Focus on your Strengths
A successful company is one that is honest about its strengths in the marketplace.
It is important as an agency to understand where your strengths are, and to focus on
those strengths rather than 'promising the world' to your clients without genuinely
feeling a confidence in your ability to deliver on those promises.
It may be tempting to overstate your abilities and 'learn later' if you have a
skill-set that falls slightly short of the brief. If you vendor a product, it may be
equally as tempting to embellish its capabilities, or 'add a feature' to make up the
shortfall. Often, agencies argue that this sort of practice is a necessary part of
the marketing process and indeed, if you as an agency are capable of stretching that
little bit further to meet the needs of your client then certainly doing so is an
important part of generating new business.
However, all too often, agencies lose sight of their real strengths and fall into a
pattern of increasingly overstating their abilities in order to win the next account.
At best, your development teams will be burning the midnight oil far and above the
estimates you might have set out for the project. At worst, you will seriously damage
the confidence your client has in your ability to produce the results you promised,
you will diminish or even destroy your chances of an ongoing relationship with your
clients, or if you really mess it up – you’ll lose the account and start paying for
the damage you’ve caused!
If you find yourself hiding your weaknesses as an agency, then you need to ask yourself
why.
Divide and conquer
Often, that additional skill-set that you cannot meet is an essential
part of the project, but it simply does not lie within your set of strategic
priorities. You may be constantly attempting to win lucrative advertising deals that
always seem to have a technical component to the work that you simply have no
interest in sustaining in-house.
Cubed digital specialise in offering high quality technical services
to agencies that do not sustain an in-house technical aspect to their business.
Forming a partnership with a technical agency often makes a great deal of sense,
when you know how to communicate your technical requirements and know how to
prioritise your workloads. You will ultimately save development time leaving the
technical aspects to a team that acutely understand the technology and often you
will provide a much stronger end-product, vastly improving your reputation and
consolidating the relationship with your client.
Understand the numbers
Perhaps the most common problem is simply trying to remain competitive
on price. The tendency is to reduce the development timeframes to lower the numbers,
when you obviously need to instead lower your development costs.
It may sound exceedingly obvious, but how often has your agency simply
taken out a few quoted days in favour of discounting the hourly rate, or a portion
thereof in order to maintain competitive on price? Those estimates remain long after
the account has been won and suddenly at midnight on Friday you're left wondering why
you didn't allow more time!
The market pays what the market pays
Perhaps an extension of the previous problem, agencies often find
themselves trying desperately to continually reduce costs in a pitch. The market
fluctuates, and certainly in the current environment it may not be viable to
approach the landscape with the same expectations as you once had.
If you are continually pruning development days or discounting portions
of the quote to stay competitive then an investigation into your development costs is
required. This could lead to an entire Pandora's Box worth of deficiencies in your
business! Constantly spending time re-inventing the wheel for a client, leaving your
staff to languish with inadequate training in the technology, sustaining far too many
overheads... the list is almost endless.
Change your priorities
If you are continually pitching for work and hiding the same flaws in
your company, then you have to ask yourself why you haven't filled that floor space
with the right personnel. Does your business need a change in strategic direction?
If the work you are pitching for constantly lies outside your capabilities, then of
course you need to consider changing your priorities to help you move in your chosen
direction.
Be honest with yourself!
Are you simply headed in the wrong direction? It may seem unfathomable,
but often agencies continually head down the wrong pathway and unwittingly seek
business that is simply not within their strategic interests! Departments may be
attempting to bridge the gap in their earnings, or just don't have a strong
understanding of the requirements of the work they're pitching for, or don't have a
strong understanding of their own capabilities.