What Clients Want - Post 2

Ok, so 2 days on the trot and this post a day thing for 10 days seems to be going well. 20% gone and feeling fit, here’s Insight 2 from the talk

Insight 2 - Clients spend 90% of their time on anything but outsourced marketing

When I became a Marketing Director, I expected to be immersed in working with Agencies.  Instead, I spent most of my time working on business issues - budgets, sales, targets, planning, product; anything except talking about marketing with Agencies actually.

This means that most Marketing Directors (and this is also true of any Director in a business) know their business inside out.  So the easiest way to lose the interest and respect of a Client is to swan in and try to tell them how to run their business without understanding it first.

What Clients want are business partners, not simply creative agencies.  So Agencies need to invest time in understanding the mechanics of the business, not just the communications.  The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to get the Client to run regular business update meetings for Agencies; at least quarterly if not monthly. Clients love to talk about their business and this should be simple to set up.

You’ll understand the real challenges facing a business from these meetings; competitive, supply chain, operations, product development and above all budgeting and prioritisation challenges.  Which will probably throw up even more questions that need answering strengthening a Client/Agency relationship further. 

You’ll also begin to appreciate that a business is like a living entity, expanding and contracting; its not the graceful duck swimming on a pond that you need to understand, its the frantic paddling feet under the water.  You’ll appreciate that timelines, priorities, budgets are constantly in flux, and understanding will bring insight into, rather than frustration at, a Client from an Agency perspective.

Remember, you reap what you sow. So understand the soil, the weather patterns, the predators and you’ll see what the Farmer’s problems are and be in a better position to help them.