Hiring. It seems to be the toughest part of the industry lately and there is no denying that the biggest impact of COVID-19 was on employment. I have heard more than a few times in the past couple of weeks just how difficult it is to find and hire new talent now that we’re entering into this ‘new normal’ phase…
As the unemployment rate continues to decline, there are still millions of Americans looking for jobs right now. So the numbers show the people are out there. The question now is, what can we do as creative professionals to hone in on our talents and reel in those candidates that won’t only be a cultural fit, but also bring fresh thinking to the table and build off other team members into our interview process?
I’m going to share a few tips. I’ll start by reminding you of what you do every day… and how you might be able to apply those skills to your recruitment strategy to attract more qualified leaders for the future of your agency!
1. Be Creative in Your Job Description
Gone are the days of boring job descriptions. You are trying to attract creative talent. Insightful, innovative people aren’t attracted to job posts that read as if a corporate robot wrote them.
Instead, speak in a language that will resonate with your ideal employee… you know, kind of like you do when you’re writing for your clients’ ideal customers. Talk less about what you need, and more about what you can provide your employees. Tell them why they should want to work for your organization and I’m talking about outside of the benefits…
- What is your agency trying to change?
- What does your agency stand for or against?
- What are you doing “on purpose” in order to create more meaningful brands?
- Why does your agency even exist?
When you write this job description with more heart, it will either resonate with the potential candidate or it won’t. More importantly, become a natural filter for the most culturally suited applicants.
2. Lead With Your Mission
A good way to spice up your job description and flip up your script is to go in mission-first. As an agency, you know all too well how consumers want to buy from brands with a purpose. Remember that your future employees are consumers too. So what makes you think they also don’t also want to work for a company with a purpose?
Whether you are trying to give women equal opportunities, give minorities more leadership roles, or donate a percentage of your profits to end cancer for good- start with that! Show your passions upfront, and you will find employees who share your enthusiasm. Work is a means to an end for most people… give your employees a real reason to become true advocates and loyalists to your agency and your mission. Everyone wants to be part of something good.
A great example of an agency that already does this is Media Star Promotions. They’re an agency that highlights philanthropic support on their website and wants new team members to feel that same passion for giving back. What have they done? They’ve created a professional family that works collectively for the good of their community. The best part is this passion spills over into their client relationships who are oftentimes also trying to demonstrate brand purpose to their audiences! It’s a win-win from a recruiting and new business perspective.
3. Ask Your Employees To Recruit For You
A study by Edelman shows that employees are three times more credible when talking about working conditions than the CEO. So when they are boasting about your agency on social media and encouraging their network to apply for a role, that carries far more weight than just posting the job application from your company’s website or social pages.
And to encourage your employees to recruit for your agency, offer them an incentive. Many organizations offer a recruitment referral bonus upon the hire of a referral, and then an additional bonus if that employee lasts more than 6 months with the company. This ensures your employees are motivated to not only ask anyone to join the company… but only people they truly feel are qualified and will be a great asset for the organization for the long haul.
4. Let The Candidate Interview You!
It is equally important that your candidate feels the job is a good fit for them as you feel they’re a good fit for it. 78% of job candidates believe that the way they’re treated in the hiring process is a clear indicator of how a company will treat its employees. So set the tone by allowing them to freely interview you about the company.
If a candidate is a little hesitant to ask questions, here are a few ways to prompt them to ask some questions:
- Share information about your company and don’t leave out the fun, cultural stuff
- Describe the department where the candidate would work
- Talk about the staff and introduce them to the people they will be working with directly
- Explain the expectations – including work from home options (hint: most people want a hybrid agency model now)
- Provide a detailed description of your benefits package
After each segment, be sure to ask if the candidate has any questions.
5. Ask the Right Questions
Lastly, it’s critical that you’re asking candidates questions that get to the heart of what you are looking for. Asking the right questions will help you to identify candidates that have a track record of succeeding at new things.
While most people can continually succeed in an upward linear fashion by building on prior experience, we are not in a linear period at the moment as a result of the pandemic. The person who can repeatedly succeed in unknown situations is what some companies will need for fresh ideas and reinvention!
It is my hope that with these five tips your agency can find the talent it needs to propel its growth! Recruit smart… hire smarter… and remember, do everything intentionally and with a purpose.
What is business improv? If you guessed a form of comedy… Bob Kulhan, founder and CEO of Business Improv is happy to tell you otherwise.
In fact, improv is a secret weapon your agency can be utilizing to better communicate with your clients in remote environments by knowing and understanding its three foundational principles:
1. Reacting
2. Adapting
3. Communicating
But what’s more, understanding business improv and its core principles can be a tool for your agency’s employees to provide your clients and their customer’s exponential amounts of value.
How? Find out right here in this AAR Partners Lesson Session.
Enjoy!
What’s Trending: There have been an increasing number of marketers capitalizing on the dental industry. Notice the uptick in search volume for terms such as “dental marketing” and “dental SEO” since 2016, as more and more dentists are finding that traditional patient acquisition techniques aren’t sufficient to help them grow their practices.
The dental industry is particularly attractive for marketers because of the relatively high patient lifetime value — about $4.5k — which means that dental practices can comfortably afford a $150-$300 cost per lead (CPL).
Why It’s Important: It is safe to say that the dental industry, like many others, has been turned on its head as a result of the pandemic. Although it has been turning back to a sense of normalcy, it’s one of the slowest to return due to the nature of the business and procedures.
Dentists have been forced to rethink their model, have been looking to marketers to sell their story. There has been a significant increase in search volume for the following terms:
- “Dental marketing”: 1.9k searches/month then → 6.6k now (+247%)
- “Dental SEO”: 700 searches/month then → 2.4k now (+243%)
- “Dental marketing agency”: 200 searches/month then → 590 now (+195%)
The knee-jerk reaction with unprecedented events is to pull back or go dark when it comes to advertising and marketing which is what most dental practices did. Rory Halliday, the managing partner of Dental Marketing Australia. He said that most of his clients paused their online marketing campaigns when the pandemic hit, but those who didn’t are reaping the rewards now, as we move toward relative normalcy. “Although demand for elective dental procedures decreased, supply almost disappeared completely as most dentists closed their practices,” Halliday said. “Those who maintained and ramped up their online campaigns have now captured all of the traffic and new patients as a result.”
What’s Next: Telemedicine is another trend that is exploding. A new study has shown that virtual urgent care appointments have increased by more than 600% since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Teledentistry and virtual dentist consultations are on the rise, too:
There are opportunities for marketers to help dentists and other medical and healthcare practitioners navigate this new contact-averse world. Consider how you can help orthodontists, occupational therapists, chiropractors, biokinetics, plastic surgeons, physical therapists, and even homeopaths transition. Many of these medical professionals are similar to dentists in that they: 1) have relatively high patient lifetime values; and 2) are extremely proficient at their jobs, but are often less comfortable with the technical aspects of growing their practices (e.g., marketing strategies).
Many of these high-touch medical industries will adjust their business models to changing patient behavior in the long term, which creates plenty of opportunities for Marcom agencies to help practitioners to transition online. In fact, it may be prudent to research ways to capitalize on new HIPAA compliance requirements for telehealth practices.
You could focus on a niche, like dentistry, or build a more generalized service offering for healthcare practitioners. PatientPop, for example, is a platform that provides SEO and marketing services to all medical practitioners, as well front-office automation, telehealth, and resource management tools to enable dentists to run their practices remotely.
The Opportunity: If you haven’t already thought about this exploding sub-category in health and wellness, it is certainly something to chew on and most likely, take a bite out of… (couldn’t help the puns!).
Prospect smAARt, pitch with purpose, and most importantly, with passion.
Credentials meetings, Chemistry meetings, Capability meetings – basically three different ways of saying the same thing. But the question is how do you set them up in order to crack through and be invited into the next round?
Honestly, AAR Partners eliminated credentials meetings as a semi-finalist step for many years but due to the pandemic we re-instituted these meetings as a way for marketers to be able to spend a little extra time with agencies and more importantly, their team, since we cannot hold in-person meetings yet.
But what makes a successful credentials meeting?
The simple answer is there is no simple answer. Unfortunately, there is no 100% guaranteed solution since every new prospective client team is different. However, there are some tactics that seem to stand out to help be successful with these meetings:
- Start with a quick story – yes, a short 90-second intro video that highlights the agency team that is selected to manage the account. Each agency player should introduce him or herself both professionally and personally – add a little human touch because in the end, people work with people. Here’s the key – send this to the prospect 24-hours prior with a VERY short note expressing your enthusiasm to meeting them and encouraging them to watch the 90-second welcome video.
- Ice-breakers – they work as long as they are relevant to the brand and are kept very short. Prospective clients are not interested in playing games but they are interested in learning about how your team has the appropriate expertise for their marketing challenges. So tie the ice-breaker to the brand.
- The prospect – Ummm… please do not forget to ask them to introduce themselves! I realize that agencies do their homework and should know a lot about each prospective client at the meeting but they do not know that you’ve basically stalked them on social media. They think you’re not interested in them as a team of people. And what’s most important in the end? People want to work with people that they like.
- The consumer – remember those man-on-the-street interviews? A little tougher to do in a pandemic but they always work like a charm! Clients LOVE to hear what their consumer says about them but here’s the key, you must keep it very short in a creds meeting since this is supposed to be about your credentials and the ultimate key is to integrate those consumer comments into your relevant case studies showcasing the proof behind your relevant expertise.
The best capabilities meetings hit five key Cs:
- Credentials – showcase your relevant experience in two key cases – use stories, videos and be sure to show results.
- Comparison – compare relevant cases side by side to the prospective client’s brand
- Conversation – remember to engage and re-engage; it is a bit more presentation-oriented but you must engage them in some conversation
- Calisthenics – discussion questions or quick exercises are great to engage the prospective team but be careful not to turn it into a work session. Many clients are turned off when agencies shift their creds meeting into a Q&A or tear sheet session.
- Compatibility – this should come naturally or not. You truly cannot prepare for “chemistry” but you can be yourselves as an integrated team and if there is a natural camaraderie, it is often that the client team wants to be part of it.
Clients often evaluate these meetings on three key areas: strategic insights/smarts; innovative creative/engaging solutions; agency process/relevant experience and of course, cultural compatibility. I recently had a client say, “I can tell within five minutes if this team is a fit for our brand.” I didn’t agree with that statement as it is a little too shallow but whether I agree with it or not, it is reality at times.
There you have it. That’s my counsel on this topic and I hope it helps. Look out for more of my new biz quick tips shared exclusively with AAR Agency Growth Program Partners…
Aggressive sales pitches. Desperate sales pitches. ‘Try hard’ sales pitches. Over the past 20 years at AAR Partners, I have seen many forms of these types of pitches as an agency search consultant… but AAR’s (CMO) clients see hundreds of these emails pop up in their inboxes every week to the tune of about 1,000 per month! In fact, I had a bet with a past client that he gets close to 1,000 unsolicited agency emails per month. One month later to the day he emailed me saying, “You win. 936!” Needless to say, that is an awful lot of cold emails.
It is understandable why agencies send them… being a new business professional is far from an easy role. Follow-up calls, email cadences, and your prospect playbook is the bread and butter of what you do so you must keep driving awareness and visibility, right?
Wrong. You certainly need to share quality content in order to build relationships. But when it comes to “content pollution,” lazy sales emails do more harm than good. I’ve had one CMO tell me she doesn’t even read her LinkedIn inbox anymore… it’s so full of spam.
This is disheartening for new business pros but there are three quick tips on how to stand out in a sea of bad prospecting.
3 Tips for Standing Out in a Sea of Bad Pitches
1. Be Creative & Do Your Homework
Remember, you are pitching to a creative person. Marketers love things that stand out… questions that make them think twice or even feel uncomfortable… and info that hits their pain points on the head. It’s literally what they spend their lives trying to master! So take a tip from their playbook and approach the conversation creatively.
To do this, you will need to do your homework instead of sending your scripted mass email. Take a look at the brand’s marketing. What do you see that you can improve? Test their newsletter forms… sign up for their email campaigns… study their website… read their content… follow their social media. Where can your agency help them grow?
And that’s just surface-level stuff. Use Winmo to take it a step further:
- See what their ad spend looks like.
- Read WinmoEdge to see if they’re adding to their marketing team.
- Check out which agencies they’re currently working with, and who they’ve worked within the past- how do you fit into the mix?
- Check out the decision-maker’s personality traits.
Go into the conversation educated so you can address the things that are hurting them the most. In fact, I used Crystal Personality Insights to get the inside scoop on how to reach out to a particular CMO before reaching out to him and he responded within hours because I followed the tips provided on how he likes to receive emails!
Having this knowledge will allow you to craft an introduction that doesn’t merely say “we’re an award-winning agency…” they don’t care. Everyone is an ‘award-winning agency.’ What they want to hear is how you are going to solve their problems with as little headache as possible. Showing that you did their homework will surely impress them.
2. Drop the Script
If you read anything I mentioned above, then you understand this means you need to throw the copy and pasted emails and phone call scripts out. Sure, keep them for training purposes and new hires getting started. But real success is going to come from real relationships. And you just can’t create those with a one-size-fits all approach.
Instead, create an SOP that trains your new business team on how to do research on clients before reaching out. Give them a list of items they need to be searching for. Provide guidance on how to identify marketer pain points and windows of opportunity. And the pain points aren’t always the obvious ones… The CMO of Arby’s once told me that his biggest pain point was keeping clean bathrooms! That’s far from a marketing issue but shows how it’s not always a marketing issue that needs to be solved.
And don’t forget to look out for brands triggering a need for marketing help. Here are some of the top triggers to be looking out for:
- New CMO hires and CMO shifts
- Budget and spend increases
- New product launches
- Marketing team expansion – even hiring junior team members means they’re looking to grow
- Executive vacancies
- Dated agency relationships
- Big events – anniversaries; openings
- New technology investments
- Venture capital investments and brand mergers
Train your team to keep up with these events and take full advantage of the tools your agency is already paying for.
3. Know When To Stop
Lastly, don’t get to the point that you’re pissing off the prospect. I know follow-ups work. I’m not here to tell you to stop being diligent. But it’s not about “following up” – huh?! Nope. It’s about building a relationship. It takes time and it takes effort and it takes a lot of care. Share helpful news, insights, information… anything that can help make their job easier. But don’t just “follow up!” Most of all, be patient. It’s about planting seeds.
Standing out is half the battle. You’re competing in a sea of thousands of Marcom agencies. Take the extra step… I promise, hardly anyone else is. It may take longer to craft your outreach, but it will return tenfold.
And remember, always, to pitch with a passion.
