Agencies and clients. Why are we treating each other this way?
When I went from being a Creative Director at a good-sized agency in Central CT (Happy 50th birthday, Mintz + Hoke!) to becoming a small agency owner, something interesting happened to me on LinkedIn. I started getting unsolicited link requests from services that claimed they could help me “fill the sales pipeline with hot leads.” Which sounds pretty good on the surface. I even tried one of those services for a while. But I didn’t use it to fill my lead pipeline. I did it to connect with about 3,000 new people in the transportation sectors I serve — bicycles, public transit, commuter airlines, mobility as a service, green technologies like electric cars and charging stations and any client that moves people. I set up at least 100 zoom calls during the pandemic when we were all working from home and I met some amazing people. But never once did I treat them like a “lead.” I treated them like people who have a story to tell. People I can learn from. I spoke to one of the foremost experts on public transit. A higher-up at the MBTA. Someone who was on the front lines of battling COVID within the New York subway. A person who created transportation technologies that I had a hard time understanding until I Googled it after the call. I spoke to an inventor who created a cool family-friendly mode of transportation. Another who seems to have solved one very vexing traffic problem. I spoke to an architect who designs habitats for space. I spoke to consultants and artists and people in the marketing field who were doing the same thing I was. And I spoke to a bonafide space shuttle astronaut (and acted like a pathetic fanboy). If you are one of the people I spoke to, thank you. Really. I did not book a single project as a result of this effort (nor did I ever attempt to pitch any of these people). But the truth is, I gained a heaping wealth of insight from those conversations.
As a curious lifelong learner, I just can’t put a price on that.
As agency owners, we have a decision to make when we create our businesses and position ourselves. We can try to be all things to all clients (which is very hard, but a handful of agencies do it well). Or we can specialize. In a kind of service or in a specific industry. Ideally, we try to convince clients that our deep expertise is not interchangeable with the shallow expertise of other firms. For me, it’s all about the hard-won knowledge and insights I’ve gained working on a range of public and private transportation accounts. Few firms our size or several times larger have that. Our hope, as well-positioned agency owners, is that clients never treat us as commodities. (Because when they do, their decision becomes all about price. Ug. And as David C. Baker often says, that’s a race to the bottom that no one wins.)
But, okay, here’s the thing. We work so hard to not be a commodity. But when it comes to finding clients, many of us do to them exactly the thing we hate when they do it to us. We reduce them to leads. Lining up neatly in a pipeline. A commodity. I know how this feels because I also get at least two link requests a week from people who sell services like SEO or WordPress development or some other service that I may or may not be interested in (usually not). And I can tell that they are treating me like a commodity because many of them are using the exact same script in their LinkedIn solicitations. They don’t even wait an hour before sending me the canned pitch. It feels like shit to be treated like a cold lead. Like a commodity.
When I reply to them, I try very hard to treat them like human beings. I say something like, “Hey David, I appreciate your note, but I don’t have a need for _______. That said, I wish for your success moving forward. Cheers. G.”
Why do I take the time to write a personal note to these folks each time when they are acting so impersonally? Because this business is hard enough already without being reduced to a commodity.
Grant Sanders is founder and lead strategist/creative at SAND.
