saying no is a powerful service to offer clients
February 23rd, 2010 • posts i've written
Sometimes saying no is the best solution for our clients and for ourselves.
Engagements end in many ways, but they all start with a conversation. And conversations are a great way to suss out whether or not the human being in front of you is temporarily insane.
The role of the modern brand manager breeds insanity. I think Lisa Bradner of Forrester Research makes the case evident in her report, Adaptive Brand Marketing:
clearly brand managers have cause for finding themselves overwhelmed
In a crisis of reality, brand managers transfer the pressure over to the agency and the agency begrudgingly takes their check. Clients will easily admit that something is broken, but it’s not their problem. And agencies will refer to lights that need to stay lit.
Instead of this is why you’re fat… this is why you’re both dysfunctional, unhappy, and hemorrhaging people and/or money. And I very sincerely, and gently, want to help coax you back to health.
Use these questions during that initial conversation with the client to suss out temporary insanity:
- What’s the fundamental problem needing to be solved?
- What’s the objective of this project? Is it measurable? Is it attainable?
- What’s the timeline? What or whom is driving it?
- Who’s pushing this at the brand and will they help or hinder us?
- What resources are available from the brand-side to make this successful? (money, time, and attention)
In addition, you should also ask yourself, is this what we do well, what we want to do, and what we want to be paid for? While it’s true that money is required to keep the lights on, what kind of business are you keeping the lights on for?
Saying “no” sends a powerful message to your client. If communicated the right way, “no” means that you’re unwilling to build a business around projects that do a disservice to their organization. Taking that check means you’re alright with perpetuating a broken system, profiting from it, while simultaneously harming the business. Certainly, some agencies can and do make this work their sole profit center, but their time is consumed looking for a new client to replace the one they just lost. You can spot these agencies by the size of their new business department.
“No” also sends a powerful message to your employees. Agencies and organizations have an obligation to create a sustainable environment where the best people can do their best work and be recognized for it. When clients force you to become a reactive organization, you lose this environment and possibly, your best people. And it’s almost impossible to recover either.
With the pace of changing technologies and client needs, now more than ever, agencies cannot afford to say ‘Yes’ to every project. Your team needs to learn skills they don’t currently have and you should be pursuing industries and opportunities outside your current client portfolio instead of catering to the momentary needs of a single master. And chances are quite good that if you have a client that makes a continual habit of these requests (and possesses a structure that reinforces the behavior), they themselves have a difficult future ahead; one that you might not want to hitch yourself to.
Ultimately, if you’re faced with saying “no” to a client, you’re probably being asked to solve the wrong problem. The better partner will work with the brand manager to relieve the underlying cause of the stress, instead of focusing myopically on the destructive effect.
Offering a solution is always the best way of saying something is broken.
Related posts:
- apple buys music streaming service lala
- me, me, me, me, me, me
- responding to the agency of the future
5 Responses (add your comment)
-
In my last corporate job, the company had an official, written “Yes Policy.” The essence was that, as employees, we had to say “yes” to any client request, no matter how wrongheaded or counterproductive.
Behind the scenes, we always called it the “Yes, But” policy, because you were also obligated to explain the ramifications of the client request–extra costs, delayed deadlines, etc.
Saying “no”–as you say, politely and in the right way–would’ve been the smarter move in many cases, though I suppose that the yes-with-unappealing-strings-attached achieved a similar endgame.
-
reeegan February 23, 2010at 5:23 pm
totally, wholeheartedly agree. I think this is a bit more systemic than just a philosophy change in an industry though. Our particular industry has been built on these types of projects for a very long time, so saying “no”, requires some people admitting they don’t have a function or purpose (or it doesn’t require their full work day), which as you can expect is a difficult thing to do. I’m reminded of the Smykowski character in Office Space… “I have people skills damnit!”
-
Clients and agencies need greater fluency in defining marketing problems and their relationship to business issues. The more that client and agency options fragment and broaden ,it becomes critical to be able to set out marketing strategies, metrics, cengagment architectures and audience plans much more clearly, much earlier. This is increasingly emerging as a core need for younger “connections/account/technology” strategists. Its no longer about being the third member of the creative team but about getting to back to what planning was always supposed to be about- the optimum links between a business and consumers.
been lurking around your site for a bit, Bud; completely agree with saying no to clients when it doesn’t actually answer their business problems, and doesn’t take their business anywhere spectacular.
My own focus on work has been from the beginning about getting into clients’ businesses – it’s important to say “No”, true; but you certainly get a whole lot more leeway when you’re proactively helping shape their business strategy from the start.
Some clients may not be so enthusiastic at first – but as that second chart showed, and as experience says – they’ll be more than happy to have you on board if they think it’ll help them and their companies grow.