What's the key to a great agency relationship? What are the tell signs for a high performing agency partner? We pick the brains of Account Director Vicky Pester on agency maturity.
Whether you’re currently working with an agency and aren’t sure if they’re delivering value, or if you’re in the market for a new agency and are evaluating the right fit, here are 5 signs that the agency you’re speaking to is mature and ready to create a long term and productive partnership.
An early sign that you’re speaking to a mature agency is that they’re inquisitive. They care enough about your business to want to clarify your objectives, fill gaps in their knowledge and build context around the problem to be solved.
For agencies responding to tender situations, the quality of the questions they ask is a key differentiator between them and their competitors. This should be true of any client agency engagement, not just during the tendering process.
A surprisingly common misconception is that agencies are the experts and thus their job is to know and deliver answers without any research. Of course, there’s an element of truth to this. Your agency should know the right discovery methods to use to uncover relevant insights that inform better decision making and combine this with their own experience and intuition. But an agency that forgoes research under the guise of having all of the answers is an immature agency that, more than likely, is charging you to rollout a ready-made cookie cutter solution which research poses a risk to.
A close cousin of believing you have all the answers is not showing the client anything until it’s ‘finished’.
Since every dynamic project has known, unknown and emergent requirements to cater for, a mature agency will involve you in the process such that you’re empowered to apply your business wisdom to the act of shaping the solution. And they’re willing to disappoint you if what they show you early on isn’t everything you expect it to become. knowing that your feedback along the way will lead to a solution that more closely aligns with your expectations in the long run.
A good project is often seen as one that gets delivered on time and doesn’t see you crawling back to the business sponsor begging for more budget. But what about the benefits that the project was meant to deliver. Sometimes remaining focused on those benefits, rather than dogmatically following a plan, can alter the trajectory of a project for the better.
A mature agency will clarify the business goals and expected benefits early on, find ways to deliver those benefits quickly, measure and report back on the benefits and use your not-yet-met goals as the basis for continuous improvement.
Lastly, a mature agency accepts responsibility.
I’m proud to say that Everything Connected enjoys long standing relationships with our clients, many lasting five years or more and some lasting a decade or more. Agency client relationships are like cat years so five years is a long time.
But I can’t think of a single one of those relationships that hasn’t required us to apologise for our mistakes at some stage. Apologising for our mistakes isn’t admitting weakness - it’s accepting responsibility and valuing the relationship over the issue at hand.
In all cases, our willingness to own the problem has not only built trust but also taught us valuable lessons that prevent those same mistakes from happening again.
The principle of “owning it” has become one of our core brand values and underpins our name, which represents the formula applied to every successful client agency relationship.
If you want to connect with Vicky or any of the Everything Connected team to GET IN TOUCH
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