While it’s very important to carefully select your vendors, it’s equally important to be a good client, says “The Marketing Assassin,” Rene Power, who works with UK companies to advance their marketing and sales efforts. Here is his take on how to be a good client:

1. Write down what you want. Marketing agencies will go the extra mile for clients that are fair and know what they want, says Power. “Don’t expect your agency to fathom what you want from a sketchy brief,” he cautions. “This results in unclear ground, unchecked expectations and problems in your relationship.”
2. Review and dumb down what you want, so what you get is categorically what you want. “Nobody wants to spend time working on the wrong thing,” says Power.
3. Make yourself available. Don’t assume completing your brief is the end of your job as a client, says Power. “Good partners will have a ton of questions regardless of how thorough you think your brief is — and you should encourage it and answer them all,” he advises.
4. Hire someone with a track record. “If you can’t settle on one agency, select two but do the decent thing and give them both a paying gig so they have something to invest in,” says Power. “You’ll get better end deliverables.” Agencies, he notes, rightly despise pitches as a necessary evil that gives away time/resources and creative ideas with no guarantee of resulting business and no protection of their IP.
5. Be prepared to pay the going rate — or a rate relative to the service, resources, and value on offer.
6. Don’t make unreasonable ‘creatively stifling’ demands on your agency partner. “Remember why you are outsourcing this specialist requirement in the first place,” says Power.
7. Celebrate milestones throughout the course of the project and don’t just wait for the end result. “Doing this brings the team closer together and encourages everyone to work harder and smarter,” Power explains.
8. Manage the internal communication of what you are doing externally. “This ensures that everyone from your sales teams to the guys who answer the phones and make deliveries will understand who you are, what you stand for, and what you are trying to communicate,” Power says — adding that too many organizations fail at this critical task.
9. Support your agency with recommendations, testimonials, and referrals if they have done an excellent job. “All good agencies work on the maxim of only being as good as their last job, so this is very important to them,” Power comments.
10. Above all, be positive and enjoy what you’re creating.

Source: The Marketing Assassin

Posted January 5th, 2010 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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