The Great Client Partner

by Jared Belsky

  It’s all about casting. A great account manager puts the right person in the right role at the right time and in the right situation. I recommend that every client leader ask themselves three core questions before deciding on a final casting recommendation.

  Who is the throat to choke? Clients need to figure out who is in charge very quickly in a pitch. Who would be their person? Who will be their visionary and their day-to-day leader who pushes them forward? This can’t be vague. This can’t be some mash-up of a talented senior designer, a passionate CEO, and a project manager. It has to be one person. Here are some actions to take:

  Be very clear about who the leader is. Name this person at the start of the meeting and be consistent with these remarks throughout the pitch.

  Be very purposeful to make that leader at least 50 percent dedicated in the staffing model. When you have the obligation to fill out the staffing chart, be clear that the person you established as the leader at 50 percent is an allocated full-time employee or more. If you took the pain to call the person the leader only to staff them at 20 percent, you are being accidentally hypocritical. With 20 percent focus, it’s hard to be very focused. What I mean here is that in an organizational chart or Excel grid, 20 percent allocation might look fine. However, 20 percent focus is not enough to move the needle for the lead on a piece of business.

  Did you put feelings ahead of the win? The Great Client Partner has to put their team in the position to win and succeed for both the agency and client alike. This means that no casting decision should start with “I really feel that Sally should attend this big meeting because it’s critical to her morale!” This is a dangerous statement for a principled leader to make. On the surface, this feels very human and compassionate, but it actually is selfish. It puts the feelings of one team member ahead of the win for the larger team or the best outcome for the client. The leader must put the best possible team forward and not be afraid to hurt feelings on occasion. The best presenters should present, period.

  Did you over include people at the expense of intimacy? Cast for intimacy. Intimacy in this usage is about ensuring the room does not get too big. In the agency world, there is a gravitational pull to over include. It happens for good reasons, but it can be counterproductive. What typically happens is the account person decides he needs the quant, the creative, the search specialist, the AI guy, and the experienced design expert. Each invite seems like it will add value in an expert-driven society. However, what seems to happen is that too many people talk too few net moments, and there is no connection, no intimacy in the room. My recommendation is there should be no more than five to eight people in a room for a big moment or pitch.

  Casting for the “Big Meeting”

  While the pitch may only happen once or twice a year, the big meeting is far more common in the everyday work world and will partially define your reputation as a Great Client Partner. So consider these elements:

  Intimacy—Some of the best “big meetings” were small meetings. I once brought just the lead account person, a strategist, and the head of analytics to a big meeting with a large client and found this led to a greater level of intimacy in the room. People share more in small settings. Any more than five people in a room guarantees less truth sharing.

  Expertise—Bring expertise that is unexpected. If your clients know more than you do, you are not adding enough value to earn a premium.

  North Star—Every great meeting should start with a simple reflection: “What is our North Star?” Identify what you are trying to achieve. Then it should be written up on the whiteboard in the room.

  Whether it’s a big meeting or a pitch meeting, be sure to align on what you want to accomplish. The one thing I always remember is what my old boss, Jason Trevisan, told me. “Clients are rarely both surprised and delighted at the same time.”

  What did he mean by this? Well, advertising and marketing folks love the surprise. By this, I mean that marketing and services folks alike love the grand reveal and the high that comes from unveiling some new innovation, idea, or campaign. They love to build up tension and then pay it off with some grand ending and solution. This is an unnecessary challenge, however. If you are too good at creating the tension, you need to be even better at selling the solution in order to get past the distraction caused by the presentation.

  Instead, the best two things to do are: (1) align the meeting with the client or prospect, making sure you both know and agree on what needs to be accomplished, and (2) tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them. This is the classic rule for presentations, both for pitches and the big meeting.

  Three Habit Changes

  In the next meeting you are running, take a body language inventory and pay attention to what the client is doing, what their faces look like, and how they’re holding themselves. To maximize engagement, take risks of casting, but make sure everyone is set up for success and has a very specific role.

  Avoid the grand reveal and bring clients along with your work and thinking. Avoid the surprise and delight mentality.

  Be the master by focusing on casting to win, not casting for morale wins.

  Your FROM → TO personal goal:

  FROM a leader who thinks only about the content of the pitch or big meeting, TO someone who obsesses about the characters in the meeting.

  Lesson 16

  16. Not Everything Is a Fire

  “Use a pencil instead of a space pen whenever you can.”

  —Kevin Geraghty, VP, Data Analytics at AvalonBay Communities

  The 80/20 rule, as it is most commonly known, is actually shorthand for an existing and well-documented concept called the Pareto Principle (see the diagram below). It is the idea that 20 percent of the effort can get you 80 percent of the results.

  People are perhaps more familiar with looking at this like you can get to 80 percent of the right answer and that, often, it’s not worth the extra effort to get to 90 percent or 100 percent. The notion being that, in many situations, 80 percent is good enough and that it’s time to move on.

  Of course, this is not always the case. One of my oldest and best friends, Jordan Schecter, is in oncology. I would think his patients would all agree that 100 percent accuracy is damned important. Alas, for us folks in the services business, we tend not to deal in life and death scenarios like he does, so 80 percent is often a golden rule. It’s about harnessing efficiency and productivity for the best outcomes.

  Having a good grasp of the 80/20 rule is a great thing because it allows you to know how to prioritize your tasks. Too often, client leaders seek perfection, which can be counterproductive. In seeking perfection, client leaders also tend to see fires where in fact there is only smoke or even just a bit of heat.

  A great story that brings this 80/20 rule to light is that of the space race between Russia and the United States. This was a very heated and competitive time for both nations. While the US was doing very well in its conquest of space, there were always new obstacles to overcome. One such famous example is that ballpoint pens didn’t work in the absence of a gravitational pull. American scientists dealt with this by spending a reported $12 million inventing a new pen that could write upside down. For such a small instrument, the thing was a scientific marvel, solving all the problems introduced by the twentieth-century environment. Meanwhile, the Russians also came up with a solution—they used a pencil. It was free and elegant. The space pen, meanwhile, can be bought for a few dollars at the Smithsonian gift shop. The Great Client Partner thinks about the pencil solution before jumping to the pen solution.

  A Great Client Partner has to figure out how to use 80/20 thinking to avoid creating a nonsustainable, reactive, driven team of firefighters instead of thinkers. You have to calibrate a filter that is an ongoing, human cost-benefit analysis tabulation. It’s not about what you could do, but rather what you should do, all re
lated to what else you now can’t do as a result of this new thing you actually do.

  The issue is that, all too often, due to stress and time issues, we just run from fire to fire. Your credibility as an account person hinges on your Accurate Fire Prediction Ratio (AFPR—a keenly important term I just invented—don’t fret if you can’t find it on Google yet).

  Your AFPR is a simple equation: the number of times you yell fire divided by the number of actual fires that are verified and believed to be fires by your team and clients. If your ratio falls too high, your credibility will be flushed, and you will not be able to move your team forward. Your earliest learning of this AFPR concept is the childhood story of the boy who cried wolf. It’s a universal lesson yet so hard for so many to adhere to.

  There are common situations that can tempt your AFPR into the danger zone. However, if you apply the 80/20 rule to these common situations, you can be a hero. Let’s discuss perhaps the most classic and frequent AFPR ruiner of all time. We’ll call it “The Good Deck vs. the Perfect Deck.”

  In most cases, a deck that you have to create for a client will be seen for twenty minutes and then never thought of again. Listeners remember your words more often than slides or remember even just a feeling based on your actions. Your job as the account lead is to ensure that the deck plays its role in being a communication aide. Your other job, based on that, is to know when good is good enough. If it’s 10:00 p.m. the night before a presentation, and you have your team perfecting slides instead of focusing on chemistry, practice, and delivery, then you are violating the 80/20 rule and have scored a very low AFPR.

  Over time, you should get good enough to run a simple lens through your head. However, in the early days, I would recommend a simple chart to help keep your AFPR high and the trust in your leadership skills high. Consider this simple rubric:

  Task

  What is really at stake?

  What grade does the task require?

  Does the client ever notice perfect execution on this?

  What are the odds of a B hurting the outcome?

  How many hours should I invest?

  Present at a meeting

  The client could be expecting greater detail

  B+

  Rarely

  10%

  50

  The only wrong rubric is to go with your emotions and have no rubric at all. The true key is to use some type of hard metrics, so you are not tempted to use your gut.

  So that is the lens for the first part of the challenge to Great Client Partners—knowing how to prioritize tasks. It should help you think of how to mitigate problems.

  But let’s get to the more interesting part. How do you think more structurally about when to go for it and get your team to rally around you—to really go all the way and believe in the pitch, the cause, the campaign, and the work you need them to do?

  Great Client Partners earn the belief of their team and their clients based on a combination of a few things: (1) the reasons and justification provided for this belief; (2) the likelihood, or odds, of a good outcome; (3) the level of desirability of that outcome in the first place—and all that is divided against the costs associated with pursuing that belief, whether it’s a financial cost or other resources.

  A simple prioritization grid like the one below is very simple and always in fashion. It simply allows you to put forth three priorities, the associated investment request, and the thought of outcome, in ordered fashion. Clear, simple, and easy to use in any situation.

  Opportunity

  Description

  Investment Request

  Projected Outcome, Timing, Probability

  A

  Upgrade senior analytics capability on team

  Additional $20K in salary investment to upgrade resource

  High impact: client will appreciate the expertise, resulting in expanded analytics remit and 30% increase in project scope

  B

  Lobby to get CRM and Ad-tech help for the upcoming quarterly business review

  100 hours of a CRM expert

  Earn the trust in the CRM space, which is increasingly important to the client

  C

  Request that the chairman of the agency travel to visit the client

  Time, flight, and date for chairman to visit client

  Goodwill

  Create and use lenses and rubrics to fully understand the multiple demands and outcomes inherent in each challenge.

  Three Habit Changes

  Use some type of lens or chart to really analyze what is at stake and to determine how much to invest. Apply math and odds to determine what is truly at risk before determining the appropriate investment into the work.

  Carefully consider what you know about your client and their specific personalities when evaluating each task in a project.

  Ask your team and yourself to think in terms of the 80/20 rule.

  Your FROM → TO personal goal:

  FROM a leader that is always in fire-drill mode, TO a leader that judiciously decides when to light a fire.

  Lesson 17

  17. Help People Find Their Superpower, Then Accentuate It

  “Everyone has a superpower.”

  —Kembrel Jones, Deputy Vice Dean, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvannia

  Client service organizations tend to emphasize the negative in employee reviews. Don’t follow that path. Great leaders realize there is more leverage in accentuating the great. Every person you lead has a superpower, some signature strength, that makes them amazing. It’s your job to figure out what that superpower is and nurture it and get optimal value from it.

  Meet Billy

  He is the account supervisor on your team, and he proudly works for you. He is twenty-seven years old and talented. He very badly wants to get promoted. He is enthusiastic, smart, and has real potential. Like any young employee, he has some strengths, but also has some weaknesses.

  Let’s assume that Billy is really strong in his skills of persuasion. On a typical one-to-ten scale, let’s give him a score of eight. He is charismatic and an excellent presenter. It’s clear to you and the leadership that if that skill of persuasion was nourished, it could be a major value-driver for the organization, the client, and Billy himself.

  But what folks rarely stop to do is pause and ask themselves a key question: how valuable is this strength that Billy has? We rush to assign a value on the classic one-to-ten scale, but we rarely dwell on the significance of that numerical assignment and how, as a leader of men and women, you really do need to understand it because it shapes your understanding of your team and, ultimately, your team members’ understanding of themselves.

  If you use the first chart below (Exhibit A, the Unit Value chart), you can see that the numbers assigned take on a nonlinear, almost exponential form to them. To be clear, these values I have assigned are for illustrative purposes and are meant to convey simply that as someone gains more expertise, the value they in turn produce increases exponentially (rapidly and scales) in step-change fashion, not just in small increments. This is why someone who is a ten when it comes
to presentation skills is not simply two times more valuable than a five but rather five times more valuable. What it means, for example, is that if you can get him from an eight to a nine—from great to greater—you will create and drive twenty units of value for the organization. For Billy, getting him from an eight to a nine will not be easy, but it’s very possible and within his constitution and abilities to achieve it. Furthermore, that move from an eight to a nine creates massive value to your team and organization.

  Now, let’s assume Billy is a mere four in organizational skills. His call notes are solid, but not always delivered on time. He occasionally needs a reminder or two on random assignments. If you as his manager can get him to a five, you will only score an incremental ten points of value for your organization. And let’s face it, it will be much more difficult and take dramatically more time than getting his presentation skills to a nine. For Billy, focusing on his organization shortcomings would be going against the grain.

  So why all this math and curve illustration? The point is to show you that it’s important to be probabilistic in how you evaluate talent. Take yourself out of the feel business and replace it with a more balanced approach. When you reevaluate Billy through a more math-based lens, it’s very clear that getting him from an eight to a nine is the single best investment you can make, accentuating his superpowers.

  Exhibit A: Unit Value Chart

  Rank

  Unit Value