How many agency account managers, strategy planners, creative copywriters, art directors, production managers, producers and coders do you need to deliver your marketing plan?
This is a fundamental question facing most marketers when appointing a new agency or about to engage in annual negotiations with their existing agencies.
Whether using a traditional resource-based retainer, project fees, or even a value-based pricing model to pay your agency fees, it is increasingly important to accurately and confidently calculate the fee level and resource mix to determine if the proposed fee represents value.
With a granular or detailed scope of work, TrinityP3 can calculate within 5% accuracy the level and mix of resources required by the agency to deliver that scope across creative, account management, strategy, and production.
What this means for our clients is that by providing us with the scope of work, we can:
- Calculate the FTE levels in each area of services the agency offers.
- Discuss the mix of the quality of the resources within each discipline based on their strategic requirement.
- Provide the level and mix of resources to the agency (or, in the case of an agency search/tender – agencies) for completion.
- We can benchmark the agency costs against the level of resources and market rates.
- We can ask the agency(ies) to propose their suggested resource mix and benchmark this for cost and market value.
We developed the Verificom Scope of Work Calculator 18 years ago because we had a marketer who reduced their scope of work (SOW) by around 50% in the number of projects. Yet, the agency resource plan reduced year-on-year by only 15%. They were in a dispute that was not resolved after six weeks of discussion.
We reviewed and benchmarked the SOW delivered, and resources utilised in the previous year. Using our calculator, we entered the proposed SOW for the coming year and demonstrated the change in resources to be 35% due to the change in the complexity of the mix of projects, not just the number of projects.
Over the past 18 years, this has been demonstrated with up to 60 projects per year across all marketing categories and agency types, including direct, digital, search, media and the like.
We have also applied the Verificom SOW Calculator to up to 36 countries worldwide and found that the resource metrics are proven. In contrast, the cost of resources varies from market to market. To maintain track of these resource rates across markets, we have the Verificom Ad Cost Checker database, where we store thousands of agency rates to provide statistically significant rate benchmarking.
Each application provides increased insight and refinement to the process, resulting in a very high level of accuracy across almost all variables.
Learn more about the TrinityP3 Agency Commercial Evaluation services and how we can provide accurate and reliable assessments of your current agency commercial arrangement.