Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast

Transcript  Jenny:So I'm really excited to welcome to the show, Alison Coward today who is the founder of Bracket Creative and Bracket Creative help teams work better together. Now the first time I met Alison was when she was speaking at an Agencynomics event. And she's a very well known keynote speaker. And I was just struck by how she captivated the audience. Literally all of these agency leaders were scribbling notes, because she was just so, so articulate for one, but also, her speech contained so much fact based, you know, there was data, there was thought leadership that she was quoting books and statistics, and it was so impressive, and we've become friends. And I'm, for that reason, we're both in the same kind of industries. Alison works with lots of different types of industry and companies, but specifically, we have an overlap in terms of agencies, because she works with agencies. I would love for you, Alison, I know you've got over 15 years experience, I'd love you to just give us a flavour of your experience. Alison:Yeah, well, firstly, thank you for having me, I always love our chat. So I'm really looking forward to this. I think you've given a really good introduction to what I do already. And my company is Bracket, I specialise in team culture and collaboration, I have been working in the creative industries, literally most of my career. And specifically what I do at Bracket is around helping teams to become more creative, more productive together, essentially looking at that high performance, but how can they make the most of the talents of the team and, get them to work together so they can achieve amazing things together and enjoy while they're doing it, as well. So I do a lot of workshop facilitation, which are sessions where we bring teams together, helping them to have productive discussions, and, you know, figure out what they're going to do, how they're going to do it, strategy, sessions, kickoff, sessions, brainstorming, you know, new idea type brainstorming sessions as well. The other thing that I do around that is a lot of my work is influenced by workshop facilitation. And I'll probably get into that a little bit later. We also do kind of training and coaching and consultancy, because I think one of the things that's really important to me is that people within teams become owners of their culture and responsible for their culture. So I'm really kind of quite keen on helping people to develop the skills that I have in particularly in facilitation, and how they can have better conversations about how they work together. Jenny:Fantastic, what I love, you always pop up on LinkedIn. And it's not necessarily that you're posting, it's because your clients tend to post about the experience of working with you. And they're usually just glowing with great feedback. So I know that you do some great work in the world, and why specifically, like turning our attention specifically to agencies, because this is the audience that I'm talking to mainly, why do you think it's important for agencies to pay attention to their team culture?  Alison:Yeah. So I mean, I come from the creative industries and create, like a creative background. So my history is in working with creative people, people that have you know, have got creativity as their currency. And there's one thing about like, being creative. But then there's another thing about the conditions that foster more creativity, and foster high performance. And that often comes down to things like the culture like, you know, how easy is it for people to put forward ideas? How supportive do they feel in their environment? How easy, how comfortable do they feel, taking risks, and making mistakes in front of their team members. And that's all cultural. So within an agency environment, focusing on the aspects around the team, which kind of create the environment for people to do their best work is super important. You know, you can be creative without some of those conditions. But if you do put those things in place, then you're going to get much more kind of productivity and creativity from a team. And as I say, they're going to enjoy doing it as well. Oh, and you know, enjoyment is a big part, enjoyment and engagement is a big part of doing great work. It's not kind of you know, if you do the work, and then you have fun, it's, it's completely interlinked. If you can enjoy what you do, then you produce better outputs. It's just as simple as that. Jenny:It's so true. I mean, you mentioned the creative output, which is so key to what we do as an industry and how great team collaboration and culture can foster that. What do you think the impact on the agency's bottom line is as a result of a strong team culture? Alison:Yeah, well, I mean, the thing that comes to mind when you when you talk about that is, and this is what I spoke about at the Agencynomics event, it was one of the things that I mentioned was the idea of psychological safety. And it was a study that came out, actually, psychological safety comes from I think it was coined by someone called Amy Edmondson who's an academic. She does a lot of work around like teams and teaming. But when Google did this internal research study into what made their most high performing teams, they found that psychological safety was right at the top of the list. They thought when they did this research because they wanted to understand like, what made the best teams perform highly? And how could they replicate that and they thought they were going to find things like, you know, IQ and like aspects of technical expertise, that kind of thing. But everything that they found was more cultural. And at the top of the list was this idea of psychological safety, which is people feeling safe to make mistakes, and take risks and learn from their mistakes, all within a team environment. So I mean, if Google were finding that this was what made them high performing teams, I definitely think it's something that we should probably all take notice of. And there's no I mean, there's loads of research studies, I can reel some off if I kind of look through my notes, but research that shows that when people are more engaged, and it leads to more productivity, when people are happier in their work meets more productivity, when people have good connections with their colleagues at work, it leads to more productivity. So there's, I mean, there's loads out there and show that concentrating on culture is not I mean, I think the problem with culture is that it can seem into intangible that, I think, is a mixture of so many different aspects. But it might be hard to pinpoint exactly which thing is having an impact on the bottom line, but all of it together definitely does. Jenny:I love that point about psychological safety. And it's, it's quite a well known study in certain circles. But if someone's listening to this, and it's the first time they've heard that concept, and they're thinking, actually, I want to make sure as a leader of an agency that I am creating an environment that my staff feel that they are psychologically safe, that they can admit they've made a mistake or take risks, why would they know they hadn't created that environment? What would they look for? Alison:What would they look for so? Honesty. Are people able to be honest? Are you able to constructively critique your teammates and team members ideas without, you know, it turning into unproductive conflict? Are you getting ideas from people, because the thing is, is if it's not psychologically safe, and then people are going to be afraid to say something that they think might be stupid. And we you know, we know in the brainstorming session, that often it's those kind of terrible, those ideas that seem terrible at first that leads to innovation. So if you're not getting those kinds of terrible ideas, I guess that's a good way of kind of seeing that you haven't got psychological safety, because people don't feel safe sharing them, or playing around or kind of, you know, experimenting. So I think those are some of the signs. I do feel that people have been honest, are able to speak up and be honest. I mean, you can look at your meetings, for example. And I guess this is not always a sign of psychological safety. But it can be one of the things to look out for when you're running your meetings and our people speaking up? And does it feel like an environment where people do feel that they can speak up without getting, you know, any kind of pushback, or, you know, being blamed for getting something wrong, or made to feel stupid? Jenny:This is so interesting, because presumably, if it takes a lot of self reflection, maybe and self awareness on behalf of an agency, or agency leader, for example, to recognise that, and maybe it's the middle management, maybe that spot what's happening as a dynamic. And to that point, can you talk to us when an agency comes to you, someone from an agency, who typically comes to you? And what kind of sort of symptoms do they explain to you as to why they think they need to address their team culture? Alison:Yeah. Well, do you know what Jenny, this is super interesting. And this is something that I've discovered over the past couple of years through looking at who comes to me, I mean, first of all, it depends on the size of the agency, but often, it is like an agency leader, that comes to me. I find that the teams or the agencies that are really in trouble, I don't see them, because they don't know what they don't know. They don't know that, you know, it's likely that they haven't even registered that culture is something that is important to focus on, or they've completely dismissed it or something. And they think that it's a luxury and something not necessarily the teams that come to me, they're already on their way to exploring or looking at a team culture, I often tend to work. I mean, I've had it on my website that I work with forward thinking teams, because I really think that the people that come to me are the people that are already doing a lot right. And they want to know, how do we keep this going? We're growing, things are changing, how do we make sure that we maintain our culture because they already see how important it is. Or they might be at the kind of early stages of that they're starting to kind of come around to the idea that we need to spend a little bit of time and resource on our culture. So I don't really, I can't really say that I kind of see people that have, like, you know, like you say the symptoms, but it's, you know, it's usually all the kind of things that we want to make sure that people feel included. You want to become more collaborative and want to run our meetings better. So yeah, there's, it's usually kind of towards the other end.  Jenny:That's so interesting, isn't it? It's almost like I can't tell you that this input is important, you almost have to decided it's important, and then look for some help in how to make it better. Alison:Definitely, yeah. And I think, you know, it's not like you sit around the self awareness, this is not easy work. And, you know, there are all kinds of things that you can do to get things going and to start things off, which will make an impact. But actually, the self awareness, you know, if you've got a leader that all of a sudden realises that their meetings aren't a place where people can speak up, that does take kind of like an admission that maybe I'm not running these meetings in the most effective way, which is like a self criticism, which, you know, some people aren't ready for. Jenny:How do you think the whole situation with COVID and this global pandemic where we’ve all had to work remotely? What effect do you think that's had on generally across the board on Team culture? Alison:Massive impact. I think if people weren't thinking about it before, they're definitely thinking about it. Now. People have really seen I mean, in the conversations that I've had, and people have really seen the connection and engagement piece, but how do we stay connected as a team? And we're not sitting next to each other? And, and yeah, meetings, online meetings in meetings, but how do we run our meetings to make them more engaging, and we make the best use of our time? I think, you know, again, one of the things that I was, was quite interesting at the start of pandemic, you know, this was something that none of us had experienced before. I was kind of looking around at teams and thinking is the stuff that I've been doing with teams over these years, is it relevant in these times? Does it work? Is it you know, is it going to hold up, so I was kind of, you know, just observing and seeing what was going on. But one of the things that I remember and quite distinctive, it started with pandemic was, you know, there was kind of like that initial rush to get everyone working from home. So everyone focused on like the tech and that, can we work from home, and there was this kind of like, wave of zoom screenshots on LinkedIn, of like, you know, people with, you know, maybe with the silly hats on or, you know, showing we’re all working from home, we can all do it, we can all work from Zoom. And sort of like thinking, it's great that you've been able to get on Zoom. But that's not culture. That's not team culture. Team culture actually happens in between those zoom meetings. And so I think there was kind of a, I think, a realisation of what culture really is. And not just kind of people feeling good and happy. And the kind of, you know, the Friday night down the pub, and it's really all of everything, and all the stuff that we can't see as well, and how people feel about their work. Jenny:Give us a few examples of what good looks like.  Alison:Good looks like,  I've spoken about a lot of it. Good looks like anybody being able to say, this isn't working in the way that we work together, let's improve it. It looks like anybody within a team standing up and saying, I would like to improve this within our culture. But what can we do together? It means somebody in a team. I mean, I talk a lot about facilitation. And I think that's really key to meeting. So for me and ideal, this doesn't always happen. But an ideal is anybody been able to facilitate those meetings and all of those meetings being productive, and the best use of everyone's time. It looks like a team, like if you were to ask a team, that what is it that you're working towards? Everyone would be 100%, super clear. And it looks like a team being aware of the value of their teammates and their team members understanding everyone else's contributions as well as their own and having empathy to how people work differently. Yeah, there's a mixture of things. I mean, I could go on forever, really. But yeah, it's like a resilient team, you know, that how well does a team stand up, like if something changes within the team, it could be a pandemic. I mean, we've kind of experienced that now. But how resilient is a team that how does a team kind of bounce back quickly? Or how does the team kind of rally round and support each other through that? So those are those are the kinds of things that I look for in cultures, team culture. Jenny: if someone's listening to this, and thinking, oh, my goodness, I'm a leader in a business. And I believe that we've got a bit of a problem. I don't see people standing up and presenting ideas. I don't see people being quite bold in their thoughts and being able to express themselves, where do you even start? Like, what can you give us a few tips for someone listening to think what they could do about it? Alison:Um, so again, it depends on sort of what stage you're at, like things are really broken, and obviously you need to kind of address it more sensitively. So in that case, I might suggest like one to one conversations with team members and anonymous survey and those kinds of things to kind of gather thoughts and feedback and that actually listening to that feedback, not kind of dismissing it because you don't agree with it or it kind of sounds quite threatening, but actually really listening to it and taking it to heart and then looking at what can change. In a team where you can start to have those conversations have an open conversation about like, what's, what's not working for us? And what is working? And where do we want to be as a team, and therefore, how can we get there. Again, that kind of takes a certain level of connection within the team already in place, because people need to trust it, and trust that it's going to lead to something. But starting small is super key, like the worst thing is to kind of make these massive promises that everything's gonna change, and then not be able to live up to that promise, because a big part of this is behaviour change, behaviour of the leader and people in the team as well. So making sure that whatever you kind of at least start with is a kind of a small shift. So you know, starting with our weekly meeting, and how can we improve that? How can we make our weekly meeting more collaborative and more inclusive and working on that over a period of time and seeing the shift. And see the shift in that weekly team meeting you can start seeing the shift up in other places, as well as building up the momentum to kind of try new things. Because the team would have seen that actually, they set up meetings weren't working, they were involved in figuring out what makes what will make that meeting work. And then they started to see those changes actually take place. And they can feel the difference. Jenny:It's such great tips, such great advice. Recently, I heard of an agency who had been listening to their team, which is great, as you say, and the feedback was, we're having too many internal meetings, everyone Xoomed out, they're exhausted, and they wanted some control back on their diaries. So they decided to have a no internal meetings day, a week, you know, and what else? Have you seen other examples of little initiatives that have been helpful to teams? Alison:In the pandemic, one of the things that I've seen and I’d advised teams on, and I've seen teams doing this as well, is making space for the social connection. And because we don't have that now, do we, we don't have the kind of we can just walk over someone's desk and ask them a question or say, let's kind of take a coffee break together. So actually making this up being intentional and making a space for that. I've heard of some teams using a there's like a little plugin on Slack called Donut, which randomly pairs people for coffee. And so there's that the social connection, and what else is there? What else have I seen, um, so the no meeting days are something that I've seen as well. One team that I've worked with actually gave the example of giving everybody and got rotating the responsibility of doing a little activity at the start of a team meeting, which was a fun activity. And everybody had responsibility in there kind of, in turn to do that to kind of involve them. And to kind of surprise the team. Also, what else have I seen? And Gosh, lots of things. And I think also very simple. I mean, personally, I've seen leaders investing in this more so actually getting external facilitators like myself to work with their teams to have these kinds of conversations when teams haven't done that before, you know, so that can make a difference. I mean, there's a lot of follow up to be done after that. So the workshop in itself is not the kind of, you know, check, we've done it. Actually, it's the kind of the start of a conversation, I've seen much more of that and much more sort of leaders willing to invest in like away days, and like team discussions and those kinds of things to talk about how they work together, as well Jenny:See, that would make total sense to me that you get someone in externally to conduct that, yeah, it might take a, you know, a certain amount of humility, because you don't know what you're going to find out. But I would have thought that a third party people would be much more likely to open up and presumably they do to you? Alison:They do and I mean, on that as well as I am, you know, obviously I do facilitation as an external person, and I see the value of it. And I do see the kind of value of having someone from the outside be able to spot that my aim with teams at the same time is eventually for them to be able to do that themselves. Because I don't think that these kinds of conversations and discussions should be reserved as a special thing. And I think that this is how people should be running their meetings, they should be open, they should be collaborative, there should be a space where people feel that they can be honest and constructive and kind of problem solve together. So at the same time, as you know, I do see the value in every now and again, getting some kind of external facilitator in to support those discussions, especially if a team has never done it before, because a facilitator knows how to handle those dynamics. But encouraging a team to have those discussions more frequently and eventually take responsibility for the facilitation themselves. Jenny:I love that it's almost, it's much better to make that investment to almost course correct the agency and then give them the tools and the skills to carry on. I love that. Where do you see this evolving? What kind of trends are you seeing for the future? Is this just gonna carry on being something that we invest time in? Alison:I hope so. I mean, I have, since I've started the business, I've definitely seen a shift in the way in the recognition of the importance of team culture has accelerated in the last few months, in terms of kind of like the complete end of the scale where I hope teams will get to. Where I really want to see teams get into is that they do take responsibility, like everybody on the team takes responsibility for the culture. So it is like a kind of self evolving, self sustaining continuously developing team culture, rather than it kind of being seen as something that you do once and then it's kind of done. And the reason I see that happening is because change is, it's I mean, change is normal now, we should expect change. And a team needs to be able to kind of take themselves through those changes. I mean, it's great if you can bring an external person in. But what's much more powerful is if the team themselves have the skills to be able to kind of adapt and respond to what changes happening around them. So that's where I hope team culture is going in that it becomes much more natural part of the work conversation, we're not just focusing on the output, and what it is that we need to create. But we're also having conversations about how we get there together. Jenny:I think this is fantastic. I've got a question for you. With the way we've been working recently, particularly agencies, obviously, this is really super relevant, where you have a team that you want to enhance the way they work and be more productive, be more collaborative. What about if agencies now are getting more freelance talent now and again, for different projects, bringing in teams from around the world? Because now we've opened up the market to the world, haven't we? Working on projects together. Do you have any advice or thoughts around how to do that efficiently? When it's just more about maybe, you know, short term contracts with people. Alison:Yeah, I mean, to be honest, this is where Bracket started, Bracket started off as an agency that brought together freelance talent. And that's where all of these concepts that I've kind of, and these this methodology in this framework, it's evolved out of that through the knowledge of like what it takes to bring independent experts together into short term teams. And, you know, because they're working together in over a short period, they need to kind of perform well, quickly, right. So and it's all of the same principles just intensified. And, you know, get the team together, get everyone in the team together from the start, whether they're freelancer, whether internal, get the whole team generating that, how they're going to work together, and what they're going to work together on that. What's the what's the final idea, make it collaborative from the start and keep everyone involved. And so that everyone's got a bit of ownership over how the project goes, rather than kind of coming in and doing a little bit that they can only see. You know, their part, they need to be able to see the bigger picture. And so, that's exactly what I was doing when I first started Bracket, which was like bringing these things together. No matter what their kind of discipline was getting everyone together at the start of a project, having a discussion about like, you know, this is what the client wants. This is the skills that we have on the team, but what can we do? What does it look like? And how are we going to work together to make that happen? And I mean, I mean, this is a long time ago now. But I remember, this is how I started facilitating, because I didn't really do facilitation before that. I just remember, like all of those sessions, the freelancers enjoyed it so much, because they were kind of, they felt much more part of the project rather than kind of being handed a piece, and that they would take away do and then and then kind of deliver. Jenny:It just feels like such a no brainer, doesn't it? Alison:It does. Yeah, it does. I've been talking about it for ages. And I think for me, you know, I know, there's lots of complexities involved within companies and agencies and teams and organisations. At the same time, I think that if we kind of kept it simple, which is, you know, how do we get great people together to do great work? That's what we want, right? And we would kind of probably make it a lot easier on ourselves. Jenny:Absolutely. And you want to get it right first time, don't you, because time is money. And the longer they have to work, you know, over and above the original brief. It's just costing anyone money. So it's just it's absolutely no brainer. It's been fantastic the amount of information you've shared with us. And the insight you've provided is great. I know you have a team culture programme, which obviously you've been iterating over years. So it's now probably a well oiled programme with all of your experience. Can you tell us a bit about that?  Alison:Yeah, so the programme is almost like a combination of everything that I know and do and have done with teams over the years. So it's a mixture of like facilitation, ie, getting the team together to create ideas. Figure out like, you know, what it is that they're working towards, what their team purpose is, all that kind of stuff, as well as training. So this idea of ensuring that teams have the skills to kind of sustain this and so teaching them things like facilitation and how they would have conversations about designing new ways of working together, and as well as team coaching as well because every team is unique. There's no kind of like cookie cutter approach for you know, making a team work. A team culture depends on who's in it, what they're working on the nature of their work, and what that team looks like together, the environment that they're working within, so that the coaching addresses the specific issues for that specific team. And it's a mixture of all of that stuff. So yeah, training, facilitation, coaching, consultancy, and to get a team to a level where not only do they know what they're working on, they know their culture, they know their identity, but they've got the tools and the skills to kind of sustain that if any changes happen, or someone joins a team, someone leaves, if they face any challenge together as a team as well. Jenny:I can imagine that it's not only an effective process to go through, but also a fun process. Alison:I should hope so. Yeah, I would say that it's fun to work with me. But yeah,, the thing is with this as well, is that, you know, I've learned a lot. As you say, I've been doing this for quite a while. And I've learned a lot about teams and kind of, you know, evolved my thinking around it. And I think when I first started doing this, I was so focused on collaboration, and you know, the team as a unit, and I kind of I wouldn't say that I forgot about, but I didn't really see the relevance of the individuals within the team. It sounds bizarre, but I was kind of looking at the team as a whole rather than the individuals in the team. And then it kind of dawned on me that if you want a team to perform well, together, then those individuals need to perform well, individually, right? They need to be self aware, they need to kind of know where their opportunities for development are, they need to know how they fit into the kind of collective goal of the team. So you kind of need to work on those two levels. So the programme kind of works with a team in terms of the dynamics of all of those people coming together, but also works with the individuals to ensure that they are engaged and connected and you know, their areas of development that's been focused on in terms of how do they contribute to the to the bigger picture. Jenny:Makes total sense. What are the first few steps that you take when you start working with an agency? Alison:And so as an assessment, there's lots of kind of interviews and kind of where are you now and I’ve actually designed a bit of an assessment, which is on my website, and just about to be released, actually. So it kind of helps teams to figure out what stage they're at, whether they need to fix their cultural overlay to build it when they need to sustain it. But anyway, you know, after that, it's like a five minute quiz. And there's more investigation into that, what are the actual dynamics in the team? What do people in the team feel like the priorities are to address or fix or improve or work on and then we'll set up a plan around that. So there's the five pillars of the programme, which are the kind of things that I've learned, that are important for high performing teams, but then there's all the pieces in between, which is where the team gets to really address the issues based on their own specific culture. Jenny:Sounds like a really useful tool, we certainly put the link to your website, because I think even if it's not live yet, when someone listens to this, I'm sure by the time they listen, it'll, it'll be live. How do you get inspired, Alison? Who do you follow? What kind of sources of inspiration do you go to? Alison:I'm always reading and I do sort of, you know, I've got some Google Alerts set up for things like collaboration and creativity, you know, I get a lot of inspiration from, sounds really boring, but I get a lot of inspiration from academic papers. I really love reading and you know, kind of like research papers on meetings and the connection to wellbeing and how to, you know, increase creativity and productivity and the value of facilitation. So I get a lot of inspiration from those kinds of those kinds of studies. Yeah, I mean, I love hearing about teams that feel that they're doing good work and kind of seeing examples of things that they're putting in place to get inspiration. I think one thing that's important is that, you know, you may see something work in one team culture, and you can take inspiration from it, but it's may not work for you in exactly in that exact same way. And you may need to kind of adapt it. So I do like kind of reading about teams and what they're doing and sort of what they've learned as well. And so yeah, and I've got like a stack of books behind me that I need to get as well. Jenny: You're probably one of the most well read people I know. And it was clear from your talk that you did, I mean, it was just bam, bam, bam with all these statistics, and it was just, you know, it's evidence based, everything that you talk about is evidence based. So I think it's really, really powerful. If someone's listening to this, who ideally is the ideal person that you think you can help the most, like, who would you want to contact you? And how would they do that?  Alison: Yeah, I think anybody that's got responsibility for a team and is able to invest resources in you know, their development, essentially. So whether that's kind of a middle manager within a larger organisation or a senior leader within a smaller agency, although I'm happy to talk to anybody to be honest. Like I you know, sometimes I go in and I do kind of, you know, coaching with people that want to learn to facilitate more effectively, for people. I mean, one of the things that I feel quite passionate about, as well as obviously, from a business point of view, certain people that are able to kind of invest in what I do, but I'm also really passionate about helping people that work within teams. It might not be at that level, but really concede that there's things they can improve. And they've got like a real passion to make their working environment and their team's working environment better. So if you're one of those people, then feel free to get in touch because I always like talking to people like you as well. And you can go to my website bracketcreative.co.uk or find me on LinkedIn - Alison Coward. Jenny:Fantastic. Have you got any final pieces of advice for anyone listening to this about teen culture? Alison:And yeah, I mean, I think I said it before, but start small. You know, this is I think, you know, you can feel very passionate about improving team culture. And I think that's great. Like, definitely, if you're in the stage where you think like, this is something we want to work on and, but be realistic about what it takes for people to change their behaviour. Like it's not instant. It is, you know, something that you will work on over time and hopefully continue to work on. So I'm taking like a small first step, just to get the ball rolling, just to get buy in, just to get people feeling a bit motivated, that change can happen and then then go from there. Jenny:Thank you. That's great advice. I love talking to you, Alison. You can see in your eyes how passionate you are about this subject. So I hope people will get in touch and benefit from your services. Thank you so much for joining us. Alison: Thanks for having me.

Transcript:Jenny: Welcome to Episode 12. Now, this episode is a solo episode, and it's all about growing existing business and existing accounts. So this episode really is for you if you are an agency account director or an account manager in the role for a few years, and it's your responsibility to grow that business to grow your client business, and to expand the account and to grow those relationships. Now, this has come up because many of my students, the people that work with me, often have questions like, how can I grow my account without coming across as salesy or pushy and compromising my client relationships? Or what do I need to do? So the client sees me as someone that brings value, because at the moment, they just see us as very transactional. Some people ask me about asking for referrals, we all know it's a lucrative thing to do. And it's a very smart thing to do. But how do you actually ask without coming across as salesy? And what questions should I be asking my client to really understand their business to uncover business problems? And how do I sell without being inauthentic and really having a client centric approach? And do I need to be more assertive without putting my clients off? So these are some of the questions that I'm asked all the time about selling to existing clients. And that's the reason why I've decided to put together a series of podcasts around growing existing business. And the key really here is having a client centric approach, and ensuring that you continue to add value to your clients. So in this episode, we're going to be looking at the different value levels that you can give to your clients, and what skills you need to deliver those that add value.  Why is it important to retain and grow our existing clients?So let's step back for a moment and just ask ourselves, why is it important to retain and grow our existing clients? Well, there's a number of statistics on online, some of them you may already be familiar with. But some of the really standout ones is, quite frankly, it's cheaper to grow your existing clients. So according to the Harvard Business Review, it's anything from five to 25 times more expensive to go out and get new business. And when you think about it, the cost of pitching is huge. And that's often where we stand a one in four chance of winning the actual business. So it's a huge investment. So it's cheaper to grow the existing account, because they're already familiar with us, and we already understand their business. It's also more profitable. Now, according to Bain and Company, if you increase your retention rate of a client by 5%, it can increase the profit margins by between 25 and 95%. So again, retaining your existing business is much more profitable. There's also a study by Gartner that says, 80% of your future sales come from 20% of your existing clients. Now, that is quite an eye opening statistic. So if we are thinking about that, then we really do need to be nurturing, and adding value to these existing clients.  Now, there was a study by Gartner in 2019, that really looked at why accounts don't grow. And the really interesting statistic that came out of that was that, although there's a belief among the account management fraternity that exceptional service leads to account growth, it's proven not to be true. Exceptional service delivery leads to retention, for sure, but it doesn't necessarily lead to growth. And the findings from that study concluded that what you need to grow an account is to have what they call customer improvement conversations. And if you are having those customer improvement conversations, then it can increase your account by 48%, and increase the likelihood of renewal or retention by 94%. So increasing your ability to grow an account by 48% is really huge. And so we really should be paying attention to what does a customer improvement conversation really mean? Customer Improvement ConversationsSo the study defined a customer improvement conversation as three core things. The first thing is to provide customers or clients with a unique critical perspective. Now, when you think about that you think about, you know, that could create some tension in your client relationship. If you are providing something unique, and something critical to maybe what they're doing already. But this really is going to move the needle for them, because they're going to suddenly see you differently and see you as someone that can add a huge amount of value, because then you are showing them something that perhaps they hadn't seen before. Point two was for you to paint a vision of your customers future business, which means you need to be ahead of the curve looking at trends, looking at the future of their business, so that you can spot opportunities for them to capitalise on, or also avoid challenges that may be coming down the line. And then three to provide customers with a return on the investment. Return on investment on the entirety of your relationship. So what I'm going to do now is to talk you through the four levels of client value, and the skills you need to deliver value at each of those levels. Level one - Deliver a quality serviceSo the first level of value that we can give to our clients is to deliver a quality service. And this skill you need to deliver a quality service at this level is to really have an understanding of what your agency does, and a technical understanding of all the services that you deliver. So you will be, for example, you'll be able to link a client problem to an existing client case study in the past where you can cite examples of where you've helped other clients in the past. You'll also have a really good understanding of your client’s internal processes, and particularly their sign off and approval processes, so that you can make sure that you're aligning your processes to them. You'll also understand the difference between your high value products and services, and your low value services. So, for example, if you are a full service agency that does brand strategy, then perhaps a brand strategy workshop is very high value, to do an execution of an ad is low value. So the idea, the concept, the strategy, is very high value, you can usually charge more for it. And understanding the difference between strategy and execution is key. Another example would be perhaps you're an app developer. So it's low value, the actual execution of an app or delivering an app. But actually, if you are consulting with your clients at a very top level, then maybe you're talking to them about their general digital transformation, and their digital strategy. And the app is an execution of what their desired outcome is. So understanding what your own services are in terms of high value and low value is a great starting point. Similarly, you can, at this level, understand how the agency works in terms of processes. So when you're in front of clients, you really have a good idea if a project comes up of how to execute that project and how to deliver that project seamlessly, to ensure that it gets delivered on time and on budget. And you also have a thorough understanding of how to scope a project, how our cost estimate works, how our purchase order works, how our timing schedule works. So it's all the nuts and bolts, the technical understanding of how you deliver a quality service on time on budget. And that is level one, in terms of what our clients expect from us in terms of value. Level two - Deliver an exceptional client experienceLevel two value is not only do you deliver a high quality service, but you also deliver an exceptional client experience. And in order to operate at this level to value, you not only understand your services and processes and how they fit in with the client, but you also understand how to manage the relationship with the client and deliver greater service to go over and above. So, in order to do this, you probably would have done some kind of relationship mapping exercise. So you understand all of the clients, the client side, who is involved in the decision making process at the client side, and who's it important for you to establish relationship with. You also understand your own client context pain points, and how they're measured. How are they measured? What are their KPIs, and also you understand their challenges, both internally and externally. So you're always looking to identify areas that you can add value and help them solve their problems. You may have a little, what I call a fuzzy file, a fuzzy file is taking a note of any particular details about the client that will be worth you understanding, a new remembering, so that you can create that rapport with your clients. So for example, if they support a football team, then make a note of that. So you can ask them, the next time you see them, you know, is your team playing this weekend, for example, or maybe they mentioned the name of their son or daughter, and you can repeat it back the next time you speak and say, ‘I remember that you had to disappear to take your son to school, how is Simon?’ You know, using people's names is always really a good way of making sure that they know that you're paying attention, and that you really are interested in them, not only their role, their pain, their role in the business, but also on a personal level.In order to understand and operate at a level two value level, then you also you have a very thorough internal client experience, process from the moment that your client joins you. And you have an onboarding process, but all the way through the relationship, so you know what the touch points are. You know, the level of value each point in that relationship, you are consistent, because what this helps to do is to manage your client expectations, and to make sure that their experience of working with you is consistent. Because if you think about it, if they want to maybe refer you to someone else, then they need to make sure that you are going to deliver the same high level of value and experience that they've come to know you for. So making sure that internally you have a very, very clearly defined client experience process. Level three - Understand the business outcomesNow moving on to level three value. So for a client, if you are offering level three value, not only do you offer a high quality service, you not only deliver an exceptional client experience, but you also understand the business outcomes that the client is trying to achieve. And you align your services to help them achieve them. And the client has a return on investment for the relationship. So if you are operating at level three value, you are not only doing everything that we've already discussed, but you're also regularly diagnosing the client, that and their business, to uncover opportunities for you to really make a difference to their bottom line for you to make them money, save them money, save them time, reduce costs, and all of these business outcomes that clients work with us for. So you will understand how to ask the right questions at the right time in the right way to uncover the business outcomes and the business objectives that the client is trying to achieve. You're also researching. So there shouldn't be a client question that you asked that you couldn’t be looking up on Google before you actually get to the client office. So make sure that you really fully understand the client business. And that is typically, you know, looking at the client's website, following the company Chairman online, following all of your client contacts on social and having a Google Alert set up for your company, the company name, maybe the product, maybe the competitor products. And if you're working with a listed company that's on a stock exchange, then you can also look at resources like Seeking Alpha, where you can actually download the C suite transcripts of some of their meetings, and their investor meetings where they're talking about where they're headed, where the company is going, what their long term visions or what their yearly plan is, what their strategic imperatives are. And you can really get a great understanding. So you can actually download those transcripts for free and read them really to understand the company at a very, very senior level. You might also talk to their clients and customers. So you might join focus groups, you might generate some unique first party data to understand their client customer. And customers, you may be doing some kind of listening study to understand more about what their needs are and how their needs are changing. Or you might be talking to other departments within your client company to get their perspective on where the growth areas are in the business and where the challenges are. So for example, if you are dealing with the marketing department, then you may ask to talk to their head of sales, or even go out on the road with one of their sales reps if they're still doing face to face selling. So, really having the skill you need to operate a level three is a level of business acumen and a real thirst to understand the client business from a business perspective, and understanding what they want to achieve. What are the value drivers? How are they, what next year are they focusing their energy and their budget on, and who owns that problem and who owns that challenge to address. So you will be asking for their marketing plans or operational plans. And you understand where their focus is, and what the important issues are for them as a business. Because where you become more valuable is where you really understand, not just thinking about yourself, it's not thinking about your services, it's thinking about their business and how you can add value. And you can share insights. Level four – Future value creationSo I hope this is useful so far. And finally, we're moving on to level four value. So level four value is where you do all of the things we've discussed, this isn't one or the other, this is actually building on the skills that you already have. But level four value is about future value creation. So the skill you need is to be a strategic thinker. Future value creation simply means that you are looking ahead of where the client is currently, and you are spotting opportunities for them to capitalise on, or you're identifying challenges where you can help them avoid. So in order to, the skills you need at this level really are to be looking at the environment, to be situationally aware, to be reading about trends, to look at competitive landscape, to be a lot more consultative, to be very proactive in generating ideas of where you think that the client needs to be aware, and what's your point of view, in terms of how you are going to help them solve these problems or capitalise on opportunities. And there was a study done several years ago, and it was led by Tim Williams from Ignition Consulting Group, and he's a pricing strategist for agencies. And there was a big study, it was global, and it was between agencies and clients. And one of the questions that was asked was, Why do you, why do you let go of an agency? And the client said, because they never gave us anything that we didn't ask for. And I think sometimes in agency life, we believe that because we are delivering good value quality service, that that's good enough. But unfortunately, our competitors are waiting in the wings to help our clients solve their biggest problems and challenges. And if we are continuing to be reactive to briefs and just deliver good service, it's no longer enough. So yeah, if you're operating a level four you are, you've got an analytical mind, you're looking at trends. And a little tip here is I think trends. You know, you can google what trends there are, both in your business, but also how they relate to the client's business. So for example, if you look at management consultancy websites, they tend to have a lot of people that are part of these generations of reports. So PriceWaterhouseCooper,s Accenture, McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Bain and Company are just a handful of those websites that you can refer to, because often they publish reports about different market segments. So there may be segments in the market, and there certainly have been recently ,that you can look at to identify maybe what the customer trends are, what the market trends are, what's changing, what you know, a lot of people have been talking about digital transformation this year, particularly in 2020. So we you know what, what is changing for your client and what can you bring to their attention. Think about the customer insight that you can find out that your client didn't know. Think about the market trends that you can find out more about and help educate your client. And I think education is huge. If you are looking to grow your existing accounts, because anything that you can educate your client on, is going to stand you in good stead for being positioned more as a trusted adviser, rather than an order taker.  So I hope these four level of levels of value, and the four sets of skills that I think are really important in order to deliver that value, has been useful. And this is step one, all about a value ladder in my Account Accelerator Programme. My Account Accelerator Programme has been running since 2016. It is for you if you're an agency account manager with at least two to three years experience, if you’re an account director and you have to be responsible for existing client growth. It's a three month programme, it's weekly calls. And I literally give you the tools, techniques, strategies, and you end up with a plan after that 90 days in how you can grow your existing accounts. Account Accelerator ProgrammeSo there are nine steps. And the first step is the value ladder, which we've just briefly discussed, where we actually sit down and develop relevant ideas for you to proactively take to your clients. So you're definitely increase the client's perception of value for your role and your services. The next step is relationship mapping, where you will ultimately save time by focusing your account growth actions, on the right opportunities, the right clients, because otherwise, it's a scattergun approach, where, and I know this is one of the push backs that a lot of agency account managers say, I don't have time, I don't have time. So we need to make sure that you are spending your time in the right areas. The next step of the Account Accelerator Programme is client diagnosis. And this is where you'll increase your confidence in client interactions, and ask the right questions to uncover the right growth opportunities. And I give you a framework for asking those questions. The next step is referrals blueprint, and this is where you'll ultimately feel really comfortable about asking for referrals. Referrals are really, really important in terms of growing your existing accounts. And statistically, according to an Agencynomics report, 30% of growth comes from your clients referring you to others, or leaving the client company and taking you with them. So in order to master referrals, it's really important that we are able to say them in the right way, and ask for them in the right way. The next step in the Account Accelerator Programme is all about client stories. So you'll increase your client's receptiveness to your suggestions and ideas, because part of interacting with clients is making sure that you are proposing ideas in the right way, without any resistance from your client. The next step is all about client experience. And you will ultimately reduce your uncertainty of which growth strategy is right for which client. So we literally give you a toolbox of strategies and tactics to use for growth. And the next few steps are your authority builder. So we'll make sure that you raise your personal profile. And so that you're interacting with your clients in the right way, not just in person, but also online. Your risk management is the next step. So risk management is all about how to reduce the client relationship risk, because the last thing we want to do is make all this effort to develop our client relationships when ultimately, we also need to be mitigating the risk against losing them. And then finally, we pull everything together into a practical, short, usable client growth plan.  One of the things that I hear time and time again, from account managers account directors is that they have a plan for growth, a client development plan, but it's so unwieldy and so huge, that frankly, they don't use it and it gets left on their desk. So if you would like some more information about the Account Accelerator Programme, there's limited numbers. We're kicking off in January, on January the 12th 2021. And there are going to be different account managers and account directors from different agencies who are very enthusiastic. They want to accelerate their career. They want to be able to add more value to their existing clients, and they don't want to be coming across as salesy, but ultimately, they are responsible for account growth. So if this sounds like you then please get in touch. It's jenny @accountmanagementskills.com or send me a message on LinkedIn. It's Jenny Plant. So I hope you found this valuable. I'd love to hear from you. And I will see you on the next episode.

Transcript:Jenny: So today I'm delighted to have Bill Wallsgrove, who is a bit of a guru I'd say in the branding world. He has over 30 years experience helping companies with branding. And now he helps agencies established their brands. And that's particularly one of the reasons I wanted to invite him along today was to talk a little bit more about this. Bill has such an impressive background that I struggled to pick out some key points in his career to kind of highlight, but there are a couple of things. One, you were Creative Director for Coley Porter Bell and also Future Bands. Obviously, run your own branding consultancy for many, many years. And you have a lot of experience both in paint and branding beers. And some of the names are Heineken, Budweiser, Pils. You've also worked on Benetton, B&Q, and I'm sure hundreds of others. You also run workshops for agencies to establish their brand. And you're also a university lecturer, I don't know where you find the time to do that. Is if that wasn't enough, you also advise agencies. So you sit on the board of a couple of agencies, one of which is Studio Blup as non-exec. So Bill, welcome to the show. I'm really delighted to have someone with such experience here. So thank you for joining me. Bill: Thank you. That's just a great introduction. And I feel like it's like if I was on stage, I'd say, Hello, London town! Jenny:  You can still say that. But I will always say, would you mind spending a couple of minutes first of all, just kind of filling in the gaps to your background and experience? Bill: Yeah, well, it's interesting what you say, I'm not a university lecturer. I'm a visiting lecturer at several art colleges, universities, and one of the lectures I give is all about personal branding. And personal branding is really to help some third year students think about how they brand themselves to go out to the world, how they launch themselves, how they celebrate their differences and their unique qualities. And one of the slides I put up is saying, ‘where I never knew that I'd be where I am now 30 years ago’, because you know, here am I now a brand consultant, specialising in digital strategy for agencies. And talking about personal branding, talking about colour theory. These are not things I started out doing. When I kind of left school, I went to art college, to be a graphic designer. And that was a pretty difficult choice because I also was offered a place to do history, which is my other passion, at University. Well, I told my father, I said, Look, I'm not going to take the history place. I'm gonna go to art school he said, and I've used this adage before, he said, you know, go to art school, you'll never get a career out of that. Also it's, it's it's sex, drugs and rock and roll. I said, Dad, you just sold it to me.Brilliant account management. So yeah, I went to art school and thought I wanted to go into advertising. In fact, I did, I spent, after I left art school, I went to the creative department at Ogilvy and Mather.And I was there for about three or four months, I really didn't like advertising. I didn't like being in a creative department that had no contact with the clients. And I was talking to friends about it. And they said, Well, you ought to go work, maybe for more branding agency. And you know, you're not stuck in advertising. I then went to work for a very small agency before I joined Coley Porter Bell and really enjoyed it because with a small agency, you were both creating, and also presenting your work to clients. And I began to realise my passion was not just about the creative work itself, but also being passionate about explaining why the creative solutions, right from clients, I began to enjoy talking about why creativity, creativity mattered. And I went on to be creative director at Coley Porter Bell. And I was stopped one day by my managing director who said, and she was a very bright woman, she said, you know, Bill, I think you're wasted in the studio. And I thought I'd been told off, you know, you know, you're no good. And she actually didn't mean that as well. She said, you're much more valuable to us selling design to our clients, than you are actually being stuck on the drawing board as it was then and then the computer. And I began to think about so I went back and told my wife this and she said, Oh yeah, she's right. You know, you're passionate about your subjects and obviously, you know, she’d seen when I've been out with friends at dinner parties and describing the latest projects, I'm working on how passionate I was about. And so I kind of moved from being a creative to by default, being a sort of client manager, if you like and managing fairly large accounts at the time, which included things like Dulux Paint, Holsten Pils, which is where the beer and paint thing started. And several other brands like Nestle and Unilever and retail brands like Tesco and began to become really interested in, then I started reading up about the theories of branding realising that I couldn't just talk about design, I had to talk about why design worked for business. So then began to read books like The Big Idea and, and Fishing in the Deep Water and several other books, which were all about how brands have to differentiate themselves and it's interesting Coley Porter Bell was a great place to sort of start my career because it was a strategic design agency, which was one of the sort of pioneers in the 90s actually talking about strategy and design. Which is why in the end they were bought by WPP, because Martin Sorrell could see that see what capable trying to do had a very close link to what his agencies were doing. So ironically, I started working with Ogilvy and Mather again. You can't get rid of it. So since then, is it okay to carry on? So since then, after WPP bought Coley Porter Bell, I didn't like being in the larger agency group to be fair. And that's when I then broke away and formed my first agency. When I say formed, I didn't, it was an existing product design company. But I joined it as a partner to introduce graphics and branding, its product design. And that was particularly important for new product development, particularly when you're doing beer brands where you’re both creating brand new bottle shapes, which is the product design part, but also creating the branding. And of course, the bottle shape is part of the branding there. It's what we use called 2D and 3D means 60. It's the kind of it's how it comes together. So became passionate about new product development. And obviously, the branding as part of that. We had that for about eight years before we sold that to Interpublic, which is the McCann Erickson agency, we then sort of sidled up alongside McCann Erickson. And again, I realised I didn't like being part of an agency group. And that was my kind of, I guess it was my kind of midlife crisis, as I never really want to work for anyone ever again, I quite enjoyed running my own agency. So that's what I should be doing. So ever since then, I've had several other consultancies. But now I'm an independent brand consultant.I think somebody described you know, the hitting 40 moment as being you want to only work for yourself, means that you've decided you're unemployable, which I think was probably what I meant. Because I was too opinionated. Jenny: There’s nothing wrong with that, Bill. There's so much that I want to dive into. And before I start asking my questions that I've kind of established, I want to pick up on something you said about strategic design. And I talk a lot to agency account managers about talking the language of the C suite, you know, talking the language of business outcomes. And I would just love your thoughts. If you can explain to me, how do you, perhaps you don't need to, but how can you convince the C suite? That design has a place at the table, that it's going to actually make a difference to the bottom line? Bill: It's a good point, I guess it's why almost all projects that I've been involved in for the last 15 years always start with a brand workshop, which is actually when you sit around table, with all the key stakeholders and work out what's the current status of the business? What's the current status of the brand? What are the things we need to do which define what the communication creative briefs should be? Because obviously, a design is only as good as the brief. But of course, everything is designed. You know, you can't say design isn't at the table. Because there's nothing that isn't designed, everything we see around us is designed by somebody. Because design doesn't just mean drawing, design from the dictionary term means problem solving. So design doesn't mean you have to actually draw something design means you have to solve a design. Scientists use design to solve things like creating a vaccine, you know, the brief was, how are you going to create something which is going to attack this particular virus? And what are the solutions? So it's design and through experiments, you come up with the right answer. But why strategic design, which I think is more key to your question, is if strategy really means, you know, very basic marketing means, what are you trying to sell? Who’re you trying to communicate to where do they gather? What do you want them to do? What's the call for action? It's very simple. It's why I almost hate the word digital marketing is because it's all marketing, it's selling to people. And it's knowing, you know, you've got to motivate people, you've got to provide them with information and stuff, which is going to engage them and make them buy something or make them do something. And design is both the process and obviously one of the outputs. Jenny: This is great. And the other question I was going to ask you was a lot of people have different interpretations of what a brand is, you know, and I know there's lots of descriptions of how to explain what is a brand? How do you define a brand? Bill: Yeah, well, I think for me a brand is a price. And I agree with you the problem for me with a lot of sort of brand strategy stuff is there have been so many things going around the world of branding in terms of, you know, is it a brand mission, a brand vision, a brand proposition, value, and people get confused by the terminology. And for me, it's about a promise delivered. That's what a brand should be. And my latest bugbear, I guess is a lot of people talking about it seems to be en vogue. In vogue, whatever the phrase is? I think En Vogue were a group, that’s my DJ past! In vogue is to talk about brand purpose. And I kind of get slightly irritated by that. Because some brands do have a purpose or some brands don't. You know, I'm working for an engineering company at the moment. And they do fantastic engineering, it's high precision customised engineering. And they said, What's our brand purpose, I said, I don't think you have got a brand purpose, you've got a brand promise, which is to do highly efficient robotic engineering. And they went Okay, that's fine. Whereas I'm working on another brand, which is all about combustible packaging. Now, that definitely has a purpose. Because what it's trying to do is reduce packaging waste, it's a purpose is about giving something back to society. Now, whether it's environmental, or community or some, a purpose, I think is a much more human or Earth bound thing. It's not about you know, if you're just making widgets, you don't have a purpose, you have a promise that we're going to make the very best widgets. And we're about efficiency. So I think promise and relevance is what branding is about. I personally use something which I love, which I kind of used and going back to the personal branding side, which is I like the term Ikigai. Do you know the term Ikigai? Yeah, I've used it in lots of brand workshops. And it's a very simple thing. It’s Japanese philosophy. And it, it asks, but it's really Ikigai means your reason for getting up in the morning. What motivates you? And if it was a Venn diagram, sorry I’ll draw a Venn diagram in the air, and then it's got four component parts, and it's What are you good at? What do you love? What does the world need, and What can be rewarded for. And at the heart of that is your Ikigai. And Ikigai really means your personal sense of purpose. And those people I think, who find their Ikigai early enough, they do find things, they're really good at things they love, things that they really need to provide things that people need, and they can be rewarded for it. They're going to be happy in what they do. I think when you're doing something, which doesn't suit your Ikigai, that's when there's a sort of dysfunctionality. So I tend to use Ikigai to define, not just purpose, but your kind of mission. What's your role? What’s a brand's role, and if a brand defines what its role is, it will then define what it needs to promise to people and then deliver that promise, and brands fail and they don't deliver the promise that they sell. Jenny: Do you think that too many companies right now are thinking we have to have a purpose? Because there seems to be a rise in brands having to have some bigger purpose, then? Bill: I think so I think, well, I'm not saying it's the Emperor's New Clothes, but a bit of me thinks that people try and oversell it. I think purpose is very clear. There are some brands for the purpose. And there's some brands who don't say some businesses that do and some don't, maybe that's me just being very black and white about it. But I do think that when you strive to, you know, give a fizzy drink a sense of purpose, you know, and the way you justify is saying, you know, we liberate people, you know, and let them express themselves, I kind of go, no you’re just a fizzy drink. And I'm sorry, it's you know, I love marketing, but I can also see through the bullshit. Jenny: I love that you've said that because it almost seems sometimes a bit contrived, doesn't it? Bill: That's my problem. And of course, the great thing about marketing now is people are very marketing savvy, I hate the kind of Z generation or Millennials or whatever you want to call it, but they're very aware about how they're being marketed to. And I think if you strive to over market, and you don't use human terms to describe what you're trying to do, because brands succeed, now, if they're discovered, they don't really succeed by selling hard to people, people discover brands now. And also, they like peers, peer to peer recommendations as well. So I think trying to sell purpose when you really don't have one absolutely is probably, it makes me cringe. It's like scraping nails on a blackboard to me, though, I can see through what you're doing. It's just it doesn't work. Jenny: I think if everyone's honest, I think that's the same kind of impact that it has on individuals as well. So moving on to thinking about brands, the actual, how do you think branding, the process of branding, and also brands themselves have evolved over the lifespan of your career thus far? Bill: Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. I mean, I read an article recently about sort of three generations of branding. And I thought what was great about that was it sort of  it kind of clearly says because when you think about the history branding, branding sort of started with almost you know, what it is it's putting a mark on your animal in a field. It's or, you know, the Romans use branding for various things, But branding sort of post war and I think post war is really where branding kind of took off in America in particularly, and obviously spread across to here was all sort of fast moving consumer good lead. And it was all about product performance, and it was all about aspiration. And it was branding was about ownership of something, of course, it was about owning a product or service. And then it was about giving that message out. And that's why all the classic kind of David Ogilvy advertising stuff, which is all about pushing messaging out, which engaged people. And that feels, to me, that was the kind of first generation of branding. It kind of really changed, I think, at the turn of the century into now, when I say turn of the century, that's my history thing coming back up. But I think now it's much more about customer, it was much more about customer experience. And it was much more service led. And I think you found things like financial services, and computer companies and hotel groups and airlines started talking, and coffee brands, started talking much more about service and the experience of that brand. You know, how did Starbucks grow so quickly? Well, they branded what should be very simple process, which is buying a cup of coffee. And I think we've gone past that now. Whereas I think what's happened now is moved and particularly with the huge success of the technology companies, we've moved into this third generation, which is much more entertainment led. And it's much more about a kind of engaging people's intention. Apple, of course, the past masters of that, and I hate to say like many brand consultants, I use that example. Because, you know, Apple said very early on Steve Jobs said we're about think different. We're not about selling computers, we're selling to consumers, what they can do with our computers. How can they be creative? What music can they create? What designs can they create? What films can they create? So the think different was trying to be almost anti technology and saying, we're empowering you because we made a computer system, if you don't have to be nerdish to understand, sorry, for the nerds out there. Thats kind of what I think it is now. And I think that's why tech brands have used much more of the elements of the entertainment industry. When Apple do new product launched, it's like a new film being launched. Or it's like a, you know, it's like everyone I know last night was waiting for the for the new episodes of the Crown on Netflix. God, I even put it in my diary, The Crown’s gonna be on, but I think brands now use much more about that. It’s not my thinking. There's several people writing about this kind of three generations of branding. And I think they have moved from the hard sell of products, then the experience of being with the products. And that's much more about the expectation, and particularly as a lot of successful brands now are not tangible things. I mean, Google massive brand, but we think it's a free service. It's not a free service. It's Google, you are part of the brand now. It wants to own information about you, you are the content. And so you know, and I think it's interesting how brands that were traditionally FMCG brands are desperately trying to catch up with that sort of, you know, so to use my fizzy drink, I will call it out but when Pepsi Cola did that awful ad, I think a year ago, which was sort of young people marching, protesting in the street, not protesting about anything, it's just, you know, we're Pepsi. We're providing people with the power to go on the street in protest. Of course, there's blank signs, not really protesting anything. And that's when going back to the two things I was talking about, it's trying to pretend you've got purpose, your fizzy drink is motivating people to go and talk about revolution on the streets. And also, you know, trying to pretend you're involved in entertainment that you’re not. It's just sort of, don't try and pretend you're you know, and the problem is young marketeers, I think jump on a bandwagon very quickly, and they say, we've got to have a purpose. We've got to be relevant. We've got to, and they don't stick to their knitting. No, maybe maybe this is just me being the Victor Meldrew of branding? You know,  you can see through it and and I kind of watch how my my son engages with branding as well. And you know him growing up just seeing the brands that meant stuff to him and the fact that I don't think he has ever really looked at a laptop. I think he uses his mobile phone for everything.And the brands that he has loved and liked have been usually fashion brands, music brands, you know, Spotify is big to him it's just, he’s not particularly you know, I can wax lyrical about, you know, the history of fast moving consumer goods. How Unilever, with Sunlight was one of the first kind of brands, but it doesn't mean anything to him. You know, it's, I'm interested in the history. He's actually interested in, you know, what engages with me, you know, what, what do I use? And I remember when he first, you know, said left us with him about 10 years ago, who can probably have got the timing wrong. And we've had dinner I said, I'll just go and get a taxi and he said, No, I'll get you getting an Uber. What? So, you know, he was introducing me to brands long before I knew about them. Jenny: I love this, there's so much. I love that third, you know, first, second and third generation branding, I think that's really clear to understand. I mean, just this, I don't know if you've got one off the top of your head. But given that we are in this third generation, it's all about entertainment and expectation. And I can certainly see from my partner’s son, actually, following fashion brands, they have the drop of the new range of clothing that everyone's lining up in the streets for, so I can see what you're saying about this. Do you think that there are any FMCG type brands that are doing that well? Bill: That's a really interesting one. No, is my honest... I've kind of gone..it's more kind of retailers. I think online retailers who have been smarter than anyone at engaging people, I don't think FMCG brands themselves. And I think actually, there are things like good design on shelf and standout, good packaging, and good advertising still matters. You know, I don't think these things are dead. And of course, advertising doesn't it could be just a fantastic YouTube campaign. It could be just a fantastic. But you know, wouldn't it be great if they got podcasters like you, or bloggers talking about how great their brands were to people who actually bought into them? You know, I know that my partner's youngest daughter, who's she, she does fantastic. She sells fashion through Bing Bong and bang bap that I don't know what it is, I don't know what it's called. And she uses Tik Tok and I have to admit, I'm lost now. Whatever you're doing, you’re doing it well. But you know, she seems to love watching people dancing in her clothes that she's made. Jenny: And before I go on to how you help agencies, specifically, I want to kind of pick up a little bit further on this because you work with Studio Blup, I had to look them up, to be honest. But I realised how trendy they are and how kind of what a famous youth brand they are. So on this point about, you know, the third generation branding and your experience with guiding Studio Blup, can you kind of just give us a little bit of background on how you help them and what they're doing that's different? Bill: Yeah, I mean, in a way, Studio Blup has been sort of a happy accident for me and serendipity. I discovered them because they did a website that I admired for a client of mine. And I said, How did you find it and find these people? And I think it was through a connection through college students or whatever. And said, Well, I'd love to go and see them found out they were in Islington, went up to see them and got on with them, like house on fire. And we started talking away and they're a different generation from me, they were probably 10 years out of, or eight or 10 years out of college, and just doing some fantastic stuff. And they were sort of founded on the basis of being much more sort of design and illustration agency, because the creative director came from a background of graffiti design. And he had lots of friends in the sort of grime industry, the music industry. And so they were being used by brands like Nike and Universal for doing great social media campaigns. And when I started talking to them, they said, well, we'd really like some help on two things. One is more on our direction. So I’m no longer a non executive director, by the way, I'll explain why. A non executive director was always a kind of inverted commas more, I was more a mentor for them. And they wanted to think about how to repurpose themselves to make their brand more relevant. And they wanted to add in branding services to what they were doing. So I started doing brand workshops for them. Because brand workshop helps clarify the brief, they were very frustrated that some of the briefs they were getting were pretty fuzzy. And, you know, I when I was at Future Brand, we were forever offering writing the briefs for our clients service, because actually sometimes clients know they want to do something but actually writing the brief is a really hard thing to do. And so I started doing brand workshops to help clarify the brief, of course, they could add that as an additional conscious consultancy service into their fee basis. So I was both a mentor but also doing projects with them. But for them, I began to say stop trying to pretend you're a design company. It's quite obvious you're not a design company in the classic sense, what you are is a much more like a style house. You have a very idiosyncratic style, which people really love because it's relevant. It's now it's funky, cool, fab I can use all the 60s groovy words you want. But it was a very engaging style and their social media reach was huge. Their Instagram page is fantastic. And I said, instead of saying we are another design company, because there's hundreds of them knocking on the same doors, why don't you say that we are a style house. And that we're rooted in, in in culture that we, you know, we, we look at the streets we absorb it, and we put it back into our designs. And almost say, we have our own distinctive style, if you want some of that come and work with BLUP, but because nobody else has it. Not, we're another design company knocking on your door. And so we kind of pushed that further that that they are a style house with this unique way of remixing things. If you look at their work, and I would say look at their Instagram page, because the website isn't the key thing, really. Their following on, on their Instagram page is huge. And the fact they get so many projects from people going, we really like what you're doing. And they're hugely cheeky as well, in terms of, you know, they started doing what they called Disney remixes, which were taking, and I know, Dines the creative director loves, like me, he's got a love comic books and cartoons, all that kind of stuff. And they did these Disney remixes. And they got approached by Disney and I thought, Oh, my god, they're going to be sued? And they said we love your stuff. You know, would you do some work with us? So it's that kind of it's, it's an attitude, which is not that we’re yet another design agency, we have our own style. And if you buy into it, we can prove that people really follow it. And so much so that they started managing some of their clients’ social media accounts as well. Jenny: Wow, do you know, as you're talking, I was just thinking of a slight sort of a different industry, but a similar kind of thing where, you know, George Northwood. I get my hair done at George Northwood. And if you go to George Northwood, it's a type of cut that you get, you know, they cut all in the same way in George Northwood style. He's really very popular on social media, he does some stars. And it's a similar kind of thing, what you're just describing, and I, I don't know whether many others sort of, you've called them a style house, but originally, they were a design agency, that have that kind of, you come to us, and we will help you with all the way WE do this, that's going to keep you relevant. Do you know anyone else that's doing that? Bill: No, but I’ll just finish, but I will go on to that. But BLUP the other thing they were doing, which I thought was great is because their other passion is not just design and illustration, and graffiti, and video and all that kind of stuff, animation. But they love clothes, and fashion. And so very early on, they started doing their own fashion items. So when you go to the BLUP site, it's not just to look at their work, you can buy a T shirt, or a bag or a hat or whatever. And I thought that was extraordinary. And I thought it was just a sort of vanity luxury bit of project. But weirdly enough, the fact they do that makes them appear more like a style fashion house. In fact, their clothes have been very popular with the community they know. So in the grime community, you know, and they gave samples out, and it's very, very clever marketing, so much so they did a pop up shop last year, just to test it in Soho and sold out all the items within the three to four weeks. So I think the analogy of because if you think about it, you know, I know, my partner has particular fashion brands that she buys into, and you know, she will constantly look either online or in store, see what the fashion brands are doing. And I think that's what people do with BLUP. So and, of course, there's still a very good creative design house, they do great identities and stuff, but I think it's kind of you’ve got to buy into the BLUP way. And so much so part of their success and I'd like to think I contributed part of that as a mentor, is they were bought by the Lab group at the beginning of this year, actually during lockdown, which is extraordinary. But that's because Johnny Tooz. who is the chairman of the Lab group he was also another mentor to BLUP, the managing director, Alex. And you know, they were kind of chatting away about what the future was. And I think Johnny must have had a eureka moment. He said, why don't you join our group. Because the Lab group is one of the companies that I really admire, what they're trying to do is build up this sort of digitech way of approaching branding, which is what I call all brands should be doing this now which is having a digital first approach to branding. Much as i say i hate digital marketing, I do, the terminology of digital marketing, but you have to understand and particularly when brands are becoming critically aware of this lockdown has exposed, this things won't change after lockdown. You know, all sorts of things that happen the way people work from home, the way people buy things, the way people engage with things, you know, as soon as who you know, who's the biggest suffer when they announced this potentially a vaccine, Zoom shares must have dropped you know?  Jenny: What is a digital first approach to branding? Bill: I guess the prime example of that, I'll say Apple, I won't use them again. But Airbnb would be one that I would say is that it starts off with is, what's the first thing you see on Airbnb is probably the app on your phone. Okay, so if you work backwards from what's the app on our phone, and we have to have a distinctive app on our phone, and brand backwards from there, you know, how then does that identity express itself across different social platforms, how does it engage as a website, you know. I used Uber, you can use Deliveroo, all these brands have realised it's about digital first. Whereas a lot of the companies I'm working for now haven't thought about that, because they designed their identity maybe 15-20 years ago, when it was much more print based world. So the identity actually can't be transformed to a digital first brand. So most of the work that we're doing particularly a lot of work here in Brighton, my other part of my job is with a company called New Juice, and almost all the work but we're much more sort of, say a classic, purist, typography based company, we create classic identities, but we are a digital agency as well. So we work from what's the smallest place your brand is going to be seen. You know, it's going to be if you're a B2B business, it's going to be your website, and probably your LinkedIn page. So work out that how those things work. And also, from a digital first point of view, realise that don't put repetitive copy in because Google doesn't like that. Make sure you say the same thing but you say in various different ways. So you begin to, digital first means make sure that your identity works at the finest point it has to, work backwards from there but also think clearly about the words that you use, you know, understand how organic search works. And so there are a lot of tools of how digital branding works that you need to incorporate in your next generation of branding. So literally, I love working on brand new briefs and working on some great ones at the moment. But I love working with companies who actually come to a realisation that actually, probably we need to go into the next generation of our branding, it just is not fit for purpose anymore. Jenny: This is so fascinating. I'm loving it. And to that point, there's obviously agency owners, leaders listening to this thinking, I love what Bill's saying. And actually, the first question for you is, why would an agency come to you about their own brand, when a lot of them are experts in themselves? Bill: Actually, weirdly, it came about, I've done more for Brighton agencies and I have for London agencies, it came from BLUP experience, I didn't change the way BLUP looked, but I changed the way they talked. It's a different thing. Sometimes because when you're not an employee or a shareholder or a director, you can see the wood for the trees, it's what consulting is you can stand back and be more objective. And sometimes, so when I was trying to explain the benefit of using brand workshops, quite often, an agency would go, can you do a brand workshop on us because it's a bit like doing a health check or an MOT. It's just going where we are fit for purpose. And of course, when you do a brand workshop for an agency, and I've done several now,  I've done four or five here in Brighton the last two years. They're just checking from an objective point of view that it's not that they don't have the skills themselves. But quite often, you know what it's like when you've got your own business, you're immersed in it. And sometimes you just want it's a bit like having you know, and my joke is, you know, being a consultant is stealing someone's watch and telling them the time. You’re not telling them anything they don't know, but they quite like having it as a health check. Jenny: I so see that. And being a consultant myself, it's so true. And you're right, you get so immersed in your own business. You cannot see it objectively, you cannot see the wood for the trees. So I love that. Can you, I mean, do any particular agencies spring to mind apart from obviously the ones that we've mentioned, that do their own brand really well. Bill: Yeah, I think my my favourite agency at the moment is one called You and Mr. Jones. Do you know You and Mr. Jones? Jenny: I don't actually, it kind of rings a bell. Bill: Well, I think what's clever about, they're an American agency, and they were founded bysomebody who's rooted like you in advertising, but began to realise the world they call themselves you know, they are helping brands through digitech. They're helping brands understand how to use all the skills out there to be more effective. I love the brand name as well mainly because I'm a soul fan. So you know if it's a Billy Paul, Me and Mrs. Jones, it used to be when I was a DJs to be the song I played at the end. You know, it's what they call the dance section. There's another phrase for it, which I use.Jenny: How did you how did you manage to squeeze in DJing as well? Bill: I've been an owner of a house music label. I've been an investor in a nightclub I've yeah well, no, it's kind of you follow your hobbies. I mean, look, I couldn't, I failed miserably at the things I really wanted to do if you want to know my Ikigai. So I'm not centre forward for England, never was, never played for Arsenal. And, you know, was never, you know, successful drummer in a band. So all of which I've tried. And you know, what they say about people who fail at being musicians themselves, they become DJs. You realise, you know, you’re not going to make your own music, play other peoples. Jenny: So I completely cut cross you there. So You and Mr. Jones is… Bill: It's worth looking at their website. It's just I think they're very clever. And I’d say the Lab group are probably following a similar model whereby it's much more using thinking about neuroscience, thinking about behaviour. You know, it's much more, you can't motivate people if you don't know more about psychology about what motivates people. And I think so it combines this, I think You and Mrs. Jones do it very well, which is, is it combines research, it combines constantly having your finger on the pulse in terms of how platforms are changing. It requires creative solutions to navigate those. So they're what are called post advertising agency. Because I think the old advertising agency model is dead, but that's another thing. Jenny: Okay, brilliant. I'm gonna have to look them up. And if there's an agency leader thinking, I love what Bill saying, and I would love to work with him on my brand. Can you just give us a kind of brief overview of how you approach that task? Bill: Yeah, well, I mean, with, I'll go back, it's good question. I'll go back to why I've worked with some agencies in the past. One agency I worked with, they wanted to reframe what they were doing, because their agency name, I won't name them, was the two partners names, and the two partners have fallen out. So the remaining partner wanted to then reframe what the agency was about and rename it, of course. So that was a very specific task. So I don't just work on agencies,  the reason I do it with agencies is to help them sell brand workshops as part of their service. And I say I do run workshops with them to show them the process. But go back to the reason you’d want some third party help, some objectivity, is because you've obviously decided you, you either want to change your proposition or your promise, or you want to add existing services, or you want to go to new markets, or there'll be a different reason. And like anything until you ask the right questions, you can't come up with the right answer. Everything is, I like the word bespoke. But that's the fashion telling, it's probably customised. Everything has to be customised. The problem is every problem is different. It shares similar things, because branding, you know, branding is like tree rings, or fingerprints, everyone has a unique fingerprint, and every tree has a unique tree ring. But they exist, and we know why they exist. Jenny: And is the process of working with that agency. Do you do what you mentioned before about getting all the stakeholders around the table to do that process with you? And if so, how long does that take? Bill: The classic brand workshop is probably about three days, and it will be the first day would be me researching the competition and researching the category. And if this is I do this for clients, as well as agencies as I say, it would be, you know, let me go and find out how the world sees you in this sea of other brands that you're competing with, you know, tell me who you think your key competitors are. And in that, I'll also probably look at some other categories as well, where other people are doing good stuff. So that audit and research happens first, research is really critical for any workshop. That means you go into a workshop with a few preconceived ideas. And this is what I've seen and observed, what do you think? So it's like putting a straw man into the conversation, which allows the stakeholders around the table then to go actually, yeah, and, of course, in a brand workshop, there's no wrong or right. You know, it should be a sense of everyone can just bring ideas to the table. And quite often you'll find somebody who's maybe more junior has really bright idea for the business. And the workshop actually brings it to the surface where I guess that's a really bright idea, whether it may not have come out of the normal systems, you know, within the office, you know, it's a chance to talk about our brand or our business in a kind of objective, consistent, the workshop can be a half day or a full day. And of course, a lot of these workshops now being done by Zoom. But of course, you can do that with the audit and questionnaire, then the Zoom call. And then the third part is the report which comes after which will be based on everything that everyone said, This is what you said, this seems to be the consensus. This is the criteria for the brief that you've set yourself, which is usually a new communication strategy. It could be, you know, a new look, it could be, so a creative brief. So it's three parts and say it's the research the activity which is the most critical part and then the honest, objective review of what you all collectively said. So putting, like I said, it's the watch back to you, isn't it? It's, it's almost putting the mirror and saying this is what you are. And this is what you say you want to do. Is that right? And of course, if they then say that's right, that can either go onto a creative brief which I can feed into one of my agencies, well, they can fit it back into their existing agency, it doesn't require me to them do the work. However, it's sometimes it does. Because you know, what it's like, and we go onto account management, when people like the way you talk about things, and they like the way you think they'll work with you. You know, it's nothing to do with I have a unique process, or I have unique proposition, I have a personality. And, you know, I have, I hope, a promise, which is that people like my personality, and some people don't, I can understand that. And people like what you're promising, they'll work with you. So it's a, I love workshops, because I guess in the same way that we all probably like counselling, you know, whether it be the counselling of friends or professional counsel, whatever your situation in life is, sometimes you do need to stop and take stock. Jenny: I totally agree. I think this is such a, an actually, I can see why this is so valuable, both for agencies who are looking to look at their brands in more detail for themselves, but also, as you say, as a service, that you step into that role to help agencies with that, with that, with that thing, because many agencies I work with, for example, they don't profess to be experts in branding. And yet through working with their clients, this comes up and the need comes up. But it's not something that they offer in house. So this is great to know that you do this. Let's turn our attentions to account management because many of my audience are account management and I, having worked in the industry for so long, Bill I'm just really interested in, first of all asking you the question, where do you see the value in account management? Bill: Good account management is so critical, as you and I both know, we're involved, we have been and are involved in the whole thing about relationship audits anyway, where you know, account manager, account management is about understanding the nature of both the business you're working with, and also the people you're working alongside, you know who your counterparts are in the business you're working for. So I think the value of account management is it, sometimes I say I had to learn by default, because I moved from being a creative into being a client director. And I tend to use the same things I use in my personal relationships was it's all about listening carefully. You know, knowing when to talk when not to talk. I think it's a lot to do with empathy. Because sometimes what you're being told to do isn't actually the whole brief. And sometimes if you’ve got some empathy, and you begin to ask the right questions, you'll know other aspects of the brief, which are equally as important. And of course, that's really important in account management, because good account managers actually can take one brief and turn it into two, you know, it's that kind of thing. Write a proposal, I always say this to people, whenever you write a proposal, you know, your proposal might be that one activity, but always put last sheet at the back of the proposal, did you know we do these other things? Because it doesn't matter if that's just seen as being a wasted page, or wasted PDF, at least because sometimes we'll go I didn't know you did that. Yo do copywriting? I didn't know you did that, we've actually got copywriter. So it's, it's got to be a sprat to catch a mackerel, you know, good account management should be about, of course, it's about continuity. It's obviously about success. It's about making sure that what is promised is delivered on time, at cost, accurately. And but I do think it's this, this. And the other thing, of course, with really good account management is, as I said, about workshops, research is so critical, not just research on the company you're just about to work for if you won the pitch, research on what their competitors doing, and research on the individuals you're working with, you know, I know that Simon a friend of ours, that said that, you know, he made it his job whenever he can't imagine would find out, you know, what are the interests of the person you're going, you know, are they interested in music, fashion, football. I mean, the weird thing for me is I know when I've been a successful account management because some of my great friends on LinkedIn are former clients of mine, and you know, we talk about football, music, politics, how much we hate Trump, you know, all that kind of stuff. You know, what cat videos we like, I'm joking. But you kind of and I say to an account manager, don't go out to try and be somebody friend, just be a really good professional. But if a friendship evolves out of that, then, you know, I probably in my career, worked for the same person in three different roles for three different companies. In other words, they've carried me along with them, no matter what agency I've been working with, it's my own or for somebody else into that. So people, I think people develop a shorthand together. Good account management is developing that shorthand, so that actually everything isn't laboured. Because I think the other thing we got to remember is, we think what the services are providing are so important, but they're not the most important thing in the client's life. You've got to recognise what you're doing, it may be a fun part of what they do, it's probably more fun than, you know, doing reviews of packaging lines, or whatever it is. But, and obviously, they love the results and when it motivates them, it really motivates them. But it goes back to if you have all that thing, that listening empathy and you really do some research, you're bound to probably have a better relationship. It may not be the strongest bond ever. You either want people to like you and like what you do, or just really like what you do. The liking you isn't the critical thing, but it often goes hand in hand. Jenny: I love all of that,everything that you've said. And I think, like you said, research is really important as well. It's bringing insight and ideas to the client that perhaps they hadn't considered.In terms of any high performing account managers you've experienced or you've worked with in the past, can you think of any examples where they've, you know, specifically delivered a lot of value, either to the client or the agency? Bill: I mean, when when we grew Planet very rapidly, Planet was the first company that I was the director of myself, which was the new product development agency where we used 3D design, product design and branding. We very quickly realised that as a group of creatives, and we were all creatives, that there were limitations to some of our skills, and three of our clients over a period of two years, then said, I really like your agency, I'd love to work, I'd love to switch sides. And two of them came from Unilever, one of them came from DHL, I think, and they were the best account managers we ever had, because, and they ended up they've all actually gone on and started their own agencies, we were just a stepping stone for  them. Hey c’est la vie but that's life out there. But the fact they’d come from the client side, meant that they instinctively knew what clients wanted, and how clients needed to be talked to. And also, the key thing we learned from them was actually how to provide stuff to your clients, which they could use to sell up to their bosses as well. In other words, how you provide information in a way which is useful. So I what I got out, there was a real understanding about what it must be like to be working inside Unilever or Nestle or the Diageo, you know, what are the things that are important there? Or Coca Cola? I remember once I was speaking to the marketing director, Coca Cola, a good friend, and I said, how come Coca Cola has all these problems launching new products? Should the problem is we've got too many clever people. I said, What do you mean, she said we’ve got so many clever people that often ideas get stuck in the system, because everyone's adding their, you know, it's almost we don't have a streamlined system. I think what they did for some of the revolutionary new products is they had a breakout team who went and worked in a separate office completely. Because the problem is, if you have too many people, you don't get clear cut through. Jenny: This is brilliant. Bill, I feel I could talk to you all day. But I've just looked at the time. So I'm really keen to get your view on. What do you think is the future of agencies and the future of the agency model? Any thoughts on that?  Bill: Yeah, this is this is an area again, Simon Mishra and I were talking about the other week, which is that I think it must be so tough for clients to work out where to get the services they need. You know, it used to be simple, you know, you had your advertising agency, you had your design agency, you had your public relations agency, etc. The digital world changed all of that. And the problem is, I think you've got digital agencies who have claimed their branding agencies, branding agencies, who are saying that social media agencies, people saying.. it's not being, not sticking to themselves. So I think the future of agencies is actually saying, again, going back to branding themselves, so they really know what their promises, what are they really good at, focus on what they're really good at, doesn't, they can still sell a whole bunch of other services, but understand the hierarchy of how you communicate what you don't pretend to be things you're not, you know, if really you’re greater public relations, and you have fantastic insight about how to, you know, speak to magazines, and you've got great relationship with journalists, that's your strength. The fact you can do social media stuff, as well as, don't pretend you're a social media expert. You know, and you've got you got hands on touch to all the, you know, the guru bloggers out there, and it's just, I think, stick to your knitting. But the future agencies means that lots of agencies are going to be confusing people by pretending they're everything to all men, and that's it's a very grey area out there. I think shopping it must be really difficult. I think it's why you know, the clever agency groups now you know, much as there are things about WPP I don't agree with but what Martin was brilliant at was sorting out what was.. this is a digital service within our agency. This is an advertising services agency, this is a creative, you know, saying it's all about you know, we're passionate about doing branding, and okay, that's why You and Mr. Jones is an agency out there talking about guiding people through digital technology. That's what we're best at. And then okay, well, what's the service that you need to guide you through this changing digital world?So I think, and it's why with Studio Blup, it's very clear what they are good at. And it's why they're, they're part of the Lab group now. They are great creative, hotshot have their own style, their own unique way of doing things, which people buy into, and has that way of working. And with New Juice here in Brighton, we know that we're when we're not a B2C agency, we're much more B2B agency, where we love doing business to business brands, and we're working, we've worked on several startups, they're probably my favourite kind of work at the moment, which is where you got a blank sheet of paper. And so we don't claim to be things that we're not, we're, you know, we say we're a branding agency that has our finger on the digital pulse, it's, it's fairly clear. Jenny: I think that makes so much sense stick to what you do really, really well. And just finally, to wrap up, do you have any sources that inspire you, sources of information, any books that you've read, that you think would be particularly relevant for the audience to read? That would help them either with their thoughts around branding or account management? And, yeah, or anyone that you follow? Bill: Not so much books, as I said, I'm not really, you know, the only book I've really loved reading recently is The Body by Bill Bryson. And that that was a very poignant book to read right before this whole COVID because it talks about, you know, the immune system and things. I mean, you know, so learning about your own body is pretty interesting. But that's irrelevant to what we're talking about. I mean, I guess the people I really follow people like Mark Ritson. Just  because whether you agree with him or not, he pumps a lot of stuff out of there, which is worth.. It’s like anyone you know, you can agree or disagree, but at least there's stuff that's being put out there. I really like Michael Wolff. Now, don't get confused, there’s two Michael Wolff's. If you Google it,  that one's a journalist. I mean, Michael Wolff, who used to be the creative director of Wolff Olins, the branding agency. His website, which has got an A-Z of branding, it's fantastic. I mean, it's quite frivolous and lovely. But, you know, I know him personally. And he writes stuff on LinkedIn, which I always read. And I like him as well so probably, it's not books, it's magazine articles. You know, there's, there's just some great people out there. I could go go through a long list, but I think it's kind of, definitely I suggest Michael Wolff, if you're a creative, I think if you want to, as you know, if you want to know what your client's needs are, you've got to be reading Marketing Week and Mark Ritson has great views about marketing. Marketing changes all time. Jenny: Great advice. Thank you. And just finally, if anyone's listening to this thinking, Bill sounds fantastic. I'd really like to kind of contact him. First of all, who would you like to be contacted by and and how would they do that?Bill: My real passion at the moment is helping people. The lovely thing about, not lovely, if there's any, any good news, but lots of people coming out of the woodwork who wants to launch their own new businesses. So I think it's been a lot of time for people to do their own Dragon's Den in their head, going, actually, maybe is this the way I want to work again? I've had an idea. So there are lots of new businesses being formed or new entrepreneurial ideas happening. And I love working on those because quite often, it is a brilliant, I'm working on one at the moment, which is an absolutely brilliant idea. But they haven't really got a brand name, or the one they came up with is not really clever. They hadn't really researched, the branding wasn't really important, the business idea. I can help on the branding side, so I love startups. Particularly I can really help those and of course, the other thing is because I'm not an agency with overheads, I can give much more of a personal service, which is valued for money, I have to say, people. I’m advertising myself!  I love that. And of course I love working with agencies, but I've kind of restricted myself now to working,  I've kind of done my job with BLUP, I'll still be working with them, but they're part of the Lab group. And that's their extended family, which gives them international reach. Doesn't mean I don't still work with them. But I'm really enjoying working here in Brighton with New Juice. Because the great thing about I weirdly moved to Brighton to work from home seven or eight years ago. So I kind of think I'm Nostradamus. I predicted it. But the lovely thing about looking Brighton is they're very small agencies here but the sense of collaboration is huge. It's a kind of mini Silicon Valley. There are so many digital companies and so many games developers and just really diverse.  Wired Sussex is great,  you can connect with people and I've connected with great video makers, animators, all sorts of people. So I think the future model of the agency world, from my perspective, is we're going to keep very lean at New Juice. But it's a bit like a film production company, you bring the right people in when the right brief needs them, you don't need to employ them. It's much more about the collaboration. And Brighton seems to have a great collaboration culture, partly because it's essentially I think it's Camden by Sea. It's got a love of music and arts, which is you know, that's why I lived in Camden. Jenny: Amazing, Bill, listen, I feel like I talk to you all day. This has been absolutely gold. Thank you so much for spending the time with me, sharing all your knowledge and all your views. I think it really has been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me today. Bill: Always a pleasure, Jenny. It was great to be introduced to you and I think your podcasts are great. I think that's the other thing is podcasts are something which have been hugely helpful during lockdown. I think I've certainly enjoyed doing several now. And it's got me listening to a lot as well, which is again, it's weird, isn't it? I just don't read books as much. Jenny: I think you should do one yourself. Bill: I've got an idea for one. Jenny: Okay, all the best. Thank you so much, Bill.

Today's guest is the lovely Lucy Snell the co-founder of Cherry Consulting. Cherry helps creative and digital agencies to generate new business and Lucy started the company in 2004. She's been featured three times in the BD100 list as one of the UK's most influential business developers and during this interviews shares many tips for agencies who are looking to generate more leads. In this episode, she shares: * Some of the biggest challenges she's seeing agencies have for approaching prospects right now * Tips for how to get cut through when prospective clients aren't responding * What she did to get a 50% open rate on one of her email campaigns * What she finds agencies need the most help with in the area of new business generation * Her thoughts on why some agencies are thriving at the moment * Exactly what she believes you should be spending your time on in the area of new business depending on the size of your agency. If you're working in agency new business or have aspirations to do so, this is a great interview and full of practical real life examples and advice. Enjoy!

Transcript:Welcome to episode nine. I'm continuing the theme today of talking directly to clients to understand their perspective on working with creative agencies, and particularly how agency account managers can help enhance relationships. So today's guests are Iris Gatzweiler and Jess Bowler, both of whom work for a global pharmaceutical company in the procurement team, both of whom have a huge amount of experience dealing with agency relationships. So in this episode, we discuss what procurement look for in long term agency suppliers, where procurement see value in agency account management, and how to ensure you keep the relationship on track, advice for how to approach procurement for the first time if you have no relationship currently, why involving procurement in how you expand your relationship within the company makes total sense and how procurement make an agency selection and how you can stand out from the crowd. There are so many golden nuggets in this episode, I really hope you're going to come away with some value areas. Iris and Jess are very generous with their time and their insight and sharing some examples of both good practice and also some things to avoid. So grab a pen and enjoy this episode, I’ll go straight over now. Jenny: So I'm delighted to welcome Iris and Jess. Iris and Jess both hold senior procurement roles for a global pharmaceutical company. And the reason I've invited them on today is that I believe that agency account managers need to have a better understanding of how their clients work. And also to understand the role of procurement. Because I think sometimes procurement is treated a bit revered, you know, we can't possibly approach them or talk to them, we don't quite know how to manage that relationship. So the reason I've invited Jess and Iris on is to really share some insight into their everyday role. And also some ideas maybe for how agencies can optimise the relationship with procurement, how to approach them, how to deal with them, how to manage the relationship. So I want to hand over to my guests so that they can spend a couple of minutes just talking a bit about their background, and also their experience of working with agencies. So Iris, can I start with you? Iris: Sure. Thank you, Jenny. So yeah, Iris is my name. I have nearly 20 years of experience in procurement, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry a little bit in FMCG, when I started my career. And I've had various types of roles in the local market and cluster markets, or in regional roles, and also in different parts of the world. And currently, I'm based in Asia. I've managed personally, marketing, procurement and agencies since the beginning of my career really. And since the last five to six years, it's more about managing a team. So it's my team being operationally involved with the agencies, managing the relationships with the agencies on a day to day level. Nevertheless, I'm still involved in some of the strategic aspects like QBR meetings, evaluation meetings, and some of the strategic reviews that we do. Jenny: Fantastic. Thanks, Sarah. That's brilliant. Jess? JessicaL Sure, hi, Jessica here. And I have been working in healthcare for over 20 years, and in pharmaceuticals for the majority of that, and in terms of marketing agencies and the operations with that about the last 12 to 13 years. Before that I managed other categories within medical and marketing, for procurement as well. And for me, it's nuts to bolts marketing agencies, from bringing them in to evaluating them to having the tough conversations, and I really enjoy the partnership. Jenny: Amazing. I mean, I can see that you're both hugely experienced. So I'm quite excited about diving into my questions. Now I think the other thing to mention is Iris and I met many years ago when she was working for another pharma company. And we kind of hit it off, didn't we Iris and it's testament to the fact that you're here now that we've continued that relationship so it was successful. So Jess, first for you a quick question. What for you is a good solid, long term agency partnership? Jess: Sure, that's a great question, Jenny. For me, the most important thing is trust, I think it's really, really important to sort of build that foundation of relationship. And without trust, you really can't build that foundation. For me in the job I currently hold long term relationships are key, we don't want to be looking for new agencies all the time. So again, it's just building that foundation. And you know, problems will come up, right. So it's about being proactive, catching them early, working together in that partnership, to come to resolution, whatever that might be and remembering that it's business and not personal. So especially when you're asking an agency maybe to rearrange their people. It's not easy, these conversations are tough. But at the end of the day, they only make the partnership stronger. You have to feel like you're on the same team, working for the same goals. And you know, the lines do get a little bit blurred in terms of agency and pharma, in terms of you’re that kind of partnership. Jenny: Brilliant answer, Jess, and interesting that you talk about sometimes tough conversations to be had with an agency or, you know, making sure that you and the agency are on the same page? Principally, who do you tend to have the contact with? Is it the account management team or is it the agency leadership team typically? Jess: Sure, it really depends on the situation at hand. But certainly both those people are always involved in those types of tough conversations. It also depends on that agency and the relationship that we have with them. But I would say the majority of the time for us, it is the agency lead overseeing our company that we reach out to first and sort of brainstorm about the best way to then go speak to the account management about it. Because you want to make sure that you're doing that in the best possible way, again, not offending anyone reminding them that it's business, but I think it's important to have both those lines of communication open. So again, I tend to go to the lead first, and then we have the conversation together with the account management. Jenny: Great. I mean, from what you've just said, I'm assuming that many times where those tough conversations need to be had, does it involve the account management team? Jess: It can, I think more times than not, you know, it's an issue we're seeing with creative, or it's an issue we're seeing with managing the budget. So it's not always with the account manager per se, I've seen that. And when you have that kind of issue, that you would really, you know, have to talk to the agency lead about and let them handle that internally. But a lot of times if it's with a specific person on the team, or say we have a vacancy, or sometimes it's an uptick, you know, as we're heading, say, to a launch, and we don't feel like we have enough support. So again, it's just trying to be proactive about whatever the issue is, and making sure that we resolve it as quickly as possible. I always say that cracks come first. And if you don't sort of fix the cracks, then the foundation starts to crumble. So the minute you see an issue, even if it seems super tiny, and it's getting marketers to come forward and tell you about the small issues, because small issues become big issues. Jenny: This is brilliant Jess, this is really useful. I know, I'm going a little bit granular. I'm just curious to know, is the fact that your marketing team flags an issue to you mean that it's got that bad? i.e, do you usually find that most day to day issues can be resolved between the marketing team and the agency? So does it have to get quite bad before you're involved? Or is there just that flow of communication between you? Jess: Yeah, um, no, I appreciate the granularity, Jenny, I think that it really depends on your relationship with the marketer, because I've been where I've been for so long, and I've managed some of these people, maybe they've switched brands, but I've been with them for a long time. And I try up front, you know, during the pitch process to say, if you see little problems, just make me aware, even if you're going to handle them on your own, I just want to be aware. So if the issue which hopefully it won't, starts to snowball, and get bigger than I've been made aware through the whole process, so that when it is time for me to jump in, I would love them to handle it on their own, I think it's important part of them building the relationship. And I have a saying, you know, where I like to talk about, you know, we sort of tried to fix it as quickly as we can. And if that's the marketer fixing it on their own, and just making me aware, that's fine. If the marketer wants my support, you know, I always say to the marketer, I want you to build the relationship, but I don't want you to do anything to hurt your relationship. So if you're starting to have a conversation that you feel like might hurt, then I want to take it up a level to my agency contact, and I want to start that conversation for you. Jenny: Hmm, sounds very sensible. Iris, can I just direct a couple of questions to you, what value do you see in the actual account management team, because many of my listeners are in the account management team, and they are responsible, really for developing and growing the relationship on behalf of the agency. They're the ambassador, let's say. So what do you see as the key value for the procurement department that an agency account manager can bring? Iris: Thank you, Jenny, I think this is a great question. And for me, first and foremost, the account manager is something like a conductor, you know, it's really the person who orchestrates everything, especially inside the agency, and then with the client, you know, they need to really be well connected. They need to be empathetic, they need to understand where different people are coming from, you know, they have to deal inside the agency with a lot of different roles and a different people. And then they have the clients. So for me, the agency client relationship is all about people. It's about chemistry, you know, if you have that chemistry, yes, you mentioned at the beginning, you know, you and I, I think we had a level of chemistry straight away, which helped us to be and establish a successful relationship. So for me, that's key, you know, we're in the people business, whatever, you may say, a client agency relationship is all about people. To Jess’s point, I think that account manager needs to be very present to pick up any little things that may happen. Because I totally agree with Jess even little things that go wrong, especially when it's a new account, we have to fix them straight up, we'll have to bring them up straight away, because if we let them go, they will escalate, they will bubble up and become a much bigger issue to deal with. So I think that account manager for me, when I see them working at their best is when they have been very present to the client and wanting to have feedback all the time. And you know, they're ready to hear the small things that involves a lot of transparency and honest conversation from both sides. So again, they must not be offended, or, you know, take a defensive stance, when we bring this up and say, Oh, you know, it's my agent, you know, it's, they need to be quite factual. They need to listen, they need to go and of course, hear the other side of the story. And I've seen a comment just becoming quite offensive, of course, I want to defend their business. But I think someone who can really, you know, see, both sides of the story, for me brings the most value to such as such a relationship. Yeah, and transparency, because they sometimes have to admit that things have gone wrong on their side. But also, it's not always the agency fault, by far, you know, and it's also for us to be able to say, yeah, maybe this brief hasn't been as strong as it could have been, or they haven't been able to really express our needs. So I'm always saying to marketers, the agencies don't have a crystal ball, if you don't, you know, express your needs clearly, you can't expect that they can just, you know, read in your mind and come up with the perfect solution for you. Jenny: That's a really good point. I'm going to direct the same question that we asked Jess, Jess mentioned, that sometimes issues arise around creative work or budget. Those are the two things Jess mentioned. In your experience, what are the most common issues that you see with agency client relationships? Iris: I think the creative like Jess mentioned already is in because it's something about expectation management, you know, you people go in with different expectations when it comes to creative and sometimes you know, the agency hits it, sometimes the agency is just about on point, and sometimes the person had an expectation that is not met. So that can be sometimes challenging. The other areas, for me are more like ways of working, you know, operational topics that if you don't say at the beginning how you want to work together, then it can cause you know, frustrations, you know, some people like to, you know, jump on a call, some people want to have an email, read through and then respond. So you have to basically establish some ground rules and say, how do we want to work together? What's our operating model ways of working? And I think if that's clear, then it's a lot less issues or problems that I have been observing. Jenny: So this has come up a lot then expectation management and setting ground rules from the beginning. Do you find generally this is directed at both of you really, the agencies don't do a very thorough job of setting the ground rules, or how this is going to work or how we're going to run this account, how we're going to make sure that we're communicating with you in the way that you would like us to communicate etc? Iris: It's probably not the first discussion or the topic that is top of their mind when it comes to starting an account. But I think that's what I feel that procurement, we can add value and have a role and we can force that discussion and say, you know, it's not the sexy topic. It's not about the creative it's not but let's sit down and have a conversation how we going to run the account, what works for whom alternating escalation is super important, because the last thing you want to see is like this email being sent to, you know, everyone in the agency, everyone in the company at a very high level, you know, you should understand you can make certain decisions and who should be a point of escalation, you know, depending on what issues we're incurring. And I feel if that's kind of set out at the beginning, then that usually, again, everybody knows what to expect. I'm not saying that it works perfectly. But you have to force that discussion a bit. And I think I see this as part of our role, it doesn't necessarily come natural to the agency or the marketeers. So we might be forcing that discussion a bit. But I think it adds value later down the line.  Jenny: Very much so. Do you feel the same, Jess? Jess: Yep. I agree with everything Iris said. And I would say I think we've gotten better at it. Right? As our roles have evolved, I think we've gotten better at making sure we say to the marketers, this is important out of the gate, and I think our agencies that we've worked with, for longer periods of time, have gotten better at it as well and see it as something they expect to do, especially when they have a new account, or people change, right, you need to change those expectations when people change on the accounts as well. I think when newer agencies come into our fold, it's really important that we sort of train them to do that, because they might not do that with all the different companies that they work with. Most of these agencies span across, you know, not just pharmaceuticals, but other industries. And you know, I'm sure we all work a little bit differently. But I think really managing that upfront, and establishing those ways of working, like Aaron said, you know, do they prefer an email? Do they prefer a phone call? If you're going to tell them some bad news? Do they want it over email first. And so I think it's just it all comes back to what we talked about in the beginning to partnership, right? And knowing that every team probably will want to work a little bit differently. Jenny: Before we leave this topic of just general sort of roles and responsibilities in agencies, I want to pick up on the creative part, because I know that creative directors also tune into this. And I think partly I suppose because there's a certain amount of intangibility about creativeness, isn't there? What do you believe, to avoid mismanagement of expectations in terms of creative? What could agencies be doing better in that sort of creative development process to set and manage expectations? Jess: So I think it's like many of the things we've spoken about it is really that open two way communication. And I know typically, agencies come forward with tissues before they present the real creative. But I think it's even meeting prior to that having, you know, an idea session, just to make sure you're headed down the right road, right. Because when you're working in, you know, whatever you want to call it, a war room of such, where you're developing creative, which is obviously different now, in the land of COVID, they're doing those types of sessions remotely, which I'm sure is not easy for them. But you know, there's certain things that they need to hit, especially for pharmaceuticals with regard to our strategy and things they're able to say. So sometimes pie in the sky isn't quite right with like our legal or medical. So I do think it's having those checkpoints along the way, just to make sure you're not headed down the wrong road, you don't want your agency to go down a rabbit hole, and then the tissues and then the main creative and you're completely off track, because then you're starting over.    Jenny: Fantastic advice. Really, really useful. Thank you for sharing. Let's talk a bit about agency selection when you're selecting an agency for the first time. And this is kind of directed at both of you. How do you go about that process of selecting an agency? Iris: So maybe I’ll start and I’ll really cover this question more from sort of a local or regional point of view. So within the company, there's, you know, certain strategies, and agencies are certainly an area where we, you know, we have done a lot of work in the past. So we have good, what we call a category strategy, which kind of gives a little bit of a playbook to our regions and our markets. So certain choices, we can only make them within boundaries of global strategy. And other areas were a little bit more flexible. So on a local and regional point of view, it's a mixture between, you know, following a brand and an agency of record all the way through to the local or regional level, and then where it's more local work, also someone who has to be to understand the local culture, the local language needs to then would we call transcreate or translate really that material more into what is going to work in the local market? So we definitely have a combination here and of course, we have what's a different maturity. You know, I'm I told you before that I'm currently based in Asia and we have very mature markets in Asia with a lot of agencies present then we have other markets where, you know, agencies are not as mature. And you know, they're doing pretty much everything that can be doing the printing, they're doing a one stop shop. But that's maybe what is needed for that market.  Jenny: Great. And what about for you, Jess? Jess: Sure, I'll take it from a different standpoint, just because my role is slightly different. I come at it more from either North America or global. And for me, it really depends on the product, we're looking at the geographic reach, I need the therapeutic expertise, the correct size for the business, because no products are the same, where they are in the lifecycle. And we have everything from, you know, niche to large. And it really is finding that right fit, because I don't want to try to make a match. That's a mismatch. So it's really using the knowledge that I have both about my agencies, as well as the knowledge I have about the brand. And trying to marry that forward. We also take into account, previous track record, you know, how have they done in the past with these types of brands or situations or the need that I have? It's very important to look historically, it's not always completely accurate predictor, but it is it is a good predictor. And it's what we utilise, and it works for us. Jenny: And do you tend to put it out to tender through like a middle person that would find that agency for you? Or do you principally look at your current agency records, and then decide from there, Jess: We have pretty robust lists. So we tend to go off those lists. But let's say you are looking for something new and different, you know, I might end up you know, doing some research, talking to other procurement colleagues inside and outside of my company, it really depends on the need. But for the most part, I would say for the needs that we have, we do have lists in place. Jenny: Okay, great, because I'm sure there's some agencies that are listening, thinking, I would love to work with a global pharma company, you know, and I think I've got something a little bit different, you know, how would I even begin to be considered, maybe because they are very specialist. And maybe it's a new technology or some kind of expertise that's very sort of digitally focused, that's just emerging. So what advice would you give for a company like that that wanted to get themselves on your radar? Jess: Sure, that's a great question, Jenny. I think a lot of people get intimidated, but they shouldn't. Because there's a lot of great tools out there from LinkedIn, obviously, which is a great tool, and I get a lot of LinkedIn invitations or emails sent to me, I do also get cold calls and what I would call a cold email. And I'll tell you that our needs are changing all the time, right, the marketing landscape is changing all the time. So I do have different needs all the time. And our brands are, you know, no two are alike. So I definitely read those emails, I read the messages. And I have a folder where I keep everything, if it's something I think is coming down the pipe, or something I might need relatively soon, I'll respond, I'll set up a meeting, either for myself. I tend to do a pre screen just to make sure it's a good fit for us. And then we'll meet with my larger team, so that we have it on the radar. We also keep slide decks of capabilities on agencies and I have to tell you more and more, we've been really relying on them. So I don't think that people should feel like they shouldn't reach out. I think it depends on the time of year as well, like right now is a very busy time of year. So it would probably be very difficult for a new agency or provider of any kind to get someone's attention. But the beginning of the year, and then once I speak to an agency, and I think it might be something really promising. I asked them to communicate with me, quarterly, or twice a year, we set up a cadence that makes sense , a check in to see you know, if I have anything on the horizon. It's good for me because it allows them to stay top of mind for me, I don't want to forget them. And I think people would be surprised to know how often we do sort of go off our preferred list and bring new entities in. Jenny: I think this is phenomenal. Actually, for those that are listening thinking, wow, maybe I do have a chance. I mean, the fact that you've said actually I'm very open to it. And I'm I'm willing to kind of listen to everyone and receive cold calls. Iris? Iris: Yeah, just to add something because I think it's an area where we have to get better. And I think as a company this year, we've done a couple of things. In my region in particular, we've done a project to see how we can use technology also a little bit better for this because not everyone is organised as Jess, you know, has folders and I know I have sort of agency contacts a little bit all over the place and then I'm not necessarily going to the right place when I need them. So we're looking at getting technology in place where we can open up a platform to agencies to register themselves. They will have to kind of go through a couple of hurdles and give us a little bit upfront information. But once they're in there, you know, we'll really screen also what their capabilities are that they have the ability to attach them slide decks or testimonials. So I think that is something that we're hoping to develop further, because I think it would be really great, especially also in a region like, now, Asia where some agencies bridge more than one market. So if we have visibility, whether they can do, you know, serve a couple of markets, then that's another plus. And we can see that because we have the visibility in the tool. And I know in the local market, also people, my colleagues, they invite agencies for supplier days. And that's been quite successful. And that has been particularly successful when we were looking for something new, innovative, like niche technologies that have a lot of around digital, of course, any kind of AI virtual reality, these kind of things. So, to Jess’s point, you know, don't be intimidated, it is happening. And I think we're getting better at keeping the information and pulling the information out when we need it. Jenny: Thank you for sharing that. I think that's super organised, actually having a tool that  sounds the perfect solution, because like just said, the needs are changing. So therefore, it might not be the right time now, but who's to say that's not going to change? Just picking up on this theme about people approaching you? Jess you sounded so open to everyone approaching you. But I'm sure there are approaches and approaches like the wrong way to do it and the right way, can you share some tips for anyone that's thinking of approaching you? Jess: Sure, I agree with you, right, there's always a good and bad approach to everything that we all do as humans. So I think it's being careful not to be too aggressive. And knowing that it's okay to send a reminder, but I would say if you know, if someone hasn't gotten back to you, after two approaches, you should probably back off for a little while, it’s either not the right time or not the right fit. And I think, you know, it's just people being natural and friendly and asking for that opportunity. And what I've been doing a lot lately is I can't give you an hour of my time. 30 minutes is even really tough right now, given that we're in Q4, but 15 minutes is a good snapshot of who an agency is, and if they would be the right fit for where I work. So I've been doing that a lot, lately, I've been responding and saying, hey, can give you 15 minutes on that, again, it's like a pre screen. And then for a lot of those that have been coming up, I've been setting up meetings for January, February, March for my larger team, as Iris said, you know, mostly in sort of those new innovation and digital areas. It's interesting to hear what's new and what's coming. It's just not a perfect time for that right now. Jenny: Great tips. Thank you so much. Let's turn our attentions away from new business. And let's talk about the existing client agency relationships you have, because I'm really I'm really keen to kind of ask you both what kind of stands out for you in terms of a well performing agency? You know, that's been with you a while. And, you know, how do they continually stand out from the rest of the agencies? Jess: Sure. So I think for me, it's managing the business you have as well as being proactive about new business, and they think you're only as good as your business is today. So I don't really want an agency who's after the next piece of business, if something is struggling in their current portfolio. For me, also, it goes back to you know, sort of how we started the meeting with that honest, open two way communication. I think Iris really had it right when she spoke about the fact that we're not perfect, either. It's a two way street. And we need to make sure that we're setting our expectations that we're treating our agencies well. For us, it's really important to maintain the relationships we have, let's be honest, the RFP process is not easy. It's time consuming. It's laborious. And we have to do it sometimes. But fixing what we have before we go and try to bring in a new agency is really important to me personally, it speaks to sort of those staff changes that we should do sooner than later if we’re seeing a problem. If there's budgetary concerns, we should speak about them as quickly as possible. If creative doesn't go well, you know, I've had agency say, you know, that just didn't go well. So that one is on us. And we're going to do a new round. And that's what you'll be paying for. Sometimes you need to bring higher leadership in, you know, things just aren't going right. And a lot of times our agencies will say we're going to give you this person for a period of time, and it's on us. I think little things like that go a long way to that partnership. Jenny: I think that's great advice. And I'm sure a lot of agencies are thinking yeah, that makes total sense. It shows that trust building, doesn't it in the collaboration element, era, see where you're going to say something to add Iris: Maybe just one point to add. I think you can really see an agency's enthusiastic about working with you or not, and also about the brands. And let's not forget, you know, we’re pharmaceutical and we have, in the last couple of years really made sure, again that we talked about the patient. And I think when the agency also brings in that patient perspective, and is really passionate about what together, as you know, client and agency we can do to make things better for patients. That's when I see especially in our world a real difference. And so when I see this enthusiasm, and I see like sparkles in people's eyes when they talk about our product, you know, this, for me makes a huge difference between someone who just sees us as a client and a brand as a job or someone who's passionate about the brand and the entire supply chain and actually hits the patient. Jenny: I'm glad you brought that up, actually, because there's a couple of agencies that spring to mind that really do have this purpose angle, you know, and for personal reasons, one owner lost his father to cancer, and is very much driven by that he's in healthcare communications. Another partnership I'm thinking of they have a doctor in the family and health has always been part of their lives. And, again, it's very much about doing the right thing for the patient. So do you think that's become more important for companies, big companies like yours, to actually work with partners that do have that purpose behind them? Iris: Personally, I think yes, but Jess might have a bit of a different route, because she sees the bigger picture. But I think in market, that's definitely more important these days, Jess: I would definitely agree, I think it's so important. And I think it comes through in everything that they do. You know, we live in a world where everyone in some way, shape or form has been impacted by cancer, or some other disease. And it doesn't take much for them to find an example of how it's impacted their life. And I think you start to see that come through and how they feel about the product. You see it through the creative, it's great to see that passion, I think they have to have that passion in order to do a great job and be a great partner. So I think it's a great point, Jenny. Jenny: Fantastic. That's good to hear. And turning our attention specifically to the account management role. One of the key roles that they have is to develop relationships, not just with their marketing team, but with the procurement team. So can you give me some examples of where agencies do that really well, or how procurement facilitate that relationship to sort of happen? Jess? Jenny: Sure. I think that it's really important that that's done in conjunction with procurement. I think that whatever senior level person, we're talking about senior director, Executive Vice President, I think they like to do it hand in hand with us. So that it's not ever seen in the outside world as given preferential treatment. But let's be honest, people move around agencies over the life of their career, and they bring those relationships forward. So I think it is about utilising procurement, either in those meetings, or giving us a heads up that you're having those meetings, don't go behind our back, it's great to try to forge them. And I think to also remember that every leader is different. So while some leaders appreciate those relationships, and having those contacts, others may refer you back to procurement. And I think you have to be okay with the fact and respect the boundaries of how certain people work. That's their way of working. And being respectful of that. Jenny: That's really good advice, Jess actually, is it the same for yours? Would you say in your experience? Iris: Yeah, definitely. I think agencies have gotten better at this and they’ve seen the value that procurement can bring. So I think today, they do come to us, and they ask us, you know, how to approach people in the company. And I think that that's not doing that, because to Jess's point, not everyone has, you know, the door open, it's not always a good time for a leader, you know, we can really facilitate that. One of the things that I love about procurement still today is that we have so many different touch points in the company, we are connected with everyone, we're connected to the assistants, we're connected to leadership team, you know, if it's not me personally, and someone else in the organisation who can facilitate that. So I think it's a shame if agencies don't take advantage of that kind of pivotal role that we have to play and we can advise and connect them. And we can also advise on the best way to approach these people. And usually, you know, we can say we can set up a meeting, we can facilitate a meeting or it's better to send this person an email or I would wait till you know, the operating plan is done and they will be much more receptive again. These are the things that you know, we know because we know how the company functions and you know, if they don't listen to that, and if they're not receptive to that feedback, then you know, they can burn bridges very quickly. Jenny: I think this is fantastic advice because I know having spoken to , I train my account accelerator programme, I'm talking to agencies all the time. Some don't even have a relationship with procurement. You know, and they've been working with their companies for years. So I think this is a really good reminder, if you don't currently have a relationship with the procurement team, then, you know, aim to have one. And to that point, what would you suggest the first approach. You mentioned before Iris having QBR meetings, quarterly business review meetings? How would I go about, as an account manager that doesn't have a relationship with procurement? Sort of how do I go about sort of setting that up? Iris: Well for me, I think they should request whoever is in charge of the meeting, maybe you know, just to point out, wouldn't it be useful or good if we invite procurement? And again, Jess and I, we work in an organisation where this function is very established and is quite mature. And that might not necessarily the case the case everywhere. So it could be that the marketing team has actually never really thought about procurement or  engaging procurement than any of these discussions. So it could be a way for the agency to bring it up. It could also be, you know, for them to reach out and say, again, if they haven't have the relationship yet, say to marketing, we believe it would be good to build those relationships with your procurement department, could you maybe introduce us to them and then have a short discussion because, of course, it's a different, you know, we're discussing different things with the agency than the marketeers. And I think that's, again, the value, you know, we're coming from a different point of view. So we can, you know, we can facilitate many things, we can remove obstacles, we can sometimes have that tough discussion on behalf of marketing so that they preserve the relationship. So it's usually in my opinion can only be beneficial. Having said that, they might not find that the procurement team is ready for that. I can’t comment on that. But I think it would be good if they seek out the relationship and read out why existing contacts and want to build that relationship. Jenny: I think it's great advice. Just a point, do you get involved in the actual QPR meetings yourself? Jess: I do. Um, we're set up in a way we're responsible for certain suppliers. And we run those QB RS for those suppliers we’re responsible for. And during that, obviously, we speak about the accounts that they have and how they're performing. We also talk about innovation, things that might have been done differently over the past year, whether it be for us, or for other companies that they work with, that we might want to think about doing ourselves. It's a two way street. It's a lengthy meeting. It's part of that partnership, you know, we speak, they speak, we know we're not perfect, we are looking for feedback in those meetings. The other thing that we do is, you know, there's a lot of M&A in this industry. And so during that, we always give them time to show us any new capabilities, new companies they have acquired something else, we might think about something they think we might need down the road. So I think all the components, you know, are really, really helpful. Just to go back to your prior point, Jenny, I think sometimes people arrive at our company with suppliers they might have worked with before, especially agencies, and maybe they don't work with our company. So I think it's really important when you meet that internal customer, most likely a marketer, and they bring forward a company that they're interested in, that you get them to make that introduction, you start having those conversations, because if it's something they're going to try to bring forward to where they are now, it's important that we get ahead of that relationship. They do need us as their partner as much as they need their agency, we really see that as a two way street Jenny: Great advice. Thank you so much. Honestly, this is just gold, I think really, really valuable. So just sort of coming to the end of our interview, sadly, cos I'm sure we could go on all day. How would you say that the role of procurement is changing? Jess, can I direct that one to you? Jess: Sure. I think it evolves every day, right? And it changes year over a year, I've been here long enough to see it change. I think we really now have a seat at the table. I think we're extremely valued by our customers, they truly see us as a partner, the way they see our suppliers as a partner. And that wasn't always the case. I'm very proud of it. I think, as Iris said, we're very mature organisation. So I think we're fortunate that way, it took us a long time to get here. And you can't rush that process. But you know, I'm proud of it. I'm proud of the relationships I have. I love that my marketers feel that they can come to me and tell me anything. You know, I'm seeing this, but I don't want to talk to the agency about it yet or I'm going to speak to the agency about it. But I just wanted you to be aware. I think we've established our own ways of working, which I think is just as important as the ways of working with our suppliers. Jenny: It's such a good insight into how it works behind the scenes from the outside looking in, Jess, and you just forget actually that that's going on, you know, people see you in your company, as the go to person to discuss issues. So it makes sense, total sense for agencies to kind of make sure that they involve the procurement team. So thank you for sharing this is really brilliant. What about you Iris? What about the trends in how procurement work with agencies, there's anything, anything that you're seeing obviously Jess was saying about a seat at the table and being seen as the go to person. Anything else that you'd like to add?  Iris: I think Jess mentioned that, I think we're also trying all the time to simplify and streamline the pitch process, you know, this is not always ideal. So I think we're looking at ways to making it simpler, making it quicker, you know, now that we're in a phase where we're launching a lot of products, we don't necessarily have the time to do really long pitches, you know, so we're looking at ways to connect with agencies quicker, you know, doing most of credential meetings, first, it goes to the point of like having a good understanding who's out there so you get it right the first time, you don't like invite a really large group, and then you narrow it down. So you be a bit more specific. I think the other point is definitely with the evolving needs around digital that this was before COVID, this is going to be even more, you know, as we're going through this pandemic, and as we come out on the other end, I think digital will be even more important going forward. The patient centricity, I think, is something that we're looking for. And also, I think agencies have understood that they need to, you know, internally, I have seen that they used to be these, you know, the big networks, but they weren't necessarily well connected. So they would kind of show us all the capabilities that they have. But in essence, they would still be individual companies and be very cumbersome to, like wanting to get the PR side or the medic side or the digital side involved. I think they've gotten better at connecting the dots internally. And this is something that I always questioned them. How's your internal governance? You know, can you actually bring someone in from the PR division? Or do you know, is it a different cost centre budget or, or even a different entity? So it's really important to understand who the decision makers on how the agency governance is structured? Jenny: That's a really good point. Are you finding the same thing, Jess? Is that the same question that you have in your mind when you're dealing with maybe a network rather than a independent? Jess: Absolutely, I think Iris, you know, spoke about it perfectly it's exactly how we feel. Jenny: Fantastic. Look, this has been amazing. And just one last question. Obviously, we're recording this in November, as you just mentioned, Iris we’re in the Covid situation in the UK, we've just gone into the second lockdown of the year. So how have agencies adapted to this remote style of working? Have you seen any particular successes? Or maybe challenges around this? Iris: Yeah, so just one point for me, I've seen them being quite proactive and coming with like, Hey, we tried this approach, you know, this is all new, we're kind of all learning, we're figuring out how to do things in this new way in this new norm. So I've really appreciated them coming forward, saying, Hey, we tried this, it might not be 100% perfect for you but we want to share, you know, can you give us a bit of time? Or do you want us to send the slides. Some suppliers have sent regular updates about about covid situation and what it means for the industry in particular, or healthcare. So I think the agencies have adapted quickly. And they have also tried to kind of get us on board to think about now and also to make us think about what it's going to be when this is sort of behind us, because we know we're not going to necessarily go back to the same ways of working then before.   Jess: I agree with that point completely, also think that there's a sense of sort of maintaining that relationship, right, you know, we would see our agencies live within pitches, we would meet them at our offices, might have a coffee or lunch and get updates. So it's really about sort of maintaining that relationship both for ourselves, as well as our internal customers, as we discussed. I've been putting some Zoom chats on, and they've been doing that with me as well, just to see how they're doing, how they're operating. How's it going for other companies? Are there any learnings they want to bring forward? Is there anything we need to know? I just think it's important. And it's important that we're all supporting each other. And this isn't easy. So making sure you know if there's anything that we can do better, if there's anything we can do for them, and vice versa. I think it's really, really important. And I think it's it's about adapting to our ways of working. You know, we're doing pitches over Zooms or WebEx, that makes it really difficult to figure out who a person is what makes them tick. What's their chemistry, like? Is their chemistry good with our marketers? So coming up with unique ways to do that, whether it be a workshop model or asking them a question, so you really understand how they think. I think it's really important and I think our agencies have been asking for that during this difficult time because it's very hard for them. to just show us creative, and then have us choose. Jenny: I love that so some great tips there for agencies listening, interactive sessions, so fantastic. Any parting words of wisdom or advice for an agency account manager that's listening to this, that is thinking, oh my god, from everything they've said, I need a relationship with procurement. Iris: Maybe two points for me two key takeaways. The one is around the, you know, the ways of working and establishing the relationship from the outset and having this open and honest conversation about it. And the second point, I just want agencies account managers to hear when they listen to this, they may have noticed that we have spoken very little about costs during this entire time. And so I think by now most agencies understand that procurement is not all about costs, and that we have moved on. And in my personal experience, if the relationship works, there's rarely an issue about costs. So I just want them to hear that we're no longer the cost killer, or the you know, the traditional procurement people that they may have come across a couple of years ago, I think, as a profession, we have really moved on. Jenny: Brilliant advice. And Jess? Jess: I think that's a great point, Iris. And really important because we have evolved a lot. I think it just goes back to a lot of the key words and themes we've used throughout this session. transparency, open communication, trust, two way street, really seeing it as a partnership. And to make sure you sort of find that fine line, if you don't have the relationship between pushy and persistent. I really think that there's a difference. And just making sure that you're forging ahead on your relationships, whether it be with your marketers, or procurement, or making sure that you have them with both entities.  Jenny: Fantastic point to finish. Thank you so much. And thank you so much both for joining me, this has been gold and I know that agencies listening are going to get a huge amount of value. From this. I'm looking forward to putting it out there and hearing the feedback. So thank you both so much for taking the time to talk to me.  Jess: Thank you so much, Jenny. It was really fun.  Iris: Thank you, Jenny for having us. I hope you enjoyed that chat with Jess and Iris. And you've come away with some ideas for how you can develop and grow your business using the relationship building approach with procurement. I'd love to hear what you thought of that episode. So if you're not already, please come and connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Jenny Plant or come over to my website accountmanagementskills.com and take the quiz to find out how good your agency is at growing existing business. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Jenny: Louisa, I'm delighted to have you on the show on the show today, I've been wanting to have a chat with you for ages. And I know what you're going to share is going to be so valuable to people in working agencies. So I'm just going to give you a short introduction. But obviously, we know each other through the healthcare communications industry, you're probably one of the most well known people for having built and sold your own agency Woolley Pau. So I know that you've got a huge amount of experience and having run the agency for 19 years. But you then pivoted to start another business in 2013, which is called Otherboard. And one of the biggest reasons for the listeners that I invited you on the show is because your journey and story is just so powerful. And it's sort of led you to do what you do now. So without revealing too much, I'd love if you could spend a couple of minutes just introducing yourself.Louisa: Oh, thanks, Jenny. It's lovely to be here. Yes, I mean, you've told my story, really, I founded, built and sold the agency. What people probably don't know is that during that time, I also had four boys, and that it very nearly killed me. And I thought, you know, I learned some, I learnt a lot of lessons the hard way, by just making the mistakes and doing it. And, and now, the reason for setting up Otherboard was that I really felt that I didn't want to do it again, which a lot of people do, they kind of go and do it again, I wanted to help other agency leaders, grow their businesses have it all, and not feel guilty and not nearly killed them. So have it all and have a healthy business and a healthy life. And I felt that I could have more impact by working with lots of agencies rather than just doing it again for myself.Jenny: So if you take us back to when you were growing your agency, because it probably was one of the most successful agencies, there wasn't anyone in the healthcare industry that didn't know Woolley Pau, the name, you're always winning awards. You were always known as a really creative agency. And so take us back to that time. And when, you know, what would, what's your day typically like,  how was your rhythm, you know, running with four boys which is absolutely incredible.Louisa: Well, it was really crazy. I remember my third child, I went to a pitch two weeks after I had quite a sort of traumatic birth with him. I mean, I just did crazy things. I didn't have any maternity leave. So looking back, it does all look a bit crazy. I mean, I had loads of support at home. And but, you know, about 10 years into the agency life we were doing quite well. I mean, it was slow. People always remember sort of success, but it was very slow. But about 10 years in, we were doing quite well. We had a nice offices in Covent Garden. The children were really young. But you know, but things were kind of going well, we had started winning awards, and we were growing. And then we had, and I remember, I mean I was it was a stressful time. I remember going to an awards dinner, and I was sitting next to this client and he said to me, oh, tell me Louisa, what are your hobbies? I just laughed in his face. There wasn’t really time for anything else. The business and home like that just took up every part of my life. There was no, there wasn't time for anything else. And then we had really terrible year, which most people probably don't know about. We lost nine pitches in a row. We lost two of our biggest clients. We didn't renew their contracts. My husband had a massive work life crisis and decided that he wanted to give up his big job. And, and Dean, my business partner also had sort of family bereavements and things going on for him. So we were really sort of sorely tested at that time. And we just carried on, I think we kind of sat down and I used to tell this story was, how did I come back from that? And, you know, we sat down and we decided and we made a plan. And then three years later, we sold the business. But what I didn't used to tell people was that what the cost of that was, so the stress involved in that. But at the time I didn't really do self reflection. I just did my mantra ,because everyone has a mantra now my mantra was pull your socks up. We nearly wrote a book about it, a sort of self help book called Pull Your Socks Up. But I now sort of laugh about it. It's awful, really. But I had this sense that I could manage on my own, because that's what I've always done. I've set up on my own, you know, obviously with a partner, and with support, but I think my parents say that my first phrase was ‘self do it’. And that's how I was, I just thought I could do everything. And we did sell the business, and it was all very successful. And then a year after we sold the business, I got very ill and nearly died. And I had ignored the warning signs. And and I believe that that illness, the cause of that was probably years and years of ignored stress that finally caught up with me. And, I can't remember what we were saying now!Jenny: No. And this is fascinating, actually, the timing of when it happened. So you sold it,  all of this stress was going on? You had this huge amount of pressure on you, additional pressure, when you lost all the clients, you lost the last two clients lost the pitch, Dean's family problems. And then, but But you made it through that, then you sold, then a year later, it actually affected your health. So looking back, the accumulation is massively powerful.Louisa: And I think that's what people do, they ignore the, there were warning signs. So which I ignored up, I kind of ignored for instance, during that three years, I was suffering quite badly from heart palpitations. And I did go and see a cardiologist, I had tests. And he came, the test came back and he said, Well, you know, everything's fine. You're just suffering from stress, you know, there's nothing else. So if I meant thinking, Okay, it's just stress. Now that I know what a bit about the science of stress and what that means I'm kind of amazed that that was just sort of brushed off because stress is, is incredibly unhealthy and can lead to serious illness if you don't deal with it. And you know, I had other, you know, other warning signs, like feeling, you know, those sort of feelings of guilt that I wasn't doing enough for the business or enough my family, you know, that's a very common sort of warning sign. And the trouble is that, that feeling of stress starts to become normal. And that's what happened to me, I think that was just my normal. And so it was only when it just came to a point where I literally nearly died, that I just had to go what, and physically I couldn't go back to the business, I was really quite poorly for a long time afterwards. And then it took, you know, the trauma of having to have a massive operation, the trauma of all that took actually years to process. And, and for me to get healthy again. And, you know, I just really don't want that to happen to other people. Jenny: Absolutely. And that is, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on, because I think this is, you know, like, what you've described is probably other agency leaders are listening to this and thinking Well, okay, maybe I'm ignoring the signs, or maybe that kind of little heart flutter that keeps happening, you know, you don't know how it's gonna manifest to you, as you say. So talk us through what your actual sort of routine looked like, because maybe other people can identify, was it because you were working weekends? Or evenings? Or was it the relentlessness of everything? Or you said you had help? But wha, what did your sort of day to day existence look like?Louisa: I suppose when the children were very young, getting up really early, so lack of sleep, getting up really early. Um, I mean, it's all a blur, really, for when they were really young, I can almost hardly remember feeling really tired all the time, getting up really early. So I would normally go into the office early, and then we had a nanny that would come in until my husband gave up his job. And then he looked after the children, as he had a basically a breakdown. Um, so we were both quite stressed for a long time. And then it you know, looking back, I just think I wasn't putting my energy, it's all about energy, what you put your energies into, and I think at work, like many agency owners, I felt I had to do it all as well as have it all. And so I probably just got got involved in too much in everything, and it towards the end, yes, I did let go of stuff, delegate stuff, have a good management team. But even so I think I was probably a bit too much the hero, you know, sort of stepping in when there was problems to be solved. Or if not meddling with, with things. It's a common theme I see in all with all the clients I work with, and really not, I suppose I didn't really, my role was a bit of everything. And so I just got involved in everything, everything to do the agency, you know, going to, you know, dealing with clients, dealing with the finances of the agency. I mean, my business partner used to always say, I was the conscience of the agency, I was really good at looking at creative work and deciding if it was good enough for us to present. So I did get involved at that stage, you know, at that level with creative work. Yeah, it's a lot of travelling around , which is funny now, because you spend so much time to go into meetings, spending time at clients. And it's actually quite a funny question, because I almost can't remember what, I think it really was just this blur of, and then coming home, you know, bathing the children trying to spend some time with them and the weekends with just fully the family. Unless we were doing a pitch or something, then you'd go in. I mean, I used to think that we had this healthy agency, because we didn't encourage late working, you know, staying up all night, every week. Yes, we did do it every now and then for a pitch, but we encouraged everyone to go home, because I did. But it was still stressful. Does that answer your question? And I almost can't really remember the details. Jenny: Sounds to me like you were on autopilot. And you were just doing, doing, doing? And how did it? How did it affect everybody else? Like were you noticing any reactions from other people? Or did anyone at any point take you to one side and say, Louisa, you know, I feel like you're doing too much? Was there no one around you at the time? Did no one dare to come near you?  Louisa: I think people used to find me quite scary, which I always find really odd, but I think they did. Oh, no that never happened. I think I mean, I did speak to my business partner, Dean. Yeah, I mean, I did want some time out of the business. But it was just so hard to sort of accept that. I did get a mentor. It was around that time before we sold the business. And he was really helpful. And that was the only time I really got some support. Apart from joining, I was a member of the IPA and the Institute of Practitioners for advertising. I was on Council and I also ran the health care group for a while. And that was a brilliant support network, because they were my peers and people that you know, and I'm still friends with some of them now. And that's been a really, you know, when you, I would advocate that to anybody to find peers that you can talk to, because they're the only people that really understand what you're going through.Jenny: Did you ever share? I mean, because to certain extent, I mean, it's always a double edged sword, isn't it? The reason you were so making sure that everything was done just so, you didn't drop any balls, and you were making sure that the company was operating at its highest level, and you got the success as a result, but actually, what was happening behind the scenes was personally, it was having a detrimental effect, albeit very slowly, chipping away at your health. And I'm just curious, like you were surrounded I mean, as if you hadn't didn't have enough to do you also get involved with the IPA and all that. So with your peers? Was this topic ever brought up? Or was it not discussed? The fact that hey, you know, like, um, you know, was it a bit like a badge of honour saying no, we're doing it all? Were you able to talk about it? Or was it a lack of consciousness on your part that you didn't actually know enough about how it was affecting you to be able to share how you were feeling?Louisa: I think I kept it very much, I did share with my husband and, and my business partner, um, that I was stressed that I felt guilty that you know, those kind of feelings. I don't think I did really share it with anybody else. I mean, we shared issues we had, you know, around, say pitching or something or issues or, you know, something to do with contracts or procurement, but they were more sort of functional things we didn't really share about how we were feeling in that way. I think I didn't I think, I put on my brave face. I smiled a lot, because that's what I did. I looked after everybody. That's, that's what I did. I pretended I pretended for years and years, everything was fine. And, you know, the way you introduced me, I obviously did a really good job, did a fantastic job.Jenny: This is the thing, it's like everything is in line in life is a balance, isn't it? You know, it has to somehow calibrate. So when, if we go back to that time, because what I'm what I'm really keen to do is to and as what you're doing now, I want to dig into how you're helping agencies now, because I think this is such a brilliant topic to talk about. I think so many people do suffer from stress, pressure guilt, when they're growing an agency, building an agency or working in an agency, actually, because it's very 100 miles an hour, everything, isn't it. And I just think it's a topic personally that I don't think talked about enough. So I'm keen to kind of try to pull out from you, what you believe people can do to recognise that they might be going down a path that they don't want to be doing. And quick, more quickly do something about it. You said that a mentor came into life and help support you, you could talk to your husband about things. But what I mean, you're obviously working now with agency owners leaders, what signs do you see from the outside looking in that they might be like you just getting on with it. But really, they need to be, there's a bit of a warning bell that you can see.Louisa: Sometimes I wonder, maybe, maybe that this doesn't exist, maybe I've just made it all up, I have those moments. And then for instance, the other day, I'm in an agency group that I'm in, there's a little chat, and 18 agency owners, but in this chat talking about feeling overwhelmed, feeling stressed. And these are the warning signs that you can't relax, that your sleep is interrupted. Or maybe you have that like 4am feeling where you wake up worrying about everything, or just little niggles like, you know, for anybody watching, things like headaches or you know, that you don't normally have itchy skin. Or just that feeling, you know, in your stomach, you know, that kind of like constant pressure in your stomach, which, which you might have, or even it could be more about, like starting to doubt yourself or that you know that you might make mistakes. And also, you know, actually making poor decisions, because when we're in that stress state, so there's a difference between healthy stress and unhealthy stress. This is important to realise. So, you know, I've noticed it in the last six months during the whole COVID time, there was a kind of sense that the first few months of it, that's just huge stress. But in a way, for some people, it was sort of healthy stress, because it's like, right, something's happening. It's almost sort of exciting, we've got to change things, we've got to do things differently. And that's what happens. Healthy stress is fine, it improves performance. And we've all felt that, you know, you start a new project or a new job or a new relationship. It's exciting. And that, but there's a tipping point which is where it turns into unhealthy stress. And that's the thing that we're not very good at noticing. Because we start to just think that this level of stress is normal. And it's realising when we start feeling those warning signs that it's tipping into unhealthy stress. And that that's the time to sort of do something about it. Because healthy stress makes is great for good decision making. But unhealthy stress is the opposite. So agencies should really worry about it because it's also really bad for creativity. Because creativity needs calm. It doesn't need stressed in the unhealthy sense of stress. So the other thing that is a little warning sign is that whole ‘I am fine. I'm fine.’ Yeah, yeah, smiley everyone's smiling because nobody's fine all the time. So that's that sort of understanding there are diminishing returns to that stress is very important for all and you're right, especially in agencies because it's already a stressful environment. You win pitches exciting, you lose pitches that's all for you, you know, have a new client you've got to get going. That's lots of new stuff to do. This is always up and down stressful. It is that kind of environment. So we need to really watch out for it more than many other people.Jenny: What's the first thing that you would suggest someone did, if they listen to listening to this, and they perhaps are thinking, I think that I'm starting to go down the route of the more unhealthy stress, rather than the healthy stress, what's the very first thing that they should do really?Louisa: Brilliant, they've already done the first thing, which is to notice it. So being self aware, is the first step to kind of having a plan. Because if you're, if you don't notice it, then you're just going to fall into it. And what happens is people go until they fall over. So people might get ill or, or literally can't go to work, you know, suffer burnout. So noticing it, being self aware is the first good step, then talk to somebody, most agencies do have some sort of, they're usually covered under their insurance, they do normally have somebody you can talk to like a kind of counselling services, you can just at least you can talk to somebody. But I would just suggest talking to, you know, a good friend, or, you know, just just to be able to voice those feelings is really important. And talk to somebody that makes you feel good. And talk to somebody that's going to say, Oh, I know somebody that's got stress, but you don't want to talk to the conversation. Yeah, know exactly. You want to talk to somebody who's going to go, I hear you. Yeah. So talking is, is really important. There's loads, there's loads you can do you can do for yourself, I would as a small step, we could do it actually, we could do it now, if you want is, it's up to you, a way of holding a stress, stress response as a physiological response. And one way to hold it is just a simple breathing. And if you start learning how to do that, that's a great way to get yourself into a more calm, alert state. So even if you just take a couple of deep breaths, but if you have a minute, would you like to do it now?Jenny: I'd love to do it. I’m going to get away from the microphone, I don't want to impose my breathing on anyone. Louisa: So it's just a really simple breathing technique called heart focus breathing. Just take a deep breath to start. And then just focus your attention in your heart or chest area. And then just start to breathe through your nose in a nice, balanced way. So for instance, in for a count of four, or five, and out for the same. And make sure you don't hold your breath on the ingress or the outlet.Jenny: Your voice is making me feel very relaxed as well, to be honest, I honestly, I physically feel better, just breathing twice there. And your voice is calming me down.Louisa: This is a great little technique that you can use with your eyes open anywhere. So if you're having a conversation with a client was like a stressful conversation or a colleague, or you're about to go into a meeting, if you do this just for a minute. It's so simple. The key is just to take your attention to your heart, it interrupts your automatic kind of breathing patterns. So attention to heart balanced in and out. And that's all you have to do. And that's just a simple little technique to take away. And yeah, it's funny, I was finally getting you were saying about talking about being, you know, about how you were then and I sort of think I would never have done that. I've never have known to do that.Jenny: Well, you take breathing for granted, don't you? We don't even think about using your breath as a technique.Louisa: And it's great because we do have an autonomic nervous system that makes us breathe without thinking.  But the brilliant thing is you can interrupt it. And what that does, it gives you a little bit, gives you a little sort of top up, I sort of like to talk about your inner battery in terms of resilience. And what happened to me is my battery just ran out. I had no more reserves, I had nothing. And a little breathing like that just tops up your battery, just a small amount and there's loads of other things you can do. But that's just a quick one, and it halts the stress reaction. Because every time you'll stress like that you're building up cortisol in your body. It's just so bad for you. Jenny: So is it cumulative? I mean, I don't know a lot about cortisol. So you add more and more and more? I mean, it's, well, I mean, my, my father died of cancer, and I'm sure a lot of the manifestation in his body that started it, he was he was very, very stressed. But I so that's one technique that people can use, which is really super helpful. Thank you so much for sharing. Tell me about the other ways that you help people when they come to you like, what's your advice for people? Because Do you find that the more you talk about this topic, the more people start sort of secretly contacting you and saying, hey, Louisa, I heard you talk about this. Louisa: Well, what tends to happen is people go, I know,  I agree I am, I'm really stressed, I really need this, but I've got no time. And because they are so overwhelmed, it's very hard for them to see how they could find the time. So the first thing is to help find some time, you know, help help even just, you know, one of the little workshops I run for whole agencies is how to have a good day. And that just is just like little productivity tips, you know, because until you find, you know, a bit about a bit of time to have for yourself. And I think a lot of agency owners are actually really good at looking after their staff, but they often don't spend any time on themselves. So until they're ready to actually say, I'm worth spending some time on because if I don't, I can't look after all these other people, then actually, there's usually a bit of a time lag, which is awful, because I don't want to get, I don't want them to get to the point where they're burnt out when they get to me, because then they probably need to go to the doctor, not to a coach. So I really want to help people before they get to that point. So the key is programmes, I think quite a lot of people do sort of resilience workshops, and that kind of thing. But I stopped doing them because I realised that one session is really not, you've got to do a programme, because this stuff tends to be ingrained. You're not going to change it, you know, in one, one session, this is going to take this is going to take some time and some commitment to help people.Jenny: And typically, what do people say about working with you during a programme? You know, how has it, how does it tend to impact them? Like what what did they, how did they describe their journey and their experience of you being able to help them with that transformation?Louisa: So they normally talk about feeling calm, which again, always makes me laugh, because I've always been known for being this kind of loud, extrovert person. I love the fact I'm making people feel calm. And they always talk about clarity. Like, suddenly they can see what they need to do. They, they have a plan. They have the next step they feel, they just feel, they often say they feel better. And for different people, it means different things. But usually, they see the next step that they're going to take and it feels doable and exciting. And they feel energised.Jenny: Is that  what you help people do is develop their own bespoke plan for them and where they're always, tailored to what they need?Louisa: Yeah, I mean, the techniques, and if I'm doing the resilience programme itself, there are there's a workbook and we work through it, but it's all based on them and what they need, and everyone's at different points in that journey. You know, some people I work with are really, really stressed and overwhelmed, and other people less so but they can see it could come if they don't do something about it. And we're also working on growing the business or, you know, helping them grow the business as well as the cost themselves. And that's the mix.Jenny: Well, I was gonna say, I mean, not only can you help them with their health, you can help them with the practical side of running a business, can't you? And presumably, I mean, that's the beauty of working with someone like yourself, who has trodden the path of growing and selling successfully an agency, you know, it's like, well, there's nothing probably that you come up against now that you haven't, you know, with someone else that you haven't experienced yourself.Louisa: I think that does mean that I have huge amounts of empathy for them. It might sound a bit odd but I really love my clients. Because, you know, when I'm in the moment with them, I you know, I really want to help them and, and I think they, you know, they clearly feel that support and I prefer now to take more of a coaching approach, which is really believing they have, they're the experts in their life, and they will find the answers that work for them. So yes, I may, you know, help, I may with my questions, and, you know what, what to ask them that might help them. And if I'm doing blended sort of mentoring and coaching, I may suggest some things if that's helpful to them, but usually, it's going to work much better if they find the ways that work for them. Jenny: You said before about, you know, the agency owner is very good at looking after their team and recognising stress in them. But then, you know, it's it, they're not looking after themselves. I think what I've realised working with a lot of agency account managers, is how the agency owner shows up within the business can have a real effect on everybody. I mean, their energy levels, their approaches. And I remember, when I was, I was running Publicis between different MDs, I was picking up the reins. I remember, I was I was what you just described, I was really resonating with what as you were describing it, I was, I was working weekends I was full on. And I was really excited. I thought actually, it was this anxious anxiety, I think all the time. And it wasn't until an old MD came to visit me for coffee. And she actually really helped me because she leaned forward said, Jenny, are you okay? And I went, it came as a shock, the question, but she'd noticed the change in my energy, my demeanour. And obviously, I was carrying myself and, you know, imposing that way of being to my team, so God knows what detrimental effect it had on everybody else. But do you think that's equally as important that, you know, ultimately, you're, you're looking after yourself so that you can help your team perform better?Louisa: Absolutely and as I say, I do find that most agency owners do really care about their team. And somebody I was talking to you the other day used the metaphor of the oxygen mask, they were saying, you know, if you don't put the oxygen mask on yourself first, how can you help everybody else? And, and I think that yeah, I mean, the impact on your staff is massive, because it could just be that you're micromanaging. That could be the impact of it, because you're so worried about everything, but you're constantly checking, checking, checking. Instead of going, I've trained them, I've empowered them. Jenny's done a fantastic account management programme with them. And you know, that I can let that go. And they might not think of that as a kindness, but it's actually so important for them to concentrate on the things that only they can do. And that's the biggest piece of advice I would always give anybody running a business is to really think about. And at home as well, you know what? So for me looking back, like what, what was it that only I could do with the children that only their mum will do? Because there are some things they don't, they didn't need me to pack their lunch, but they did need me to go to their assemblies, which I did go to most often. For instance, you know, so deciding what only you can do in the business, what what could you know, where you bring value to the business, and what you can let go of, or outsource or get somebody else to do is so important. And that's a really key step to, you know, having a healthy life and a healthy business.Jenny: Yeah, that must be quite cathartic for someone to sort of sit down with you and just pour it all out and analyse different areas of their life with someone else that can really have a practical and pragmatic approach to what can you leverage? What do you need to absolutely do? And what don't you need to do because that must in itself actually feel like a relief? And just you've mentioned your family a few times. And I hope you don't mind me asking the question, but do you think that your family in any way suffered as a result of what you were experiencing?Louisa: Yeah, I do. I do. I feel a bit emotional when you ask that, I mean, some of not all of it was bad. So I have four boys who are and I think partly, they were already lovely, obviously. But I think having seen me really, really ill meant they've always just been incredibly loving and sweet and my youngest son, I think it's the reason he's decided to go into medicine. Because he was only nine at the time, and it really it really affected him. And it was really sad at the time. But yeah, and I think it was a good thing for my marriage because I think we kind of fell in love again. In the hospital. Because it you know, sometimes those things are give you that real sense of what you could have lost, you know, and that perspective. So I don't, it's not all bad. You know, there was some amazing things that came out of it, including, you know, that I love what I'm doing now. And, yes, a lot of love. And I think I also have, I think one thing I gained was empathy, a lot more empathy for, for everyone. And, and I feel very blessed to have that, because it's, it helps me every day.Jenny: It's so powerful. I mean, it's so powerful to think that your son chose a career path as a result of what he was experiencing, that it had such a positive impact on your relationship. And I suppose in those times you do understand who your true friends are, and who your true supporters and the people that really care and love, love you. I'm sure. I mean, just out of interest, did you find that people from the industry were rallying round? Or did you want? Did you? Did people come out the woodwork that you didn't think had that sort of empathy, as you refer to at the time? Or were you surprised at the lack of care in general?Louisa: I don't think it was particularly one or the other. I think a lot of people just didn't really, I don't think it really registered with people. I think some people knew I'd been very ill. But you know, people were just busy and getting on with their lives. So I think apart from my sort of close, friends and, and sort of close business, friends, I don't think people really knew. I mean, people are funny, I remember smart people often, but I remember being in hospital and realising how, how little people understand about people who are sick, really, really sick. And, you know, sending you like huge boxes of chocolates that, you know, like work people thinking, what, you know, I'm really ill, I can't eat anything. It's sort of, they've got their PA to send a big box of chocolates. I think there is a sort of, I don't know, I think people don't really I don't think people really sort of understood. And I think if you're in a sort of leadership role, people just want us to be better. You know, I don't really want to know that you're, yeah, that human.Jenny: Exactly. That's, that's really interesting. That's really interesting. So the gesture was there, but the execution fell down. I'm interested to, to know if what else you would advise you've shared some really valuable tips, I think, you know, first of all, having a recognition of what you're going through and talking to someone about, and you've shared, the fact that, you know, breathing techniques really helped to initially calm you down, to think about your life in terms of areas that perhaps you could leverage, you know, and somebody else's services or tools even to, to help yourself. And I'm interested sort of to expand on that too, to understand the different ways that you work with people, I know that you prefer to work as a programme, and you don't do sort of one off resilience workshops or anything, but yeah, what do you do, you do that as a group? Or is it always one on one?Louisa: Both I like, I really like both. And I've found doing group coaching on zoom or group mentoring works really well. I love it. I never thought I'd say that because I really like being with people. And there's something about it that seems to work when people are in their own homes. So I do both. I love doing both. I work with small groups, unless it's a workshop like I'll do a How to Have a good day workshop. I can do that with 20 people. But with the mentoring and coaching programmes, the groups are normally around seven seems to be an ideal number and the one to ones and so I tend to work with the business owners and then also do groups with their teams or sometimes one to one with their teams, depending on what the need is?Jenny: And have you got any examples of perhaps agencies that are excelling in this area that are kind of super aware? And they have any kind of initiatives that they do? Like, what have you seen best practice with agencies?Louisa: Yes, I've been thinking about this, um, I think some, some, maybe bigger companies are tracking they’re maybe doing online surveys tracking, you know, the happiness of their staff. Some are doing training programmes. But this says, I don't know if there is a lot of really great best practice. I think, as I mentioned earlier, some will have sort of mental health signposting around, you know, so people will know, maybe to ask things in a certain way, and if and then we'll know who to sort of post them to signpost, them to, they might have a counsellor that you can talk to. And I think the thing with resilience is that people think it's all about sort of bouncing back after something terrible's happened. And so the programmes tend to be for that. So there's a lot of good stuff for people who have fallen over and say, is some way you can go and to help you up. But the way I just define resilience is that it's the capacity to prepare for, to recover from and to adapt in the face of stress or challenge. And so it's that building up your inner battery that that building capacity, and I think there isn't a lot of great work going on with that. I think there's good stuff. But what happens when I'm ill, but not so much, how do we create this capacity, which means that you are healthier individual at work? Even that's creative, you know, building up your inner battery, because I think everyone that resonates with everyone, isn't it? They can just imagine, yes, that makes total sense.And we do it, you know, for our cars, you know, we have MOT's we have regular service checks, we put oil in we check it, we look at the light switches, come on, but we don't do it for ourselves. And I don't, I don't think companies have really, you know, I think agency owners have been really good at the last few months that keeping the energy going the team, you know, I've worked really hard on team culture. And I think they do care about how much people are working, especially at home, where they're working possibly even longer hours back to back meetings on zoom, and I care about it. But I'm not sure there's I haven't seen any signs of brilliant best practice in terms of ongoing programmes.Jenny: Would you say that, just a couple more questions before I'm just conscious of your time, would you say that COVID the whole situation with everyone working remotely and on their own? Have you seen a higher prevalence in, you know, people who are, it is affecting their health because not everybody loves? You know, if you're maybe over 50, you know, you love being at home and working from home because you're very self sufficient. But generally speaking, our industry does attract a lot of young talent, doesn't it? And if you're starting in an agency, part of it, part of the enjoyment of an agency is the bars and pitching and stuff like that. So would you say that you'd seen any trends or changes recently?Louisa: I mean, I think it's been such a mix, some people and it's not just a age related, you know, I know some younger people also love it depends where they live, you know, what their home life is, what their commute used to be. And some people have loved it and are healthier, doing my exercise eating better, because they've got more time. Other people have gone completely opposite seems to be two camps, they put on weight, they've drunk too much and not as much exersie. I think the common theme is there's definitely more anxiety around. Some people have stress as well. But there's definitely kind of over here there's this like level of anxiety, which we've all got. Now, I've been working really hard on building up my inner battery these last few weeks, especially because I can see that it's being depleted by this kind of background anxiety that that is there all the time for us to see. So, so I think it's a real mix. I think that is more anxiety, more stress for everybody.Jenny: I think what I from what I've seen, I agree with you as well. Louisa, I think this is so powerful, I'd love you to share where, because I'm sure there are people listening to this thinking, oh my god, she's like, taking the words out of my mouth. That's exactly how I feel. And I recognise that I do need to do something about it. So I find it hugely inspiring that you're doing what you're doing because of your background because of who you're helping. And having trodden the path before. I think that does make you so much, so much more valuable, because you get it as you say, your empathy is increased. So how can people reach you who, who are the best people that you would like to be contacted by? And how can people contact you if they want to know more?Louisa: So they can find me on LinkedIn, or email me, louisa@otherboards.co.uk. I mean, I'm happy to chat to anybody. My usual starting point is usually business, the agency owner or person running the agency, or somebody in the senior management team. They're usually the people that employees employ me as it were. And so they would be the best people.Jenny: Amazing. And any finally, anything that I haven't asked you that is pertinent about your story that you would like to share? Because I just want to capture everything. Anything that I haven't asked you that I probably should have done?Louisa: I don't think so. We've been really kind of.. No, I’d better now share any more – my poor family!   Jenny: I honestly, I really want to raise the awareness of this because I, having worked in the industry myself, I I totally believe that what you're saying is so valuable. And I just think it's phenomenal what you're doing. So it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. And, yeah, just carry on doing what you're doing. I think it's hugely valuable in the industry. So thank you.Louisa: Thank you. 

Jenny: Welcome to the Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast with me, Jenny Plant, from Account Management Skills Training. I'm on a mission to help those in agency client service keep and grow the existing relationships, so their agency business can thrive.Welcome to Episode Seven. I have a real treat for you today, particularly if you're an agency owner. I've managed to grab an hour in Spencer Gallagher’s diary and Spencer is in the middle of rewriting his book Agencynomics, which he wrote with his partner, Peter Hall and in this chat, we discuss what makes a successful agency leader now and what successful agency leaders are doing differently to accelerate their growth. What he’d do differently today if he was starting out his agency, what trends he's seeing in the agency landscape and why you need to keep learning to keep yourself relevant. He also shares loads of fantastic, really useful tips, particularly if you're an agency owner or leader and also if you're managing tribe relationships. So sit back, relax and I will introduce Spencer in more detail. Spencer - for those in the agency world, you need no introduction whatsoever. But for those in the audience who may not have heard of you or met you, you run one of the leading well, the leading, UK agency growth consultancy, Cactus. You're also co founder of Cactus Academy, which is online training for agency leaders. You're also the author of the bestselling book Agencynomics, which is a phenomenal book for anyone growing an agency. And you also run the biggest global community for agency owners of the same name, Agencynomics. And you're also the host of the vodcast agency Phonics. So I'm thrilled because I know you advise companies, you're a non exec, you do a lot of speaking gigs so to get some time with you, I know you usually sit on this side of the fence,  is an absolute delight for me. I'm absolutely thrilled. Just a short intro before I pass over to you to ask you to talk a bit about your history. We obviously met a couple of years ago and what struck me about you was first of all your energy, which is phenomenal. I just don't know how you get everything done, but also how you essentially adopted me into the Cactus and Agencynomics family, which I will be forever grateful for. And you've also gone on to trust me with many of your clients. So I just feel so at home in the community. I think you obviously attract a really decent, lovely type of person and you've created this really supportive community which is really active, really involved. And you just seemed so generous with everybody that you meet. So I would love you to share your journey with us because I obviously haven't mentioned the fact that you built a 20 billion turnover agency and sold it. So I would love you to share your journey with us.Spencer: Thank you. That was a wonderful introduction. Thank you. When I hear it back, sometimes I'm also thinking, Wow, how do I find time to do all those things myself? Well I'm so busy, I had a complaint this week from someone, who said your PA, Abbie, who you know very well, has said it's currently 58 days to get a meeting with you.Jenny: I'm not surprised.Spencer: And I was trying to make the point that I actually look after about £100 million worth of agencies with 1000 staff and I think people don't always realise what I do in my day job. Agencynomics is obviously something that I do as a bit of a charity, sort of social enterprise ‘pay it forward’ my spare time. But yes, I mean a brief history of time. You know, I'm one of those kind of classic entrepreneur types, I think. I left school at 16. No qualifications Left home at 16. Didn't have the best start in life. You know, worked in clothes shops, selling clothes and so life wasn't that good for me in the beginning. It wasn't like, you know, pure poverty. But put it this way, you know, I brought myself up and your life wasn't simple and I had to be quite independent from a young age and I don't know, like I just worked really hard at everything I did, and I got some lucky breaks and I ended up at the age of about 27 getting made redundant. I went through three jobs in a year, got made redundant twice and decided that in my spare time I'd been playing on this thing called the Internet since about 93. So to give you an idea, Tim Berners Lee came up with the Internet html and in 1991 so 2 years later I'm taught myself to write websites and after being made redundant from a purple shed in my mum's back garden, I started to build websites. And I started to build at the time what I thought was a web development company. And then about three years later, somebody walked into the business and said I really love your agency and I was like, what's an agency and then from that moment onwards, the business really, really grew quickly. So that's kind of briefly how it started, obviously aside building websites when it was a joke to build websites. So if you told people you built websites in the year 2000, they'd laugh at you because it's a bit like crypto currency or Bitcoin today. And so you know there was a tough times I think we called ourselves new media agencies back then and so you know, it's a long story short. I won, I got a couple of big breaks. One of them was Tottenham Hotspur football club and I then became very big in sports and I ended up building websites for people like the NFL, worked with Jamie and Andy Murray before they were, you know, big time really, you know, Judy used to come down to the offices. So we did a lot in sport , sports was our niche. But we did end up working with other companies like with Cancer Research, a big client. Before we used iPhones and Samsung we used blackberries, a BlackBerry or crack brief as we used to call them. So, yeah, I was very fortunate. Grew it organically. No investments. Deloitte Tech Fast 50 Growing business and ended up in 2008  really the big ad agencies had missed out on Digital. If you remember back then, they would call the digital team in their agency the dark arts department. Or they had, like, a separate division with a different name that did digital. A lot of big companies had missed out. They hadn't found a way to integrate digital into their advertising or marketing, so I sold the business very successfully. I was the only owner of the business and at 37 I kind of retired really, I sort of stopped working and my last pitch in an agency, I share this story sometimes with people, it was 63 hours with three hours sleep, and it was for a global business with Technicolor to do the re-brand and the global website development. And after kind of stopping work in 2010 I decided that I would never work or set foot in an agency ever again because I was just so burnt out. But the reality was after a year of sort of stopping working and having some time outs, a lot of my old friends, my old competitors, my frenemies, would ring me up and say, Hey, listen, there's a new era needed for a non-exec that understands technology, not just that Mad Men era. There were a lot of non execs 10 years ago who were very much from the advertising and marketing traditional world, whereas I was very much from the New World because I've been there and done it on did it organically I think there's a lot of connection there, so we started Cactus, and that was nine years ago now and it's been an amazing journey. You know, we’ve worked with a 1000 agencies,  written a book and it’s been a lot of hard work, but I'm really proud of everything we've achieved.Jenny: You should be as well. It's a phenomenal achievement. What drives you now? What drives you to continue?Spencer: Well, I think it's still the same thing. You know, I was a 16 year old who left school with no qualifications. Who left home at 16 and I felt a failure and so I've always been driven by the fear of proving that I'm not a failure. You know, I've always wanted to be successful. Even when I sold the business, actually, I sort of fell off the top of Maslow’s triangle and crashed down because I'd sold the one thing that made me successful. And I had nothing to show for it anymore necessarily. I had a nice house and car, lovely family and, you know, but I didn't really have something that I had built and made, you know, I’d sold it. And so in a way, then that's a rebuild that, so the driver with Cactus all along is I guess, you know, a lot of people say, you know, you could be one hit wonder. I guess you know a lot of people could say because you build one business and sell it doesn't mean that you can do it again. Well, I think a couple of people said that to me. In fact, you just reminded me there was a statistic that said something like and this is true, like only 30% of people who build themselves a business go on to do it again. So I wanted to prove that I could do it again. And I think we've done that through Cactus, time and time again now through our clients and through the investments we've made. Jenny: You know, I love that you shared, but that because I was just reflecting. And I'm sure a lot of people hearing that very open story and a really honest story wo;; identify with that because I think. Like, I didn't go to university. I mean, maybe in those days it wasn't so common, but that kind of drives me. And also I think you've got a shared love of personal development. You're always reading, aren't you? I mean, you interviewed Daniel Priestley..Spencer: Yeah, I managed to get Daniel Priestly on my podcast.Jenny: Amazing. So you're always developing yourself and your skills. Spencer: It’s funny because they were sort of two or three books along the journey that really helped me,  shape who I am. And when I say them, you know you'll laugh because they're the books that you probably see time and time again people always promoting. And the first book actually was it wasn't The Secret, but it was, I was discussing it this morning with someone, it was a book with a red cover, and it basically said ‘How to be successful in life’. This is a 16 year old me going. I'm earning £70 a week selling clothes in Foster's, which is like Top Man in a small town in Surrey, my life's not looking great, and I read this book and I find I left home with my mum at 15, my parents divorced. I moved to my dad’s house, and he had it in his, just as I left home at 16, he had it on the bookshelf, and it was something called ‘How to Be a Millionaire’ or How to Be Successful. One of those books and I read it and it said, close your eyes, sit somewhere comfortable. Imagine your life three years from now. Now I listen, I had nothing, right? I had no qualifications so at this point, I don't have anything other than this book telling me how I'm gonna I don't know, do something with my life. But I did it. I closed my eyes. I said, by the time I'm 20 I want to earn £20,000 a year, which, bearing in mind where I was, was quite an achievement. To give you an idea, I think I was earning about £4000 to £5000 a year, and that would probably be about the equivalent of about £10,000 today. So 20 would probably be about, what, £40,000 today. I want to have a company car and I want to own my own house. And three years from that day, I bought my first house. I was 19 years old. Interest rates were 15%. Not 1% like they are now 15%. I got a first time buyers discount. Some reason the visualisation worked. Now I don't know whether it was the manifestation of the secret or it was just the neuroscience, the fact that you know you achieve things, human beings, where we draw our attention to we focus and we achieve things. Who knows what the answer is? I still don't know. But what I do know is it worked. And so the first lesson I learned was about visualisation visualising your future, and even today, every day I read out a daily gratitude list where I'm grateful for the outcomes that are gonna happen to me. That was the first one. The second one was ‘How to win friends and influence people’. And that gave me an ability at the time to be able to talk to anybody. I think I kind of had that anyway, because I was in the bottom set for everything at school. So I hung around with rough kids. But then I was reasonably sporty enough to know the wealthy kids so I could kind of adapt up and down a little bit, that probably helps you in sales. But actually reading that book, you know how to win friends made me realise what's the saying, you know, to be interesting, you have to be interested, and just all of those techniques. And then lastly, it was ‘Think and grow rich’, which really underpinned the first book and you know for those people it’s a book that was written in 1927, ‘Think and Grow Rich’ and the book was at the time it just really struck a chord with me in many, many ways. So they were the kind of the early bits of reading I did, and what I found was because a lot of learnings from those books really helped me I realised that a real education in life actually starts the day you leave school, not the day – you don’t stop school and stop learning. You have to almost go, you know, and in fact, even I remember 2-3 years ago when digital technology started moving much more into distributed crypto, AI, you know, I went out every morning, walked 10 miles between six and 10K and 10 miles listening to audio books and podcasts around, AI,  machine learning, trying to make sure that I'm staying relevant and I'm learning new things. Yes, a journey of learning has been really the heart of everything I do.Jenny: And do you think that's the secret of success for an agency owner? Because I'm sure there’s agency owner is listening to this thinking I really would like to have whatever Spencer’s got to accelerate my agency's growth. What do I need to be doing differently? So do you see, when you meet so many, that the ones that stand out for you, you can see that they're going to be more successful. Are there any kind of traits?Spencer: So the reality is, is that we're complicated people, human beings and I think that I'm very fortunate in, like a couple of my superpowers are able to sort of cut through. So where some people overly procrastinate or suffer from imposter syndrome or have, you know, barriers from, psychological barriers from when they were younger and their stage fright, whatever it may well be. I'm someone who always sees cut through. So I don't try and coach people, and I talk about it quite a lot. I'm more of a fitness instructor because I find that I don't really have the skills to be able to retrain the way people work. What I do is I tend to show them the answer and then I give them the trust and confidence to just make and take that action, that decision. And then when they do it and it works, you know then they are like, OK this is great. So the danger is with that, of course, is that if you don't coach someone, they never make the mistakes. They don't go through the process themselves, don't learn it forever. So my approach is more like the PT instructor. You know, I'm moving the weight stuff. I'm telling how many reps you gotta do – you need to do three more, you know. But the moment I go, you might just revert back to going and hitting the Haagen Daz ice cream and I think a lot of agencies who start working with me, actually go back to who they were before. Because, you know, success, you know, is doing the right thing day in, day out, and failure is doing the wrong thing day in, day out. And so I'm just course correcting. I call it course correction. I have a philosophy that I believe is, you know, a successful philosophy, and I try and get people to understand that and embrace that and drive them down that route. But my skill, I guess, is to deal with all the different complex personalities and try and also find them the right people. Because, for example, you're a good example of this, because I find that it's very hard for me to work, I'm good at working with, like, agency owners, but I'm not so good at working with team members, you know, because team members do need coaching. They need a different level of empathy than I have time to give them. Apparently I’ve got a high EQ, I’ve just had my EQ test done today. I’m very highly self aware which is great. I have empathy, but I'm probably too busy sometimes to sit down and coach over a long periods of time. In fact, one of my colleagues who works with other non execs, he says, I sit in board meetings with other non execs and they spend six months trying to coach someone to do a new thing, and you come in, you just tell him to do it, you know, I think that so it's really good to bring you in to situations for me. Like I find it hard  sometimes to bring out the best in client services because they need the empathy that to relate to someone who's worked in their role before. I haven't been an account manager, I had fantastic account manager client servicing in my teams. I made a lot of mistakes but in the end, I feel like I got a successful team through making lots of mistakes. But I think you know that’s where you’ve got to bring the right people in to do the job could be better than you. And I'm also good spotting that, you know, so does that answer the question? Jenny: It does, fantastic answer. I wasn't expecting it to be answered like that, but absolutely and I was gonna ask you another one. If you were going to start again, because I know a lot of agency leaders that are here at the moment listening will be thinking Well, okay, so if you were going to start again, what other things that you'd be doing differently. Like you've said, you made a mistake. I'm sure a lot of us doing, that's how you learn sometimes. But you're very good at short cutting their learnings for others. So what if the top three things that you would be doing differently if you start it again now? Spencer: Well, the thing that is really obvious, and I think people sometimes because I'm slightly more extroverted than I am introverted so it's easy for you to say these things. But, you know, Malcolm Gladwell says, you gotta be 10,000 hours to be an expert. I've done 20,000 hours now, you know, helping agencies grow and another 10 growing my own. And the one thing I've learned is that agencies do not exist without, before even clients come on boards and even when clients do come on board, if you don't have leads coming into the business, you will not have clients. You will not have services, people, processes, profit, cash. You won't have any of those things. And so the number one thing you need to understand is how are eads generated. It's not about creating the best products in the world than trying to figure out how you sell it. It's not, you know, you have to understand what is it the problem that you're going to solve as a service business? That's what we do. We solve problems. What's the problem that we're solving, and how am I going to create an abundance of people wanting to work with me to do that? So the first thing is, is for me all about that. Mow to create that in today's market, so if I started tomorrow and I have this thing, there's a lot of people say I don't know who the person is who maybe coins it, but there was a think it might be someone like Jim Rome or Tony Robbins they said, You know, if all the wealthy people in the world lost all their money tomorrow, they'd all have it back in five years. I really firmly believe that. I'm not someone who is obsessed about money at all. It is not thing for me, but the point is you see how to make life easier for yourselves. You know often  as entrepreneurs and you see where the optical national agencies. But in today's world, what would I do in simple terms? I’ve been a massive fan of Daniel Priestley, and I would first of all say you read his book ‘Key person of influence’ in a world full of people on social media, establish your expertise, work on your personal brands, your personal brand identity. You did it before I did. I came across you when I was just liking and sharing other people's LinkedIn posts. And, you know, I would see you there talking about client services online, in video format. It was clear that you were an authority. And I think when I met you at the time, there was no other, I knew other people who did what you did, but you seem the biggest authority because you spoke about it the most. So I'd read ‘Key Person of Influence’. I’d work on my personal branding and my point of view and become an expert on what it is I'm looking to sell. And then the second thing, I would just get some LinkedIn training and learn how to use it properly. Because if it was the top 40 charts right now for lead generation agencies, I think the fastest riser is LinkedIn. I'm very fortunate, because I get to look at lots of pipelines every month, so I see where all the lead sources are. Since Covid started LinkedIn has been one of the fastest growing areas for new business its now appearing regularly on, whereas generally actually Twitter , Instagram they don't often appear on, they do, but not very often appear as lead sources in agencies. So if I started again tomorrow I’d work on my personal brand, work on learning how to talk about the process, to share what I'm doing, to demonstrate my expertise. And I would start to build a really good network of connections because the number one way – I’ve done around two surveys this year, Jenny, one was the UK Lead Generation survey, and one was the Global lead generation survey. And if you take out the number two, number three way for agencies to get business is always existing clients referring other clients or existing clients leaving. But if you remove those because they're already clients, the number one way is through networking, speaking ,thought leadership and so those three areas you need to build your connections, you need to set yourself some numbers. I mean, I used to have this thing, at Blue Halo where I'd meet 50 new people each month. And, I think today it doesn't have to be new people, but meaningful conversations on a regular basis will build your pipeline and if you build your authority then those two things come together. So that's what I would do in a nutshell.Jenny: It's such good advice and funnily enough I've seen quite a few posts from agency owners saying I followed what Spencer’s telling me and this month I'm doing my 50 phone calls and it gets results. Why do you think people resist it? Is it difficult? And why do you think agency owners don't do it?Spencer: You know I mean, it's funny because Agencynomics isn't my first community that I set up. In the early days of Cactus, I had a lot of people ringing me up, whose struggling in their businesses. Owners and I set up an early stage community, and I used to these talks in there. I used to share the philosophy that, you know, if you make 50 new connections a month and you understand what they do, then you share what you do then you're able to help them in some ways, to build some reciprocity and not unauthentically but genuinely you know, the more you help, the more business will come back. And I knew that because actually, when I analysed my own pipelines, there was one guy spent a million pounds with me over 10 years because I helped fix his email in 1999 when he was made redundant. And so you help people, connect to people and keep in touch. And so I tell people this. And I remember going to a dinner in Manchester about two years ago, and I hosted an agency dinner there. And someone say yeah, you’re always banging on about this meet 35 people a month, and that's just impossible. Now ir wasn't 50. It was 35.  And I said, you know, it's Thursday. I'm in Manchester. Every day of the week, I'm in a board meeting from 10. 30 till five o'clock. So that means I've only had from 8. 30 to 10. 30 and maybe the evening. I just wanna let you know that you guys are my, I think it was the 70th people that I've met that week because I did a speaking event the night before, in fact you were there that week by the way. The MAA speaking event was about 35-40 people. There was quite there was a couple years ago. I'd worked out I’d met 70 people in four days, and you know the reality is there are 22 working days in the month, 21- 22 working days. If you talk to two people a day, you know that's 44 people a month. If you can't find, you know, an hour a day to have two conversations for half an hour over Zoom, you know, with people that you used to work with you, used to go to school with, ex colleagues, ex customers. Well, if you really want to be successful, then that's what you need. And by the way, everyone has a number. So although mine was 50, because if you have 50 conversations serendipitously, you will probably find two or three opportunities. You don't find 50, you find 1 to 3 and of those three, maybe one or two will convert. But that for me was worth about £200,000  a month when I was doing your business. There were people I know they do a hundred, and they bring in maybe 40 a month. That's not a problem, but you've got to know your number because everyone will have a number based on the size, the stage they’re at, who they are, how they help people, etc, etc.Jenny: I notice this might sound like a silly question, but are you finding that generally, particularly younger people prefer not to speak face to face or on the phone?Spencer: Um, is it a younger person thing? I don't know. I've come across some people of all ages who do and don't do it. Is it a younger thing? Possibly. I mean, I don't know.  I'm not sure that I’m qualified enough or done the research to identify whether or not. The way people work has definitely changed, but I would say, you know, I know some fantastic super connectors who are under the age of 30 who do do these things. So maybe not. Jenny: I suppose the reason I'm asking is in my work with account managers who always tend to be a lot, obviously a lot younger than me, I often say, well, how about picking up the phone or just call them. I emailed and I said XY and Z and I got an email back and they tell me this whole story of what's happened over email and I said, well, how about just calling them or leaving a voice message or, you know, on LinkedIn and I suppose that was the reason for my question, really? And I was just wondering, is this a trend?Spencer: I mean, I for me I think that's yes I think there probably is an overarching trend as communication has changed, and people can use, you know, WhatsApp or text or Snap or whatever to communicate that they don't need to ring up, pick up the phone. Interestingly enough, my son is 15. He talks into his phone, so they use Snapchat and they just send each other voice messages all the time. It’s easier than typing. They commentate through games. It's like doing a phone call so maybe going full circle. But, you know, if I'm honest about it even 20 years ago, maybe let’s say 10 to 15 years ago with my client service team, you know, I probably used to be nagging them to pick the phone up more because as soon as email came out, it was very easy to hide behind it. But I do think there's a lost art of communication. I think there is a lost art of picking the phone up, and I mean, I think through Covid, what was very exciting was all of a sudden a lot of marketing managers and clients who are quite hard to get hold of suddenly had a bit more time because they weren't commuting. And actually, I think a lot of people who hate networking as an example found it a lot easier to just Zoom call to speak to someone, then having to go into a building full of men and women in suits or whatever. You know, I mean that horrible feeling of and they could just do it in this kind of format. So I think it's, you know, it could well be a problem. And I think if you are an account manager, listening to this or account director and you, you know, be different. Be the 1% be the ones that pick the phone up, because that's how you're going to get cut through. If you want to be successful, you've got to do the marginal gain things you've got to do the 1% yeah, so you just got find a way to overcome the fear because actually, like all things, it scary the first time. But once you've done it. You know, it's like speaking. If I meet, so many people are scared of public speaking. But, you know, the reality is is that you know, you start off with a couple of people on your team and say can I test doing a talk with you two? Then you pick five and six and you know, one day you'll accidentally walk out like I did and there's 200 people and you know you can't even breathe, but you do it and then you realise, OK, I could do 200 now and it just gets easier as it goes up. We have to start somewhere.Jenny: I'm so glad coming from you as well that advice was so golden for the creative agency account managers listening. Do you have any other advice that from what you've seen teams doing exceptionally well with their clients or making mistakes?Spencer: I mean, I don't know whether we did talk about this much detail, but there's been a lot of, I think in the last eight weeks in particular where are we now we sort of October 2020 and certainly that middle of August, Campaign magazine started to do this kind of it's the end of the account director and the end of account manager. No one really sees them any more as relevant. They're not needed. And I just don't believe that. I think that the problem is because of technology now being at the heart of all marketing and advertising and agency businesses, whether your PR or whatever, the technology is moving so fast. Business growth has become exponential too, in fact, the first time in history, ever, where technology has outstripped business requirements in the past technology could never keep up with business and now it's the other way around. So the point is, is an account director you have to be commercially aware about your client's business? But you’ve also got to understand that their business is changing rapidly because of technology. So the problem is is that you have to invest. So my advice would be, it doesn't matter how much time your company give you to do research for learning and development. You've got to make your own time in the future world, I get up early every morning and walk before your day starts, or get in a car or whatever do now, get on a scooter but you're gonna listen and learn about your client's businesses and understand, you know, where things are changing. You've got to be relevant or you just become irrelevant. You become commoditised so my advice to anyone listening is, you know, there's a famous meme going around with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, if you’re not spending five hours a week learning new things, you're not gonna be relevant. I genuinely believe that. I think, in fact, I would predict that during 2008 with the last recession hit, 2009, a huge volume of client service people got made redundant from agencies because they didn't understand digital. And what happened in 2008/9/10 all they knew about was print and traditional advertising channels. Now they all got made redundant, they all came back two years later as social media experts. That's kind of the joke of the time. They went away, realised they’d missed it all, learned about such a media, came back again again and got re trained, but they had to use a redundancy period to do that. The reason why I've already had five or six very senior client service directors I know been made redundant. And that's because they know the world of websites and social media. But they don't know the next world of digital transformation of, you know, machine learning, they don’t understand the next wave where technology is impacting on businesses. So my advice would be come up with your own learning and development plan to keep yourself relevant, to find your expertise, to understand your client's business. And don't be a victim to your company not giving you time to learn. It’s not about them. It's about you, about your future, your career, you know, you will become more valuable to that company, to the clients, to other organisations. So don't look at it is that you know my company aren't paying me to get trained out of work out of hours. Don't worry about it. Just do it. You know, I'm sure you probably did that when you were working back in the day.Jenny: I always feel like I'm behind, so I could never absorb enough information. Honestly, there's not enough hours in the day, so I do have that drive to want to know more. And, I have noticed that some people do have that drive and others don't. But I think that's such a good point, like invest in yourself because it's about your career. It's not necessarily just about the agency you're working with, all the clients you're working with.Spencer: If you work harder on yourself than you do in your job, you'll always be more successful in life. That was said by Jim Rohn and I mean, just to add, once I I sold my business. I went back and I got told, because I was a little bit anti Tony Robbins, because he's always very positive and I'm very positive. But someone told me a good friend of mine about Jim Rohn, who was Tony Robbins mentor. I listened to a CD by him. A CD. I've got loads of them. I still can't play them anymore. But you know his philosophy back then, you know, he said things like, you know, skip a meal. But don't skip reading for an hour every day. I mean, that advice is timeless. You know, people say I don't have time then just skip a meal and read, right?Jenny: Absolutely.Spencer: You know, it's quite interesting. So I think I think the advice hasn't really changed. If you want to become more valuable in society, you need to basically invest some time in developing yourself.Jenny: Do you have any preferred sources of information that you go to like your go-to places to keep on top of things? Spencer: Do you know, when I had the agency is very different to where I am now. When I had the agency, I was you know, the term ‘Maven’, I would look for a Maven so I would look for people who I read Malcolm Gladwell's ‘Tipping Point’. And in that book he talked about how things go viral, and there’s a Maven at the beginning, someone who kind of knows about the future or is an evangelist for a certain trend. And then you get connectors and sales people down there who spread the word. But I used to follow certain Mavens around certain areas. So who are the people that are talking about what's next. For example, I would probably, again I'm going to do a bit of a Marmite thing with everyone now. Half of me would watch Gary Vaynerchuk because he's going to tell you about the next and future. Whether you love him or hate him, you still gonna watch him and listen. The other half of me would be watching Mr Mark Ritson because I want to know what is the now? What should I be doing strategically? Because the smart money is knowing where the now, next and future are. So I would bring the two of those together and go, I'm listening to you guys. And, you know what, I do listen to those guys now. So when I have my business, I was used to follow, because I was in sports marketing I would look out often stalk the bigger, more successful sports agencies. Bigger, more successful sports brands, individual thought leaders and futurists in those areas. And so I would always look to get some intuition around where things were going. So I’d probably look at, you know, you look at my clients. If I was people listening now, I’d look at my clients. I’d find the thought leaders in that space, I would follow them. I would probably look at the services we sell and I’d probably tune into who's doing the best now, and who's moving forwards. It doesn't take a rocket scientist right to look at Agency World now, and I know Stephen Bartlett recently left Social Change. But like he’s an agency owner, his agency's grown from 0 to 800 staff in four years. Well, there's something going on there, and he just happens to be an agency owner who is an influencer. So his personal brand, his thought leadership and the same with Vaynerchuk, Vayner Media, they've grown really quickly over a very short period of time because of the way that they've acted in terms of their personal brand. So yes, I would just tune into the experts it’s quite hard because there's so much information out there now. But certainly there's a lot of very good podcasts, I think McKinsey do a really good podcast talking about future of industry. So find things that really focus on now, next, the future of where you're focusing from a services and from a sector perspective, that's what my advice would be.Jenny: Really amazing, brilliant advice. I usually say to people also look at all of the management consultancy websites because they have the resources and the power, the money behind them to do these studies, and you've only gotta be ahead of the curve a little bit. Do a few readings of you know, some of the reports coming out around, just as you say the client's industry, your sector, to be one step ahead. So that's brilliant advice. What else are you seeing trends-wise like, particularly, there’s two questions really. One, who aree the agencies or what are they doing differently that are putting them at the sort of cutting edge, maybe apart from building their personal brands? Is there anything else that they're doing differently?Spencer: I think the big shift is probably organisational transformation in agencies, I think Covid has been an accelerator in many ways for obviously the way the flexible first approach to working this what we call agile distributed model where maybe agencies now are able to attract a more diverse talent pool from a wider base. Because you don't have to worry about, you know everyone hopefully work to a certain degree via video tools. I think we'll get a little bit worn down within, probably craving a little bit more social face to face interaction. Now I'm saying that now I have been really quite happy, even I am feeling this week a little bit like I could just do it going out with a group of people, more than 30 and having a good time out. So I think the organisation transformation. So what I mean by that is I think the big shift is, is seeing less hierarchies of businesses. I'm seeing more flat, meritocratic structures, more grown up approaches inside businesses, you know, less bosses and management and reporting lines and more people being trusted to do their job. I'm seeing people being more open and transparent around the numbers, the communication, you know, there's more experimentation in agencies more willing to test and try new things. And I think I'm seeing sort of a bit of a movement I think around the organisational structure piece. I think that's the first thing, by the way there's nothing new to this. I mean, when we wrote our book, you know, which came out two years ago and, you know, probably wrote the section three or four years ago, there's a good few global agencies where they have this hybrid model of a core team and maybe a freelancer extended team. So I'm seeing some definite and trends around that, and I've seen some trends around, I won't namecheck people here, but one client of mine in particular who you know, was in a pitch against two traditional agencies. And this is an agency that only has one employee, which is the managing director, the whole team is consultants, experts in this particular field, and they got chosen as the agency of choice for a FTSE 100 company because they preferred the model of saying, look, you only bring in the talent when we need it. You bring in higher quality talent rather than, but you see 10 years ago I lost, I remember I was talking to a big a FTSE 250 organisation who crucified me because I had a contractor in and they saw on LinkedIn that they weren't working for me. So it's again, so there's another trend. I think the clients are maturing. The clients are going to be working more remotely. I think that means a better distribution of wealth around the UK. I think we'll start to see people who are choosing agencies near where they live rather than nearer the central London office. So it's definitely something. I mean, when people say about people giving up offices, I still say it's fairly split. I think around half of people have considered giving up the office and another half are like no, we still need somewhere to meet and still need somewhere to forge our culture of people. So what other the trends am I seeing at the moment? Jenny: Do you think that the people being made redundant, because obviously we're heading towards the end of the furlough period for those in agencies that are gonna, unfortunately be made redundant. Do you see a trend for them setting themselves up as consultants or freelancers?Spencer: Yeah. I mean the problem, the problem we've got in the economy right now, you have this thing called IR35 which is very annoying. Which means that basically, if you're self employed, you can't work for just one person without the company having to pay your taxes. And so as a self employed contractor yeah, you've gotta have multiple employers and, you know, they were gonna put the change the law earlier this year they didn't do it. And so it needs modernising definitely to protect people from being exploited, you know, it is not a bad thing why it's being delayed and taking time. So yes, I think inevitably, when there's a lot of redundancies people will like I did when I was made redundant. They use the time to try and start to work for themselves and do things. I definitely think so. I'm going to make a bit of a blanket statement here, which is from what I've seen most of the people that have been made redundant because they haven't moved with the times or there's a carrot, or they genuinely were affected by travel by, because it's only about four or five sectors that have really been hit. I wanna be really clear about this. 99% of sectors in the country are actually doing okay. They're not booming, but some of them are booming like SAS. But there is only really a handful of sectors that are struggling. But some agencies just unluckily had everyone in that space. But apart from that, last night, there was a post. A good friend of mine works in user experience, and someone asked for some user experience people, and I put the name of a friend of mine who's just been made redundant. And that post must have had, like, 60 names on it by the morning and it just goes to show how user experience has become more commoditised. And so it's almost like you've got to keep going up this value chain. But what I would say is I have not seen many people who are working quite strongly in technology in a sector that hasn't been hit by travel or high street retail that isn't very secure in their jobs. So I would say people who are being made redundant do take a good long look at what you're doing where your role is and do you need to progress it now to another area which is more future proofed.Jenny: I think it's a really, really good of advice. I'm just conscious of your time we're coming up to the hour, can you believe it? It's been so… I could talk to you all day, Spencer. Can you tell us what projects are you working on right now? What's exciting you?Spencer: So I've got a couple of really big announcements coming up, we’re doing a couple of partnerships, which is really exciting for me. I think the main thing is we're working on building our training library for agency owners, which I'm hoping to tap you up for some account client service training in there as well. So very much that's been something I'm working on now for a couple of years. It's been taken awhile because we're so busy to try and get them, but we are getting there. So the training stuff’s really exciting for us. We've just launched the masterminds workshops, which has been almost the first time we've been able to offer people maybe a low cost access to us because obviously being non- execs, you end up being a premiums or day rate. But this is a way to make us more accessible by people with smaller budgets but still get access to our tool kits, which we've developed over the last nine years. I'm loving it and it's just really building, we're building a team around the country. We've just taken on someone for the Northwest. I think we were travelling in the early days everywhere and now we're realising that actually there are better people in the regions that could do these things for us. So that's been exciting. And the communities, you mentioned the beginning, you know, we're on our way to 800 members now. Very, very close. And the engagement? The statistics have been just honestly, so good. I mean, the engagement rates are so high. I think we score excellent in every single rating in the analytics on the platform, which is really nice. And as you said at the beginning, which I'm a little bit shocked too everyone so nice in there, and it's weird because it's free you’d think you'd get all in the kind of trouble makers in there? Totally weirdly, I think I may be Covid, maybe people have got more humility. Maybe through this period.Jenny: It would really stand out if anyone wasn't nice, wouldn't it? It would be like, oh, no, that's not what we do around here.Spencer: When the person does something you’re like, alright..Spencer: We've got a good few announcements coming up, new partnerships coming in, which I think will be really exciting as well. So you know, all good. All progressing really nicely. All good fun.Jenny: So who would you like to hear from? Because obviously some people might be listening to this thinking, oh, I didn't know he did consultancy. I didn't know there was a community. What's the best way of contacting you and who’d really benefit from contacting you the most?Spencer: I think if you are an agency owner or a shareholder on Companies House, you know, with more than a team of three, because I'm trying to avoid having freelancers in the community because it will just become, because we do on our spare time, it's all run for free. So if you’ve got more than 3 people, then please, or if your boss is that person or, you know, you're whatever you know someone who owns an agency, please point them in direction of Agencynomics.com. And you know, if you're that person, come in there and come along to an event and say hi to me. I think the best thing with me now these days is if you can is try and see where I'm talking, come along, listen and ask questions and then maybe we'll try and talk through there. And yeah, I think you know I'm on LinkedIn. If you want to connect to me, please send me a personal message and you'll need my email address, which is spg@cact.us  But please send me a message because I only accept people now who kind of give me a bit of a back story in connecting. And year, I mean, you know that LinkedIn’s probably the best way to get hold of me.  Just check out cactus.com website. There's an enquiry form on there. If you know anyone that might want to work with us at some stage point them in that direction. That's a shameless plug, I’m not normally that salesy normally.Jenny: No, you're not being salesy, Spencer. You're probably one of the most generous and well networked people I know. Really, because you help everyone and to put your email address and the contact. I just think you'd be foolish not to if you’re out there on your own agency owner not to take part because there's just so much benefit. You're getting posts tagging you.Spencer: I was saying to James earlier, the problem is, is that, as I said, the beginning at the moment, I've got a couple of big agencies who are selling it to their team, so different types of ways of selling businesses, and actually that takes a lot of time up. Sometimes I feel a bit like I want to make myself accessible but eventually it gets a bit hard so they'd be too offended if you want to have a video call with me and you gotta wait a couple of months, but it will come around quick enough so book it in. You know, that's what I say.Jenny: Absolutely. And just as I said, there's not a day that goes by without someone saying thank you to you. So you are changing lives genuinely through your work, so you must be really, really proud of that. And I just want to say a huge thank you.Spencer: They say don't they your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, and I think it probably applies to your personal brand too, so and it's only really been last few months where I’ve started to hear people saying nicer things. It is quite embarrassing in a way. But it's, you know, I'm grateful for the people that take time to say thank you. If I've helped with people I've helped in any way or any of the guys at Cactus and I would say, you know, it's another good lesson, really. If anyone helps you on your journey out there, have a little think. And don't be afraid to say thank you to them. You know, it's just a really nice thing. And people would take a lot from it if you do, to make the time to thank people that helped you on your journey.Jenny: Totally agree and very well deserved. Thank you so much for joining me, Spencer. I really, really appreciate it. Big thank you.I really hope you enjoyed my chat with Spencer. I know that I got a lot of value from it and took down loads of notes, so I hope you've done the same. And if you're interested in joining the Agencynomics community then come along to community.agencynomics.com. It's a thriving community of agency owners. The only prerequisite is that you are an agency owner with three employees and it is a fantastic place to be. Lots of networking, lots of training, lots of advice and it's completely free, so I look forward to seeing you there. 

Transcript:Jenny: Welcome to the Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast with me, Jenny Plant, from Account Management Skills Training. I'm on a mission to help those in agency client service keep and grow the existing relationships, so their agency business can thrive.Welcome to Episode six and this episode I'm thrilled to have two guests, Carey Evans and Simon Rhind-Tutt from Relationship Audits. Now, I first met these guys in 2008 when I invited them into Publicis to audit one of the relationships that we had. It was probably one of the biggest at the time and what they unravelled for us and what they revealed on the golden nuggets they shared on having audited the relationship really helped us keep hold of that client relationship for another two years. And each year that client was worth on average about £700,000. So they added for us £1.4 million. So the value that they gave to my agency was astounding. Now, when I left Publicis in 2010 I actually went to work with them for a little while as a freelancer. So I was so convinced by what they did with our relationship that I started working for them for a little while and they really are phenomenal. They have a huge amount of benchmark data across several industries, and they have a question set which is really established. So they have some predictability around how much information that they can glean about your clients, that your clients might not be sharing with you. And in fact, that's what I found was the beauty of choosing an external third party to come and audit a relationship, because I actually felt a little bit strange about allowing a third party to come and talk to my clients. I felt a little bit exposed, but actually it was so worth it. The exercise really, really helped us. So the reason I've invited them this morning because I know that they have a huge amount of experience and are going to share so many golden nuggets with you. They're going to share things like tips for being seen as a client's trusted advisor, how you could build rapport with your client, the surprising average amount of time a client spends on liaising with all of their agencies - I think you're going to find this quite surprising - and how to ensure for you that you make the time they spend with you count. What 63% of clients say agencies never do but really, really should, what puts clients off agencies, they're gonna share some examples and why you need to make your client not only feel valued but special. That is just the tip of the iceberg. They share so many golden nuggets. So many tips for you. Grab a pen, take some notes and I hope you come away with some value. Enjoy.So thank you so much again Carey and Simon for joining me today. Do you mind spending a couple of minutes just talking about yourselves, your experience and also what Relationship Audits does?Simon: My name's Simon Rhind-Tutt. I founded the company along with Carey probably about 20 years ago. My background is in account management work with three very large international advertising agencies, then I went into the world of design and branding and was new business director at what was then the largest independent design agency in the world, and then started my own agency, which I sold after three or four years before Carey and I set up Relationship Audits.Carey: Well, as you see, I'm Carey Evans and, like Simon, I’ve got a background in marketing services. My background is entirely in account management in large international ad agencies across lots of different kinds of business there and spent quite a lot of time in my last agency and the one before that, involved in building business from existing clients. So, Simon and I both share a passion for great account management and really preach to anybody who'll listen about what good account managers can do for themselves, for their clients and for their agency. So hopefully we'll be able to drop a few nuggets of what experience has shown us works and maybe what doesn’t work.Jenny: I'm absolutely convinced that you will. I mean, you are my go-to people for you know what's new into the agency world what clients are saying right now. And so I know that this is going to be a really valuable discussion. Obviously, we met when I asked you to come in and audit one of our biggest client accounts. And a bit like Victor Khyam, I was so impressed with what you did I ended up where I left Publicis coming to work for you for a little while because I was just so blown away by the value that you brought and the difference that you made. So do you mind just before we get into a little bit more about account management and agencies in general just telling us a little bit about the different ways that you work specifically with creative agencies?Simon: Carey, you want to lead?Carey: Well, I think basically our role with creative agencies is to help them better understand what's working and what's not working with their clients. In fact, the clients are the be all and end all for any agency. They are in fact, they are relationship capital. If that's in a good place, then the agency’s in a good place. So what we do is we either speak to agency's clients, or we connect with them via email and online surveys to find out exactly how the agency is doing. What it’s doing right, what it could be doing better and any opportunities going forward to grow the business. That's the bread and butter of what we do. The other thing that we do really is about, if you like, enhancing the relationship capital within the agency by offering various different training modules that experience has shown us helps prepare account managers to be of a more valuable asset to their client opposite numbers.Simon: Yeah, I think I'd add to this that we are an independent third party and one of the benefits and one of the reasons why agencies use us is that because we're talking to clients, almost 24/7 We’d like to think we know the questions to ask, would like to think that we can interpret what clients say what they mean, but also coming back with action plans in terms of what the agency should actually do. Having said all of that, one of the tips that we would give you is to constantly be asking yourselves for specific feedback when a project is finished. One of the mistakes that we believe that most agencies make is not holding wash ups or post product reviews. It's really, really important to solicit ongoing feedback from clients, even if you know the answer is not always gonna be glowing.Jenny: That's a really fantastic point. Before we move on and just picking up on a couple of things that you've said, you talked about this relationship capital and one of the things I sort of discovered working with you that for agency leaders as well, you're very instrumental in an acquisition process. When you go in and agency leaders ask you to evaluate the strength of the relationships, perhaps of an agency they're thinking of acquiring. And, I hadn't realised before we started working when I was at Publicis, that you did that. And another thing that came up for me many times when I was working for you was this amount of interest in your benchmarking data. Because you've been in the market for so long, you'd be doing the services you've done for so long agencies were also able to benc mark how well they're doing with their client relationships versus others.Carey: Yeah, I mean, I think that the benchmarking thing has grown in  importance over the years, and everybody now wants to know not just how they're doing, but how they're doing against other people in their space. The other thing that we were able to do just related to that, slightly different is that we don't just work our agencies. We work for clients we’re commissioned by clients as well as agencies within marking services, but we also work outside of the sector, we work for professional services companies. And we work for law firms and accountants and people like that and what that does is it gives us a completely different perspective on a way of delivering a service. And what we talk about is our kind of helicopter learning that will allow a lot of agencies to compare what they're doing with what's being done in other service industries. And that's always a useful eye opener. Simon, do you wanna talk about relationship diligence?Simon: Yeah, I mean, we call it relationship diligence and to Jeny’s point it is used very successfully by people that wish to acquire an agency, but really wish to actually check out the quality of the relationships that they're buying. And a lot of our clients insist that this is part of the M&A process.  We generally are engaged at heads of agreements stage, so when the deal is actually nearly done. But it does provide great insight and insight is the key word in terms of everything that we at Relationship Audits give. It gives an insight into the quality of the client relationships that an acquirer is actually buying and, indeed, the opportunities that actually may exist or some problems that actually need to be fixed. What we do is not all about finding problems. It's about identifying best practise and, generally, the larger the agency, the less communication between one part of the agency and the other on. There could be one account team knocking it out of the park for very specific reasons that the rest of the agency actually don't know about. So part of our role is to identify what's working well and to help the agency actually share that.Jenny: Amazing. I mean, what other value do you find that clients tell you it brings for them doing on audits of this type and agencies on both sides ofCarey: As I said is that we gather intelligence in two ways. As I said either via an online assessment programme or by undertaking interviews and one of the things that never ceases to amaze me about when we do interviews is how many clients say, at the end of the kind of 40 minute session ‘wow, you really made me think about the relationship in a way I haven't thought about previously’, which is very good, because usually what it does is it opens their eyes into some of the challenges that the agency faces in being able to deliver what they want. And that's why, for example, one of things that we do, we typically for large corporates we insist that if they want to do an evaluation of their agencies, we insist that has done in two ways. Because you can't really criticise an agency for not delivering. Let's say you criticise them for the quality of the strategy or the quality of the creative work or whatever it is if your own briefs and your briefing as a company is hopeless. So you know, in all this kind of stuff, there's a sort of there's a ying and a yang and the great thing is that it makes a statement, undertaking this kind of exercise, makes a statement by the agency on how seriously and how important they think their client relationships are.Simon: And just to build on that question, Jenny, we're very, very lucky to have dozens, if not hundreds of positive comments back from our clients, and they can be found on the website. But I think two of our favourite ones is one of our clients for a very large ad agency said to us Relationship Audits tell me 90% of what I know, but it's the 10% that I don't know that is the most commercially valuable. There is another health care agency where the chief executive said about working with us, that there is a conversation going on in our client's office at the moment that we're not part of. What Relationship Audits helps us do is to get us into that conversation. And I think that's particularly important because the one thing that you can guarantee about any business relationship, not just a creative relationship, any business relationship is things are changing now at a rapid, rapid pace and, I suppose one of the frustrations that we see and this is another tip to the people listening, is that certainly one Carey and I started in the business in the days when I had a full head of hair and Carey wasn't grey…..Carey: I'll have, you know, fashionably grey..Simon: ..that clients were very free to share information about their business. And there was very often a really true partnership between the agency and the client for various reasons that will take too long to go into. Now that isn't quite the same and clients expect their agencies and their key suppliers to know about their business. The reality of that is that they expect their agency to be inquisitive and interested in their business. And one needs to be continually asking the client about the business, how it's changing. And let's face it, anybody that's actually working with you, you're going to favour somebody that is generally interested. And one of the tips we would give is if you work for a client that is a large public company, they will publish an annual report. And we would urge you if you haven't seen their latest annual report to actually go and read it, because one of the things in the report will be the chairman's statement, and the chairman's statement will talk about the issues facing the business and what their key challenges are going forward. I think most agencies aspire to get more upstream and to get access to senior management. And I think one of the other tips that we would give you as part of this is the ability to make your client a star in their own organisation will actually reflect very well on that client internally as well as the agency. So from the annual report, if you can identify initiatives and proactivity that the agency can engage in, it's very likely that that piece of pro activity and initiative will take you and indeed, your client further upstream.Jenny: It's a great piece of advice. Carey, did you want to build on that?Carey: Yeah, I just wanted to add something, something very simple, that I would encourage all account managers to do and this is particularly true of this environment but it is true generally, given in this environment, but there’s a lot of certainty going on. Will people go back to the office? If so, when, what it's gonna be like and so a lot of uncertainty, right? So take nothing for granted is my observation here and it's astonishing we've done some research when we go and talk to people when we wanna talk to clients on behalf of an agency. The first question we asked them is what their expectations are of the agency now. What is really interesting is that currently is something like 63 or 64% of clients claim that their agency has never asked them about their expectations of the agency, which is not setting off on the right foot, really. And if you do know what your client's expectations are, it's a damn sight easier to deliver them and beat them, as opposed to simply assuming you know what they are on that is emphasised even further when you've got an existing relationship and your client leaves on a new client joins and you assume that they're gonna want everything in the same size, the same job, the same package, same colour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course they're not. Yeah, so ask your client what their expectations of you are as an agency, it'll do you a power of good.Simon: Can I had one further tip?Jenny: Please do!Simon: I mean, this is really not rocket science, but to actually make sure that you're on a daily Google updates of any news about your clients and their competitors because that way you stay upt to speed very quickly. And if your client has on their Website a newsroom that you can subscribe to that will keep you updated with company news that is an easy win. Coming back to keeping up to date with what's happening at your client's competitors, that potentially is news you can actually take to your clients because a lot of your clients won't be doing that.Jenny: I think these are all fantastic tips because many of the agencies I meet and particularly account managers ask me, how can they be seen to be more respected by their clients? How can they be seen more as trusted advisors? And actually, all of those tips are so relevant because if you look, smell, feel like a sales person, that's just trying to sell more of your stuff. You're not gonna be perceived by the client as adding value as an advisor, but all of the things you're describing are really,  I call it level four activity, which is really adding future value, you know, look at what we're seeing in the market. Look at this trend that's happening.Simon: Jenny, can I just add one other point? Because I think there will be a lot of account managers listening to this and, Carey, I was just gonna ask you to talk about your experience at Y and R when you were given the opportunity to actually something?Carey: Oh, yes when I joined Young and Rubicam as a trainee sometime ago. Now, in fact, anyway, and the piece of advice I was given there by a guy I used to work for was fantastic and it was very simple. He said to me, become a specialist in something that nobody else is as up to speed with as you. So I was put on, I don't know why they put me on a beer account, but they did so, I got to work on a beer account as one of my first pieces of business. Life was tough, but I had to do it, and I decided that I was going to become the specialist. I was gonna become the resident expert in the team on competitive advertising. So who was spending, where they were spending, what the ads were and so on and so forth. And that was a great piece of advice, which I would pass onto any anybody. Even if you feel as though you’re the bottom end of the team, if you could be seen to be somebody whose  ‘opinion’ is asked after, it will do you a power of good and it will improve your profile in the agency and it will help you develop.Jenny: Do you know what that is such a good piece of advice. Because many account managers say to me, I need to be more strategic and obviously, it's difficult when you're working across several brands and several clients to really get down as far in the weeds with the strategy as the strategists do or the subject matter experts. So that's like another alternative to becoming more of a strategic input, isn't it? Choose one particular aspect of the business and to choose a competitor or the competition it also is so attractive for the client, isn't it as well as internally?Simon: Absolutely, and I know we’re only on question one or two but just another tip is that particularly the large corporates have writing and communication styles. So, for example, there's one retailer that we know that only will have internal communication on PowerPoint and use bullet points, etc. But if you're writing something to be sent to the client, understand what their internal communication method is and how they like to receive it, and indeed, how their bosses like to receive it and then write it in that style. Because that way it's easier for them to actually forward on, and they haven't got to cut and paste.Jenny: That is such a good point, Simon, because again, a lot of the people I'm working with are having to present a piece of information because there's about six or seven buyers, actually, or decision makers on the client side that usually have to have an input. We talk about presenting the business case, so if you write the business case in the format that is most conducive to how they work, that's such a perfect point.Simon: Actually I suppose there is a bigger point that the more you can make your client's life easier, the more you could be seen as easy to work with. The more they want to actually work with you and that starts with attention to detail and getting things right first time.Carey: And that I can't emphasise enough how important that is. And people think, oh, yeah but obviously I’ll get the detail right? Once you don't get the detail right more than once, you know when you get into its second time and you got the details wrong that sends alarm bells ringing, alarm bells ringing in your colleagues heads that you haven't got the right of the level of detail consciousness. And that's crucial. And one other thing I would say to Jenny, which is, you know, you talked about people wanting ‘more strategic’. Let's not forget there's a process of development goes on in account managers career and development and one of the things that they need to be as the first stage is they need to be a bloody safe pair of hands, right? So they've got to be on top of the detail. They got to be on top of what's going on, they’ve gotta be on top of the timings. Because that builds a kind of level of trust within their peers and within their clients that allows them to move up to the next stage. So it's not about coming in and wanting to be the top of the tree. In terms of strategic contributor, you've gotta actually earn your corn. Gotta learn the business from the ground up. And if you are doing it, if you become a specialist and do all this kind of stuff, then your journey will be quicker.Jenny: Absolutely, 100%. I absolutely agree with you. There will be agency maybe client services directors listening to this thinking, this all sounds fantastic and I love what they're saying about, you know, Simon, you said about getting specific feedback on a regular basis, but make sure you put the wash up meetings in place so that clients have that forum to give you the feedback on a regular basis. And they might be thinking, well, we kind of do that. We do that on a yearly basis, or I asked the clients how they're doing, I know the answer to this because I've experienced it several times before, but what would you say to agencies the difference really is between getting an external third party in to evaluate your client relationships and doing it yourself.Simon: I think doing it yourself is an ongoing process and the more often you ask, the easier it will be to actually ask. It's interesting because people that come to us, and we really wish it wasn't the case, but probably in about 75% of the cases, they come to us with the specific problem or they've lost a number of clients. Or as one guy said, my antenna is going wobbly and I really don't know why but I kind of sense there is a problem. People would only use us in terms of online. We always say no more than twice a year in terms of what we call Deep Dive, talking to clients directly. You'd only do that on a once a year basis. One of the benefits of using somebody like us is that we can cover all of the clients in the agency so we can have a helicopter view of all the client relationships within a particular business. But I come back to the point I mentioned earlier about being interested, keen, eager to learn. Eager to learn about the client's business but is also being open and really wanting to actually listen to how well the agency is actually doing.Carey: The other day, right, I was getting briefed. I had to do some interviews for an agency, and the person who briefed me, because we all get briefed on the individuals before we go and talk them. One of the things that I said to this person was tell me a little bit about so and so's background, you know? What is he like? Is he married? Has he got kids, what does he like doing? And the response was, Oh, I don't know him. I don't know really. Well. I know he's married. I think he's married. I'm not. I don't know what he likes, and I was astonished by that, because if you want to be really successful as an account manager, it really helps if you've got a good relationship with your client. One of the ways of creating a good relationship is building what we call bridges of rapport finding out common points of interest. So when we meet new people there’s a series of questions that we just bang out to find out, you know, just being sociable. But it builds as a reservoir or criteria that we can fix on when we have a conversation, maybe we haven’t had a conversation for a while be can, Simon, for example, is getting treatment for it now but he supports Fulham. So if he picks up, you know, in conversation that somebody's a football fan or soccer fan whenever that's a natural entry point for him to talk about his woes.Simon: Indeed, but I would always check out who they played at the weekend, how they got on and actually who the next game is. And you know, I come across as interested, although I need therapy. But, you know, I’ll just tell another story that's related to this. I went to do an interview with one of the big rail companies last year and it was with not a marketing director was with a marketing manager and I said to her one of the questions we will ask, which is do you feel like a valued client? And she said, Well, yes, I kind of do, but that's not the question you should be asking. So I said what’s that, she said, Well, um, you know, I feel valued because we spend a lot of money with this agency and you know, I get to see the chief executive every now and again, but you should be asking me, do I feel special and what she meant by that is, are the people that we work with at the agency, Iis the agency interested in me or really are they're just interested in the money?Carey: I had exactly the same thing said to me about two weeks ago by somebody in Pharma who said, I'm interested to understand where the value is, am I the thing that’s valued, or is it my business that’s valued?Jenny: And tell us a bit more about why they drew that conclusion, that they were even questioning it. Did they feel that they client or the agency weren't interested enough in them as an individual? Did they get the impression that the agency was more interested in the business?Simon: So any first conversation about a new project, and this came up the week before last with a very large I suppose, pharma company and they said, you know, we have a conversation with the agency, and the first thing they want to know is, what's the budget rather than what's the brief? Now I know that the account managers listening to this, their account directors or the chief executives will be interested in what the budget is, but you've kind of got to start at ground one. And ground one is being interested in them and their business and their job. And number two is about understanding what the business problem and the strategic problem is. You know, one of the things we mentioned earlier about learning from professional services firms, one of the things that they're very good at doing is creating what they call secondees and the equivalent would be an account manager going to work at the client for two or three months, maybe even longer, but actually understanding, really, what goes on in clients’ offices. The conversations that go on, we often ask in those days when we did training  seminars on a face to face basis. What proportion of time does a marketing manager on average in their working week spend working with all of their agencies? And the answer is typically are anywhere between 30% and 70%. The reality is it's about 7%. Okay, because a lot of agencies, people working in agencies, don't really understand what their clients do during the day. So if you can't go in and shadow a client, and particularly at the moment this is very, very difficult, just say, look, could we put a diary session in for just half an hour, have a coffee? Whenever is convenient to you? Can we just understand what you do during the week and the other things and the other challenges? If there any agency chief executives here or heads of client service, get one or two clients, have a webinar and you interview them about their working week and let certainly account management, certainly strategy and frankly, creative and everybody else listen, because it's not what you may think it is. And of course, the more you can understand about the clients and the individuals and how they work and the challenges they face, the better client service will be. If I could summarise that it's be interested and be interesting. So when I have my brand design agency and I went to new business pitches, I always had three interesting things to actually ask them, which were born from research that I’d done on. Basically, my strategy was greeted in reception, taken by the client into the meeting room, setting up the presentation if I have three interesting questions that show an understanding of their business and their challenges, I know I'm almost into their comfort zone before we even start. But that's not just for new business client’s, it's for your existing clients.Jenny: So I mean, this is so powerful. I mean what you've just said that clients, on average, have 7% of their time to focus on all of their agency relationships, so that presents the case for each agency interaction, every time we're in front of the client, we gotta make it count, haven’t we? And what you just described there was a classic example of someone who's prepared and probably rehearsed before they showed up. And it's something that I talked to agency account managers about and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because I get sometimes pushback on the fact that everyone's so busy, you know, delivering projects that when you do need to make your interaction with a client matter, that there is that lack of preparation sometimes so you're not performing. It’s like a  performance, isn't it? What do you think?Simon: Absolutely. And Cary and I work together at one of those days. I worked with an account director who was an actor and what he made me do and this had stayed with me ever since he made me prepare for phone calls in the same ways we prepare for a big set piece meeting so there would be an agenda for the phone call. But he would ask that, or he would insist that I’d always prep likely questions to actually come out so that I've actually got the answers. Obviously that doesn't cover you for everything but the impression is that it's a well run conversation, and actually, the result is that you actually save time because there's no going backwards and forwards if you've actually thought it through. My own personal view is that what we've seen since Covid broke is lots of video meetings. Those video meetings are an opportunity to actually create an impression even more than a phone call. But the meeting rooms got to be honest. The backgrounds gotta be dressed. You've got to be prepared, and you've got to take it as seriously as you would if a client was coming into your office or you were going to the clients’ office.Carey: Just to build on that Jenny, if I may, I think there's another thing which is about, you know, however prepared you are, and I absolutely, you know, there's no excuse for it really because if you think about it, you know, you may often wish that you'd rehearsed or prepared more, but you'll never wish you'd done so less. But there are gonna be times when you're not going to know an answer to something. And the worst thing you could do is bullshit. You don't know, be honest and say I don't know, but I will find out and I will come back to you whenever because again, it's transparent. And if you make it up and you get caught again in the future, your relationship is shot.Simon: And actually building on that one of the things, and I think it's within the people that go into the marketing services industry, we want to please our clients. We want them to be happy. And the easiest thing to do is to, frankly, over promise. I know Carey always used to talk about the example of Marks and Spencer furniture that they would say it's gonna take 14 days and it got to him in 10 days. You're really delighted that that's the case and this is a really, really, really important point that if you commit to a timeline, your client would have committed to a timeline internally, and there will be very often numerous other people that are kind of relying on that chain of events to actually happen. If you don't meet that timeline, you let the agency down. You let your client down, but you know you also let yourself down very badly.Jenny: Such spot on points, absolutely. Just stepping back to the rehearsing point and the preparation point. One of the things I hear agency account directors say is they'll go to a meeting with the client unprepared with other members of the team, the agency team. And maybe you've got someone that's more senior from the agency there, and they kind of take over. So the account director or account manager is de-positioned. They're sort of in the background taking notes when actually they're supposed to be leading the account, leading the relationship and what happens is the client then sees the agency owner as the one that's got all the answers and therefore, then they carry on phoning the agency owner. So lovely tips that you've shared,  what I tell people is have a pre meeting plan, which is a planning template on one page that's really simple to fill in, but it includes who sets up the meeting, who starts a meeting and how they start the meeting. What questions they have prepared to ask the client. What we can expect to receive having some research done are we LinkedIn him with them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on. It's just essentially a checklist, and it allows the fact that the account director doesn't come away from that meeting looking like they're making up the numbers.Simon: But I think it comes down to this is really basically having an agenda, agreeing who has the ownership for the agenda and also agreeing who from, let's say the agency's perspective is going to lead the meeting. You know, one of the tips that we've picked up from the professional services industry, the big law firms, is they will always have somebody leading a meeting. And when one of their colleagues wants to contribute something, what they do is they lean forward now that was in a meeting, so I mean, maybe you could scratch your ear or something like that so that the person that's leading on behalf of the agency knows that Simon wants to actually say something. And that way, the agency comes together as a team. There is a client of a big brewery who said that whenever he sees a pitch, they judge it on the quality of creative, the quality of thinking, probably quality of money but he didn’t talk about that, but also the quality of the team and what he means by the quality of the team, he said have they been put together and really met for the first time on the train up here or actually, are they a team. And the best agency relationships for all sorts of reasons are teams, rather one person that actually takes over.Carey: Yeah, I think I think it's really important that when you meet it, if there's a gang of you, firstly, don't go to the meeting unless, you know, unless you have a role. That's the first thing I would say. Secondly, if you in the meeting each person, to Simon's point, gotta know what their role is on which part of the meeting on the agenda they own and the other thing  that is really important is that people understand when a question comes who will answer that question on a particular topic, you know? So if there's somebody conducting the meeting, then if the questions on money they put it over to Jenny, if the questions on something else, they’ll put it over to Simon and so on, so forth. So that in itself, if you like, creates a sense of expertise amongst the team to contribute as a team and make sure everybody has their part and plays a part.Simon: Yeah, I think it's not done a lot for a new business pitch is probably as much as it should be. But the same applies to existing client relationships actually prepping and sometimes brainstorming the likely questions that we're actually gonna get back.Carey: So just one story about the team, right? I remember one of my very first pitches when I worked in Y&R and I was put onto the pitching for was then called the Electricity Council, which was pre-privatisation, and we were pitching there and in the room outside the meeting in a kind of anti room, outside the meeting there was a gang of us standing around and the chief exec went up to one of the guys near me and shook his hand and he said, Hello. I'm so and so from the agency and the bloke said Yes, I’m so and so from the agency, I’m the new planner.Jenny: That's a bit too close for comfort. I have been in so many pitches in that situation, similar ones. It's just embarrassing. A couple of things that I want to build on this well, the way you operate together, right?  I just want to bring up this point, going back to rehearsing as the team, making sure everyone has a role that one's prepped on. Who's gonna answer the questions? These were all fantastic tips, but the other thing that you're demonstrating, which wasn't apparent to me before I was told, was how you interact as a team in terms of answering questions, because you both you've said, can I add to that point or can I build on that point that essentially makes the other person who said something not looked like they've just, you know, said something silly. But there's some people will say, well, almost interrupt or the way they actually put their point across makes out that the person that's just said something, it's kind of disregarded.Simon: Yeah, and I think it's ,to get back to a football analogy, this time of the year, the transfer window's open and lots of teams are buying lots of new players, but that doesn't instantly make you a great team because you gotta play together. The reason why Carey and I bounce off each other is because we've known each other for a very, very long time. I kind of know what he's about to say. But that comes from experience on. It's about listening. Is that respecting? And frankly, it's also about feeding people you know, nuggets. One of the pitch tips, if you like, because one of the things that we do is what's called lost pitch audits to actually find out why agencies ‘come second’. Never last. And there was one very famous PR agency that we work with who, whenever they're doing a pitch, they insist that everything is finished before five o'clock the night before and the agency pays for the pitch team to go out for an early dinner the night before the pitch on. There was a tangible improvement in the success rate because coming back to that point, there is a team there, and also, I suspect that if the team are comfortable with each other and they're bouncing off each other, clients feel as well as listen, and you can sense the team that's happy in each other's company.Jenny: It's called chemistry meetings for a reason. It's not only chemistry between the client and the agency, but if the client could feel that the agency isn't a cohesive team, so that's such a good point as well.Simon: Yeah, to that point, Jenny, again for new business  exactly same for existing clients that people are into roles. Our view is that if you're a client service director listening to this, you really need to perform the role of being a casting director. Because at the end of the day, businesses don't buy businesses people by people and you may not necessarily need to be the world's greatest strategic thinker for, let's say, a beer brand. But actually getting on and having the chemistry and people wanting to work with you is very, very important, and there is very little often to separate one agency. And another chemistry is a key, key part.Carey: Yeah, our experience shows that chemistry is probably the most important part of the decision to appoint. It’s not about the quality of the work on presented on the day. Our view is you typically win the pitch before you get to the final meeting because you created a relationship and the client will typically feel these are the people I want to work with to help me achieve my goals. When you get to that, you're more likely to win even if you don't have the best creative solution and I remember reading a statistic that the statistic of work that is presented at the final pitch meeting and that actually runs is below 20%.Jenny: Just goes to show you doesn't it? And you both know and I know having been in multiple pitches throughour lives. You know the pitches, you can tell when they go well, can’t you? Because you just feel it. Yeah. I mean, I know we could go on all day basically, because there's so many stories. I’m very conscious of your time because we’re coming up to the hour. I've taken so many notes. I think you've given so many golden nuggets for agency account managers, directors as well as agency leaders. This has been phenomenal. Is there anything, I'm particularly interested because you're so plugged into the trends that are happening and what clients are talking about and how things are changing, particularly with the Covid situation. We're recording it at the end of September beginning of October of 2020. Is there anything that you're seeing or that you think agencies should be aware of that are changing in the marketplace that either they're not doing that they should be doing, or that you're seeing a trend in what clients are doing differently, anything that you can share that you think might be valuable.Simon: Okay, we've got separate presentation on this, but just to give you some of the headlines that we're saying, I think clients want more empathy and collaboration from their agencies. They wanted to collaborate more, infinitely more. The acceleration in new technology is a massive issue. As one client said to us the other day, we've changed more in terms of the use of technology in the last 10 weeks than we have in the last 10 years. Clients are seeing disruption in their supply chain, which includes agencies and therefore, they want to have, to come back to this point, trusted advisor type relationships. If you're an account man or on account lady, what you need to do is you need to be embracing data because data has become even more important. And whether or not you teach yourself on YouTube or you get the agency to put you on course is, the more you can understand and interpret data that is going to further your career and clients want to see agencies adding value. Just answering the brief or just doing what we call the hygiene factor really, really isn't enough anymore. And yo try and find pieces of pro activity where you can add value is absolutely huge.Carey: Yeah, I think that there's another thing to say as well as that, which is that it was a lot of change going on, right that the 10 week thing Simon just talked about, loads of change going on, loads of technology, all that kind of stuff. There's some things that just don't change, and that is about remembering that as an account man that you’ve two of these and got one of these, right, use them in that order. Sorry, two ears and one mouth. Use them in that order. And make sure that, you know active listening is a great skill of an account manager. Demonstrate you're interested. clarify if you don't fully understand, but listening. I can't recommend that, frankly.Jenny: It's not taught, is it? And it should be in schools, the skill of listening. I agree. Listen, this has been phenomenal. I want to respect both of your times. Thank you so much for sharing so many insights and valuable tips and help for account managers. I'm sure I just can't wait to type this all up. Well, I won't be typing it, but my PA will be typing it, and like getting this out to everyone, because I just think it's so valuable. Who would you like to be contacted by? And how can people get hold of you if they'd like to chat to you more about this stuff?Simon: If anybody has got any questions at all and we can help them in any way, whoever you are. And you're listening to this. Jenny, you've got both Carey and my email addresses. Please as the Americans would say, reach out to us and we'd be delighted to help or advise. You know, one of our mantras and what I've just said on behalf of Carey and myself is an example of this, that we believe in business you need to give before you get so if we can help you and we can help any of the people listening to this, we would be delighted to help.Jenny: That would be fantastic. I will include both of your email addresses in the show notes. Carey, were you going to say something then?Carey: I was – we won't charge anything for it.Jenny: You know, I was just going to say something that you add value to all of your partnerships all of your peers in the industry. Everybody, not just clients. And every time you send me an email, I think I've told you this before, I always open it straight away because I know how much value you give and how much insight I've always got an a-ha moment thinking, gosh, thank goodness that Simon shared that information with me. It's usually agency industry related or specific to clients, some kind of insight. So I think that is so valuable, so I know how much value you give. And I think this is a brilliant offer for anyone listening to get in contact, so I'm sure they will. So thank you so much again for joining me. I really appreciate it. This has been phenomenalSimon: Our pleasure. I hope you enjoyed that episode and come away with lots of tips that you can put into practise straight away. And if you're interested in how good you are at keeping and growing your existing accounts, come over to my website accountmanagementskills.com and take the quiz. It's called the Client Growth Quiz, and speak to you on the next episode. 

Transcript:Welcome to the Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast with me, Jenny Plant, from Account Management Skills Training. I’m on a mission to help those in agency client service keep and grow the existing relationships, so their agency business can thrive.Welcome to episode five of the Creative Agency Account Manager podcast. This is a solo episode and this is all about how to be more productive.What I’m going to do now and again is have an episode where it’s very short and hopefully valuable to you. And it’s going to answer a question that typically I hear from creative agency account managers. This one is about productivity because it’s a very, very common thing. Lots of people complain that they tend to lurch from one disaster to the other, or they tend to use their time not in the most effective ways.So most people are looking for some kind of productivity hacks or time management strategies. So I’ve just got 10 top tips, these are the tips that I found the most helpful in my career. And I hope they’re useful for you, so I’m going to go through them one by one quite quickly.So number one is know what your business wants. Know what the agency wants you to be focusing your time on. I know that might sound obvious, but sometimes we can carry on doing what we think are the priorities. But, actually, the business has another idea. They want us to focus on another area. This also is important if you’re starting a new job, so you might want to develop a 90 day plan. A 90 day plan is where you think, ok, what are the three key big goals that I want to achieve in the next three months and then you go to your boss, talk it through, and say ‘these are going to be the priorities for me’. You get that agreement and then if you get side tracked after those three months, or you get extra task put onto you and you can’t cope, then you can go back to your boss and say, ‘look, we did agree that these we’re going to be my three key priorities on. I’ve just been taken off track, so help me get in alignment’. I think sometimes where people go wrong with this is that they don’t feel they can ask for help. And I think everyone at some point struggles with overload. So if you’re feeling like that right now, I’d like to encourage you to discuss it with somebody else because sometimes it helps, particularly if you’re speaking to someone more senior in the agency who can help you prioritize your workload. So that’s number one.Number two is to minimize distractions. Now we all know that in our life right now we find it very difficult to concentrate for five minutes on anything. But it doesn’t help with focus. When you have pop-ups coming up, so many of us work on Microsoft teams or Slack, or we use WhatsApp groups and if we have all of these distractions, there is a study to show that if you’re working on a task, it takes 15 minutes to get back to the task that you were working on. If you’re distracted, close all those windows down, give yourself a chance to be able to focus on one thing at a time. I promise you it’s something that I still struggle with, I’ll be honest. However, when I do close down all distractions and I focus without looking at pop-ups and distractions, it really helps me be more productive.Tip number three is to limit the number of times you check your emails. Now, some of us like to have our emails up all the time on and as soon as we see one pop up, we go and have a look at what it’s about. But the same principle applies in terms of minimizing distractions. I always advise that you check your emails three or maybe four times a day at certain times of the day. So once in the morning, once a lunchtime and once in the afternoon or evening, because again it gives you a chance between checking emails to have deep focus time.Number four – talking of deep focus time, we need to understand the benefit off working on those really important tasks, versus the urgent task that tends to come in. So we want to be working on important, not urgent. If you are familiar with the Boston Matrix, you’ll know what I’m talking about here. If you’re not familiar with the Boston Matrix, I really recommend you look it up. It is essentially a grid that you can use to plan all of your tasks on along the top. You have urgent and not urgent along the left hand side. You’ve got important and not important, and each quadrant represents your different tasks and where you want to focus. As much of your time is possible is in the non- urgent and important box. And this is typically the segment off the matrix that you tend to find things like client development plans, client business research, perhaps strategizing and reflecting And, as you get more senior in your creative agency account manager role, you’re gonna be wanting to spend more of your time there. So get into the habit of looking at your tasks and thinking which ones really are going to move the needle in the client’s business or which ones are the ones that I should be focusing my time on.Tip number five is to consider Parkinson’s law. Now Parkinson’s law is the law that states a task will take the amount of time that you allocated to it. So if I say I need the report back on my desk in two days time, you’ll get it done in two days and you’ll put that amount of effort in. If I say you’ve got two weeks to get me the report then you may procrastinate. You may draw it out. So think about the way you tend to work and think about whether that suits you. Whether you really respond better to deadlines and set yourself a deadline for achieving a task, it’s amazing how much more productive you can become.Tip number six is, are you saying yes to other people’s work, are people delegating to you? That shouldn’t be. Sometimes if you’re in charge of a team, your team will start delegating their workload to you and this often happens to people who are people pleasers. Now again, hands up. That totally fits my description. When I was working as a general manager, I would often be really, really available to my team, and I didn’t want to say no. I didn’t want to turn them down, but what ended up happening was someone turned around to me, my coach at the time, and said, ‘you are getting your needs met’ and now that really shook me up. I thought, gosh, how rude. But actually he was right. I was getting my needs met by being available and helping others because that’s my natural state is to help others. But what you need to do is protect your time. Because, actually, what was happening was I wasn’t getting my own work done because I was being available to everybody else until the very end of the day. And that was making me tired, grumpy, frazzled. So it’s a vicious cycle. So just question yourself. Are you saying yes, too much and taking on other people’s work that you shouldn’t be?Tip number seven is all about planning in advance. Now a few tips here I have found that if you can do this in your agency, you may do this already, is take a long term view of the calendar. So think about booking your holidays as much in advance as you can so you can start planning the year around those holidays. Secondly, on the more medium term view, between a month and three months, think about all of the clients you’re working on and some of the projects that are going to be important in the timelines and the actual points in time during those three months that you are going to be busy. And put it in your calendar, mark it in your calendar, when these times are because these key times are times for you to make sure you’re looking after yourself and making sure that you’re keeping your energy levels up. It also will become apparent if there’s any overlap. So maybe you’ve got several clients you’re working with and many of them, their projects are kicking off at the same time or deliveries around the same time, so make sure that you’re at least aware. And that also gives you the opportunity to flag it to your senior management team, because maybe you’re going to need some extra resource to help you around that time. Short term planning – it’s all about looking at your calendar or your to-do list. But the night before now, I use a month to view calendar which of these big, sticky things, which you can see if you’re watching on YouTube. But it’s basically where you see a whole month and you can just update them manually on the other side. There’s actually ‘by day’ so you can actually write down, if you’re a paper and pen girl like me, for the month some of these key milestones for your projects that you’re working on.Tip eight. I’ve alluded to this, but it’s calendar blocking, time blocking. This has really transformed the way I manage my time and I now block time in my diary for absolutely everything, including leisure time, even stretching my legs time and I’ve really found that it’s helped me be much more productive. So think about blocking time for all of your task. So rather than having a long, unwieldy list of things to do, which inevitably you don’t get to the end off and you end up feeling a little bit disappointed with yourself that you didn’t achieve everything, think about putting each of those tasks into your calendar because again, it helps you think about ‘well, is this really urgent?’. ‘Is this really important and how am I going to make sure that I schedule enough time for it?’.Tip number nine is to continually review what you’re spending your time on with a view to considering whether you can systemise it, or use a tool rather than you spending so much time. So if you’re talking about tracking your time so you can monitor how long task take then I use a tool called Toggl. It’s toggl.com, and it allows me to track the time that I’m spending on each project and then after a few weeks, you can look back and think, ‘gosh, I seem to be spending an awful lot of time on developing timelines’, for example, and then you might realize we’re still using Excel spreadsheets for timelines, maybe we could systemise this. Maybe we could use a tool like Monday.com or using Microsoft Project so that you can use a tool that will make that speedier. Similarly, if you look at your calendar and you realize you’re spending an awful lot of time in meetings, maybe they’re weekly meetings that don’t necessarily have to be an hour, it doesn’t mean to say that every meeting has to be an hour. So think about, is this meeting a good use of everybody’s time? Could it be shorter? Could it be more succinct and, then again, ask people what they think and suggest some different format for that meeting or different length of time for that meeting.And tip number ten is to restrict your availability for meetings. Now, often in an agency, this has to be a policy. But I know of many agencies that are saying things like, let’s have a no meetings Friday, no internal meetings Friday or Monday or both. And this has been something that’s been discussed as a wider agency team. So everybody’s got a view on what could be more beneficial. And what that means is that people can’t book meetings in your diary that you haven’t given approval for. Also, it helps to manage your own personal time because during these times, I’m recording this mid September you know, we are coming out of the lock down period,  it’s the Covid-19 situation. Many of us are working from home with multiple distractions and a schedule, some of us are taking children to school. But I think this is about culture, and it’s about talking to your agency to look at collaborating as a team and thinking, ‘would this be more beneficial to maybe restrict internal meetings to certain days of the week or maybe certain times of the day, which are suiting more people?’. So have a think about how that could work for you. Personally, I try to block out Mondays and Fridays to have no coaching, no training sessions and no external calls and meetings so that I can focus on content creation, on planning, on doing all of the work that requires deep concentration. So that’s my top 10 tips.I’ve got a bonus, one for you, but let me just run through those tips again.So number one was know what the business wants, so that you’re focusing your time in the areas that the agency actually needs. So check with your seniors.Number two, minimize distractions. Stop those pop ups.Number three, limit amount of time you check your emails,  three or four times a day max.Number four, understand the benefit of working on important but not urgent tasks. These tend to be your deep work. The ones like client development planning, etc. And these are the ones that really going to move the needle on your career.Number five is Parkinson’s Law. Are you allowing yourself too much time to do one particular task? Could it be done more smartly?Number six. Are you saying yes, too much? I’m not saying no enough.Number seven, are you planning in advance? So think about your long, medium and short term planning tools that you use so that you can put those milestones in your diary in advance.Number eight, calendar time blocking. So use your calendar to block times for meetings, for planning for everything that you need.Number nine, make sure you continually review how you’re spending your time so you can see how you can leverage tools that you could use and then..number 10, restrict availability for internal meetings, and that’s something you probably want to discuss as a team.The bonus tip that I’ve got is something that my coach, Osman Sharif, said a while ago, which really, really helped me. Think about, if you are working from home, having different places in your house for doing different tasks. So, for example, if you are creating a plan or having to really focus deeply on content creation, then think about going into your lounge to do it or going to sit by a window to think, or maybe going to a local hotel reception and sitting there for an inspirational environment. Because sometimes we try to do absolutely everything at our desk, but sometimes it means that we’re not the most productive we could be. So if your brain associates your desk as a place that you do lots of quick turnaround tasks phone calls, meetings, emails, then you need to change your environment so that your brain, then all of a sudden has a different feeling and it tends to operate in a different way. So I tend to do all of my thinking somewhere else other than my desk. And if you’re in the office environment, then going into a meeting room and closing the door so that you’ve got that deep focus time.So I really hope this has been beneficial. I would love to hear from you if you have any other tips to share for creative agency account managers. May be something that you use all the time, a tool, or it could be a methodology or just a tip.I’d love to hear your views, so if you I would like to share with me your feedback, I’d love to hear from you. It’s jenny@accountmanagementskills.com, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

Welcome to the Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast with me, Jenny Plant, from Account Management Skills Training. I'm on a mission to help those in agency client service keep and grow the existing relationships, so their agency business can thrive.Jenny: Welcome to episode four. Today, I'm delighted to be speaking to Phil Lancaster. Phil has spent most of his career in account management and has worked for some of the most successful holding companies in the agency space. He's worked for companies like the Lowe Group and W P. P at a very senior level as client team leader and global business director. And he's worked at a very C suite level with clients for brands such as Bayer, Reckitt Benkiser, Jaguar, Land Rover, etc. So he's got a huge amount of experience in this space. So what he's going to be sharing with us is what he sees is the true value of the role of account management for both agencies and clients. He's also going to share some examples of the actions account management cant ake to save clients time and money. He's going to share with us his advice for agency account managers to help position you more as a trusted advisor versus a reactive order taker. He's also gonna share some examples where agencies get it wrong. And he has a particular interest in helping agencies reach the C suite level relationships of their clients. So he's going to share some tips around how you can start to think about doing that. He's also going to share his views on the role and how it's evolved, given that the report has come out recently saying that there is an urgent review needed. And also he's gonna share some advice for how to strengthen your client relationships, given the fact that many of us are still working remotely. So without further ado, let me go straight to the interview. Phil, thank you so much for joining me today. Would you mind spending a couple of minutes just talking about your experience in account management? Phil: I'm very happy to do so. Good morning as well. I've spent my entire life actually in account management, which is in terms of a career a very long time, and I came from the various lowest positions to one of the more senior positions through that function o that department. I started my career with Grey. In fact, I'm a product of most of the agency large networks around the world and holding companies. And I worked with the Bates Group and the low Group and in the last two decades with W P. P. and with an agency called J. Walter Thompson, which one point I was ahead of client service at J. Walter Thompson, which was about 120 people. I think that made it the largest account management department in the world of that time, so that was quite a challenge. But I am, you know, a child of account management. I believe fervently in it and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of being in it, so happy to discuss that with you this morning. Jenny: Fantastic. I know that you also were leading at a sort of holding company level some huge blue chip clients on I see from your background their brands like Jaguar, Landrover, Reckitt Benkiser, Bank of America, Kellogg's those a huge blue chip brands. So I'm so delighted that you've been up to join me and talk to me about this because I think you are the epitome of sort of someone who is leading account management at a very senior level. So I'm curious to know what do you see as the value of account management, both for agencies and for clients? Phil: I mean, that's if I could put this into a short answer, rather in a very long one. I again, I believe very strongly in the value that account management brings to the relationship between an agency and its client. But if we start with the client side for a moment, I think that, you know, notwithstanding the fact that many clients are perhaps beginning to in-house creative capability and resource, largly speaking, it's still, there's a world out there of very good agency people in agencies. that client's work alongside and use as partners. It is not their skill therefore to exact the creative mysteries of an agency to produce work that has a commercial impact on their business. They leave that to people within the agencies, and that's particularly led by the function of account management not exclusively, of course, but certainly often led by. And so the value to a client of account management is that it is, and the people who work in it  are those are the most expert in getting out of the agency all of its brilliant skills of creativity from its people and its execution on behalf of their business on behalf of their client brand, their service, their product, whatever we're talking about. So it's a vital role for any client institution, particularly when they're probably playing a great deal of money for it as well. So you know it's an investment in an individual and a function that will at some point return greatly on the performance of their brand or their service. So something that they don't enter into lightly, at all. It’s a deeply competitive areas as we know. So they have plenty of people to choose from and agencies. If you face the agency point of view there's so many talented people in an agency you know, and I include in that talented finance people, talented admin people as well as insight and strategy and, of course, creativity. But they would muddle together and produce very little if there weren't some kind of leadership to that process. Someone and a group of people who are absolutely accountable for ensuring that the agency presents the best creative thinking, the best creative execution, which has an impact in the real commercial world, where it drives a top line of a business for a client and indeed may fall to the bottom line, too. But there's a very clear relationship here with getting out of an agency group, its very best creativity and in some way making sure that that has an impact on the financial performance of a client business, because ultimately that's what clients are concerned about. So there have been experiments without account management in the past occasionally in agencies on none of them have worked. And that's not to say it's any more important function than it is planning or creative. Of course not, but it's a vital role, and it will continue to be a vital role. But it's changing profoundly, has a role. I'm sure we'll talk about in a moment. Jenny: Just on that point. Actually, that's curious, because I do know that some agencies decide consciously to not have an account management function, and you say there that it hasn't worked. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you think it doesn't work? Phil: Well, my personal belief, you know, I say this with humility because others may disagree with me, is it’s really quite difficult to be a brilliant creative person in an agency and to also be worrying about building the relationship with a client, understand the client's business inside out, to spot the opportunities to grow the business with the client challenging environment. And the same for perhaps the planning function the same, perhaps, for anything to do with that broad term media. It's a great deal to take on if you're going to be brilliant in one of those functions, frankly, on behalf of the client. So my experience has been that it becomes like a drag anchor on those individuals where if you're trying to be creative, because that's what you are accountable for and then to trying to take on some responsibilities of orchestration, process, dealing with procurement, whatever happens to be, you'll never produce your best work. You don't simply don't have the bandwidth. You don't have the stamina to do that and I think allow people to be brilliant in their area of expertise, gather them together, point them in a very similar direction and motivate them and inspire them. But let them be great at what they're really good at. Jenny: I love that you said that. I feel that was a great response, actually. What do you think makes a brilliant account manager? Phil: Gosh, well, I think there's some underlying skills sure than this, which is, let me tell you what it's not, in a way. If any young account manager management to person thinks that being incredibly popular with the creative group and focusing primarily on their internal reputation, and that it's simply a function of presenting what's being created internally to a willing client who will always say yes, you're not going to get very far. And equally if you take on more of the kind of the hue of the client, so you almost feel like you're outside of the agency, because what you do is you align with the client most readily and most often and see it entirely. From their point of view, it becomes quite dispiriting for the people in the agency, particularly creative people. I think the brilliant skills required of account management is that you have got to have an understanding and an innate interesting curiosity around two things. One of which is the broad business world, you know how do clients make money. How can I help them make more money on how can I grow their business? But equally you've got to have the, you know, the qualitative skills, the EQ, the genuine intuition and desire to be interested in anything creative. Not just the creative art of producing materials that stimulate brands and products and services, but, you know, you've really got to be genuinely interested in what the agency produces, you know, because that's the sausage machine that you work with every day, you know? And I've seen too many account people who come in who have really no interest in the creative product whatsoever and align themselves terribly with a client business and vice versa. You know, people who look very naive because they only talk about creativity within the agency, and it has absolutely no impact whatsoever on a client business. So the profound skill of very good account management people is to face both ways. And the thing that ties it is an intellectual curiosity and a heartfelt desire for creativity in its broadest sense. Jenny: What an articulate response. Thank you, that was really, really interesting. I think you've highlighted a couple of times about the importance of the agency account managers understanding the world of the client, their business world, the business outcomes that we're helping them achieve. Can you share with us maybe a couple of actions or examples of where you've witnessed the function of agency account management actually saving the client money or making them money, as you say, the top line revenue, or perhaps eliminating cost? Phil: I mean, the very best way to be the most effective partner for your client group is to produce the highest standard of work first time with little or no rework because it's so inherently good and finished that runs successfully in the marketplace and has the required impact on the business. The problem with that is that often we start out wrong and we get more wronger. Frankly, the brief is sloppy, inarticulate, imprecise carries no definition, no competitive difference whatsoever from the competitive set. And if you start out with a poor, sloppy, dull or lacking any kind of insight, brief things only get worse from there. And ultimately, the work that served up is frankly, average and its impact is probably worse than average. So if you want to save your client time and money, then be absolutely zealous around the quality of the brief on that. Of course you can do with your client, but you must take on the responsibility for it. And the only way that you will write brilliant briefs, frankly, is to know more about the client business than sometimes do themselves. To have this Olympian understanding of your own business in the agency and what it does, and to go further than anybody on the detail of writing something which is so perfect in its short form that everyone understands exactly what you're trying to do and what you'll be measured against. But it's such a brilliant platform for the creative teams to work from, but they find it inspiring in itself, let alone as a brilliant springboard for great work that they can produce. Poor brief, lots of rework, lots of arguments, lots of cost and ultimately a failing relationship. Jenny: And presumably also, you know, if you spend the time on the brief, get the brief right and the works right first time it can not only saved some time and cost, but also makes the money because ultimately what we're doing is a marketing action. It could be an ad campaign. It could be a comprehensive strategy around positioning. But ultimately we're helping the client achieve their business outcome. Phil: Yeah, yeah, we are. I mean, I think long gone are the days where an agency could be a partner that provided simply creative execution, that did or didn't work and that there appeared to be no accountability. Frankly and thank goodness to be any form of partner commercial partner for any client, business and agency can only be a concerned with one thing, which is how can we be most brilliant with our creative thinking execution, but only to impact on their commercial success? Because if you delve just a little into the world of the client organisation that you're working with, it's very obvious very quickly that they are accountable to very hard nose metrics, quantifiable metrics, of share and growth  and ROI you know, and profit. And so that's the language with which we need to discuss it with them. But at the same time, you know, we know that we are one of many partners that can impact on their business for a very particular reason. The management consultants that they were with may do something else and the frenemies that we are more familiar within, the Facebooks and the Googles, do something else. But none of them serve up the creativity that in theory agencies do, that can have such a dramatic impact on their commercial success. So I think account management today need to be really throw off the clothing of naivety and on worldliness and really understand if you're gonna have an impact on a client, business is gonna have to be first and foremost commercial. And it is impact will because it's just brilliantly conceived and different and captures the imagination of ordinary people like you and I in our homes, and builds that affinity with the particular company that we're talking about. So, you know, some things have changed enormously when we talk about data and technology, you know, in the delivery, to these clients now great speed and agility. Some things are always the same. I mean, we must never forget we're still dealing with ordinary human beings and need to be encouraged so genuinely fall in love with what we say and what we do and what we offer and to stay with us over the long term. You know, it's a very human interaction this and thank God, too, because it makes it so much more interesting. Jenny: You're so so right. We are dealing with human relationships. You're absolutely spot on. If there's an account manager listening right now and they're thinking right, this totally makes sense. How do I start showing up and acting like a true trusted advisor to my clients rather than sort of a passive reactive order taker? What's your advice for them to help them position themselves more in that way? Phil: Well, I think you started in the right place, by the way, that there is no future of any young account manager into next senior representative, an agency or otherwise if they are reactors. You know, we do need the practicalities of people who are good at making things happen in an agency, but they don’t tend to necessarily now sit just in the account management group. Account managers need to be forcefully in a very positive way with their clients, so that they are always prompting, always initiating, always suggesting proposals that develop the business and the thinking in the outcome. So by natural inclination, you know that's a skill that can be learned and taught. But it does help if you begin that way, as well as personality and character trait. So that's the very important start point on this. What I tend to say to anybody that I've ever interviewed or I've worked with in my groups and developed is you will always be reputationally thought of highly within a client organisation if you know as much about their business as they do or indeed, at times, more. It’s a criticism of the industry to a little, to a degree, that we still don't know our client business as well as we should. The brilliant account management people are those that have spent the time because they enjoy understanding how the client makes money. You know how they grow, where they're trying to grow, what the insurmountable problems are that they're trying to surmount. It's a bit like anybody. If you sit in front of someone and you talk about yourself for half an hour they don't find it particularly rewarding exchange. If you sit with a client and talk about them and their business and suggest things, tell them things that they don't know, you're inevitably more interesting than the other agency and the other people in it who really there to take orders to produce creative work which we’ll come onto in a moment. So, first and foremost, if you really want to stand out from the pack, either within your own agency or indeed with other agencies know their business, chapter and verse and show interest and go and see them in a post Covid world. Phone up anybody you can think of in the business, talk to anybody you know in the tertiary industries that support their business. I can assure you, you’ll be absolutely delighted in the response you get when you're able to talk about their business in great breath and depth because you then move towards this wonderful word which is such an enigma to us, this word of trust. You become more and more trusted the more you understand what they're trying to do, and how you could suggest that they might reach those goals. So that's the client side within the agency. I mean, there are robotic account managers that go through the process of just getting work out the door. Not many of them, but they're easy to see. And there are those that are driven by this innate desire to just be creative, think creative, spend time with creative people and produce things that have not been seen before, done before and that have a material impact, which is just exciting, you know, it's great fun. It separates our business from many other worthwhile sectors of industry that don't go about it. But it's very difficult to talk about clients and innovation and inventiveness and originality, when by if nature you plodding through an agency, ticking the boxes, going to work because you think that today is a good day to have another good meeting and to do some process, you know, which is not the purpose of what we do anyway, and then it's just a means to an end. So I think that, you know, the value that that one, as in account management, should be measured by your outstanding contribution to the delivery of creative work within the agency that stands out and has an impact on the client business, but also the fact that you have become more and more valuable to a kind organisation because you seem to be able to trigger the right work regularly at the highest standard, because you know where to take the thinking and where to take the work in the client organisation. It cannot be either or I'm afraid, it really has to be both.  Jenny: I love that. One of the things Phil and I’d love your view on this as I don't think I've ever asked you this before. One of the things that I get a lot of pushback on is in some agencies account management function have, like a dual role. They actually have to manage the projects but also manage the relationship and inevitably, what happens is they get very bogged down with the delivery of the projects and the development and long term strategic thinking about how you're gonna add value to their business. Spending more time in the client's spotting opportunities, getting more traction within the client organisation goes to the wayside, so it's probably more of a business model kind of question but what's your view if you have one on whether the account management function should not be in any way, shape or form touching projects and they should just be dedicated to client retention and growth. Phil: Well, I'm suspicious of that. You know what I mean? First of all, I'm not sure that you could grow to be a more senior member of the account management department unless you've gone through the learning curve of delivering the process, getting your hands dirty and understanding the geography of an agency today and its partnership. I mean, you really are going to have to be perfectly eloquent around data and technology and creativity. That triangulation is something that every year, account person coming through the ranks is going to need to be very comfortable with an understand. And I am not so sure either, that you're an effective  developer of more senior relationships, without the understanding of how a conversation you have with that client will impact on the agency whether the resources available. How you might find the appropriate resources direct it and manage it to create the output that you're looking to achieve as a result of discussion with the relationship. Also, the hard truth is that one has to make time on top of the delivery, the practicalities of delivery to build your relationships across a client base, so that's about going the extra mile, actually, to determine who you might need to know in the client organisation, what you need to know from them. And where you can take the information back to the agency to perhaps improve for shortened, to simplify, to remove complexity from the process. To produce things which are more valuable to a client and then the agency has a result in a different way, with a greater pace and acceleration. So I don't think the two will ever be separate or decoupled. Of course, as you rise through the ranks of account management, internal senior positions, you do less, and that's quite frightening, by the way, it's a point we should make that when your account director and you begin to hedge towards the border or a directorship within an agency. I have found that one of the most challenging aspects of that is for those young people to give away the job of doing because they were very good at doing and to start delegating and take on the responsibility of much more, nebulous areas of a relationship development where it's less black and white about whether it was right or wrong or whether it worked or it didn't. And to trust in those people you delegated to as well. So that transition is one that we've worked on very hard over the years in the agencies I’ve been in, to manage that emerging from senior account director position into young board director, young director position where the role is fundamentally different. But you cannot reach that more senior role unless you have underpinned the understanding,  the geography and the realities and delivering work in the agency. Jenny: It's a really good response. I like that. Great answer. You talk a lot about developing relationships with C Suite, the C suite of your client company. Why do you think that's so important for agency account managers? And do you have any tips that you can share? Phil: Right I have to keep this to a reasonably short answer. It is entirely vital. It's entirely vital for two reasons. First of all, that it protects the business in the revenue that an agency has in the first place, and secondly, it is the single best source of driving incremental new business from the existing client. I guess one has to start with what's the definition of C Suite and the first thing to disabuse people of, perhaps, is that we're not simply talking about CMO. And by the way, my private opinion is that the role of CMO is diminishing quite rapidly. And here are many other important roles within C Suite whether that's a chief technology officer, whether it's the head of corporate affairs, whether its head of legal, whether it's the CFO, CEO, the list goes on. There is a much broader spectrum now of C Suite that it’s imperative that agency people know, that they engaged with regularly, that they listened to and that they take initiatives to because they all hold budget. They all can grow your business. They all have an increasing say on the output of agencies and communication because they realise that that's a key differential now and that rarely are big decisions about communication made by individuals, including a CMO. They are more often made by leadership teams within a client organisation, particularly when you get to the bigger ones. So I'm working with a lot of agencies and I think you know, this as well for whom a relationship with C suite does not exist. And they are really, really vulnerable because decisions can be made no matter how good the agency's work has been or is at the moment, decisions can be made, which have no bearing whatsoever on the current relationship and output and now suddenly mean that the business is gone. And I have suffered this myself and particularly with the emergence of procurement who don't really care about that aspect of the business. They're more concerned about the effectiveness of the work on the relationship. And that's a separate point entirely, I guess so. It is unfathomable, really, to think that the management of an agency do not work day in and day out, week in and week out and so on, in the development of their broad based C Suite4 relationships to protect what the agency already has the business quite apart from growing up because it's hugely rewarding when you do, by the way, when you build a C suite relationships frankly, new jobs flow. New funding flows, new opportunities to reputationally emerge like out of a chrysalis every six months, 12 months of the year as a fresh agency that has fresh thinking rather than being seen as the agency that was good 2-3 years ago. You know, in terms of the value proposition of an agency, it's a great way to make sure that you look relevant and fresh all the time to a broad group of people in a client organisation that will continually think of you as a current partner, not one of the past. Jenny: And what do you have any advice for maybe agency leaders or account managers of listening to this and thinking, we don't have any relationships at all at any C suite level with our clients. Where do you even start with trying to form those relationships? Phil: Well, I mean, I believe strongly in a programme that's institutionalised within an agency to identify the C suite and to create content to take to them at a programme of managing them across the senior agency people matching them with senior client people and how it's a bit like, you know, selling a car. BMW would be delighted to sell me a car, of course, but there'll be a margin on that, but where they really made the money's in the after sales and the service and the fact that I'd become a long term and loyal supporter of the brand and buy various cars in the future. Therein lies the opportunity here, which is that we have created you know,  I have created on approach, which allows agencies to identify what the key issues are that confront the client, who the clients is,  who have prospects are across that leadership team because there are many off them in theory. And there are the emerging stars as well, coming beneath and everyone needs to pick up. Once you've managed to get something in their diary, virtually or otherwise, what on earth do I say to them that's going to interest them, hold their attention and asked them to perhaps think about a new area of their business on? Then how do I keep in there? How do I keep that fresh? How do I keep coming back? How do I keep from taking the phone call for me once a month? Because every time I feel Jenny, come on the phone, they always tell me something interesting about my business. They always provide me with a solution. Perhaps one I didn't even know I needed. You know, that's a programme in itself, is not a nice to have. It really is a must have. The very best agencies is, of course, do this. Working with the Omnicom’s and the WPPs and a little of the IPG, for instance, they have very good people who know how to build these relationships out over months and years, identifying what a client requires at any one time, but also making sure that that could be translated into what the agency can deliver, building those trust levels. But it's not a short answer to that. There is a programme that one needs to look at, think about it very carefully, you know, we share all our war stories. I think the most valuable thing I'm able to share with people is all the things that have not worked. Actually, all the things I've done wrong all the blind alleys that turned out, but there are some things that really do work time and again across business, domestic business, global business brands, products, services, I think account management needs to know these things. Jenny: Can you share just a couple of examples of maybe where you got it wrong and where you were hugely successful? Phil: Yeah. I mean, I talked earlier about the fact that if you don't believe in creativity and if you're not excited by creativity, in its broadest sense. It is not an easy industry to be in. But at the same time, I just see people do get kind of its like a laughing gas. We sometimes get so excited about certain things that we lose sight on why we're doing it, what its role is and where you know, it really needs to be quite commercially impactful. Some of the biggest mistakes I've made is where I've probably wanted to appease what I thought was brilliant creative work out of an agency, because I knew that it would provide a higher profile for the agency because of its creative prowess, and that becomes slightly dislocated from that's all very well. But, you know, was it ever gonna work on behalf of the client business? Should they ever have invested their hard earned money in it and what you're gonna say to them when it didn't work, even though someone standing on a plinth in an award show picking up awards on the trade press has picked up on the beauty of the work. But six months down the line, you're under great pressure because the brand has underperformed and I have made those mistakes a few times, and I learned the hard way, and that's what I talked about earlier. Which is you've got to be really hard nosed as an account manager, account director. Is it going to work in the real world, no matter how exciting it is on behalf of the reputation of the agency and the people who created it. Which is very important, of course, but I have lost business months after producing the most lauded and awarded work, and I have rarely ever lost business when work has been so commercially and fundamentally successful. The clients will achieve their own personal metrics and financial rewards through the bonus scheme because your work drove the performance of their brand or their service. So there's a really careful balancing act there about, as I said to you earlier, facing in two different directions. But you know, creative work can inspire great brand performance. That's wonderful, thank goodness. But equally there are times when other types of, what's the word I'm going to use, precise work, you can have just as much of an impact and develop your business. So I've made plenty of mistakes in those areas. Where have I done things differently? Some things I think that had the most impact is when I've introduced clients to new partners that they haven't thought of working with before, so that they could extend their distribution footprint. Or maybe there was a sampling exercise that they could piggyback on the backup. So the adjacencies of putting a really impressive brand together with another brand that consumers and insight might pull natural together, but have never worked together in the past because they don't see themselves as working in the same areas, has been fundamentally very satisfying, but also quite lucrative on behalf of the client business. So I mean, I think another time, but we can give some very good examples of that, how to put those adjacencies to this together. Jenny: I think that's a fabulous example. It also highlights to your point before about the more we understand about the client's business, actually, our job in account management is to retain and grow the client business, but we need to keep their business objectives in mind. This is not about us selling more of our services. It's looking at what is right for the client business right now. And you know, just there's one great example there of introducing a new potential partner, which is going to open up a revenue stream for the client. And that's not selling more of your services. That is adding value truly, adding value to the client organisations. I think that's a great example. I love the fact that you've said that you need, every agency, needs a programme for reaching the C suite and we’ll certainly share the contact details for your systematic approach to reaching the C suite because I think again, that's absolute gold. Just recently, we've talked about this briefly but there was an IPA report that was commissioned.  It talked about the role of account management and the fact that there needs to be an urgent review and it was kind of putting into question the value of the account management. Do you have any thoughts on that report and its findings? Phil: Well, I agree with them. I really do think it requires an urgent review of what account management has become and it really should be on. I would start with some of the terminology. I find account management, client service, you know, some of these terms unhelpful or redundant, and yet it's really very difficult to find a better term somehow. So I think a review of the function and its so called skillset is desperately needed. I think that sometimes the headlines would suggest that there's a tremendous crisis involved, you know, because that makes a good headline. There's an awful lot that's good in the account management within agencies, there's some very good people with some great skill set who are doing things the right way. I think what we're talking about here is like anything else you know, creative destruction which is, if we were starting from scratch what would we lay aside in terms of what the offer of account management is now on, what would we retain and what would we add going forward on. I believe that some of the requirements of the remain same, which is about, as I said earlier, you know, this duopoly off, being inspired and motivated by creativity generally and at the same time having curiosity and an interest and understanding of the world of business and the commercial opportunity that confronts our client. So those are the broad perspectives. Added to that, and I talked about the triangulation earlier of understanding what data means what technology means in creativity, they're just words that are thrown around, you know. Ultimately, one has to take it back to what do human beings want, desire, need, look for. What could we persuade them that they had never thought about before but could be quite interesting to them? And I have genuinely think, and I looked for it in anybody that worked with me in this area, you have to have a fundamental  interest in people. You have to be quite nosy and curious, you know, and watch and listen. And a piece of advice, I would give, by the way, too young account people but carrying throughout your life is, I read a different publication every day. I’ll read something out of The New Statesman one day, but The Spectator the next. the Daily Mirror one day,  The Daily Telegraph the next. I will watch ITVB and the terrible collection of reality programmes. And I will watch something like Newsnight. I have listened to you know, Asian radio, overseas radio, commercial radio, Broadcast Arabia. The more one listens and watches and assimilates information from different parts of the spectrum of society and people you'll find them more interesting and engaging. You'll understand a little bit more about where they shift in their attitudes in a society. And you're a lot more useful to your clients because I'd worry terribly about those people that never watch much TV or who don't know the plot of Eastenders, you know, or here’s good example someone recently, you know, somebody in account management in their twenties, what’s your view of Gym Shark, tell me about that, and they hadn't even heard of the brand. Now populist brands are popular for a reason because they capture something of the imagination perhaps for the first time. A young man has created an extraordinary business on the back off being in competition with major players like Nike and Reebok is an extraordinary story. But when you take it back to its base, he just loved the idea of working around this area of young people who wanted to work out and be fit and Crossfit and all the rest of it. Wow, what a story, he created it. My view is, the more you know, the more you read, the more you watch, the more knowledge you have, the more ideas you have, the more interesting you’ll be to your client. And if you're not interesting, you're not gonna last five seconds with a client organisation and you're never going to reach a senior position. And you're not gonna hold the interest levels of C suite. So feed the machine of your knowledge and understanding. But make sure you balance it. That's why I say, don't be drawn in by a left wing persuasion, right wing persuasion, populism, intellectual, academic. It doesn't matter. Jenny: I think that's just such a fantastic tip. I really, really do. I'm usually banging the drum for reading, certainly reading, too, particularly personal development books, all about developing relationships and obviously industry information. But the fact that you've just shared that tip about, just broaden it out, you know, diversify your reading sources. I think that that's just gold. So thank you for that. That's brilliant. Currently, Phil, with our relationships with clients, we're recording this just coming into September 2020 and we're just kind of coming out of the Covid situation, lifting slowly the lock down rules. But essentially many of our clients are still working from home. Many agencies are kind of moving to more of a hybrid model, letting their staff also worked from home and maybe a couple of days in the office. How do you develop relationships or continue the momentum of developing relationships when you can't meet in person? Certainly so frequently as we used to. Phil: Perhaps there is a shift of focus, actually, which is, I believe, undeniably in the need for a relationship I really do. But I think that the shift of focus is perhaps now on the word value, and I do believe that whilst it is more difficult to achieve, we can project our value on our clients remotely as much, if not more so we can, in the old model of presenteeism and being together and that having that idle time to get to know each other. So it's a tricky one, and it's perhaps a rather stock answer but I genuinely believe that you will drive a relationship over the long term because of the value that you bring. And the value you bring will be your intellectual stamina and observation and point of view, as well as the initiatives and the proposals that no one else is bringing to a client organisation, or client individual that will help him drive the business and, frankly, looks smart at times within their own organisation. So when we had the opportunity to meet in person and to spend time and to build our relationship from the outside in as it  were, and reveal our value over the course of hours and weeks and years and whatever it worked well, but you ultimately could track through to being quite a valuable individual to the client organisation. You kind of have to turn it on its head now, present yourself immediately as someone of value, on behalf of a valuable agency and a valuable function called account management that brings a point of difference and a commercial impact on the business from the word go and that will then lead to a long lasting relationship. Inverted commas. Whether relationships on the metrics of those will be in the future hard nose quantitative r ROI metrics, probably, less so than they ever were in the past, when they were more qualitative or it was as much about who you were, how you engaged with the client on a, you know, just a human aspect, as it was on the performance of what your outcomes were. So shift, I think a shift is the order of the day. But I do think engagements vital finding ways and means of engaging with these people in these organisations. And you'll do that because you're valuable. Jenny: Great point. Also, I believe that I've heard a lot of people say even the most senior people inc client organisations just are tending to be a little bit more available because of this new way of working so it could present an opportunity.  Just a couple more questions, I'm very conscious of your time. Have you got any thoughts on just generally how the creative industry landscape is changing in terms of how agencies are working with clients. Phil: Yeah, my sense is that the rules of the game have changed, actually. Probably the most unhelpful word at the moment is the word agency because it suggests to many, and this is the black propaganda that goes around this from people who was wish this to be the case is that agencies are boxes with rigid walls and ceilings that are ponderous and narrow in their scope of understanding and output, and therefore diminishing in terms of their value to a client base. Because there are so many other organisations around that are much more fluid, much more agile and much more, you know, technically competent as it were. So I think that my view of the way forward is that collectives of inspired people who work brilliantly together to deliver the creativity of thought and deed, with their data, with the technological understanding, with the ability to understand the consumer mind, and to change the course of that attitude in consumer behaviour, because of the something we learn from our data or because of a piece of simple technology that just changes everything good means that the method of agencies, if we're going to continue to use that word, has to have changed. It can't be so linear. It can't be so ploddingly process oriented. It has to be and has become in more recent years, much more quickly consensual around the good and the best, of the people and the thinking or the execution and taking rapidly to a client base, onto pilot tests, put in a crucible of, you know, life and see if it works. Course correct. Move it on. And not, in the days of past, where there was almost a delight in the process as much as there was in the work.  I think it's move. Make things, try them, test them, hold their feet to the fire, change, course correct, move again. Keep moving.  Jenny: Have you seen any agencies that are doing that particularly well and adapting to the new way, those new demands of ways of working?Phil: I see it all around. I'm not to sure it’s just in agencies. I mean, you know, if you look at the FANGs and you look at some of the still some of the great agency groups that I mentioned earlier but also in the independent sector. What a time to be in the independent sector now, as well, you know where major clients, domestic or global, are quite prepared to work with the smallest or largest. If the thinking is good and the execution is there. I think that there are examples all around. I'm particularly taken with the shift as well in some of the more long term publishers who, perhaps, have begun to understand how to confront the likes of Google and Facebook. We've been in this whole area of this dreadful word content, but I think that they are beginning to learn really quickly now about how they change their offer. So there's lots to learn from those boys as well. So lots going on lots going on.  Jenny: If you were going to start again, Phil, in your career because I'm very conscious is a few agency account managers that just beginning in their journey, they want to sort of be successful as quickly as possible. Looking back on your career, if you were starting again, what would you have done differently, or any tips that you can share for getting people sort of ahead of where they need to be. Phil: Well it’s still a glorious career to go into, by the way, that I do believe whatever that career is. But, you know, in it's broadest sense. I tell you what the biggest mistake I made in the early years, I just believed in big titles too much. I believed the people of above me and around who wielded their title, convinced me to make decisions and to do things in a particular way, which instinctively, I was unsure about or didn't believe them. And there's a fine line here between a young account manager who thinks they know everything perhaps probably just needs to show a bit of humility and learn a bit more. But there does come a point where you have to stare down the titles and the structure, and than those that have gone before that tell you everything they've done that was perfect and forget to tell you the things that weren't. And you've got to be your own person and I genuinely believe that. I mean, I fundamentally made a change of my approach in my early thirties to begin to trust myself more because I began to assess the people around me. And when I broke down their life experiences versus professional experience and the evidence before me of what they were and weren't achieving in the business I drew the conclusion that I probably had as much to say that might be was worthwhile, and it might just be better. And funnily enough, after a few months and a couple of years, it really was. You have to be careful you don't get ahead of yourself and think too much of yourself, but really, yeah, I guess that's what I said earlier. If you know more, you’ve read more, watched more, thought more, you can begin to trust yourself more. And when you trust yourself more you cand be more sure about what you say to a client and why because you've underpinned it with good evidence and understanding. You’ve tested it. You're not going in there because someone gave you the thought or the work because they were entitled to through their title. Ignore it. Jenny: I love that advice that made me feel quite emotional because I could identify that a lot myself. Phil, this has been amazing. Lots of golden nuggets and pieces of advice for account managers. Where can people reach you? And who would you like to be contacted by? Phil: Well, I'm available. I'm on LinkedIn. So that's one method of reaching me. Of course and I'm sure we could share details of my email as well afterwards. Who'd I like to? I really don't mind who contacts me, Jenny, I really don't. I continue even though I'm now working, running my own consultancy in the independent sector, I continue to be very involved with the industry and I continue to mentor casually or more professionally, many young people and many senior people. So I find it thoroughly rewarding to do both, but at the same time, I have my own client base. So I'm having to put what I just spent 45 minutes talking to you about into practise every day and still I make mistakes. Still, I get it wrong, but I get a lot more right than I did in the past. So, I feel like, you know, if you want to talk to me, as a senior member of an agency group on behalf of your management team or as an individual, or you have issues with your clients. Or you're someone that's just looking for perhaps a bit of help with a particular issue in the career. You know, if I can find time to do it, I'll always be very happy to talk. But I'm finding that a lot of agency management senior management contacted me. Just as a sounding board. Maybe one or two ideas about how to change things in a particular way and to think about things very differently. So that's the area I'm operating in, as board advisor and as a non executive, and running the consultancy. Jenny: Wonderful. Brilliant. Well, Phil, I'm gonna share your contact details in the show notes. So once again, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. This has been amazing. And I know lots of people going to come away with a lot of value. So thank you so much.  Well, I hope you enjoyed my chat with Phil. And if you're thinking that you would like to test how good you are currently retaining and growing your existing client relationships, I'd like to invite you to come over to my website, which is accountmanagementskills.com, where there's a short quiz that you can take and you'll get a report at the end of it with a score, which will give you an indication of maybe some of the areas that you could be doing to retain and grow your client relationships. So come over to accountmanagementskills.com.