Pre-Meeting Planning – Agency Style

The skills that make you successful with local direct accounts are the skills that will help you be successful with agencies. Too often, we think the agency knows everything, doesn’t need our help and we are simply there to facilitate the placement of the advertising. Some agencies may treat you this way, but many of them need more help than just buying.

Here’s another skill we’ve shared that is critical to the agency relationship- and image-building process. Do your homework before the meeting. Look at their website, check out LinkedIn profiles, find out where the people you’re dealing with used to work, clients they currently work with or have worked within the past. Look at what they typically buy and any case studies on their websites that show the effectiveness of their services for clients. This will give you a glimpse of what they are proud of and where they see their strengths.

If you visit any agency website – we’ll use FCB.com as an example. You’ll find a section for Our Work, where they highlight the work and the clients they are most proud of. You can see the diversity of account types, diversity of projects and you start to get a feel for what’s important to this agency. Next is the Who We Are section of the website. Here you can see that their overarching theme is never finished. They believe a brand’s story is never finished. What a great philosophy and information to know about building long-term campaigns and relationships with the agency. They even share with you their strategy for developing a brand. Next on that page is the leadership of the agency. Each of them has a downloadable bio that shares some of their success stories and their areas of focus.

Next along the top is their Office Locations, and you can see FCB is a global agency. Next, they have a News Section that highlights newsworthy events that they have been involved in, initiatives they are proud of, or current causes they are supporting. Along the bottom of the website are their social media links.

Technology has made the process of researching agency clients so much easier. With a few minutes invested on the agency’s website, you can see how you can develop a profile of what’s important to the agency in general, and you can start developing thoughtful questions about the account they are working in your market, so you can assist them.

As we shared in the Radio Marketing Professional course, sadly, the majority of sellers don’t take the time to look at a client’s website before calling them. We fear that might even be worse when it comes to agencies. Hopefully, you can see the value of investing a bit of time on their website so that you can not only ask intelligent questions but demonstrate your concern and interest in working with them. Maybe this weekend you could check out the websites of some of the agencies you work with.

Happy Friday!

Jeff Schmidt is the SVP of Professional Development. You can reach him at Jeff.Schmidt@RAB.com. You can also connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.