Richard Benyon, CEO of the new SAAS start-up, Alliances, discusses the importance of professional relationship management in marketing. He shares his experience developing relationship management technology and the role it plays in facilitating effective evaluations, the necessity of structured feedback, and the value of 360-degree feedback in understanding agency-client dynamics.
They also address the pitfalls of one-way scorecards, the importance of emotional responses in evaluations, and the necessity of continuous engagement to address issues effectively. Richard emphasises the importance of narrative in feedback and the need for calibration to uncover root causes of problems in relationships.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
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All research and industry evidence shows that the closer the marketing team is to their agencies, the better the performance in both effectiveness and productivity. So, what is the best way to manage these relationships, and why are more marketers not investing in improving the productivity and performance of these essential supplier relationships?
To discuss everything about professional relationship management, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the CEO of the latest SaaS startup, Alliansis: Alliansis, which promises strategic relationships evaluating made easy, Richard Benyon.
Welcome, Rich.
Richard:
Hi, Darren. Nice to be with you.
Darren:
Look, you are the perfect person to talk about because your role is in professional relationship management and surveys, or whatever you want to define them as, has been one from creating platforms and technology to facilitate this, but not actually then being in the room when people are using the tools or getting the results from the tools that you’ve created.
And so, I think you bring quite an interesting perspective because I think sometimes as consultants, especially in this area, we can be too close to the actual interactions that happen to actually understand what’s needed to get there. What’s your reaction to that?
Richard:
Darren, it’s interesting, and my original path into particularly marketing agency relationship management came in an unusual way. And that was in my previous company, I’d actually been essentially involved in HR performance management, and had written a platform for a lot of Australian major companies on that area.
One day a client of ours said, “Hey, look, I’m doing HR performance management, would I be able to do this with my agency?” We said, “Sure, we’ve got software available for you.” He actually ran an evaluation which worked really well, and at the end of that, we said to ourselves, the characteristics of HR performance management seem to lend themselves pretty well, why don’t we take this technology platform and convert it?
So, I really come very much from the tech side of things and being able to see it applied in different domains and different areas, it’s been an interesting learning experience for me, and it’s great for me to be able to obviously see it through your eyes, and you guys are at the coalface of what’s going on in the relationship. My job really is just to make sure that the data’s there, that people are able to use these tools in an effective way.
And I think we had a chat about this yesterday, I kind of liken it a bit to the Formula 1 driving experience, and that is, you’ve really got to have a top-class driver and you’ve also got to have a foundation in a pretty strong car to do that. So, I have always enjoyed being the engine. I’m a tech geek, and that’s really what I enjoy in life.
Darren:
Well, you have got a long career, and a successful career in building technology, so that’s why it’s interesting that you’re now applying that again, I guess with the lessons you’ve learned previously with building, what was largely enterprise type systems to building something in the AI era that is perhaps more nimble, could I say?
Richard:
Yeah, Darren, I think the number one thing, and I mean this is true I think across all areas of software and also all areas of consulting around it, is that simplicity is probably what a lot of people are seeking.
So, if you can get things done relatively quickly, relatively efficiently and effectively, it’s kind of better than spending weeks, months, years laboring away to get stuff out. And particularly, in relationship management. I mean, it’s the talking, it’s the conversations, it’s the action planning, that’s the bit that really works. So, getting people to that as quickly as possible is probably the best I ideal.
And now, with AI, particularly the number one pain point that everybody’s always faced in relationship management has been crunching comments. So, trying to make sense of all of these hundreds of comments that people are making, and you guys having to wade through those, trying to come up with those nuggets.
The wonderful thing about AI, particularly large language models, is that they are just ideally suited to help us. They can do the real graft work for us, create the themes and stuff, and we can then use that to interpret and I guess, understand what the sentiment is but more importantly, obviously, determine what the action planning coming out of that is.
Darren:
Because completely understanding your role in the past as building the technology, it amazes me that so many of the legacy systems treat relationship management as if it’s a consumer research project with literally hundreds of – well, not hundreds, but lots and lots of questions that are required by everyone to fill in as if it’s going to drill down to actually find the pain point.
And yet, my experience has been that in most cases, these surveys become almost like stimulus material for a conversation between the parties to then resolve what the actual pain points are. In many ways, it’s like an overall body scan to see where the pain is so that then the people involved can actually focus on their conversations on solving those problems.
Richard:
And Darren, I think, you’re right about that, and also, look, if people are unhappy, they’re going to find a way to tell you about that. So, whether you’ve got a very elaborate mechanism to do that or relatively simple, they’ll still find a way to say, “Look, there was an issue that’s occurred, these are the things that are happening and the elements we see there.”
Now, I don’t want to downplay it. I mean, obviously having a great question set and the ability to use that is much better than having a crappy one if I can be so bold, but at the end of the day-
Darren:
It’s okay. I’ve had Mark Ritson on here and he dropped the F bomb I think every four minutes, so no.
Richard:
Yeah, but Darren, you’re right. I mean, look, it’s the stimulus to the conversation. I still believe that a formal evaluation is a fantastic way to do that because sometimes, it’ll help people to say, “Look, I don’t need to do this, I have a great relationship with my agency, ah, we discuss these things informally and elements around there.”
The main issue for me on that is that particularly in a day-to-day working relationship, it can be difficult to bring up things that are not necessarily comfortable. You’ve got to work with the people and elements around there.
So, at least having a formal evaluation mechanism gets that out on the table, and then it’s over to you guys in terms of the conversations, and all the things that need to happen as a result of that. So, definitely and particularly for me, the last couple of years have been trying to slim down the experience so that there’s more time for the talking and the actions.
Darren:
What amazes me though, is the number of marketers that don’t believe they need a sort of structured feedback process. And look, I can understand if you’ve got a marketing department or two or three people are dealing with the agency, then yes, you could have a meeting every so often, and just have a conversation around the issues, but there’d be no structure to it. It’d just be whatever’s top of mind would get laid on the table.
But marketing has become so much more complicated as most professions have, and there’s this increasing growth of stakeholders involved in that, that are often outside those conversations. You would think that having a structured approach to this would be a good reason to actually bring some rigor to that process, wouldn’t you?
Richard:
Yeah, and Darren, I think the other thing about this is the ability for the multiple voices to be heard. And I can tell you the one thing that I get most uncomfortable about (and I have had people do it in the past) is when you hear something like this, “Well, I’ll tell you what, we just want the ability for one person to be able to, as an example, log in and they’ll complete the survey on behalf of their team.”
And what they’ll do is they’ll walk around and they’ll talk with everybody, they’ll build a consensus, and the consensus opinion goes in. And that makes me super uncomfortable because we’ve all been in meeting rooms where there’s been a single loud voice that’s dominated and swayed and you can see people kind of in the corners rolling eyes and elements around there.
So, I think the combination of the ability to poll multiple people and hear their voices within that, that for me, is just a super component of that. And that really outside of formal evaluation, that’s difficult to get that, particularly when you’re going to poll people particularly two totally separate voices.
One might be senior leadership who are very much more focused on the outcomes of the agency and what they produce, and then you’ve got people who are working with an agency on a day-to-day basis. And their perspective is often, well, how easy or difficult is it to work with this particular agency?
And by the way, same on the agency side. If you’re asking the agency to be evaluating what’s going on on the client side, getting those different voices and perspectives and trying to synthesize them, that’s really difficult to do.
Because if your CMO is saying, “Hey, the agency’s fantastic,” you are not going to sit there and say, “Well, actually they may be fantastic in terms of what they produce, but oh my gosh, are they difficult to deal with and financial transparency, and all of those types of things.” So, again, I’m a strong proponent of some form of formal evaluation just to try and get all those voices out there.
Darren:
I know it’s always a measure for me when I’m talking to clients about doing an evaluation. The ones that want to do the one way where they get to score the agency, but don’t want the agency to give them feedback, I think is a sign of either professional or personal immaturity in that they’re unwilling to hear what the other party has to say about them.
It also completely undermines the professional relationship and turns the agency very much into a supplier who does what they’re told, and they’re not willing to give the agency the voice to tell the client how they could actually work better together, how to give them give them feedback or engage with them in a better way, and I think that’s really interesting.
A lot of people said to me, “Oh, you’ll find it particularly difficult because in Asian cultures, there is very much a buyer supplier mentality.” And yet what I found from personal experience is that when you frame it the right way in that this is not about complaints, because complaints are not useful apart from pointing out what everyone knows, but it’s for constructive feedback. And you get everyone on that platform, then it’s much more about people contributing to a solution rather than complaining about the problem.
Richard:
Darren, it’s interesting that what we’re talking about here, the 360, which is obviously the ultimate in best practice and more often than not, client and marketers who are interested and actively want 360’s feedback done on them, generally those are the strongest relationships because they can handle the truth, and can they effectively go to their agency and say, “Look, please tell us what’s going on, because our role is to enable you as an agency to operate at your best element around there, so you need to tell us if we are hindering you in some way.”
I mean, the thing that I’ll always note (and again, please, I’m not in consulting, so I’m just going to say this with data points in mind more than anything else) is that the question sets that I see that make me the most comfortable in that are the ones where the agency are asked to comment on how effectively the marketers enable them.
So, it’s their enabling ability, not whether the marketers are doing great work or great strategy elements, that’s really complex. It’s difficult for agencies to answer, particularly being paid by the clients. So, I think this concept of agencies providing feedback to their clients on whether the clients are best enabling them, allowing them to work most efficiently, that’s the ultimate.
Now, I will say one thing, and that is that if a client’s reticent to do that, I’m still a proponent of saying to them, “Well, how about at least let the agency do a self-assessment? Let them tell you how they’re going.”
And the reason why I quite like that, if you are not doing the full 360, is at least it gives the agency a voice, and sometimes in that commentary and that self-assessment, it allows them to articulate some of those things. I’m not saying it’s the best, I’m just saying that it’s better than one way. Put it that way.
Darren:
So, you’re talking to someone that spent the first six years of their career in medical research, and it’s been proven time and time again that human beings are flawed at self-assessment.
Richard:
I fully agree.
Darren:
There was the famous study of driving, and they had to evaluate other drivers, and of course, everyone was bad except them who were above average. And so, I think, yes, it’s an option, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good option for that reason.
I’ve seen too many agencies bend themselves inside out because they start considering if I evaluate myself really well, and that’s very different from the clients so maybe I should be humble, and it becomes too much.
I think your first point, which it’s about enabling. I’ve seen too many one way – see, I call them one-way scorecards or two-way feedback. I don’t call it 90 degrees, 180 or 360 because I end up going around in circles and not getting anywhere.
But a one-way scorecard, I’ve seen things like the agency is good at creative. I mean, really, why was that question even there? Their job is to be creative. It would be better: meets my expectations or exceeds my expectations for creative ideas or is challenging me with their creative thinking, which is a positive thing being challenged.
But if they don’t get there, it’s like a scorecard of are they doing their job well, which I’m not really sure works on a collective basis. It could work as a job HR type function where you’re talking to your direct reports. Even then, I’m not sure it’s particularly insightful. But talking about how we work together and what would work better to deliver greater productivity and performance has to be a positive thing, doesn’t it?
Richard:
Yeah. And Darren, it’s interesting the word that you use this for scorecard because I’ve obviously been involved in many evaluation programs where the client is rating the agency on a scorecard, and that number then gets used in incentive compensation, and this is a personal opinion please, this is coming from a tech geek.
I am not a fan of that at all because my personal take (and by the way, I’ll implement whatever systems are needed) is that I’ve seen this in action, is that the numbers become everything, and the 4.2 and a 4.1 and what you were picking up on earlier on, it becomes less about coaching, learning, mutually improving, and it’s about the scorecard. And that number becomes everything and all there. So, wholeheartedly agree with you on that, Darren, the scorecard concept.
Darren:
Well, Rich, my personal experience of having seen that, first of all, the money distorts the purpose because the agency wants to maximize their yield. But I’ve also seen marketers use it, then it weaponizes the whole system because the marketer goes, “I don’t want to pay the bonus, so we’re going to all mark them low so we don’t have to pay the money.” It destroys the very purpose of it.
But I think the consultants that do that are trying to lock in their services to an ongoing system that justifies their fees because if the bonus is hundreds of thousands of dollars that are up for grabs, their fees of 20 or 30 grand a year to do that seems relatively small considering the amount – all of behavioral economics tells you it’s flawed.
And I’ll give you a great example, Dan Ariely wrote it in his book, Predictably Irrational. If I say, “Oh, Rich, can you come to my place and help me move some furniture?” And you come over and spend an hour there, and I give you $50 for your time, you’ll go, “What? It’s only worth $50?” And if I gave you a bottle of wine worth $50, you’d go, “Oh, great, thanks.” The money itself is what actually destroys it.
In the U.S., you get invited to Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s and you turn up and you have a great meal, and you stand up and go, “Great meal, here’s 400 bucks, thanks, we’ll come next year,” she’d be insulted. Money has that ability to distort the relationship.
Now, I know agencies and clients are in a financial relationship, but on the day-to-day basis, they operate as … they use the word partnership often when there’s no reason for it to be called a partnership. So, I agree with you, I’m a hundred percent against using surveys for anything other than improving performance, not for working out how much bonus someone should get.
There’s another thing that I’m really interested in, and that is the fact that a lot of these surveys end up being done every 6 months or every 12 months, worst case scenario, they’re annual surveys. Whether they’re a structured platform like the one you’ve developed or whether they’re more informal, my problem is that the way issues arise and we use a wave metaphor.
So, problems have amplitude, they have frequency, and so if there’s a big problem, like I don’t know, the server goes down and no one can do anything, that’s a big problem, and everyone knows about and complains.
But if it’s logging you out every time you are away from it for five minutes and you have to log back in, that’s a problem that’s there all the time, and doesn’t necessarily get picked up or discussed because it has low amplitude, but high frequency. Whereas high amplitude, but low frequency is the one that gets the attention, so that’s the first thing.
Then there’s recency. Because I’ve seen too many surveys that have picked up a problem that happened last week. And so, the agency gets scored low because it’s recent, and yet they’ve spent six months doing a brilliant job. And so, it’s not really representative of that whole year or six months or period, it’s just representative of the moment. It’s one of the things us human beings suffer from. We’re only human after all.
Richard:
It’s interesting. I mean, there’s a really great kind of, I’m going to call it like an online card that has all of these distortions, group think, the ones where-
Darren:
The biases, they’re called biases.
Richard:
Yeah, all the biases, fantastic. And that biases, if you look at that, and if you have a read of that, particularly in conjunction with relationship evaluation, it’s fantastic, it makes a really interesting psychological thing. But what you’re saying about recency, I mean that can happen in one of two ways.
So, either, let’s just say somebody’s doing this on an annual basis and I’m just going to use calendar being based in the U.S. calendar year. So, there’s a major issue with the agency in February and that kind of goes and it was really big, and I’m going to pick up on – you said the amplitude was high, but the evaluation’s done in December, there’s a very high chance that that agency will still not receive as opposed to, if that event occurred in November, that will be an absolute disaster for everyone on there.
So, I think for me, one of the most important flips and it’s only really possible now with more modern technology, is to try and move to potentially more of an engagement-based model where relationship evaluations can be done more continuously. So, I think what you’re picking up on the frequency and elements around that. So, do smaller evaluations more frequently rather than monstrous evaluations annually or even bi-annually.
Now, I think part of the problem too is that people have got into a mindset of having to do these major programs. So, I’m going to measure 50 relationships together. So, you’ve got this one person working on 50 relationships, then it’s how do I distribute this? How do I talk to the people, et cetera, et cetera.
Whereas if those were spread out more frequently smaller, discussions can be more focused about particular things there, I think it just reduces the impact, quite frankly, probably for the poor marketers and agents who’s got to sit there and do the surveys. You think if you’re a marketing leader and suddenly you get a thing that says, “By the way, I need you to work on the six relationships, six surveys, six thoughts, et cetera, et cetera.”
So, I think this concept of being able to do things more frequently, engagement based smaller, I think that that has merit, I just don’t know whether it’s been technically possible to do before. So, I think a slightly different premise is to say, why don’t we try do post-engagement, post-campaign, whatever, a major event that’s occurring.
And by the way, you could also do triage. So, you have a major, I won’t say the word, but a major shit storm happens, do a triage afterwards. “Guys, what’s gone wrong? Let’s do a survey, let’s try to figure out, let’s put triage, let’s get this thing done,” and we can do a focused survey on the problem. We don’t need to worry about … we’ll do other surveys looking at the body of the work but let’s try and figure out why this happened and why we don’t do it again, so I’m going to be proposing.
Darren:
Absolutely. Because you can’t solve a problem until you get agreement as to what the problem was. And so, often, there is the shit storm, the explosion, something goes terribly wrong, everyone scrambles around to fix it, and afterwards, everyone’s left with that feeling that it was a disaster, but there is often not enough time or effort spent to actually get agreement as to what the problem was, and then to consider how to fix it.
One of the things in post-campaign reviews is that they’ve become less and less. As marketers find themselves literally moving from activity to activity, there is not that time to actually take the moment to learn or to assess and learn and make sure it doesn’t happen again. So, what you end up with is large organizations just repeating the same problems over and over again without having any sort of data that allows agreement for it.
There is a solution that’s flying around, net promoter score. The idea that I can in one score … so if I’ve got 20 agencies and a lot of agencies are using a system based on net promoter – it’s great as a very, very light litmus test for consumers.
But even then, I don’t know about you, but I’ve just ordered something online and within two minutes of making the transaction, they’re asking me how was my experience? I don’t know because I’m waiting for it to be delivered in the next seven days, and then I’ll have the product and then I can tell you. But two minutes afterwards, I’m really not then interested in giving you feedback (point one).
Point two, the number of agencies that have said, “Oh, my net promoter score from this client was 9.2, and they’re taking me to pitch.”
Richard:
Yeah, Darren, it’s interesting. And so, here’s my take on net promoter. In fact, I won’t say it’s my take, I’m going to thank IBM who at the time, was a client of mine, and I ran their global evaluations for them. And they ran, well, I consider actually to be best practice, and that is net promoter in conjunction with a formal feedback. I’ll just use the word scorecard, but too directional, take it for granted.
So, what I liked and somebody I think it might have been in their research department articulated this to me, they said, we find that net promoter is a very useful emotional indicator, but we also want the hard facts, the concrete, we want the rating, we want to be able to dig in. We want to know exactly what’s going on on the logical side.
So, if you want to think about it, net promoter and emotional kind of like top of mind, what do you think is going on? And then we’re talking about a rigorous scorecard, looking at all the different dimensions.
For me, the combination of those is ideal. Look, I just don’t think you get the depth out of net promoter. Just one of the interesting thing though, and again, just please take this as anecdotal, this is somebody in a discussion.
The other thing this person mentioned was that sometimes, they will see the net promoter score dip first. So, they don’t know why but they’ll see a dip in net promoter coming ahead of the logical and I don’t know what the thinking behind that is or vice versa so — oh, I see your hand and yes, I’ll stop now. I’ll stop.
Darren:
No, no, no, Rich, it absolutely goes to brain function because human beings naturally burn a lot of energy thinking rationally, but we respond emotionally, and here’s the example. You walk out your back door and you see a big snake sitting there and you jump, but then when you’ve jumped out of danger, you look back and you go, “Oh, that’s the kid’s rubber snake that they left lying around.”
Because a hundred thousand years of evolution has made us have a short circuit, which is all about emotional response. It’s handled by the midbrain. It fires before your upper cortex has even had a chance to think. And so, what we see is even collectively within groups, we will see an emotional change first before they can articulate why that emotional change has happened.
And that’s absolutely why net promoter, because your point, it’s about how I feel about this group or this person or this organization or this brand, before I can even articulate why I feel that unless it’s something very recent. I mean, you’ve just completely destroyed my internet for three days, and then I’ll give you a very low score. Why? Because I didn’t have internet for three days, cause and effect.
But where we’re looking at trends over time, there’ll be an emotional shift collectively before there’s a very clearly articulated rationalization of that. It’s so much part of the way the human brain functions. We don’t want to spend energy thinking when we can just stay alive by responding and reacting to what we see as threats.
And that’s really, I guess, people are often afraid of acknowledging their emotions in a professional setting, except that it’s so important because we’re all driven that way. Even the most rational person in the world is going to be responding to their emotions.
Richard:
Just one thing about net promoter, and I’ll just say this again with caution, is that the sample sizes that we have when we’re doing an agency evaluation are relatively small. So, let me just use a scenario of even if we had say 10 to 20 people, statistically, if you were to use the classic net promoter 100 to negative 100 score, you can have wild swings based on people just moving a button from one to the left to the right.
So, I’m a much bigger proponent against software geek kicks in looking at the distribution. So, rather than going just for a hard or fast look that your net promoter score is negative 50 or whatever it is, I like to see the distribution to see how many people do we have in that upper promoter? How many people do we have kind of like in the traditional passives. I even like splitting out what I’m going to call weak detractors and strong detractors.
Because for me, somebody scoring one is very different to somebody scoring five or six. So, again, I think it’s looking at that curve to feel how do different groups of people feel about it. Now, that’s very different if you are somebody doing 10,000 people walking through a store and clicking a net promoter button.
But I just think with the sample sizes we’ve got, we’ve got to be cautious with the net promoter, even though I do think it is a good thing when used well.
Darren:
Look, I’m not anti-net promoter, I think it has a role to play in large sample organization, consumer feedback or buyer feedback. But I think sometimes, it’s overplayed, particularly in the category that we’re operating, which is professional services relationships.
And I like the approach of using it to capture, let’s say, the emotion of the relationship, but then to drill down and give people a structure so that they can start to respond to more rational, and in some ways, prosaic things, but allows them to then respond to and possibly give reason to before they’ve even had necessarily a chance to think about it, just by stimulating them to assess how they feel about those things.
We see this in pitches where there’ll be a scorecard that they need to fill in. Now, overall, they’ll have a preference on an emotional level. People call it chemistry, just these are people I trust or I would like to work with them, but the scorecard operates on giving them a rise to interrogate that feeling they have in a more rational or prosaic features that they perceive as being offered by each of the agencies, and so it’s a really interesting approach.
One of the other issues of course, is the speed to giving feedback as well. I’ve seen some of the legacy systems where they do these really deep dive, lots of questions, really interrogate – first of all, getting everyone to complete it can be a bit of a challenge. But secondly, then having even two or three weeks, in some cases, six weeks later, the results finally come back. It’s almost like everyone’s moved on. Again, it’s that recency issue of being relevant by being in the moment, isn’t it?
Richard:
Yeah. And I mean, realistically, and just use an ideal case here; if you can compress for relatively (and I’ll talk about this in an engagement) – if you can get a survey in and out done with a sample in say a week, and people the following week can sit down and have a discussion and not overly complicate, don’t need to slice this thing six ways through Thursday, I just need to figure out what’s going on, review.
I mean, if you think if you can meet two to three weeks directly after the event that’s occurred or the relationship evaluation, I mean, that’s an ideal case, it’s fresh. By the way, the other nice thing is, and I see this often happening, is that it increases then the next time round when people are resurveyed on that relationship or a different one, you are much more likely to contribute again because you don’t feel like your stuff’s gone into a black hole.
Worst case scenario, and you see this sometimes, is somebody gets surveyed, and then they get surveyed six months later and it’s like, well, I didn’t see the results of the first one time round, so why are you even bothering me with this? I don’t understand why these things are occurring.
So, I personally think a lot of motion to shorter, sharper surveys done more frequently where the debrief is done very rapidly post-completion so that you are as close to the event as humanly possible.
Darren, do you mind, I just wanted to ask you just one thing that jumped onto my mind, and that is, we talked about … because this concept of amplitude and frequency I’ve not heard before and I absolutely love it. What’s the scenario from a consultant’s perspective of trying to uncover the low amplitude, high frequency?
Because I’ve not thought about that. That’s kind of like the background noise, but that could be causing real efficiency issues inside a relationship but might not bubble up because everybody’s focused on the big things. So, how do you address those? They should be addressed because they’re happening frequently, but the impact of them isn’t as high.
Darren:
So, where it often pops up is not in the scores, believe it or not, but in the narrative.
Richard:
Okay, yeah.
Darren:
In the commentary. You need to look for where there is a persistent or the expression of a persistent frustration. But then often, they won’t actually articulate what’s causing it. It’s a bit like, “Oh, doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “Well, don’t do that.” It can be a bit like that. They’re not saying a particular thing’s causing it, but you need to then interrogate it.
And one of the things that we often use is a Boston Matrix, the two by two that says amplitude frequency. And so, let’s not necessarily deal with the big amplitude, low frequency as much as if it’s high amplitude, high frequency, high frequency and so on and so forth, so that you can then prioritize what you’re going to address.
Because I’ve been in meetings where people have reviewed survey results and ended up with big, long lists of 12 things that should be addressed. Well, sure, here’s the low hanging fruit, three or four things that could be done without – but then the bigger issues that will perhaps need more intensive addressing, let’s just pick the top three and they’re going to be the things that are going to have the most impact. And the impact is one is amplitude and high frequency. If we can fix those two things, then people will be a lot happier.
But yeah, it’s a good question, and it’s one of the reasons why I think narratives or commentary, allowing people, sure you can sometimes get venting in there, but it’s easy to … and occasionally, and when I have seen someone venting, I usually end up talking to someone in HR, either on the agency or the client side, because it will often be that there’s a problem deeper than the actual relationship, that there’s something happening that they’re … and that’s good as well because it allows that person to get perhaps the support they need that they’re expressing through the survey.
I mean, it is a very sensitive area, and one that you need to treat with caution and with respect because you are asking people to be honest and provide their feedback, and I think that’s really important.
The other thing just because you said about the sooner you can give people the results of the survey, the better, and I absolutely agree with that. In some ways, when I fill in those online quizzes and they give you the results straight away, that’s great. What I don’t think you should do is then necessarily start making decisions off that.
I think get the result, get the report, and then give people time to just be with it, live with it, reflect on it, ask the questions that they need to ask. Because that’s the other thing, is I often find that the reaction is to the report rather than to the underlying issues that the report’s highlighting. Would you see the same thing or have heard of the same thing?
Richard:
Darren, no, that is a really interesting concept in terms of … and I thoroughly agree because you’re really trying to get to the root cause of what it is, not necessarily just the symptom that’s sitting on there.
Certainly, one thing that it does bring up is this concept of calibration. So, this is a tricky subject and it’s also around this area of how quickly afterwards, and do you need to sit and think about it. And that is when multiple agency relationships are being done together, you can get the results out pretty quickly, the question is, is one team being an overly hard marker or elements around there?
So, I guess it’s really the root of it is to try and take the sting out and to try and address the factual components of that. So, as I say, I’ve seen calibration sometimes try to use to do that. So, look, let’s just try align on these things, just make sure that this team isn’t venting versus the other ones around there.
No, but a really interesting comment there Darren, in terms of the sit and think, that’s not something that I’d come across before. See, I like talking to you. See, I’ve got all these nice things; amplitude, frequency – next week I’m going to be sprouting some of these things let me tell you.
Darren:
You’re very welcomed, very welcomed. Share it as wide as possible, just a little attribution on the bottom. “I was talking to my friend Darren Woolley, and he said …”
Richard:
Yeah, exactly.
Darren:
But I think part of the problem, I’ve seen consultants that almost want to present their report as, “Da-da, look what we’ve done.” My personal approach and for us is to send the report to people, have a very clear executive summary, frame it in the way of this is about constant improvement, not criticism or judgment, and then we’ll meet in a weeks’ time or two weeks’ time (usually a week is enough), and then it’ll be the opportunity for everyone to discuss that and make their contribution.
And that will be not the people that have participated, but the leads of each of the areas will meet then to have that conversation. I think it works incredibly well because it sets quite a mature, positive approach to the whole feedback loop. And again, as you touched on earlier, I think then if money’s on the line, that then drags it back down to being less productive than it could be.
Richard:
Darren, if you don’t mind, I heard a great phrase, I was listening to a podcast yesterday, and I’m just going to paraphrase what it was, but it was just this absolutely fantastic line. And the gist of this was that great consultants don’t always come in with the answers, but they come in with the right questions, and I thought that that was a fantastic line.
In other words, I think you are getting to the heart of that as you’re not coming in with all the answers, but boy, you’re going to interrogate what’s going on, you’re going to ask the marketer, an agency and help them uncover what the root cause of that is rather than you coming in and saying, “Hey, I’ve got the answer for you guys.”
Darren:
Now, Rich, what I’ve really enjoyed about this conversation is that many of the things that you’ve clearly learnt from building a legacy system, building an enterprise system in this area, you’ve now bought to bear in addressing a lot of those issues, which you’ve been sharing today in a new platform.
Where could people find out more about this approach that you’re bringing with the promise of strategic relationship evaluation made easy, which I love. I mean, it’s all a promise in the world.
Richard:
Thanks, Darren. Please, if you are interested, just go to our website, it’s alliansis.com, and everything’s on the website.
Darren:
Fantastic. Richard Benyon, thank you for joining me today on Managing Marketing.
Richard:
Thank you very much, Darren.
Darren:
Oh, look, one last question before we go, and that is, have you actually seen people get any major benefit from doing some of those long-processed evaluations?
