The 3 investments

I try to give credit where it’s due: my sales coach Tommy Schaff introduced me to this concept and I return to it frequently.

When a prospective client is looking to appoint an agency, they must make three investments, not just one. The investments are money, time and change.

Money

Money is the easiest.

This is especially true when you’re working with a marketing department who’s spending someone else’s money: someone is going to get paid. It might be you. It might be a competitor. It might be Google, or Sky, or Hearst, or someone they hire to do the job internally. But someone, somewhere is probably getting some money. If they don’t spend it, they miss their targets. If they don’t spend it, it gets taken away and they don’t get it back.

Time

Harder than investing money is investing time.

Think about that gym membership you bought: when the money goes out of your bank account each month it feels like you’re doing something to get in better shape but, unless you put in the time and work out there, you’re not going to get the outcome you want.

The same is true when it comes to delivering great marketing.

You’re going to need an investment of time from certain people in the client’s organisation. The person who’s going to sign it off. The people in that other team who you hope aren’t going to block it. The developers who need to put it on the website.

During the new business process, we need to be upfront about who’s time we need and how much of it we’re going to take up.

It can be difficult to get a straight answer from a client when asking how much money they have for this project (or whether that money is even real). You can’t be certain until the first payment hits your bank account. It’s easier to qualify whether a client is willing to invest the time in the project: either people turn up when you ask them to, or they don’t. If you state that you need to meet the CMO during the sales process and they don’t come, you know the client isn’t willing to make that investment and you can make inferences whether they’re going to even invest the money.

There are people pleasing prospects who will string you along, spending as much time as they can with anyone who asks…they don’t drag their team to those meetings.

The more (productive) time you spend with a client’s team during the sale, the more likely you are to win.

(It goes without saying that productive time usually means time that you are not presenting a deck to them!)

(“We were scheduled to go for an hour and we went for two!” is also not the flex you think it is. Tell the client you need two hours in the first place and you will learn something about their level of investment upfront.)

After you read this article, I recommend you take a good client relationship and map out who has a say in how that work works. What do you need from them, and how long do they spend with you? Start making that clear to their counterparts at each organisation you speak with - they’d rather know in advance; you’ll look more professional; and it won’t feel so scary after all.

Change

I’m pretty sure only agency folk subscribe to this newsletter, so I don’t mind saying it: on occasion, a client’s need to find a new agency is their own fault, more than their incumbent supplier’s.

You’re not dumb. You see the red flags all the way through the qualification calls. But maybe you do it anyway because you want the money (and they might give it to you). Maybe they’ll even give you some time. But you already know that, if this client in front of you doesn’t make some change happen, they’re going to be looking again in a year.

They won’t change over time unless they show willingness to change during the sale.

I can count on two hands the number of times a prospect has said to me “we’ve been burnt by agency after agency” and I’ve replied the same way “so, tell me, why do you think this time is going to be any different?”

You are never more powerful in the relationship than you are in the sale, if you do it right. You cannot change the absurd way this organisation wants to measure success after it’s been inked in a contract.

Assuming the client is willing to give you access to the people you need to access, it’s your opportunity to ask them why the last relationship didn’t work. If some other team stopped the incumbent from doing anything, you need to understand that team’s frustrations in advance and work out how to help them, otherwise this will be another break clause triggered.

Sometimes, with the right amount of pressure, that client will tell you that you’re just a tick box. They need to be seen to be doing something. They know this isn’t going to be ideal work. How would you approach that contract negotiation differently with that knowledge?

Conclusion

Like most useful new business concepts, the three investments can be applied in lots of situations.

I walked away from a previous role after talking through this rule with my then-manager. They gave me all the money I asked for (without even trying to negotiate). They gave me more to hire a team. But they weren’t willing to give me their own engagement (and they certainly weren’t going to change), so the right thing to do was tell them that I can’t give them what they want and walk away.

Or I could have continued to take the cash; be ineffective; and ultimately end up out of a job anyway.

If you start applying the three investments in your career, I’d love to hear how it goes.