Why do agencies get themselves into these situations where they feel they have to take work on onerous terms, where they have to put up with procurement’s powerplay moves and where they have no power to affect price?
At the highest level of pricing centralization and, I believe, value-and-profit creation, here’s how account leaders and a value council should work together
Blair and David analyze and then look beyond the requests for reassurance potential clients make during the late stage of a sale to address their underlying motivations.
Let’s try on the idea of you being as ruthlessly discerning with your prospective clients, if a little kinder in your language. What are the questions you would like to know in advance of working with a client to determine if this relationship is going to work?
It’s been common for a long time for agencies to kick off a new client engagement with a workshop of some form. Sometime in the last two years, however, clients started to suggest to agencies that instead of pitching for free they would pay them to workshop some ideas. It sounds good on the surface, but is it better than pitching?
David re-reads the 2nd chapter of Blair’s first book, leading to a discussion about how sales people have to choose between either presenting to clients or being present to them.
It’s early January. My phone rings. It’s Sue, a former client I spoke with two weeks earlier. She had called to share she was leading a new firm and they were growing like mad. She needed our help again. I had always liked Sue. We did really good work for her and she’s a straight
But while I may be an expert, I’m far from a perfect salesperson. I let him distract me from the big picture with his incessant questioning. I miss one particularly potent chance to drive home our differentiation. I don’t handle the value conversation all that well, but instead, I jump right to the topic of prices. Oops.
“We never pitch.” It was a lie. We pitched all the time but I was getting tired of it. I’d seen this film before and I knew how it ended. I wanted to try to change the ending, even if I didn’t know what should come after my small act of defiance.
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