How performance management can avoid the expensive costs of a pitch
25Aug
It is certainly the case that marketing in the digital age is increasingly complex. Multiple services are required with a myriad of specialist skills that have to be organised and integrated both internally and externally through agencies and other service providers. There are plenty of moving parts and many cracks for simple issues to fall into and fester.
Businesses and agencies alike need to go beyond current procurement and tender processes and ensure they underpin their relationships with a well articulated and managed strategy around their relationship and performance measurement process. Not only will it assist it keeping all stakeholders on the one page and pointed in the one direction strategically, but it also avoids costly and time consuming pitches when business least need them.
Take the experience of a colleague of mine in a digital agency with a long-term client relationship. Over time their services had spread out across the client’s business until they were more managing more than 30 internal touch points. There were also multiple suppliers engaged, each with their specialist skill and an agenda. For a long time everything worked because of the sweat and dedication of a few, but when a couple of key people moved on both at the client and the agency, holes emerged. Tensions escalated with the people at the coalface doing the work. Little things like turnaround time and production costs on a small job became big things at the water cooler. Communication broke down and finger pointing started. As is often the case the smart people on both sides saw the writing on the wall and moved on, further compounding the problem. Eventually the relationship blew up and the account went out to pitch. The cost impact was seven figures plus. Not the pitch, but for the costs on the business to transition in a new supplier.
What made this more interesting from my perspective was that there was an annual relationship review process between the client and agencies, however the provider used an ‘out of the box ‘ solution that was probably ok for a traditional agency, but not for a complex network of specialist suppliers. The review teased out some of the relationship issues, but did not present it as an actionable insight for the client or agency senior management. It was just another case of business ticking the boxes.
There’s no doubt in my mind that a relationship and performance management framework is critical for managing today’s marketing and communications networks. It needs to be an extension of the overarching strategy plan and have the teeth and mandate to inform procurement and impact individual performance plans.
Most importantly it needs to be driven by real data that can drive actionable and measurable results both for clients and their agency partners.
