Be more collaborative and less transactional with your agency’s clients

Too many agencies focus on reporting the amount of time and effort that they put in on behalf of clients rather than talking about the strategy and the results it produces.

When agencies tell a client how many hours were spent on work that is not billed by the hour, it serves little or no purpose. If you talk about how many reporters you pitched rather than the number of stories you generated, you are missing the point.

In this episode, Chip and Gini talk about the perils of transactional relationships with your agency’s clients along with how to become more collaborative to produce better results.

Key takeaways

* Chip Griffin: “If you fall into the transactional trap, at some point the client’s going to let you go because of it.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Build a campaign that has the tactics in it, but doesn’t focus on the tactics specifically. It focuses on the outcome of that campaign.”

* Chip Griffin: “I don’t buy a press release cause I’m going to frame it and put it on my wall. I buy the press release because it’s supposed to get me media coverage. So focus on the outcome of media coverage instead.”

* Gini Dietrich: “You are being hired because you are an expert.”

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I just want you to know that I have spent the last 27 minutes trying to plan for this episode, and I gave it some thought before that too. So that’s probably another five minutes, and I’ve only promised an hour a week.

So we’re gonna have to wrap this up really quickly to make sure that we stay within those boundaries.

Gini Dietrich: Okey dokey.

Chip Griffin: Right after this.

I think we should just make this show completely transactional. It’s just, it’s just all about the numbers. We’ll just, we’ll just figure out exactly how much time to put in, how long the episode should be, and we’re not gonna worry about anything else. Just, just making sure that we’re checking off all those boxes.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. So what you’re telling me is we technically have 32 minutes left together, but because you spent five extra minutes beforehand figuring this out. Yes. We only have 27 minutes left together.

Chip Griffin: Correct. And Jen is gonna make me write a blurb about this afterwards.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Fair. So, yeah. So that’s gonna take another’s another 15 minutes.

Chip Griffin: You think I spend that much time on the blurb? I spend, I spent, I spend about 120 seconds. Okay. All right. Usually the first 20 of that are replaying the beginning of the episode so I can remember what the heck it was about. And then I write my three paragraph summary real quick. Okay. So, It is what it people, people are, they wanna listen to this.

They don’t wanna read my little summary. I just have to put something there so that it’s not blank when it goes up on iTunes. Yes. You know? Yes, I agree. So, but if you, if you actually read that summary out there, Drop me a note, let me know and maybe I’ll give it a little bit more thought. I’m bet.