What Clients Really Want, with Chantell Glenville.

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Build a Better Agency, where we show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of expertise as both an agency owner and agency consultant to you, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody, Drew McClellan here. Welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. This podcast is designed for you, the agency owner, and your staff to help you build bigger, better, stronger agencies, and to have a little more fun along the way. Today’s topic is one that I think is vital to agencies. So one of the things we’re finding in a lot of the work we’re doing with agencies is that it’s not just agencies you compete with anymore. Nowadays media companies can do everything that… I’m doing this in a air quotes, by the way. Media companies can do everything agencies do, and agencies are built… Our clients are building in-house agencies and trying to be agencies. So you really got competition nipping at your heels from all directions.

One of the things that makes agencies distinct and is a value proposition that you offer clients is the way that we serve our clients through our account service teams. And a lot of you know how vital your account folks are, that literally they are the ones who are not only helping you keep your clients, but they are the ones who are helping you grow those clients. One of the things we teach in the AMI workshops is that about 70% of an agency’s new business, new revenue should be coming from existing clients. So your account service team, whether you come call them account execs or account managers or whatever name you call them, they’re vital to the health of your agency, and them creating lasting, strong, consultative relationships with your clients is really critical to your agency’s long term health. So lots of agencies invest in their account service folks. A lot of people have started hiring them young and then growing them into really great account leaders.

However you approach account service. There are some things that we know are best practices around that we teach some of those in our AE boot camps, but today’s guest is coming at it from a very unique perspective. So Chantell Glenville is an author of a book called What Clients Really Want, and, the quote unquote, Shit That Drives Them Crazy: The Essential Insiders Guide for Advertising Agencies on How Account Management Can Create Great Client Agency Relationships. And what’s beautiful about that is that she comes at this from the perspective of having been a client. So she spent seven years agency side, and then she went over to the client side. So she’s seen it from both perspectives, and the book is really all about… Think of it as what an ex client or what a client or an ex client would love to say to you and your account team if they knew that they could. So with that, I am going to welcome Chantell to the podcast. Chantell, thanks for joining us today.

Chantell Glenville:

Thank you, Drew. Thank you for the very nice introduction.

Drew McLellan:

Your book is great. So I enjoyed it and I found myself nodding my head. So let’s dig in. What are a couple things that account service folks do that drive clients nuts?

Chantell Glenville:

Well, I don’t… So I think an important point on it is that I don’t think any of the stuff that account service folks do that drives clients nuts is intentional by any means.

Drew McLellan:

Nope, absolutely not. You’re right.

Chantell Glenville:

I think it just comes about through essentially a lack of understanding, and that’s why I wrote the book in the first place, and my viewpoint on it is that a lot of people in account servicing, unfortunately, they don’t work client side and they’ve never worked client side, or they spend years agency side first and then maybe go client side later. So it means that that that fundamental understanding of what the client’s world is like, what their pressures at play are, what their day to day goings about are, what their internal structures are, it just isn’t there. So it can lead to a lot of, not even necessarily big things, really small things, which make the clients’ lives harder, and so annoy them over time without even the agency realizing in any way whatsoever.

For example, one of the big ones that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen this when I’ve worked agency side and also client side, it’s the same issues that come up time and time again that break down these relationships. So one of the examples off the top of my head is when work is going to be delayed. And obviously, as you know, at agencies that happens all the time. Sometimes files take longer to explore than expected, creative reviews don’t go as you thought they would. And clients understand that. They know that timings move. But what you see frequently, one of the behaviors that pops up, is that when that happens, instead of the agency picking up the phone and talking to the client, giving regular updates as to when the work will be through, they actually disappear, which might sound like a stretch, but it’s true, and it happens time and time again, and they properly disappear.

And of course that’s easier for account management. Then they don’t have to deal with the awkward conversation and in their minds, they wait. I mean, I’ve been guilty of this myself, even, agency side. I’m not pointing the finger by any means. You kind of wait until you’re like, “Well, I’ll wait until I’ve got some good news to tell the client, till I can tell them it’s definitely going to be there then,” rather than actually bringing the client in on the journey and letting them be fully aware of everything that’s going on so that they can better manage the internal situation. And they need that awareness in order to manage their internal situations, in order to manage their boss who’s breathing down their ear, or the review they might have coming up with all the senior stakeholders. And they can’t do that without those open and honest conversations. So it might seem like small thing, especially if it’s a half hour delay or something like that, but it can make a huge difference to the client, and it’s not that this situation is going to change. The work is still late either way.

But that work being late can either be a small thing and can be, “Okay, all right, that’s not ideal. The work is late, but we’re all fine. You managed the situation well.” Or it can turn into a really big issue that starts to build client side, time and time again with these situations are mismanaged. So it’s about trying to stop those small behaviors that build into these big things and destroy the relationship. And as you said before, there’s lots of competition coming from all sides to take clients from agencies. And the sad truth is that even when agencies are producing great work, they still get fired. And it’s usually because of a breakdown in the relationship when that happens.

Drew McLellan:

One of the things I talk about a lot is we never… Clients never object to the $10,000 price on the bill. They object to the $50 FedEx charge or some little thing. And I think oftentimes we forget how surprises and lack of communication feel on the receiving end of that.

Chantell Glenville:

Absolutely. And it is small things. It’s small things as like a $50 FedEx charge. It is things like that, that if they’re not put up front, and if the client isn’t aware, then it causes problems for them their side. It’s like a $50 FedEx charge? Well, if the client only has 10K, and they’ve already budgeted that, and that’s spent, where are they getting the $50 from? It creates an additional hurdle they’ve got to get over. They’ve got to get a new PO from their finance department. It’s like an hour-

Drew McLellan:

It’s a process all of a sudden that they have to go into. Absolutely right.

Chantell Glenville:

But for something so small that could have been avoided if there was better forward planning in the first place.

Drew McLellan:

Well, again, I think a lot of this, and I think what your book emphasizes is the idea that we have to really be able to understand, we have to walk in the shoes of our clients to understand what their world is like. What are some things about the client’s world that you think may not be top of mind, or may not be really clear to agency folks? What don’t we know about their world?

Chantell Glenville:

There are two things that spring to mind first in relation to that. So one would be the fact that there are so many different stakeholders that clients have to manage. So many different stakeholders from different departments. I mean, if you look at a client’s linear structure, it’s quite similar to an agency where your account manager is reporting into a managing partner or someone like that who’s reporting into the CEO. You have a similar structure client side. However, there’s then about another five or six, usually, managing partner equivalents that your day to day client is also going to have to get sign off from, because there’s going to be the product team, there’s going to be all the different departments that have their own input who technically shouldn’t really control how the marketing communications are formatted and things.

However, because they do have approval rights, they will, to some extent, control that. They will feed in changes. They will affect things greatly in their feedback. And they will usually feed back more than they should even as well. That’s just how a lot of companies are structured, so clients have to go along with it. So one thing I’d say about how are they’re very different is the fact that there are so many different people and rungs of approvals that clients have to go through, that one thing changing can derail a project hugely because then they’ve got to start that process all over again. They’ve got to go through all those different departments again. It’s a more complicated structure in general. Whereas agencies, because they’re usually quite streamlined and flexible, even the bigger agencies, you create smaller teams within that, so you can move things around quicker. Clients aren’t usually set up for that.

Drew McLellan:

So let me stop you there for a second and then we’ll get to your second one. So this is a really frustrating point for agencies is that agencies build into their budget, as you know, a certain amount of revision time and all of that. And it seems like clients can never honor that. That there’s always one more revision or 12 more revisions. So agencies are struggling. They get that there are a lot of people in the mix. But from the agency’s perspective, how can they help a client move through the approval process or get things to keep on course and on budget and on track time wise? Because it’s not just the money. It’s also the timeline of, “We want our website to go live, but there have been so many changes, we can’t do it.” How can agencies be better about that with clients, recognizing that there are all kinds of layers of approval process, some that are really clear in the org chart and some that are probably hidden under politics or dotted lines.

Chantell Glenville:

I mean, that’s a huge problem that so many agencies face. It’s a really good point. And you’re right. A lot of the approvals are hidden in the org chart, and that’s a really key point about it. They’re hidden in the org chart. So the first step I would suggest to any agency to getting around that issue is whoever will be your lead in terms of doing stuff, when you’re getting campaigns out agency side, get them to shadow your client for a week or two weeks, whatever it is. Get them to go into your client’s company and get them to shadow and it down with their client and really talk through literally everything that is involved for them on getting a campaign out. Because until you properly understand that and live that, you won’t be able to help your client manage that process.

Once you know it, you can go, “Okay, all right. So I can see how maybe you could group these approvals into this, or if we supply you the work, then you can do that set of approvals then, which means we’ll get feedback from that group,” and you can work out how many rounds there are going to be. Because there are just some client structures where two rounds of amends isn’t going to be possible. But if you know that upfront, you can manage that in one, the cost estimates you build, you can manage that there is more rounds of amends than two. You can manage that in the timings upfront. But you’ve got to be aware of it at the start, and I think that understanding, it just can’t come from an org chart. So frequently we rely on these org charts and they don’t tell the true story. Really getting actually inside the client’s organization, getting to know it as well as you know the process in your agency is the essential key to getting around that situation.

Drew McLellan:

I can hear the agency owners now going, “Well yeah, that’s great. I’m going to have an account service person in there for a week. I want to get paid for that.” And my argument against that would be, this is part of your new business development investment. Because not only will you understand the politics, but now your account service person, and by the way, this should not be somebody super junior. This needs to be somebody who can have business conversations. But they also now have relationships with five or six or eight people inside the organization, as opposed to your one client contact. And that’s always a precarious position for agencies, when they only know and have access to one or two people inside the company. If that person moves on or gets let go, now all of a sudden you’re dangling on the end of a very thin thread.

Chantell Glenville:

Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got to get to know more than one person in the company. And actually even just getting to know them face to face makes a huge difference as well. I’ve worked with agencies before where I’ve worked with team members who I’ve never even met, and it’s so hard to have a good working relationship with someone when you don’t even know what their face looks like, as strange as that you sound. But it’s not as tangible and you need to build that relationship personally. And it may be an… It is an upfront investment in time putting someone in there for a week. But for one, they can still work on other work on their laptop whilst they’re there. They can still do bits, take an hour out or whatever, as they need to manage other clients.

But also it’s an investment to make sure you are going to have to spend less time in the future because you’ll be able to better service the client in a more efficient way because of that understanding, because that initial investment in time up front, and you’ll have better relationships to better manage any hurdles that come up and things. It’ll pay off hugely as time goes on in the relationship. But it’s just making sure the foundation are strong at the start by building that understanding.

Drew McLellan:

And I often think that the more tentacles you have inside the organization, the more opportunities there are for work. So it’s not just the marketing department that may need your help. It might be the HR department or the sales department or the R&D department. So there’s also opportunity to grow the business while you are hanging out there.

Chantell Glenville:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve worked on accounts where we’ve picked up other new products that they’re developing by getting to know the client really well and hanging out at their offices and things. You can pick up other accounts, even, you can pick up other bits of the business just by being there, being involved, offering additional solutions over and above just what your bits are, your remit is on it, actually just being a partner to them. And you need to be there to be a partner to them and get to understand them. And yeah, it’s a great new business strategy at the same time.

Drew McLellan:

Okay, so that was one of the two things that you think agencies don’t really understand about clients. And then I siderailed us for a minute. So come back now and tell us, what was the other thing that you had in mind that agencies really don’t seem to understand about the client side of the world?

Chantell Glenville:

So another one is… It’s a lot more basic than that. Because I think that first one is really… It’s really fundamental because if you do that first one right, it would unlock so many other things as well because it’s core to just understanding what it’s like in your client’s company, which links into everything, essentially. And another one would just be also… But it does come up a lot. Clients tend to work different hours to agencies. And I think as agencies, we forget that a lot of the time. Because at agencies we unfortunately work all hours, and a lot of the time we work till pretty late each day, and it’s just kind of normal agency side that you’ll be in the office till like 6:37, and actually when I work agency side, if I left at 6:30, I was skipping down the street with joy. I’d left positively early if I got out the door at that time. It was like getting an extra weekend.

But that’s not the case for clients. So I think agencies fall down quite a lot by… They send work through to clients 6:30, 7 o’clock in the evening, and then they get annoyed when they don’t get a response till the next morning. And I’ve heard judgment in agency’s voices before, talking to a client being like, “But we sent it at 6:30. Why weren’t you there?” But it’s not how clients’ world works. Clients tend to get in early, actually, usually. A lot of the time you’ll find clients in the office from 7:00 AM. But bang on 5:30, they’re out the door and they’re on their way home. There’s a time shift. And [inaudible 00:17:17] case in all clients, it’s not the case in all agencies, but you need to find out what are your clients’ working hours, should be one of the first questions you ask. What are their typical working hours?

And then work to them as much as you can, but if you’re doing stuff outside of them, as long as you’re aware that those are aren’t their normal working hours, you can call them or text them and say, “Hey, would it be okay if you look at this,” or, “This is going to come through outside of those hours.” But otherwise you’re kind of… You’re working at odds with each other. You’re not working on the same page as each other. So you’re frequently going to have these miscommunications where agencies think you’re going the client’s going to be reviewing stuff, and they’re not going to be reviewing anything because they’re at home with their kids by that point. Again, it comes back to communicating and understanding what’s going on with each other and actually properly spending the time and effort to think through all of that and get all the answers to those questions so you can better work with them in a partnership.

Drew McLellan:

That’s a really great point. The other thing that I encourage agency account service to understand is what is the cadence of your client’s meeting schedule? So for example, if your client has to report in on marketing activities every Thursday at two o’clock, then you want to make sure that you have your weekly update document to them that tells them where everything’s at and what’s on time and what’s on budget by the end of the day Wednesday, so that they can have time to review it and then make any changes on the progress of those jobs prior to them having to step up in front of their boss and say, here’s where we’re at with things.

Chantell Glenville:

And that’s it. I mean, I worked with an agency when I was client side who were excellent at that. They knew we had a meeting same time every week, so they prepped for that every single week,.they made sure we had everything ready for that meeting every single week. Because they knew that that was our slot. That was when we were presenting to the rest of the business, and it made our lives as clients so much easier and also stopped any embarrassment. And that’s a key thing. When agencies leave a client without the work in time or without updates or without knowing what’s going on, when they’re then talking to their bosses, it leaves them exposed to being embarrassed by not being on top of their job.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Chantell Glenville:

So the agency who does that, who works around what the client’s meeting schedules are, what their timings are and everything, they’re the ones who come out on top, because they’re the ones who actually… They’ve formed a partnership. They’ve gone, “Hey, okay, this is how you guys work. So we’ll work like that with you as well. We want to do the same as you.”

Drew McLellan:

And that leads right into something else you talk about in your book, the whole idea of agencies who stumble because they over promise and under deliver. So talk a little bit about that phenomena. Because that’s a pet peeve of mine. I’m stunned at agencies who think deadlines are optional, or that when you tell a you’re going to have something to them by end of day Thursday, they get it Friday morning or whatever it may be. So talk a little bit about that and your solutions for that.

Chantell Glenville:

I mean, it happens a lot. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, work gets delayed. These things happen. And I mean any account manager worth their salt should always add in extra time to timing plans, it goes without saying. But these things do still happen at the end of the day. And as agencies, it can be so tempting, one, to try and when you’re given tight timings in the first place to go, “Yeah, all right, we can do it, we can do it,” and crunch every bit of buffer time out of that timing plan because your client really wants it by a certain date. Or when your clients call up at the last minute and go, “Oh, I need it a day earlier,” to just to turn around and say, yes, you can do it, because especially I think people in account management in general, we tend to like to pull the magic out the bag and save the day and be a hero and show we can turn around anything in any time.

But when you over promise and under deliver, you’re just sending yourself up for a fall. Because as a baseline, just as a hygiene factor, clients expect agencies to deliver work on time. That’s not a, “You’ve done a good job, well done,” if you deliver it on time. That’s the baseline. So anything later than that and you’ve messed up, essentially. So when you go around over promising, you’re never going to come out winning from that situation. Either you manage to come out and you’ve delivered on time, so great, you’ve lived up to the baseline expectation, but you haven’t done anything wonderful, or you’re late on it, and then you’ve messed up and you start this bad relationship where the client’s then starting to get annoyed with you.

So there’s no benefit to it and it can be really hard. But if your clients are putting you under extreme time pressure, it is more than reasonable to turn around and have an honest conversation with them. Talk to them about what is feasible, what isn’t and even discuss the things where you can say, “Look, we’ll try everything we possibly can to deliver it by X, but we cannot promise it.” And show them the different parts of timing. Show them the options. Because if you don’t do that, if you just try to say yes, be the yes man, you risk actually doing more harm to the relationship than good when you don’t manage to deliver on that yes that you gave them in the first place.

Drew McLellan:

I think where it gets really complicated is when it’s the client who has delayed the timeline. But again, to your point, I’m a firm believer in rather than giving due dates, it’s X number of days from this point to that point, so that if a client takes five days to do a review process that was allotted for two, you saying to them, “Okay, look, this has pushed us back three days. We will try and make up some of that time.” It’s like the pilot who takes off late. “We’re going to try and make up some time in the air, but we get there when we get there, so understand that this delay may push back the actual delivery date.”

Chantell Glenville:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a great way to do it. Giving “it’s five days between this point and this point.” So whenever you approve it, it’s still going to be five days in between, and we will do everything we can to get better on that. But giving actual, “these are the time slots for how long those bits of the process take up front” is really helpful.

Drew McLellan:

I also think that a AEs tend to… And you alluded to this earlier in our conversation, tend to avoid difficult conversations. And I think one of the skill sets that agency owners need to interview for is the ability and willingness to go into uncomfortable conversations with an understanding it from the client’s perspective, but also being willing to say, “Look, we’re not going to be able to do this,” or, “the budget called for five rounds of revision and you’ve taken eight, so that’s going to require a change order,” or whatever it is. When you have those conversations early on and often, A, you train the client to get used to having those conversations, but B, you’re helping them understand how to be a better client.

Chantell Glenville:

Oh yeah, absolutely. If account management are doing their job well and are properly factoring how things are for the client and always having those conversations front, it should get to the stage where if the client calls up for more rounds of amends than they actually have allowed for in the budget, et cetera, or they’re doing something which will delay the timings, that they should be going in that phone call to the agency, “Okay, I need to change this again. How much extra will it be, because I know we’re out of scope now.” It should be that much awareness of it that they know what their scope is and what their scope isn’t. So it’s not a difficult conversation. There’s nothing surprising. It’s just, “Okay, well we’ve had our scope, this isn’t part of it, so we talk about it now.” But that only comes over time and over account management doing it time and time again. So it’s not a, “Oh, they’re trying to rip us off now.” That’s just how the finances work. That’s just how this situation is.

Drew McLellan:

So earlier you talked about an agency that was was really on top of things and really helped you stay informed. What makes a great agency partner? From a client’s perspective, what makes an agency an agency you couldn’t imagine ever firing?

Chantell Glenville:

So I fundamentally think there are two things to creating great client agency relationships. One is stopping doing the stuff that annoys clients, and the second is doing the stuff that takes it from good to great. I think a lot of agencies assume that they’re at the baseline of everything’s okay, but actually agencies frequently do stuff that takes them to minus numbers in that, by doing the stuff that annoys clients. And then even if you do stuff which makes the relationship great, if you’ve still got that negative going on pulling away from it, you’re not going to have a consistently good relationship. So I think as a agency you need to do both parts of that. You need to stop the behaviors that make the clients’ life harder, essentially. And then work on the things which are the things that make the client’s life easier, that’s essentially taken away the bad stuff and getting into the good stuff.

And taking it to great is when you start actively making the client’s life easier. When everything you’re doing is an agency is just… It’s almost like you’re part of the team for the client. You’re always there. The client doesn’t have to ask you for things. You already know what the client’s going to need at different times or what are going to be the important business issues coming up for them. You’ve already thought all that stuff through, and you’re thinking as if the client’s business was your business. So you’re thinking about what they need in terms of comms. Not what you’ve been told to do. You’ve been told to write a TV ad or whatever. You’re thinking about everything that might be important to the client at any moment in time, and that’s the stuff that really takes it to great. The stuff where you are actively thinking for them and helping them in their marketing planning role, essentially.

Drew McLellan:

So in the book you identify quite a list of things that agencies do that disintegrate the relationship. What’s the biggest offender of that, do you think?

Chantell Glenville:

It has to be attention to detail. I know a lot of people talk about attention detail a lot, but I mean, honestly, it’s got to be attention to detail. I have never seen anything cause so many difficulties in client agency relationships attention to detail does. And it’s amazing because it’s technically such a small thing, and yet the difficulties that arise out of it… And I know agencies always talk about, to their account management teams, “You need to get better at attention to detail,” or, “Attention to detail is really important.” But what always seems to be missing from that is explaining why it’s so important to clients, that attention to detail is so fundamental and why they care about it so much.

But the second you go client side, within a minute you know why it matters so much, and it’s because it takes your time. When agencies present work which has errors in, or typos or anything like that, it just wastes clients’ time because there’s so much more back and forth basically. And that’s the key fundamental bit. Clients are hard pushed for time. They have a lot of meetings in general. So these additional rounds of reviews they have to do because there are typos and things wears down at them over time, and it really does build up a lot of, I guess, underlying resentment towards the agency that they’re taking all of that time away from them when they could be getting on with their jobs.

Drew McLellan:

We do research every year talking to CMOs about their relationships with agencies, and what we did last year. We did one that was all about why agencies get hired and fired, and it was fascinating and horrifying to me how often the idea that typos get agencies fired or get them removed from the set of agencies I’m going to consider, that agencies are literally sending proposals and RFP responses with typos in them. And I think agencies understand in the abstract level that typos are bad, but what I think most agencies haven’t done is they haven’t built process and system around making sure that their work is detail oriented and correct.

Chantell Glenville:

Exactly. It makes an astonishing difference.

Drew McLellan:

You mentioned that clients are in a lot of meetings, and one of the things you talk about in the book is how different a client’s day is from somebody on the agency side, and that really clients don’t have a lot of time where they’re actually at their desk. Talk a little bit about that.

Chantell Glenville:

Obviously it’s different for every client, but from my experience and the experience of other people I know working client side as well, generally your day is full of back to back meetings, really. I mean, it’s not as bad if there’s not a campaign going out right at that moment, but if you’re working on a campaign, about three quarters of your day is going to be filled with meetings as a client. Especially the more senior your clients get. Just because there are so many different departments that marketing have to feed into, that marketing have to check everything’s okay with, that they’re, even in a marketing department, reliant on those other departments for making sure the product’s in place in time, they’ve done all the quality testing, et cetera, et cetera, it’s going to be out in the stores when it needs to be or on the website, whatever it is.

There are so many different bits feeding into it that marketing essentially are managing and have to be completely on top of because otherwise your agency’s going to go out with a campaign and you’ve got no product ready to launch, which isn’t going to be great. Those times you get in between those meetings to review the work from agencies are so important, and it’s so important that your agencies have lined up, when they send the work through for when you’re going to be out of those meetings, and that they’ve told you if stuff is going to be urgent coming through that day, so you know what to look for, you know when to look for it, everything like that.

Because clients don’t have a lot of time, and otherwise a client can get out of meeting where they’ve been in meetings or morning, they get out at lunchtime, they have 200 new emails in their inbox. It could take them hours to get to that one urgent email that the agency has sent through, which is why there needs to be this additional visibility there, because otherwise you’re not going to get to the top of the client’s to-do list as an agency, unless you make the client completely aware that you have something urgent, whether that’s by calling them, texting them, warning them a day in advance, sending a status email, whatever it is. They need to know these things because they don’t have the time.

Drew McLellan:

One of the things that I recommend that account folks do is that in the subject line, they, in brackets, before whatever the subject title is, they put things like urgent or just FYI or keeping you updated, whatever language they want to use, that I can, as a client, quickly scan the four emails I’ve gotten from the agency and see the one urgent, click on it, open it, and deal with it, and the others I know I can deal with over the course of the rest of the day or the week, however that plays out.

Chantell Glenville:

Yeah, absolutely. Makes a big difference.

Drew McLellan:

So you also talk a little bit about what takes an agency relationship from good to great. What of those recommendations do you think is the most important one for agency owners to have on the radar screen?

Chantell Glenville:

We talked a little bit already about getting to know the client organization as if it’s your own, which I do think is hugely important, but also as well as that, I’d say always thinking about what it is that is important to the client in terms of their communications. Rather than focusing on what the client has asked your agency to do in terms of the communications, actually, as an agency, thinking about the client’s business and thinking about all the other things that the client might have to do as part of any campaign, because it’s really easy as an agency to get a brief. Okay, all right, you got to do some TV scripts and some press. And maybe, hopefully, hopefully as an agency, you present the idea, and then you present the TV execution and the press execution.

But it’s likely that your client is probably going to put that idea across some other communications, whether that’s even emails that they send out from an internal team to their customers, whatever it is. And actually if you are the agency that factors that into your ideas, if you’re the ones who are going, “Hmm, okay, what else is important for our clients? What are the bits of that campaign that are the most trackable, whether they’re our remit or not?” And show how it might work, you show consideration for it every time. It tells the client that you understand them, that you understand that it’s about more than a TV script. That actually their business has all of this other stuff going on. You understand what’s important and that any of your ideas have to work across all of it.

And also you might find, as an agency, you end up picking up additional work over time kind just by caring that much about the client’s business. But it needs to be done just out of, “Okay, all right, this is what we think would be best for you. This is all the stuff, we’re thinking about all of it. It may not be ours, but we’re still thinking about all of it because we want to do the most effective work possible for you.”

Drew McLellan:

It always boils back down to doing the right thing for the right reasons, whether they’re going to guarantee you more income or not, almost always guarantees you more income.

Chantell Glenville:

Yeah, exactly. When you do the right thing, usually the money follows. Just focus on doing the right thing for the client in the first place and it will probably have beneficial effects for the agency anyway.

Drew McLellan:

Yep, absolutely. And it also allows you to ask your folks to think bigger and broader about the client, which if it doesn’t benefit you today, it will benefit you down the road. And as you say, what it shows the client is every agency says, “Oh, we partner with our agencies and we’re collaborative, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But this is you actually doing it.

Chantell Glenville:

Yes, exactly. It’s how you come across.

Drew McLellan:

When you think about the agencies that you worked with when you were on the client side, talk a little bit about… I think agencies suffer under the perception that their client is always thinking about firing them or looking for somebody new. How high on your priority list was that?

Chantell Glenville:

Definitely the latter. I mean, clients are busy. You’ve got loads of stuff going on. Pitching, taking your business out to get new agencies in, that takes a long time, and that’s a lot of work hours you could be spent actually working on growing your business as a client. It’s a big undertaking. So actually for clients, the default isn’t, “I want to find another agency.” The default is, “I want this agency to be great and deliver everything I need because then happy days, my life is so much easier that way.” They’re almost gunning for you to win. They’re gunning for you to do as an agency because then their life is better. It’s not a default position of, “I want to find someone else.” Those thoughts start creeping in when agencies do the stuff that annoys clients consistently, when they do the stuff that breaks down the relationship. That’s when the thoughts start crawling in.

I’d have thoughts like that start to come up when agencies would consistently slap down a bill after the job has been done which is way over budget and there’s been no warning of it before. And you start to thinking, “I can’t work like this constantly because I can’t manage my budgets if you guys aren’t going to be upfront about it.” Or when they’re constantly late and they’re not keeping you updated and you have no idea what’s going on on campaigns. That’s when, as a client, you start to think, “Oh, okay, we might need to rethink this. The relationship isn’t working at this moment in time.” But it’s not where you want your head to be in terms of being a client. You want your head to be in, “Great, they’re delivering everything I need them to so I can focus on my job properly and they’re helping me out.” That’s the ideal situation.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. I think clients want us to be successful, but I think they have a very short tolerance when we miss the mark because they’re at such risk. At the end of the day, if we don’t deliver, we get fired from the client. If don’t deliver, that client person, that person who hired us literally gets fired and can’t pay their mortgage. So they’re at great risk in terms of their trust of us. And if we violate that trust a couple times, then odds are they are going shopping, I think.

Chantell Glenville:

It’s a very different pressure at play, so yeah, it’s a much shorter fuse, I guess.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I think so, too. Okay. So if folks have been listening to us and they know that their agency needs to get better at this and they want their account service team to build those great relationships that you talk about, what are a couple things they can do… So imagine that most of our listeners are agency owners, so they may or may not have a role in account service anymore. What can they do inside their shop to elevate the game of their account service people and to make sure that they really are delivering a great relationship with those clients?

Chantell Glenville:

The first thing I would say is to focus on stopping doing the stuff that actively causes harm to the relationship. Before even thinking about taking it from good to great, focus on stopping damaging the relationship as a first point of call, which is what a lot of agencies overlook. And it’s so important to lay that consistent, good foundation in the first place. So my advice in terms of that would be, if you’re an agency owner, if you’ve worked in account service previously, you probably know all of the elements that do do damage to the client service relationship already because you’ve probably learned them through experience over the years. So I would focus on making sure you run some training for your account service teams to impart that knowledge, but make sure when you do impart it, that you don’t just tell the account service teams what they should be doing, but that you take it the stage further and you tell them what they should be doing and why.

And it’s the why that is so important in order to motivate action in the teams. They need to know why the basics essentially matter in the first place. Things like contentions to detail, why they should care that this stuff is all related to building a good client service relationship. And then for each point you talk about, why that specific thing is important and what the effects will be for your client if they don’t do it well, if they do do it well, make them actually understand what it will be like for the client, the result of the things that you’re talking about, rather than just telling people what they should be doing. So for example, if it is attention to detail you talk about, you should then, as part of that, be talking about the negative effects it will have on the client’s time if this isn’t done well, and then also giving specific advice to your account service teams as to how they can get better at that action, so that they have tangible things they can work towards going forwards.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. What else should they do? Anything else besides doing some training?

Chantell Glenville:

I think the main thing is getting… Is training in that way, but also installing it as an agency thought for account service people to always be focusing on what it would be like for the client, and encouraging your staff to go and work at the agency’s office more, go there for a week when they first start an account, or if they’re already on accounts, spending more face to face time with their clients, because that is the stuff that will fundamentally change the relationships and will then take it from good to great. Because that’s where the understanding begins, actually being in there with the clients, getting to partner with them, getting to talk to them all the time, understanding their world.

Drew McLellan:

I think in today’s technologically driven world, many AEs, especially younger ones, default to email and don’t even pick up the phone. It’s not just that they don’t see their clients face to face. They just never or talk to them. And I think that’s a dangerous habit to get into.

Chantell Glenville:

Oh yeah, absolutely. You can’t build a relationship with someone over email. Like you need to talk to people, you need to see them. You need to have that personal contact with them.

Drew McLellan:

I agree. Any last thoughts for our listeners as we wrap up?

Chantell Glenville:

I guess just make sure you don’t assume that you’re starting from baseline of everything being okay with your clients. Take a realistic look at the situation and check whether your agency is doing stuff that’s actively damaging the relationship. It’s nice to think that we’re all starting from a baseline of everything being okay, but more often than not actually there’s stuff that’s taking us into the minus numbers already that we need to fix before we go anywhere else.

Drew McLellan:

Great advice. This has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. Thanks so much for taking the time to write the book. It’s filled with insights that account service need to have. If folks want to learn more about your work or track down the book, where should they go to find you?

Chantell Glenville:

They can find the book on amazon.com, if they just type in What Clients Really Want as the search it will come up. And I’ve also set up a website related to the book called masteringaccountmanagement.com, which for provides advice and information on how to excel at account management. So it can be a great resource for agency owners, staff to go on, where people can read advice, they can even chat in a forum and ask any questions that they might be too scared to ask their bosses about and things. It’s a nice safe space for people. I’d very much suggest that for their teams, especially junior members just starting out.

Drew McLellan:

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for sharing a very unique perspective of having lived on both sides of the fence. I appreciate it a great deal. Thank you.

Chantell Glenville:

Thank you, Drew. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Drew McLellan:

Okay guys, this wraps up another episode of build a better agency. Hopefully you can take some of this back and implement it immediately in your shop. There is certainly no greater place than where the agency and the client connect where you can enhance your agency’s performance than that. So be sure that you are sharing this podcast, in particular with your account service folks, even if you don’t share all the others with them, this is full of good advice for them.

It’s common sense stuff, but I will tell you, after spending as much time as I do with account service staff in our boot camps, I will tell you that this is stuff that your folks need to hear, it needs to be reinforced by you, and it needs to be part of your agency’s culture in terms of your commitment to client service. So with that, I am out of here for a week. I will see you next week with another great guest. If you’re looking for me, best place to find me is [email protected], and I will be back next week with another guest to help you build a bigger, better, stronger agency. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of Build a Better Agency. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. While you’re there, sign up for our e-newsletter, grab our free e-book, and check out the blog. Growing a bigger, better agency that makes more money, attracts bigger clients, and doesn’t consume your life is possible here on Build a Better Agency.