Posts Tagged ‘business devlopment’

Finally Firming Up

We received the latest edition of AdAge today in our P.O. Box and I read with interest the article “Fed-Up Shops Pitch a Fit at Procurement.” A little while ago I wrote a post about how law firms were standing up for themselves and saying “if you want to pay less, that’s fine, then just don’t expect the top tier of our talent.” It appears that agencies are starting to do the same in negotiations with potential clients during the pitch phase. According to AdAge, The watch word between agencies after these budget sessions with procurement people is “don’t cave.” As the AdAge article mentions agencies (though, from the deals they sign to close a piece of business you’d never know it) are in this business to make a profits just as much as our clients are. We don’t expect them to sell their products at a loss, they should not expect us to do it either. If we don’t value our services and charge valuable rates, our clients won’t value them either.

We may not be saving lives here — though sometimes our work does, tangentially — but we are professionals who bring  know-how, years of experience and insight to issues, problems, trends and best practices around marketing and communications. We are not a commodity, nor are our services. If clients, large and small, want to regard advertising and marketing in a commodotized fashion, then I say let them — and let them work with folks who regard it the same way. Get back to me when you see the results.  In my experience the jobs that go worst are the jobs in which someone has decided to meet a potential client’s budget expectations rather than sell the best program for the client’s business needs. Stooping to make the sale is a recipe for disaster that sets the wrong tone from the get-go. It’s an incredible misjudgment on the part of the sales force. If you undersell yourself at the start in the hopes of raising your rates and gaining money back down the line, “fugghedaboutit,” as they used to say in Carroll Gardens.

Last week I was in a conversation  with a colleague and we were discussing this very topic. At the time, when I mentioned my hope that we — the ad industry — would begin to finally stand up for ourselves, he said “it’s tough, because there’s always someone willing to do a job for next-t0-nothing.” I didn’t, and still don’t disagree — though it pains me as a small agency owner. Perhaps this latest bit of news from the pitch wars is good news for the industry. Like the lawyers we need to stand up for ourselves. We can work for cheap rates if we put our B-teams on a job, if that’s what the client wants. We can scale back wish lists. Deliver fewer features and functionality. Do fewer rounds of review. Help our clients to understand the intricacies of the review process. As some commenters below the article state, some client side businesses are hurting, but agencies are in dire straits too. Somewhere, amidst the carnage, the two sides need to come together and find common ground. We do need one another, but the client/agency relationship has grown abusive and nasty over the past few years. Many of the agency-side issues come from agency’s general lack of a spine. It’s nice to see spines hardening. Kudos to the big shops. It’s high time, though maybe too late, that we tried to regain some ground.

The Dog Star, Sirius

“The dog days of summer” get their name because once upon a time Sirius, the Dog Star, used to rise at the same time as the sun during the hottest days of summer between early July and early September. Sirius no longer rises at the same time as the sun at this time of year (a result of precession, and, if my understanding of the latter is true, then it will be true again in about 25,000 years, give or take a millennium) but the term has stuck to describe this time of year. The ancient Romans and Greeks attributed the heat of these months to the anger of Sirius and they believed that this was a particularly evil time of year. While I would not go so far as to say that this time of year is evil — well, maybe I might — it certainly is a challenging time of year.

Whereas the ancients dealt with drought and potential crop devastation (still a reality for the modern agrarian) we in the small business world deal with another kind of drought — the vacation induced kind. Vacation, no doubt is brought on by another malady that the ancients associated with this time of year: sloth. During the spring and early summer we couldn’t respond fast enough to RFPs but since early July things have been quiet. The pipe was thin. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we are not alone. Colleagues at other shops are saying the same thing — “kinda quiet,” “a bit brutal out there” etc.. Contacts in other industries and professions are also letting us know that things are slow. The new business pipeline is key for many reasons. The obvious reason is it’s nice to be in the hunt for money. Another reason is that when you are pursuing it’s much easier to be confident about the future and keep the energy that you need to get a business off the ground.

All of this said, however, no sooner did July end than prospects started to look up. We live & die by our pipeline and it seems to be filling in again, pretty nicely. All one can ask for is the opportunity to connect. Now that the dog days are on the wane (though today’s weather would suggest otherwise) their attendant sloth seems to be diminishing as well — vacation season is winding down. It’s getting easier to connect and pursue and get in the hunt. Next year, hustling harder through late spring and early summer will help to allay some of this dog day slow down. If it doesn’t, I could always do what the ancients did: sacrifice a brown dog to Sirius, though that could turn into a PR nightmare.