Managing Marketing – How to create high performance client / agency relationships

Cam Carter Navigare

Cam Carter, founder of Navigare, shares his thoughts with Darren Woolley on what it takes to create high performance marketing and agency teams. They discuss the roles of tools, such as surveys and explore the function of a third party consultant in assisting in managing the process to optimise the relationships and outputs of the client / agency relationship.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Or, follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Podcast transcription

Darren:

All right. I’m here today with Cam Carter, a long-time friend, who is the founder of Navigare.

We’re going to have a conversation around high-performance relationships, something that Cam knows very well, and more importantly about what it actually takes for people to develop and maintain high-performance relationships.

Thanks, Cam, for taking the time. The first point I have is what are the attributes in your mind of high-performance teams or relationships between advertisers and agencies?

High-performance demands a commitment to high maintenance

Cam:

Okay, if I can hijack just for a moment there. Anyone who doesn’t like what I’m about to say really shouldn’t read any further. It will be a waste of their time. The fact is, and it is a fact, that high-performance requires, actually demands, a commitment to high maintenance.

If you’re not prepared to invest in and stay committed to a principle and a practice of maintenance in any relationship, it doesn’t matter whether it’s commercial or personal for that matter, then walk away because you’ll never get high performance. It doesn’t matter whether it’s at an elite athlete level or from a fast car or a sailing yacht or anything unless you’ve got a regime built on high-maintenance principles. First off, you’ve got to have high maintenance. It’s the driver.

The attributes of high-performance advertiser and agency teams, there’s a raft of them but if we just look at say 3 in the first instance, there’s courtesy, respect and inclusiveness.

They are old-fashioned concepts. You and I have talked about this. If everyone isn’t treating each other with courtesy, if they are not treating each other with respect, if that respect isn’t being earned and if that doesn’t manifest itself in an inclusive behavior pattern, then it will be shot.

Inclusiveness leads to what I think is the important second attribute. That is setting and sticking to clear expectations and shared standards. What we find continuously and depressingly continuously, and I’m sure you do too in your professional business, is that we’ve often said is that partners actually don’t know what is expected of them.

They think they know but they haven’t actually been specified and determined. They are really refreshed when something is established. There’s no recognition of the fact that times change. Needs change. Circumstances change. Therefore, everyone’s expectations change. If that is missing, then everyone’s on a path to failure. It’s just nonsense.

Darren:

It’s really interesting you say that because one of the things that always cracks me up when a marketer phones me up and says, “I’ve got to get a new agency.” We always explore what has gone wrong to work out whether they really do need a new agency. They often say, “They’re not delivering to expectation.” My next statement or question is, “Have you actually articulated what your expectation is?”

It’s almost like I’ve hit them between the eyes with a hammer because there’s this dumb-struck look on their faces because I think going back to your first point that you made which is that so many people think that relationships just happen.

They don’t take the time to articulate expectations because somehow we delude ourselves that you don’t have to, people will know, that we’re mind readers. We don’t have to articulate our specific expectations. Agencies should just naturally know it.

No consistency of shared expectation

Cam:

You are so right. Presumption and assumption kill it but what we also find exactly, and we follow the same professional practice, a commitment like yours is the business continuity. I want us to talk a little more about that later on but the stronger it is, the longer it lasts. That’s the truth. The longer it lasts, the more both parties and every individual within those elements benefits from it, everyone.

That includes the customer, by the way, or the client or whoever it is at the end of the food chain. But what we find is that the CMOs, or whoevers on the other end of the phone or across the table, do not actually know if their counterparts understand and recognise what the expectations are. There is no consistency of expectation within their organisation.

We then ask the CMO to define the expectations and rank them, and give them a hierarchy of importance, because there’ll be a stack of things – say 10 things, 15 things, 20 things – that may ultimately be assessed. They are there because they are all important but they’re not equally important.

There needs to be recognition and awareness of these things. These are the most important. It is always a revelation to the other side, but the greatest revelation is inside the client body. If we then have the conversation with Tier 2, Group 2 executives within the client body, or Group 3 – they are tomorrow’s leaders – what we find is, there is no consistency of shared expectation and the understanding of what’s required and what is allowed with the partner inside the organisation.

That’s a formula for failure because the poor agency in that respect is trying to serve you at your level with your expectations. They are going to dramatically fail all at the lower operational level because those people are probably not at all interested. In terms of shared expectations, you’re absolutely right. First off, what the devil are they? Secondly, does anyone else know?

What is the measure of high performance?

Darren:

Yeah because the number of times we have seen this concept of high-performing teams being discussed, and yet even to get agreement across an organisation about what a high-performing team looks like, that at a certain level within an organisation, a high-performing agency would be one that is very much pro-active and challenging.

Then at a lower level it’s more, “Do what I tell them to do.” Unless you actually get that alignment, about what high-performance looks like, how could anyone, any agency, actually meet the expectations of being a high-performance team if you don’t know what high performance is?

You’ve never thought before about an athlete. An athlete knows the time that they have to beat in the 100 meters or the 1,500 meters to be world-class but agencies are never even given the goal or the objective of what they’re meant to achieve.

Cam:

Following on, grabbing that and running with it, they also don’t know whether they’re performing and competing in club level, state level, national level or on the international stage. By the way, world champion is not Olympic champion. They’re 2 entirely different things.

I spent a lot of years sailing. For some of the boats that I sailed on say from here heading south, the definition of high performance was probably fastest. Fast gave you a shot at being first but I also did a lot of years sailing square-rig sailing ships across the Atlantic with the Columbus quin centenary and high-performance definitions for those was getting there safely. That was the measure of high performance.

Darren:

Just finishing is good enough.

Cam:

Getting there.

In the days of the clippers, yes with the wool clip sailing from Adelaide to Dover, the first even got the best prize but it didn’t get the best prize if it got in with damaged goods. The first clipper that got in with its cargo intact and commanded a premium that was high performance. They may have been tenth through the heads. So it’s the understanding of what’s high performance, no one’s interrogating that enough because it’s just lazy language.

Darren:

Or articulating it at all. I think we’ve probably got an insight here which is if you’re going to set out to build a high-performance team of agencies or with your agency, the first thing is to articulate the expectation of what high performance looks like.

Measure performance against a higher purpose

Cam:

Yes. That’s preceded by professionally looking at and making damn sure that that performance is in fact pegged to and measured against a higher purpose. Now that higher purpose is going to be commercial, or political or social but it will come from the CEO. The CEO has got a contract to the board.

The CEO passes some of that onto the CMO’s, some from the CFO, CIO and the rest of the production guys, but high performance has to be pegged back to, “What purpose is being served here?” Because, as we spoke about earlier, it’s no use building a Porsche, giving it to a P-plater when actually what you want is a Fiat 500 to run down to the shops in.

Darren:

That’s about first of all alignment, aligning the organisation, the marketing and the agencies.

Cam:

It’s share/share and cohesion, absolutely.

Darren:

The second piece, being fit for purpose.

Cam:

Yes.

Darren:

I think both of us have seen some probably in hindsight tragic examples of where marketers have engaged agencies to fulfil a higher purpose when in actual fact their culture and their requirements are actually less than the agency. They bought a race horse, a thoroughbred, to pull the milk cart.

Cam:

Yep. Darren, that’s not a statement anchored in the past. It’s a statement anchored today because it is happening today.

I have had conversations prior to coming up here today where that was specifically the topic of conversation. Now at the time that the agency was appointed, retained and embraced, their specs and what was required of them and needed from them, was perfectly geared to what needed to be done.

But what had changed was what needed to get done had moved on because of market forces and circumstances. In fact, we’re pushing this particular marketer into a different direction but he was still working with that agency. The pain was starting to show.

There’s a resolution to that because in this instance, in fact, the agency is capable of responding and re-gearing but that means that everyone’s got to be mature, sophisticated and just pragmatic enough to sit down at the table and say, “Those terms, those specs and that definition of our need and your reward in return have now changed. Let’s have a quick conversation, redefine it, re-calibrate it and move on.” There’s a solution to it. There’s a solution to everything, of course.

Darren:

You see that a lot, Cam, when a company appoints a new CMO or Marketing Director. One of the things they’ll often do is that they’re appointed because they believe that the old strategy wasn’t working or it needed a refresh.

And the very first thing they do is change all the agencies because it’s a visible thing for them to do very quickly when in actual fact they’re throwing out all of the existing knowledge and integrity that’s often held within these relationships.

The other thing is even if they give the incumbent agency a chance to prove that they’re fit for purpose, I find they set them up for failure because they won’t articulate what their strategy is. They’ll just allow them to flop around trying to find out what the expectations are, going back to your point before about it being very, very important to actually get alignment around expectations.

Short-termism – too many people expect too much too quickly

Cam:

It is. Look, I’m sympathetic to new CMOs but even new CEOs coming in because I cannot think of any instance where that occurs where their superior, the board to the CEO or the CEO to the CMO has said, “I don’t want you to change a thing. I just want you to keep this going.” Nobody ever says that because when there is new talent or a new party involved, they get a new brief.

How that brief is then translated and migrated inside their organisation or outside the organisation is critical in those early days. What you’re talking about I call the snack. I’ll just call it early evidence in the first 100 days. The days we live in now are driven by short-termism.

Too many people expect too much too quickly without really figuring out whether or not that’s viable, realistic or sustainable but the pressure is on everyone to demonstrate something. For those who may not have the experience or the sophistication, changes seem to be an adequate demonstration. It’s not because change itself isn’t a lagging indicator.

Darren:

Yes because, activity…

Cam:

Evidence of industry.

Darren:

…actually supersedes results.

Cam:

Precisely.

Darren:

Look. You’ve built a very successful and sustained business around helping marketers and agencies develop these high-performing relationships.

Cam:

As have you.

Using tools of the trade to gather evidence

Darren:

And core to that is the tools of the trade which are things like surveys and evaluations. Now I want to explore that a little bit because I have to say when we talk to clients, there seems to be one group of thinking which is, “It’s all about the tool.”

Then the other group is, “We don’t need the tool because we just do this naturally.” I would be really interested in your thoughts and from years of experience, as to what is the role of say surveys and evaluations because there are a plethora of different tools out there, aren’t there?

Cam:

There is. For anyone reading this it should be noted that whereas we (Navigare and TrinityP3) share common views and common standards across the board, we do compete in areas. That’s a good thing. That competition provides something of great value to our market.

The only reason that we compete is that we’re both earning respect out there, which is a good thing. I say that because I’m going to quote you. This is about 5 years ago. You gave me a line that I use to this day with great pride because we were talking about agreement on things and happy and healthy competition in the marketplace. You said to me, “You know what? You are not known for what you do. You are known for what you do with it.” I’ve used that line. I attribute it to you because there’s no greater line than somebody that you’re ranking…

Darren:

Thank you.

Cam

… against in a race but it indicates and defines what you just raised. It’s your language as well. They are only tools. The tool needs to be applied because nothing’s going to be actually undertaken with any professionalism unless you deploy a range of tools. Surveys are merely one of them, but unless you deploy those tools, you are not going to acquire the evidence.

That evidence serves two purposes. It must influence the judgment of management. Once management has made a judgment and then moved on to make a decision, it supports that decision. The evidence influences judgment, supports the decision. It’s not what is there. The real issue is what follows. It’s what sits behind it.

Why is that the case? Where is that the case? When is that the case? Because until you apply those diagnostics and they are not mechanised, they are born of experiencing the sector which is marketing and advertising but specific experience in this field, until that’s applied, then all you’ve got is more evidence of industry and it is wasteful. Now we happen to be enemies of waste.

Darren:

Absolutely. It’s probably more a science background but I articulate very much the same approach. I say to people, “The tool, the survey, the evaluation, is like a diagnostic tool for medicine. I can do an MRI scan and the results will show me a dark spot on your brain, in your lung or on your liver but it won’t tell me what it is definitively and what I need to do about it in the way of therapy.” It’s not until you go in and you identify that there’s a spot there. That’s all it is, a spot on a scan.

I then have to go in and do further study to work out exactly what it is. Is it a tumour? Is it a malignant tumour? Is it a benign tumour? What are the possible outcomes? Then I can then start to talk about what therapeutic steps we need to take, if any, because it could be that there’s a problem there but it’s actually not a real problem so we don’t have to waste our time with it at all..

Cam:

I agree. I think you missed something.

Darren:

What’s that?

Cam: I too use a medical analogy. My background as well is biological sciences and psych. We have the same. Mine is different to yours because of what you studied and went on to do but like you, TrinityP3 and Navigare, we are a bunch of people that if you like we are the radiographers.

They are taking the picture. They’re posing that person. They know where the machine should go and the angle of presentation. They are taking as smart a picture as possible. They do it with 360 scans and whatever the equipment but what you are and what I am is we are radiologists. In the first instance when we look at that data, that evidence, those films, those scans, we actually recognise something.

A radiographer might say, “There’s a spot there.” The radiologist will immediately be able to hypothesise what sort of spot. We will know if there’s something else there and whether it’s a primary or a secondary. What are they looking for? That’s the skill. It is a great skill.

It is not easily assumed and it is hard earned. Then you can become prescriptive about, “This is what needs to be done.” I think the thing that you missed is the radiologist and the knowledge of recognition and of understanding. “This may well indicate this.” That’s actually the beginning.

Darren:

I think that’s probably because we haven’t limited ourselves to the diagnosis. We also have surgeons. We will then go through a very detailed, therapeutic regime beyond just the diagnosis. I’ll admit some of our competitors have said to me that that provides a conflict for us. I just say it’s a full-service hospital. We just don’t take Medicare.

Cam:

Look. I agree with you. It’s different analogies, isn’t it?

Cam:

This is enjoyable. Navigare is all about navigation. We’re looking for the indicators out there. There’s danger there. There’s clearance here. There’s a good channel, whatever it might be, but what we’re doing with all of that in terms of looking for where to go is the definition of our role, and back to the sailing thing, is that we’re not like the major consultancies as they used to be. They are changing. So they should but I always compared them to dispatchers.

At the big end of town, McKenzie, or Boston or whoever it might be, they would spend a lot of time coming up with the sailing plan. They’d walk right down to the dock. They’d hand it over the gunnel and say, “Here’s your sailing plan. Follow it. Good luck. Try and get there first.”

Now the difference with Navigare and what you’re saying, and it’s true, the difference with TrinityP3 is, is that I work out the plan, go back, step on-board and say, “Now it’s not my ship. I’m not the skipper. I’m not the first mate. I’m not the first officer. I am here to serve you as a navigator.”

Darren:

To authenticate that, you’re the pilot actually.

Cam:

That’s right.

Darren:

You’re the pilot that will get them into the safe dock.

Cam:

Then get off. You’re the same. There’s a conclusion. If we go back to the earlier conversation of is the tool the answer, no it isn’t. It’s the beginning and it is a long way removed from being the point and the purpose of it.

Can high performance be achieved without the tools of the trade?

Darren:

It’s interesting then that some marketers especially will think that they can do this without any sort of tool or discipline at all. You laugh …

Cam:

No, I do. What elite athlete can you name, team or machine does it because it is self-managed, self-driven, self-monitored, self-assessed, self-diagnosed, self-motivated? There are no examples. I can do it myself. I’m happy. I’ll pick up the phone and tell them when I’m not happy. It is blithe if not willful, if not criminal, ignorance. It’s unacceptable.

Darren:

It probably goes back to this false belief that it should just happen anyway. I think a lot of marketers and even agencies believe that the relationship will just manage itself.

Cam:

You’d hope that is not the fact.

Darren:

That’s right.

Cam:

It just doesn’t happen. It’s not a problem because every problem’s got a solution. There is no solution to a problem. The problem isn’t a problem. It’s a fact. You can’t solve a fact. You manage it. The thing is that you cannot take anything for granted.

You cannot be sanguine about something that happens to be humming at the moment and believe with any sort of knowledge commitment that that will be the case in a day, a week, a month or a year. Without maintenance, without attention and without care and attention something will change and you won’t like it.

Darren:

That gets me onto the next point that I wanted to discuss with you.

Cam:

We have a lot of points.

Achieve high performance through training and management

Darren:

This is that the first obstacle seems to be to overcome the belief that they don’t need management whereas clearly they do. If you’re going to achieve high performance, as you pointed out you need the training. You need the management. You need to monitor to help improve.

The second part is that we still see, especially in Asia and even in the US, a lot of marketers who only want to do their evaluation one way which is the marketer gets to score the agency but they don’t like the idea of the agency scoring the marketer. Now I know that from your experience as we discussed earlier that doesn’t seem to be prevalent but what do you think the underlying drivers are of that behaviour?

Cam:

I think I know. I’m disappointed, almost aghast, that it still prevails. In the mid-90’s when I founded Navigare, I founded it for agencies. It took me a couple of years to figure out that in fact I was talking to the wrong constituency.

It needed to be the marketers which disappoints me still but I founded it for the agencies because when I was running multinational agencies here, we were taking part in one way only surveys, particularly from the multi-nationals, but it was geared to the lowest common denominator because they wanted a common platform in all markets regardless of sophistication or maturity. It was so dumbed-down it wasn’t funny.

I just really did not believe in that at all. With local clients in those multi-nationals when we got close enough as me heading the agency and then heading their businesses for them to agree, they couldn’t do anything about it because it was head office driven.

The fact that 20 years later that is still the case is unacceptable quite frankly. The only reason it exists is that the real intention is to use the tool and whatever is discovered as a punitive tool is to dominate and dictate to the agency when the agency has no voice.

It’s a kangaroo court really where you can mount no defence. You can provide no context. You can provide no contribution whatsoever to changing things for the better. Where that still exists, it should be a matter of shame for the clients who allow it to exist. That’s a fact.

Yeah but I said before we’re going to come across a lot because like you, the clients that ring us ring us because they want two way. We haven’t been asked to only run a 1-way, private assessment of agencies for years.

Darren:

We don’t do it. If you want to do it, to use a metaphor, it’s like the judges at the Olympics. They sit there. They score the performance of the agencies by holding up these scores out of ten. As you say, there’s no chance to challenge from the agency’s part of it, for the agency to challenge the judge on the score that they are given.

You mentioned 2-way relationships. That’s really interesting because I’ve now heard 2 clients, major global clients, who use a 2-way system but they pay the agency a bonus only on the score they give the agency. They’ve created…

Cam:

You’ve got to factor in the other side of the coin.

Darren:

Yeah but they’ve created the illusion of being collaborative and then made it punitive by only using their score of the agency to actually give the bonus to the agency.

Cam:

So, they’re denying mitigating circumstances …

Darren:

It’s not about the mitigating circumstances. It’s purely their score of the agency but it goes … What I was going to say …

Cam:

Well that’s flawed.

One-way evaluations are not collaborative

Darren:

…because my experience is that the clients that only want 1-way scoring or 1-way evaluation are not collaborative. They are purchasers of services. They are the buyer. Very much the agency is the supplier.

When you read all of the research that the The Economist Intelligence Unit has done on collaboration, collaboration requires the 3 things that you said at the very start, which is courtesy, respect and inclusiveness plus trust. You cannot collaborate unless you trust each other.

Cam:

The trust is the ultimate thing. It’s the lagging indicator but until I like you, I am unlikely to be inclined to respect you and to allow you to earn my respect. Until I like and respect you, I am highly unlikely ever to trust you. That’s a social contract. It’s the emotional one.

It’s the psychology of it. Yes, trust is the grail if you like that you need to aim for but it’s got to be earned. It takes time to earn it. There’s got to be consistency and demonstration. You have courtesy, respect and inclusiveness will lead to trust. That’s the whole point and the purpose of it. If we come back to denying, or refusing or …

Darren:

Ignoring?

Cam:

… ignoring

Darren:

…the mitigating circumstance

Cam:

The agency assessment of the client, Darren, our conversations with clients … No, I’ll back up. There’s 2 points. There are certain circumstances where when we are called in we may well counsel the agency particularly to say, “Hold off for the benchmark. Listen. Learn.”

Just understanding what’s going on at the client level. Don’t contribute to a counterpoint or a counter-view. Just listen. Keep your mouth shut. Sit at the table before you open up your mouth and say, Yes, but, because there is much to be gained from paying that respect and extending that courtesy to the client to say, “You know what? Before we come back to you with a counterpoint, let’s hear the point.”

There are a number of circumstances where we counsel that, that is a wise thing to do, because you learn. It establishes a benchmark. Then the agencies are able to come back in and then link its assessment criteria not just to the client’s criteria and parameters, but to the circumstances because now they have a lot of knowledge about what’s going on at the various levels and from the various units within the client body because they’re always complex. It’s never just a number. There’s a wealth of indicators that sit behind the one number. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is we then sit, talk to those parties and say, “We want to discuss this. It may be debate this but in the first instance, let’s hope it’s a discussion.” It is not a case of who goes first is the weakest. It’s not who’s blinking first. He or she who goes first, in fact, is the most mature or has the soundest and best-grounded ego in the room. It starts with the client, because until clients themselves are operating at their peak performance, they will never get peak performance out of an agency.

It all starts with the clients

Client behavior, client performance and client efficiency, effectiveness and excellence dictates what they get. It starts with the clients. Those clients who understand that, respond to it and actually then do something with what the tool spits out in the first instance because I understand how to interpret it and invite us to work with them on that, they’re the ones who achieve greater things faster.

Darren:

To me that means that…

Cam:

…they’ve got to listen. They’ve got to learn so the agency side must be factored into it. This goes critical.

Darren:

It goes back to the whole concept of co-creation …

Cam:

Yes.

Darren:

… that this is not a buyer/supplier relationship because the outputs of the agency are directly impacted by the inputs and participation of the marketer.

Cam:

We won’t get into this. It’s for another 2 hours somewhere else. I’m not too sure about collaboration. I think it’s one of those words that has been hijacked by far too many people and we all assume we know what it means.

We all assume that people understand the positive intonation’s connotation of it. One definition of collaboration is the unnatural alliance of natural enemies. Post-war, whoever collaborated with the losing side is in for a really rough, tough time.

You get no prizes for that but it certainly is a co-word. It’s cooperation, not collegiate or consultative. But co-creation does it for me, but until that occurs, then even the highest ambitions will never be satisfied, will never be achieved, will never be reached, at all.

I am still bemused by the fact that the agency side is still not respected and not factored into their performance, because if a client isn’t listening to what the agency has to say, they are denying themselves the knowledge of how they might be better and stronger.

Linking relationship performance to financial bonuses

Darren:

I mentioned the whole remuneration component and in fact, there’s one of our competitors in the marketplace who has done a very good job at selling their software solution by linking it to performance bonuses.

Now I’m interested because if it’s used in a way that benefits only 1 side, so it’s actually being used to punish the agency rather than reward the agency, what’s your general principle or what are your thoughts around linking relationship performance to financial bonuses because I think we may have a disagreement here?

Cam:

Big question. Most of the current models which exist out there … the caveat here is I have no knowledge of the many and various different financial models that exist across the board. I will talk about those that I have either experienced myself over the years or that I’m familiar with at the moment, but it’s a big caveat.

Darren:

Fair enough.

Cam:

Those which are geared to withhold agency revenues are flawed. If I enter into terms of business and a contract with you which for metric convenience says, I’m going to buy this from you. This is what I expect to be delivered when and how. I’m going to pay you $120 but by the way I want you to have skin in the game.”

This is the ridiculous language that’s being used. “I want you to have skin in the game. We’re going to a deal here. Let’s withhold 10% of that $120 because I’m going to keep $12 up my sleeve. At the end of the year, if I think that you’ve done a good job, I’ll give you the $12 that I’ve been holding back from you. If I think you’ve done a terrific job, I’ll give you another $12.”

Darren:

Withhold that much? Usually it’s only $6

Cam:

$10 down and the $10 up is not unusual. That’s ridiculous.

Darren:

I always say …

Cam:

An employee would not work on that basis.

Darren:

I say that to every procurement person. “Would you do this personally on your salary?”

Cam:

But no employee does do it.

Darren:

No.

Cam:

Employees are employed at a price to do a job. They are progressively assessed. If they’ve done that job, they might get a bonus.

Yes. It is a bonus. It’s an uplift. If they’ve done a superlative job, they’ll probably get a whopping great bonus. It’s the whopping bit of it that needs to be brought to the agency table because there are agencies out there that are doing sensational jobs in partnership with their clients. There’s evidence to attest to that. I have no idea but they should be on a whopping bonus because they’ve contributed to client wealth.

Darren:

I’ve just noticed the time. We’ve run out of time?

Cam:

Oh have we?

Darren:

Yep.

Cam:

Good God.

The man with the gold makes the rules

Darren:

I want to absolutely thank you for sharing your knowledge and insights because that was a terrific conversation. Is there anything that you wanted to finally sum up with?

Cam:

Thank you for that. I too enjoyed it even though it’s been an across-the-table general agreement on all matters but out of that agreement, there should be learning. It starts with the client, the marketer. They control the destiny of their relationship more than anyone else. They are in charge, in control. They can define anything they like.

If we go back to the opening words and aspect of the conversation is you can achieve and have high performance. You have to have high maintenance. High maintenance doesn’t actually mean that it’s going to demand a huge amount of you. It’s just that you are there all of the time.

You have got an active awareness and an active interest in your team being at high-performance levels and, therefore, getting high-performance levels out of the agency. How that will come are performance results. I can guarantee that.

Darren:

Absolutely. Let me sum that up. The golden rule. The man with the gold makes the rules. If I meet a marketer who is unhappy with the performance of any of their agencies, it is usually because they forgot to make the rules that work.

Cam:

Very true. The performance of that golden rule is, if they’ve got the money, to remind themselves the first place the spend the first cut of their budget is on their team.

Darren:

Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Cam:

You’re welcome.