What to look for in a “Trusted Agency”

Mike Richardson, VP Client Services

Cardinal Web Solutions

Then and Now

• Clients used to need to be wined, dined, and bribed for business

• Now agencies are hired as “trusted advisors” rather than vendors

• Trust is built as you start managing their business

• How do you build that trust?

What not to do- The Blanket Approach • All clients are different and so

are all agencies

• Don’t apply the same blanket approach to all of your agencies

• Don’t accept it as their client

• Find an agency that goes above and beyond to counsel and explain their strategy

• A Trusted Agency will prove their worth in the first 90 days

Trust Building- 5 Simple Rules

1. Listen

• Be involved, interactive, and above all listening for what is being said

• Not what you “think” the client or agency wants.

Trust Building- 5 Simple Rules

2. Structure

• Plain and simple, work on giving clear and direct advice.

• This part of the process usually involves problem solving, and taking points of view, even if it means going against the grain, all of which request trust by both client and agency.

Trust Building- 5 Simple Rules

3. Visualize

• Not only should you define and defend the problem, but search for the best and most effective solution.

• This sometimes involves asking the obvious questions:

• What are you looking to accomplish?

• Why do you want to accomplish this?

• How long do you believe this will take you to reach your goals?

• As an agency one should never be too quick to offer a solution just by reaching into the same bag of tricks from the past.

Trust Building- 5 Simple Rules

4. Engage

• This is where the trust factor really comes into play, it’s easy to sit in on a call and take notes, even to ask questions that seem intelligent to the prospect.

• However, where this simple to remember, difficult to repeat process falls to the ground, is after those first 90-days.

• Far too often agency’s become complacent and tend to overlook the value of continuing to build trust.

Trust Building- 5 Simple Rules

5. Commit• This can seem like a one-

sided cause and event, agency takes all responsibility and accountability for this to work, and that’s – that.

• Nothing could be further from the truth.

• At this stage it would appear that all trust has been built, given that most clients will allow an agency to guide them to the end result, with very little effort from the client.

Trust Over Time

• With this type of process, the agency most likely ends up with a satisfactory result and typically the client feels they were not involved.

• Let’s add a bit of accountability to this process shall we?

• A better solution might look like this, coming from the agency, “this will take both of US X amount of effort and time to achieve this together”, as a form of both commitment and engagement at the client level.

Now What?

More questions about how to hire a trusted advisor?

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company in the first 90 days with a truly integrated digital

plan.

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