Marketing firms do this all the time. Most of them don’t put it front and center, instead describing what they’ll do for a client and then giving them a price (e.g., $140,000). But then the hourly rate will sneak into the small print when they talk about what will happen during scope creep: “After seeking your prior approval, we will bill additional work beyond the scope of this estimate at $xxx per hour.”
Here’s why you don’t want to talk about your hourly rate:
I recently keynoted a conference on UX and before and after taking the stage I made a point of asking as many of your clients the same very specific questions about how they hire agencies. Two newer trends quickly became apparent, and it would be good to keep these in mind.
You’ve had some new business success recently and now it’s time to staff for it. You might be too quick to hire people, and when you do hire, you may be hiring the wrong ones. So let’s see if I can help you out a little with some principles that might preserve the momentum at your agency and keep you out of trouble:
What do you do with smaller clients, especially the legacy ones? The acquisition cost is behind you, but should they occupy a spot on the roster? It's one thing to hire for additional capacity when you land a new client, but there's also a good argument for cleaning out your client base and freeing up existing capacity first.
Start by getting all the data together that you need, which is primarily cost accounting. If principals and key leaders aren't participating in the timekeeping system, estimate their time to cover that. This is important because legacy clients have outsized relationships with principals because of the way accounts were handled in the past, before you grew. Next, score each client in five categories:
I love it when an agency tells me about their sophisticated clients. They make an agency better primarily for four reasons:
You are very smart people, and so I can make some bullet-point observations without much explanation and still be helpful to you. Read these and see if they ring true to you:
I consult with one new agency every week through our TBR, and a question that comes up regularly is how to transition a new client from the sales team to the account team. Here's how to do it well.
As a student of positioning, I've grudgingly noted that many very poorly positioned firms are doing well. The common thread is that they are confident, which prospective clients sense and are drawn to. If you lack that confidence, consider the two ways normally available to fix it.
The first is your Mommy telling you how great you are. A parent's job is to believe in their kid in spite of any lack of evidence to support that. My parents believed that I could do anything, and we still believe that our kids could do anything. But that matters more when you're young. And besides, I often believe in my clients' ability more than they do, but it doesn't matter. They don't believe me because I'm not their Mommy. (tweet this)
So in your case, we have to default to the only other reliable method of confidence-building, and that....
You have something your client needs--how do you deliver that effectively? Here are the six best avenues to deliver your expertise to an agency prospect or client:
The mandate for working together, agency and client, is effectiveness. How do you work together and separately for that to happen? What does each side bring to the table? How can you be an expert but still require the client in order to create this magic?
How you handle this interplay determines your impact, your compensation, and how much they appreciate you. Here is how the best agencies do it:
Late last year, Creative Mornings (Atlanta) asked me to present some thoughts on this subject to 400 creatives. They were kind enough to capture and edit the video, which I think might be worth watching. If I may, consider watching this with some of your staff--it's about 25 mins long.
In essence, I posit that you start with competence, then move to cross over to something else, and that's when you then create. How do you change your world? It's not through your work, likely. The safest prediction is that you'll impact the people around you…by just being competent. By doing your job, raising their game, and explaining humanity through your actions. To do this, you tame the genetic A.D.D, relax a moment, and realize that it's not death to simply do your job for a few years.
After you've done that, you must leave things behind—strengths, even—to form the next level of competence. Your ongoing impact comes from abandoning those strengths. In the process, life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself. And the process of creating yourself often means leaving part of yourself behind, rather than finding yourself, like the process of new growth in the world around you. It's using an opportunity from a position of strength.
Where are you in the process of creating yourself? How much do you really know? What is it that you contribute? Do you wonder about the worthiness of the entire marketing industry? How do you place yourself in an industry where most of what you do is bullshit?
I think it's an interesting presentation, and there were some good questions at the end.
You can download a PDF of the presentation and watch the video.
Sometimes it's helpful to step back from all of the positioning and service offering differentiation we play around with and get back to a basic question: what is it that clients are really buying from your agency? It's two things.
