 Forester Report
- Agencies spend 12.46 billion dollars on pitching every year (Publicis Groupe’s 2022 revenue was 13.5 billion)
- Agencies are creating specific teams within their organization to keep up with RFP demands
- Agencies will spend roughly 17% of their revenue to cover the non-billable hours spent annually on pitching new business
- Agencies consider this a necessary sunk cost, but the incumbent can actually lose the new business and existing MRR
Additionally, there are a host of new factors and players in the space that have added even more wrinkles:
- Specialized & niche agencies are more prominent than ever, offering expertise inside of specific industries
- Agency search consultants who help pair clients with agencies, usually offering a very specific expertise in one area of media
- Client side marketing team being disengaged, typically because they’ve been given less freedom to choose or evaluate an agency partner than they were initially hoping for
- Procurement departments seeing marketing as a cost rather than an investment
- Tech stacks, new platforms, brand safety issues have made procurement more complicated and extended the sales process across certain industries
- Of course the mother of all evils, the incorrectly managed RFP!
RFPS Don’t Have to Be Like This
RFPs are a mainstay in our world, as a small to midsize full service agency. We receive invitations to ~50 RFP’s per year, we choose to participate maybe 30 of those. Despite my complaints, Logical is actually happy to accommodate RFP’s provided that time is not wasted and the questions are relevant enough to actually let us demonstrate what our agency is capable of. Conducting a better RFP isn’t more difficult or time consuming, just a matter of approach. Here’s a blueprint for a more successful experience:
Relationships Aren’t Built-In Questionnaires
If you roll out an RFP process that’s cold and clinical in nature, that’s exactly the relationship that you’ll build with your agency. It’s possible for anyone to fake their way through a quality answer to your RFP questions, but compatibility and a natural rapport is tough to manufacture. Take advantage of your built-in RFP runway to meet your prospective agency team and work together on a project. Measure their competency and your compatibility at the same time.
Create Trust, Save Money
Many companies use the RFP process as a way to keep an agency sales person at arm’s length. Resist that temptation! Create a sense of openness and vulnerability about your needs and demand the same from your prospective partner.
On the agency side, we understand that the final negotiation is where wiggle room is found on budgets, but those flies are caught with honey. Be the client who creates trust, genuinely seeking a productive relationship. It’s rare, and almost always rewarded in long-term value.
Utilize Time
You’re getting hundreds of hours of free work by conducting an RFP… take advantage of the free work! Asking every participant to provide a high level strategic recommendation doesn’t actually move the needle on meeting your company goals if you don’t have a good understanding of an execution strategy.
Don’t Trust Yourself To Be an Expert in Everything
You probably won’t be able to fact check every strategy, but you can make sure you understand which suitors’ approach to the work suit your needs the best.
- Perspectives: What does your media planner think of the current state of one platform versus another as it pertains to your company goals? What do they expect will be the biggest breakout performance channel of the year?
- Methodologies: How does the agency conduct industry research, how are budgets set and allocated, who gets chosen for an account team? Most importantly, when shit hits that fan (because it will), how does this agency find their way back to the light. Prospects tend to prefer to look for an agency they feel will make the fewest, if any, mistakes. Successful relationships are built on the comfort of problem solving tactics.
- Quality Inspection Process: Who is responsible for checking your work? If you’re a company with extremely rigid brand standards, this conversation is critical! Most prospects stress the need for urgency and speed in the sales process, and are much less transparent about their brand standards, which are the enemy of agency speed. The secret here is that most agencies can custom-build a team and set of processes to address your needs — so offer as much information as you can up front.
Ask the Right Questions, Negotiate Things That Matter
When starting up an RFP or agency selection process, resist the urge to go straight to goals, tactics, KPIs, or strategic recommendations.That’s the dating equivalent of discussing meeting the parents immediately after matching on the app. To really understand who you’re getting in bed with, talk discovery and onboarding, make them show their work!
Discovery
Agency work falls apart all too often at the time of signature. The salesperson is gone and a new team steps in, the process of knowledge transfer dilutes the initial goals and strategy. Dig into the processes related to discovery — a make-or-break step in a successful partnership.
- What tools and processes are utilized for competitor & industry analysis?
- Can the agency adequately identify your brand position on their own?
- What case studies or client references can speak to the agency’s ability to identify and capitalize on market vulnerabilities?
- Ask the agency to push back on your goals and KPIs, you want an agency that’s comfortable challenging you.
Onboarding
Agency’s consistently lose momentum at the conclusion of the sales process as the account team takes over. Slow starts, redundant communications, frustrated folks. If you’re looking for an opportunity to earn extra value from your agency, dig your heels in for better onboarding terms.
- How long will you technically be considered in an onboarding period? (Remember that longer onboarding DOES NOT mean longer time to results.) Clients constantly make the mistake of cutting their onboarding time down to get assets into market faster or try to produce results as soon as possible. Most agencies won’t fight you on this, because you’re cutting some corners for them. Don’t rob yourself of valuable research and planning time just to get a campaign launch, have your rep map out a customized onboarding.
- Have the prospective agency demo an internal transition meeting so you can see how the knowledge transfer will work, and ensure you don’t end up repeating yourself for the first 60-90 days of the partnership.
Innovation
Agencies and clients negotiate for hours on end over deliverables or hours. This is, more often than not, a huge waste of time. The negotiation process doesn’t guarantee you the most ambitious learning and testing plan — in fact it probably takes you in the opposite direction.
Things change in our world at such a rapid pace, adaptation to changing trends is a guaranteed issue to consider when selecting the digital marketing agency partnership that likely comes with a twelve to twenty four month contract.
- How does your agency innovate its own product? Does that responsibility belong to senior leadership, team managers, account management?
- How does this agency learn, or adapt to industry changes?
- How, and when does your company enjoy the benefit of these adaptations.
- Be the Guinea Pig, if your agency is looking to test new product betas or innovations they will be looking for clients to test things with. Be vocal about wanting to participate and fund platform testing.
Product Feature: How we do this at Logical is through a program we refer to internally as Tuition Dollars. When we decide to test a new beta, or experiment with an angle of marketing
Don’t Negotiate Your Way Out of a Good Deal
In order to run effective performance marketing in 2024, you will likely need a combination of platforms and services working in harmony to meet your goals. Conversion rate optimization, creative, messaging… these are services that might be considered add-ons in a scope and many clients request they be taken out or deferred to an in-house team. Resist that urge!
If your chosen partner is capable of executing these services at a high level, fight for as many additional elements as you can that will support your goals.
- Demand your agency be able to speak first about business goals, second about marketing product application. With no consideration of the first, the second won’t succeed.
- Brands under a certain annual revenue threshold have different needs than those above, but use agencies the same way. Ask your agency how they’ve customized their SOW to your business size, and what lessons they’ve learned from approaching each company differently.
Make Sure They Get The Message
If sales calls with agencies feel the same, there’s a good reason for that since a pretty specific formula works because it’s what agencies expect. Instead of being passed around to different product experts who likely won’t be on your account, request an audience with the individuals who would be responsible for creating or distributing your messaging. Unless you’re a category leader with a massive budget, your ability to create and dictate exceptional product differentiation through messaging is imperative to success.
A few things to consider when discussing messaging strategies with your potential partner:
- Are you aware of your industry’s vulnerabilities?
- Are your targeting & messaging tactics designed to attack those vulnerabilities?
- Are the main differentiators clear on the company website AND reflected in the company’s content strategy?
- Have we clearly addressed primary value propositions for our ICP?
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