Agencies need to be better at describing themselves

When we talk to agency clients, we often ask themselves to describe what they do in a single sentence. Quite often we get multiple answers depending on who we ask, and they often sound something like this:

“We are a full-service agency that delivers omnichannel end-to-end customer experiences.” - Everyone is ‘full service’ and ‘omnichannel’ these days, how are you different?

“We provide complete content production services for digital and non-digital channels.”- Really? So that means you’ll do pretty much anything, whatever it is, in a largely undifferentiated way?

“We combine, technology, data, and creative for better brand experiences.” - Actually, I’m looking for someone that’s more off-grid, uses horoscopes, and has dropped a lot of acid. Said no client ever.

Agencies are often not great at talking about themselves

It’s a remarkable thing that businesses in an industry that’s built on creativity and proposition development can be so terrible at describing themselves, what they do, and why they’re different. A lot of agencies tend to have very generic descriptions of what they do for clients. I think this is largely down to two reasons:

1. We focus on inputs not outcomes

As an industry we’re focused so much on selling inputs, we think what we’re selling is a capacity and capability. Phrases like ‘full service’, ‘content production’, ‘creative’ and ‘analytics’ are all descriptive of things that are done to produce some sort of outcome, but we shy away from describing the outcome itself. Instead, we tend to talk about the generic ingredients we use.

Which leads me on to the second reason we’re so bad at this:

2. We suffer from FOMO

Because our business model is so fixated on selling people on the clock, we are often less concerned about exactly what they’re doing, just that they’re doing something that’s billable. We shy away from being clear about what we do, because we’re afraid that if we do, we might miss an opportunity to do something else. We’ll say yes to anything, whether we really know how to do it or not. We think we’re keeping our options open, but the result is we end up selling undifferentiated services for commodity prices and piss off our clients.

Lessons from technology product marketing

I spent years working in product marketing for technology companies. Ironically, as smart as technology products are, their single biggest problem is they can do too much. It means they can do a lot of things, for a lot of clients, in a lot of different ways. Consequentially, many technology companies try to tell everyone, about everything their tech can do. This is the equivalent of going on a date and constantly talking how great you are, it’s the worst mistake you can make.

Nobody wants to know everything your tech can do. They want to know how it’s relevant to them, and how it can help solve the one or two challenges or opportunities they specifically have. They want you to understand them and to help. The art is in anticipating the client challenge, segmenting the prospects, and pitching the one thing that is relevant to that individual prospect.

If your offer does one thing particularly well compared to everyone else, and you can prove it, then instead of talking about how it works, or the features, own the problem that it solves. Become synonymous with solving that very problem. Although not everyone may be in the market to solve that problem right now, but if you’ve done your job well, when that problem arises, you will be the people they think of to solve it. Seems kind of obvious, right? This is what we tell our clients, but often fail to do ourselves.

It's more than just a proposition.

The product marketing principles I described for technology are no different for agencies. But don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s just a snappy proposition and positioning challenge. I have worked for too many agencies that think that you can take a proposition to market with absolutely no substance behind it. The ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ approach has some value but to pitch something you have no ability to deliver is dishonest and quickly uncovered by clients. It needs to be founded on reality. You don’t need to have absolutely everything in place, but you do need to have a pretty good methodology that defines how you will deliver, and some demonstrable expertise.

Getting the proposition right pays dividends.

Having a clear proposition, backed by a delivery model that makes it reality can be the starting point of a virtuous cycle:

With a clear proposition you can be far more focused on generating leads and gaining market traction for your offering. You’ll be looking for people with relatively tightly defined problems, and as a result there’ll be greater consistency of opportunity.

Consistent opportunities lend themselves to more consistent delivery methods and clearly packaged offers. More consistency in delivery enables you to make continual improvement to improve your speed, efficiency, and quality, which means greater profitability and client satisfaction. In other words, you raise the value of the offer and can justify your pricing.

Finally, by establishing your leadership in delivery, it becomes far easier to differentiate yourself, with clear proof points and convince your clients to adopt your delivery methods, rather than you having to adapt to theirs. This further grows efficiency and strengthens your leadership, positioning, and differentiation.

Hang on, don’t a lot of products fail?

Yes, it’s true, a lot of new products do fail. There’s always a risk involved in placing a bet on a new proposition. But we’re not starting from zero here. Quite often it’s about reframing what you’re already good at doing.

A good place to start is to look through work you’ve already done with a critical eye. Unpick your current and past projects. Which ones were particularly successful? Which were most profitable? Which generated the longest-term revenue or the greatest client satisfaction? Which ones did you really enjoy? Which would you love to do again?

Now ask yourself what was the essence of what you did for a client in these projects? What were you really delivering? How could you package that up and offer it to someone else who might need something similar? Sometimes this is a difficult exercise to do looking from the inside and of course, that’s where we are able to help. You might not get it right first time, but continual improvement is the most important part of the process.

Does this mean we change everything all at once?

You don’t have to bet the farm on one proposition, and you don’t have to stop what you’re doing today.  You can test and transition over time. You may end up with several propositions, targeted at different audiences, or structure follow-on propositions to expand your value for existing clients. This is part of having a strategy that plans your propositions, how you’ll deliver them and your route to revenue. Also, remember that a single set of capabilities can have multiple propositions. The problems you solve may be different, but the resources you apply may be the same.

Hopefully this all makes sense because what I’ve just described is the practical process of productisation.  That is, transforming your proposition from describing a bunch of things your people do and billing for their time (the inputs), to describing an outcome you can deliver for your client and charging for value (the outcome). Which is why thinking about propositions is a great starting point for applying product thinking.