It’s the very first question you should ask yourselves when you set the wheels in motion for any pitch. I’m a fan of David Maister, the author, speaker, and consultant to professional service firms. Maister has an uncanny eye for irony, and he singled out one such irony in a blogpost of his last...
While spending a weekend a few years ago at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, I toured a huge, Cold War-era bunker nearby. Built in the 1960s to shelter Congress in the event of a nuclear attack, the now-declassified facility was designed to employ elaborate psychological measures to keep surviving legislators...
Does your firm stalk tigers or elephants? Do you get along best with bulldogs, or do you snuggle up coziest with pussycats? These animals are metaphors for different kinds of clients. Market segmentation is not just for client-side marketers. It’s for you and your agency, too. When you use a segmentation strategy to analyze...
If your agency never gets calls and emails from agency search consultants, you’re in the majority. Of the more than 72,000 agencies and design firms in the USA, search consultants can get to know a few at most. You can choose to look on search consultants as the enemy… or you could recognize their...
The setting was the noisy, dimly lit Gotham Bar & Grill, an upscale destination for fine food and pricey wine at the northern edge of Greenwich Village. Along with the president of an agency, I was dining with an agency search consultant: the head of a firm that clients hire to help them find...
Agencies spend a small fortune on pitch paraphernalia, but where is the real ROI? It’s like an arms race. In their anxiety and eagerness to win, firms continually dream up new ways to up the ante, seeking to impress clients. Creativity is great—it’s what we do—but I constantly get asked, “what works and what...
