Month: March 2019

I’d like to share an anecdote that illustrates one of the many reasons to hire an agency.

One of our newer clients has a problem. I’ll call this client Acme Corp (the names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

Acme Corp is a first-class brand, a world-wide leader in its field. However, Acme’s long-time dominance has them, I think, a little bit on the defensive. They’ve not had to innovate super hard, due to the incumbency of their dominant position. So now they are counter-punching as this incumbency is eroded by hungry upstarts.

In a meeting with the board next month, we – Mason, the agency – are going to surface one specific strategy that will help Acme increase incremental revenue by – we estimate – 10%, at no incremental cost.

The issue is that we, Mason, are not supposed to be in the silo where the fix for this particular strategy lives. So we are going to piss some people off, frankly, when we surface this.

And that is one virtue of working with an agency: we have seen this problem more times than any one company has, so we are able to see it super-quick, and implement a solution. Most-importantly, because we have 40 clients, we can afford to piss someone off a little bit. It’s part of our job to offer these solutions, and we can do it in feather-ruffling way because A) we have a solution in our back pocket and B) although we’d hate to lose this client? We’d survive.

Put simply, one reason to hire an agency, is to have someone on call to tell you hard truths you don’t want to hear – – – as long as they provide a solution.

I wanted a four-foot long sign of our logo, big and bright, so that when you get off the elevator, our logo is the first thing you see.

So I went to Google, did a search, submitted the specs to five websites, and gave a budget of $1,000.

Exactly one of the five people I wrote, wrote me back.  Well actually that’s not true: I got autoresponders from two.  So that stat breaks down as follows:

• two firms ignored me

• two firms sent me an autoresponder and never followed up

• one firm sent me back an actual quote, and left their number to call back

Guess who I bought from? The one who gave me a quote!

I think about this, only because I am 100% sure that if I talked to the other four sales teams, they would insist “Yes, we have auto-responders.  Yes, we follow up real quick.”

I would challenge you – or maybe, challenge you to challenge your agency – to audit the competition and have a hard conversation about what those competitors are doing that you are not. Be prepared to have an open conversation around self-improvement.