What you’ll read:
- Everything you need to know to foster healthy relationships with your agency.
The modern CMO has many responsibilities, and most times it would be nearly impossible to handle everything in-house. Whether your team is unable to meet specific needs, their bandwidth is full, or there’s a gap in expertise, you’ll need to bring in an outside agency to help out. But CMOs should remember that managing client-agency relationships is not the same as leading your team.
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside
As someone who has played the role of client lead and agency rep, I’ve learned that managing a client-agency relationship is quite different from hiring and leading an in-house marketing team.
As head of marketing, here are a few ways you can make the most of your agency relationship:
First, hire the right agency
There are as many different types of agencies as there are types of marketing. You may be working with an ad agency, PR agency, content marketing agency, SEO agency, creative agency, media buying agency, development agency, or some combination of all of these and more. Once you know what type of agency or agencies you need, ask yourself the following before jumping into a relationship with them:
- Have they worked for similar companies in the past? (Hopefully.) And do they work for similar and potentially competitive companies now? (Hopefully not.)
- How will success be measured? How will they provide reporting against your KPIs?
- Who will be on the team, and how much of their time will you get? Do they have relevant experience?
- What expectations do they have of you, and what responsibilities will you have?
- How transparent are they going to be about their processes?
- Do they share your same values? Do they value boldness and risk-taking, while you are more conservative? Do they value teamwork and collaboration? What other values are important to you?
Onboarding an agency
Once you’ve chosen your agency, it’s time to bring them up to speed. You have hopefully laid out your objectives and strategies during the proposal and get-to-know-you stages, and the agency has laid out their intended scope of work. Now that the contract is signed and you’re ready to start working together, it’s time to kick things off on the right foot. You’ll want to:
- Introduce your team: Host a conference call–or series of conference calls, depending on the size of your organization–to introduce the agency to anyone and everyone in your company who you think could be a resource for them. This likely includes at least one representative from every team in your marketing department, as well as people from the sales, product, customer support, engineering, and other teams, not to mention the executive staff! The more perspectives and viewpoints you can provide your agency with, the better they’ll understand your business.
- Collateral review: Inundate your agency with every piece of sales and marketing collateral you have–every pitch deck, sales sheet, creative brief, messaging framework, planning document and anything else you can think of. They’ll want to get as much background as they possibly can.
- Establish workflows: Be sure to establish up front how you and your agency will work together. How often will you meet? Who will be on the calls? Who will manage what? What will each party be responsible for? What channels of communication will you use? What if there’s an emergency?
Remember, it’s a partnership
Agencies can’t work in a vacuum.
They need clients to set the creative vision, offer useful feedback, and keep everyone apprised of internal milestones. Most importantly, clients need to tell agencies about the audience for projects and give them enough in-house data to create the best possible deliverables.
For these reasons, it helps to approach agencies as partners. They are not just the executor of your vision; they are vital collaborators helping you achieve your goals. Communicate with each other, share ideas and perspectives, help each other be more effective — and know when to step back and let everyone do their job. After all, when the agency succeeds, the client succeeds, and vice versa.
Hold formal reviews
Every partnership will change over time — hopefully for the better — and agency relationships are no exception. Eventually, you’ll find reasons to adjust your scope, perhaps to address changing priorities or assign new responsibilities. And that’s great! Go with the flow! But you should have a formal process that lets all parties have input.
At a minimum, you’ll need regular check-ins with agency contacts to make sure everything’s running smoothly. Beyond that, CMOs should probably host a formal review every quarter to review milestones and plan next steps. However, if a project starts to go off the rails, don’t be afraid to start this process earlier — the sooner you lock down a problem, the better.
Agencies are invaluable resources that expand your available expertise and help you bring projects to completion. CMOs used to working internally, however, may need to adjust their leadership styles and processes. The good news is that if you facilitate communication and build a solid professional relationship, the rewards for both parties will exceed what you could do alone.