Hello, everyone. Welcome to Question Everything, a podcast all about learning from the successes and the failures of those who dare to, well, question everything. This podcast is part interview, part therapy, and part Price is Right. We have our own game board stacked with questions that'll make even the most successful CMO sweat. I'm your host, Ashley Wolter, CMO and partner at Curiosity. On today's episode, I sit down with Dan Jeffries, founder of Daniel Jeffries Consulting. His goal is to forge world-class relationships among brands, agencies, and procurement teams. Today, you'll learn completely avoidable reasons why CMOs put agencies up for review, why agencies should never rewrite a client brief, and Dan's bad news for ditch-the-pitch believers. If you know anything about Dan, he shoots it straight and never holds back. Check it out.

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Dan Jeffries: Dan Introduction

With over a decade at Jeffries Consulting, Daniel Jeffries has earned a national reputation for helping the world's most recognized brands forge groundbreaking agency relationships. Besides sourcing dream teams for companies like Samsung, PetSmart, Capital One, Sonic, and of course, AutoZone, Daniel's unique point of difference is his conviction to stay on after the contract is signed. Daniel Jeffries is the CEO of PetSmart, and he's been working with CMOs on the art of agency management, brief writing, and conflict resolution. Prior to consulting, Daniel served as an agency procurement lead, a driving instructor, and a combat medic. Needless to say, Dan's got a little something for everybody. Welcome to the podcast, Dan. How are you? Very good, thank you. Very good indeed. I'm so excited for this. We've known each other for a long time.

We might even dig into some of those old reviews that I was a part of. PetSmart was one of them. And so, I'm excited to have you here and kind of dig into your career and your journey, which is like so fascinating. The consultant side, procurement side. There's just so much to learn there. So thanks for saying yes. No, I appreciate you guys having me on. I've watched a few of these and I find them really interesting. Awesome. Awesome. So what have you been up to lately? Like what's new with Dan? Well, on a personal side, I've just come back from London. I arrived back last night. I was over there for a wedding. My younger brother got married on Saturday. Congratulations! That was nice to go back and see family.

I don't see them very often. We all live around the world, so we don’t get together very often. You asked me a question a minute ago, what’s my name? I get called Dan by most of the people I know, but I’ve just spent the weekend being called Daniel by my mother, my father, and my two brothers. So it’s kind of weird. I love that. I love that. Well, I’ve always called you Dan, but then your website is Daniel. And I’m like, well, what do you prefer? I don’t mind, whatever. Okay, well, we heard it here first. Call him Dan. Yeah, call me Dan. But other than that, work-wise, we’ve got loads going on.

Really, really kind of busy start to the year, quieting down a little bit in the summer, which was great. I could work on my golf game. And then since kind of late August, it's gone a bit mad, as it kind of does every year. It's good. Yeah, we're feeling it over here, too. It's mayhem right now, I feel like. Yeah, it's certainly got busy, and it feels like there's a lot more coming down the pipe. Yeah, we've got stuff through the end of this year that's going to close out. We've got projects running all the way through to the end of 2024, and already stuff starting in January and into February as well. So it's going to be a busy period. Cool. Well, and I know, did I hear this right?

You have shot three hole-in-ones? I've actually shot five. Five hole-in-ones? I thought I was exaggerating with three. On three different continents. Three continents. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's an interesting little factoid. Five hole-in-ones. Like, most golfers will go their whole life without shooting one, and you have five. I'm just lucky. Lucky. Okay. All right. I hope you made a lot of money on those. Probably. I probably spent more than I made. All right. Well, let's dig into it. You know exactly how those podcasts work. We have 12 super spicy questions. You don't know which question is behind which number, but the power is in your hands. So where are we going to go first? Number four, please. Number four. What is the best advice?

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Dan Jeffries: How CMOs can repair client-agency relationships

What is the best advice you can give for CMOs looking to repair a broken agency relationship? Well, the number one advice is, 'Give me a call.' Yeah. Sorry, that was just too easy. No, I mean, well, that's why I want to know, because you're oftentimes like on the front end of creating that initial relationship. But I know you also stay on and you consult with brands, and help just make sure that relationship is really strong. And then I might imagine you get called a lot to help fix it, too, when things don't go. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the biggest issue is clients don't pay attention to it. They go through all the work and the cost associated with it of getting a new agency in play.

And then they say, OK, let's go. And then they start working with that agency and the whole working relationship with that agency becomes quite transactional. And it's sort of, you know, here's a brief, respond to the brief, give us the work, move on. Here's the brief, respond to the brief. And there's no sort of relational counseling or any relational sort of management. So a lot of times. Sometimes, smart clients, and there are some of them out there, they invest in you know what procurement people would call SRM, which is supplier relationship management. In the agency world, you can call it anything you want, but it's just agency management. And it's a structured ongoing process where you can assess how the agency is performing beyond the obvious, which is, you know, are they responding to the brief?

Are they doing it in time? But what are the behaviors like? What are the personalities like? Are people getting along with each other? Often agency relationships break down because of like one or two people. It's that simple. The creative guy is just a bit too up his own ass or, you know, the strategy guy wants to pontificate on everything or, sorry, I just said ass. Or, you know, sorry. You're good. You're good. You can pass on this podcast. Or, or it could be something that, you know, somebody just, they just don't get along. And, and the problem is that then that whole relationship gets tainted by one person and no agency should be losing business on the basis of that. No client should be going to pitch because of that.

So I think it's interesting. Most of the times when I start a pitch, the first thing I'll ask an agency, oh, sorry, a client is why are we doing this? What's, what's so bad that this has to change. And often it's, it could be the end of a long-term, you know, it's been 10 years and they've just kind of run out of steam in which case. Okay. It could be that there's a new, a new broom coming through. It might be a new CMO and they've, they just don't particularly value the agency. Um, and that's a difficult one to fix, or it could be that that's, you know, three, four years into a relationship. And it started to sour a little bit and maybe the promises aren't being met.

And I think that, you know, a CMO's job is to, is to basically get the best out of that agency. And sometimes by not managing it, they're never going to do that. So I, I would suggest to CMOs, if they're struggling with a relationship, that's not working-first thing is if they've got resources internally who are independent of the team, bring them in, but they don't go to a third party, someone like me or any number of other people and get them to come in and sort of run a quick assessment of what's wrong. And that can be a bit. A bit of counseling, you know, often, often these sessions literally are like counseling and you talk to the agency and you find out that the agency is just bloody frustrated because the client.

Uh, changed their mind 15 times on a project and they, and then they, then they put the agency on the back foot and they're always working weekends to try and achieve something or the client's annoyed because the agency never sends, um, you know, a pre-briefing to an agency call. So they don't know what they're going to talk about or any number of things. And I think that it's funny. One of the biggest frustrations between clients and agencies is poor briefing. And you, you know, I would say five times out of 10, poor briefing is the, is the, the sort of genesis of the problem. It's either the client not briefing the agency well enough, the agency rewriting the brief because they don't like it, or they've got a weird internal process where they do that, or they're being non-brief and the brief being literally an email or a phone call.

And I think that's the start of a lot of problems. Yeah. Why is that still happening today? I've had a lot of guests on this podcast who have mentioned this. And some people who take the briefing really seriously. Like, uh, we had Grace on here from PNG Native and like briefing is her thing. She has studied it. She has an art to it. She takes it very seriously, but there are a lot of clients out there that don't. Why is that? And why isn't there more training? Markets aren't fastly educated anymore because the reality is, you know, you talk about PNG as an example, PNG are just such a great example of a marketing organization. And when you go in there as an employee and you're a part of that marketing team, you're taught: how to do all the various aspects of an agency relationship well, before you're given the chance to do it.

So, you're taught how to brief; you're taught how to assess a brief; you're taught how to assess creative; you're taught what category management looks like. And the problem is that a lot of marketers haven't gone through that schooling anymore. And that's not to say they're not smart people. They just, no one's ever sat them down and said, 'this is what a brief should be.' They either they've never worked in an agency, so they've never run on the receiving end of it. And so they go through the process of, of kind of, oh, well, what brief do you use? Now I'll tell you now. If a client says to an agency, 'well, what brief do you like to use?' That tells you straight away.

They probably don't really know what they're doing when it comes to briefing, or they're very, you know, they're very happy to just do whatever you say. So I think part of it is, uh, an educational piece with clients is that they're not, they're not always educated on how to brief or they've just got into bad habits. Maybe they work with an agency that was just very receptive to the email or a phone call or a text, and they did an amazing job with it. So they get lazy. Uh, but I, I think that, you know, the brief I've actually done brief. We've been training for clients where we've, we've taught them how to brief, like across a suite of marketeers.

And one of the things that I always kind of come back to is the brief is the lens through which you've got to assess creative. So if you don't have a brief, how the hell can you really assess creative? It just becomes an opinion. You know, my opinion is that this is good. This is bad, but without the brief, I can't truly assess it through that lens. And so I think that's why that's the need of the brief is to be able to assess creative probably in a response. Yeah, that's really true. You said something else. That's really interesting. Me. Uh, on agencies writing their own brief. So they'll take a client brief and then they'll just go ahead and write their own. And it, you seem like there was a little tension there.

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Dan Jeffries: Why agencies rewrite client briefs

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I'd love for you to talk about that. Why do agencies do it? I've seen that too. We've done it even where we'll take a brief, rewrite it. Is it, is that a waste of time? Should agencies be doing that in your opinion? Yeah, really? It happens when a client's briefs are not brief. Um, when the 72 pages like in brevity and they, you know, they give you a 12 page brief and the, the reality is that, uh, strategies or account teams often say, well, if we give our creatives a 12-page brief, they'll never, they'll never get anything out of the back end of it, which I think is, I personally think is a bit of an insult to creators.

But, um, I think the challenge is that if, if there's no, if there's no real thought gone into it from the client perspective, and they're just filling a brief in, cause it's a template, then I can understand why agencies might want to rewrite it and just pull out the nuggets that really matter. But the issue is when you rewrite something that I've written, you're going to make some assumptions on what I was thinking. And they're your assumptions. They're not mine. So you're going to assume that when you wrote mails like this, or you talked about an audience, or you talked about a thought, you're going to assume through your lens, which is what all the experience you've had and all the thinking you've had, you're going to assume that I meant this.

And it's like, you know, remember playing telephone when you were a kid, you go, you go through 10 sets of hands and a message can get diluted from, you know, something that was very clear to something that's very unclear, or it can be completely different. Well, if you rewrite someone's brief and you put, you put some assumptions over the top of it, you're going to start to get down that, that route of telephone. So if we think about the worst case scenario, and this is I'm a client, I write a brief and that brief goes through some kind of colleagues of mine on my side. Before it goes to the agency, I might be a CMO and I've got a brief in my mind, and then my creative organization go through it and they do some work with it.

And then somebody else does some work with it. And then that brief leaves our organization goes to Curiosity, curiosity, seating, go, you know, I'm not, I'm not really buying this. So, you know, your account guy has a little tweak on it and then your strategy guy has a little tweak on it. And then your creative guy sees it. So it's gone through five sets of hands before, between when it was set up and now, and the problem with that is that all those assumptions along the way and suppositions along the way on certain things. It's. It's going to change and, and what, what I meant and what I wanted might not be what that brief says. So then here's the worst case: you do some amazing work.

You go off and you do your work and you're, you know, you're building your, your, your strategy and you're, you come up with some great creative and it answers the brief that that creative saw. That wasn't my brief. So when you bring that to me, I go, well, I didn't answer the brief. You missed this key thing. And no one's really at fault in this. No one's done anything wrong. You guys have worked your ass off. I thought I gave you a clear brief, but somewhere along the line it changed. And I think that's why briefing is such an important part of the agency-client relationship. It's got to be done. Well, it's got to be good advice. All right, let's go back to the board. Number 11, please.

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Dan Jeffries: Where agency compensation models are headed 

Number 11, agency compensation is a hot topic right now. Where are compensation models headed? What am I saying? It's that this has been a hot topic for many years. Yeah. But the reality is if agencies continue to sell hours, then clients will continue to buy hours. It's just the reality of it. And if agencies want to get away from that and start to work towards outputs and outcomes, they have to really build their model and even their business against that. And not enough agencies do. That's the reality. I mean, you guys are an independent, so you probably can, but if you're a WPP shop or a publicist shop, you can't just suddenly go, oh, well, you know what? This hours thing we're done with it.

We're going to go fully to outputs and we're going to actually price all our business on that. It doesn't work like that. And I think the problem is that it's got to be driven by the agencies as much as it has by the clients to make significant change. What I do see is, you know, there are some relationships that I've worked on and I continue to work on where we've been able to elevate the relationship to a very clear scope. And the scope is very clear on what's expected over a 12-month period. And the agency price against that. And so I think it's really important to look at that and say, okay, well, we think it's going to be this much based on the people serving it.

And then that's conversation is kind of put to bed. And then it's just about delivering. Yeah. That's really the ideal. That's the ideal sort of scenario because it's based on the outcomes. The issue is if the client changes five things in a year and the agency says, well, you know, it's actually going to cost us a lot more to do what you've changed it to. Well, how are you going to benchmark that? Where are you going to go back to for price? And so. Yeah. You're always going to be up against that. Yeah. And it's an age-old problem and it's very difficult to solve. I think a big part of why I do with clients is put incentives on it.

So, you know, go to a base fee and then build a massive incentive over the top of it, maybe 20% of the base fee, which is based purely on achieving outcomes. And so that's that thing about getting the agency and the client working well together, you know, aligned on goals, aligned on objectives, and really driving towards that. Or getting that same approach and having those objectives aligned towards the same end point. But that can be unfair on agencies too, because, you know, sometimes those objectives or those situations are taken out your hand. Yeah. You know, you can do all you can do, but then the client has a, I don't know, a recall or a product. Yeah. This actually happened to me.

I was working with a very, very large technology company who do phones and watches and computers and stuff like that. And we did a big, big deal. This goes back sort of, this is the first time I've done this. Six seven years ago in New York, and I remember we did this really good incentive-based compensation, and the agency could have made significant millions on top. And they did everything they could do, but then halfway through that year the client, one of their main devices that they sold to the public basically started going wrong. So they had a real revenue issue, and part of the incentive was tied back to the sales of this particular product. So that agency did everything they could do, and they still didn't get paid.

And so that's in my in my kind of take-that's unfair.

And you know that client tried to make good on that in some ways. But you know it's funny agencies I always hear talk about well what other compensation models are out there, and then I just go back to agencies so what do you want how do you want to sell yourself? You know I'd ask you that question how do you want to sell yourself?

Yeah, well how how do you compare proposals? You know I imagine you get a few of them on any given pitch. And you know you've got one who's more of like a deliverables, you know, outputs, outcomes kind of model.

And then you have another one that's like an FTE hourly model, like are you just looking at the bottom line or how do you compare as Apple compares apples? to apples with these different agencies so when when i run a pitch i'll brief the agencies on what i'm expecting whether it's an output based model or whether it's going to be an hours and you know time and hours type one and i'll say now most of them are time and hours it's just it's just especially when you're running these big you know pitches for organizations with procurement teams who want to see the numbers they want to understand what they're getting you know they want

to see they want to see the comparison unfortunately it's still the only almost not the only it's still the best way to make that comparison happen Yeah, and so I'll brief the agencies and say, 'You know, here's the scope, here's all the deliverables, build a team, price out the team, let us know what's you know what's going to go against that.' Yeah, I want to stop doing time sheets like ultimately. So how do I get there? The time sheet thing is it's just like throwing data aboard, it's made up, none of it's real and I try to say this to clients. I say, 'You know, you realize the agencies aren't doing this with any discipline. You're working in agency for five minutes, you'll know what a ball eight time sheets are.

Nobody really wants to do and they'll get done on Friday afternoon, you know Expenses won't be paid unless they're done, that sort of stuff, they're nonsense. And so I'll say to clients on this one: 'I'll say, look what you're looking for when when you're getting a pricey proposal in. Is I can give you some insight insight into um, you know, what sort of size teams you'd expect to deliver certain size scopes that that's just that's out there. But then after that is the case, if you've got to trust the agency, these are your partners, and I mean one of the clients I worked with last year; they do a reconciliation, and I advise them against it. I say: all you're going to do if you do that is commoditize your agency.

create like an um like a combative relationship from day one because they've got to track every hour and justify the costs associated with them and you and you know knowing that you're going to come and look at it and and you're going to try and true up up or down and i said to this client i said what happens if the agency puts 20 more time in than than agreed you're gonna pay any extra 20 yeah oh well no because it doesn't work like that because you know we don't have the funding for ourselves coming under hours then so it's it's just it's poor incentives it's just dumb incentives so i you know i'll build a team based on those hours And then, really, what you're looking at after that is the outcomes – did they deliver or did they not?

Yeah, that's good. I love the idea of the success metrics and setting those in advance. We've had some really good success in doing that, and I think it it does make it more mutually beneficial too, and you do feel like you're part of a bigger team, it's a deeper partnership, um. So yeah, I've seen that work really well. I've needed some more company time to do this, so um, I'm really excited about it, and i'm I think more clients should start pushing that harder, you know, make it happen more. It's becoming more prevalent in media. Media, it's easier to do because the metrics are more, you know, binary really. In creative, I think a lot of clients are reluctant to do it because they're saying, well, what do we measure?

And it's not that hard. There's stuff out there. You can measure, you know, brand measures. You can look at sales. You can look at the effectiveness of advertising. You can look. There's so many different things that you do to measure advertising effectiveness. Why can't you use those numbers? But I think what it comes down to in the long run is that clients are slightly worried that if their business just takes off because it's good, they'll end up rewarding an agency, you know, even though the agency hasn't done a thing. And I'm like, well, no, that's part of the team. You're part of a team. You're together. You kind of rise and fall together. It's a good thing. Some clients are good at it. Some less so. It's a battle every time.

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Dan Jeffries: Dan’s thoughts on #DitchThePitch

Definitely something people should be considering for sure. No doubt. All right. Let's go back to the board. Let's go for number five. Number five. You have no rhyme or reason for this, do you? No. All right. So you've heard of Ditch the Pitch, I'm sure, being a search consultant. I am curious. What's your take on this Ditch the Pitch movement? I'm going to be contentious now, I'm afraid. I mean, look, I get it when pitches are done badly. I'll be honest with you. I think if a client spends over a certain budget and they don't use a third party to do a pitch professionally, agencies are dumb getting involved in it. They really are. Because often it's just a, maybe it's a procurement practice to try and figure out where their fees are at and they're using it to reduce costs.

So I think there are times when you shouldn't take part in a pitch because I don't think they're legitimate. Or there's going to be an outcome at the end of it that's going to be worthwhile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something about pitching that I hear agencies whinge about all the time. It's like, it's the cost of winning business. Every industry has a cost associated with winning business. I have a cost associated with winning business. I have to go to conferences. It's not free. I have to get on a plane. I have to fly there. I have to talk to people. I have to spend that money. It's a cost of winning business. Every single industry. Look at the car industry. How much money they spend to try and sell a car.

You know what I mean? And the pitch is just our version of that. It's our cost of winning business to test drive. There are times when it gets completely out of, it gets completely out of hand and I agree that it's, it's done badly, but to suddenly say, well, we're going to just get rid of it and, and, you know, clients should just, you know, pick an agency out of the blue. Well, I mean, I'll tell you now, all that will do is upset all the other agencies who don't get picked to give it back, given the chance, you know what I mean? Yeah. So I actually think the ditch the pitch thing has merit for bad pitches, but I would rather see it as a win.

I would rather see the energy go into how do we improve the pitches and that's where I think we can make a difference. So, what are some things you're testing and trying now to improve the pitch process? I'm always looking to innovate, uh, the process itself to try and, or the process as you like to call it, um, to try and make it more something that, you know, something that the agencies want to take part in and are willing to invest in. Um, big thing for me is, is access to the clients early on, um, as early as possible. So that agencies understand, As much. As much about the client as possible through the process so they can perform better.

You know, when I, when I bring in eight agencies, let's say to an RFI phase, I truly want those eight agencies to be able to win the business. I'm there's, I don't agree with bumping the numbers because we need to have a, and only six of them are gonna be successful. It's nonsense. It's, it's just the wrong way to go. I think the other thing is, um, you know, you think about something like smaller pitches where maybe there's not as much of a fee to win. I think you can simplify the front stage much quicker. Um, I was at, um, I was at Bramwick actually, and I spoke to somebody who competes with us. I won't, I won't name drop her on this just in case she doesn't want to be named dropped.

And she was telling me about a process that I was really kind of, it really, it really resonated with me and it was a fast process. And rather than having an RFI phase, what they did was they said to the agencies, you've got an hour to present your case. To the client and we'll pick three to go forward to the final final pitches. So no kind of big written RFI, but you've got to be able to talk in an hour. Why you, and I like that because I think what that does is it shows the client, the agency from day one, not on paper, but you know, straight into it, it gives the agency access to the client on day one. And, and I, you know, that's not a bad thing either.

And it's quick, it's, it's fast. You get to a fast decision. I'm in, I'm out; an investment from you guys reduces. And anything you can do to reduce that investment is a good thing. Um, and it's a gold. So that's another one. I'm also a bit of a fan of live briefings, and you know, for a long time, we've, we've been reluctant to do live briefings because the problem with them is, you know, if I do a live briefing for four agencies, that's four, one hour sessions that I've got to organize. And we've got to get people there online, put them all in the room together, brief, brief at the same time. Cause I think what happens in you, when you do that is it just, it makes the client look more human. They're not right.

So it makes their mind feel more valued, you know what I'm saying? Like, why whether that was over the camera, or you'd uh, it on the client's site. We took them to a client retail app location. And we asked the client if we could do it. And the client was kind of excited about it. We used this place to do it. They did a walk around the store together, all agencies. The client brought in some very senior people because it was only an hour. It wasn't four one-hour sessions. It was one hour. They brought in the CEO. They brought in other people. The agency suddenly got access to these people they would never have access to. So I think that's a good, you know, it's not an innovation, really.

It's just a good way to do things. I was secretly hoping to be in that room when that briefing took place. I know you were. Next time. Next time. I learned a lot in that process. But you have been focused on like speeding up the process too, which I think is really beneficial to agencies because sometimes they can just drag on for months and months and months. And that's part, I think, of the resentment that agencies have where it takes a long time. It's a lot of work, a lot of hours. And then, you know, a one-in-eight or even a one-in-four shot, it's hard to repeat that, especially smaller shops like us. I think the other thing agencies, and it's easy for me to say from my position, but agencies need to be more discerning about a take-home.

They really do. They need to be more like thoughtful about where are we going to invest our time and effort. The problem is you can do that as an independent. The reality is, lot of the um, a lot of the network agencies can't say no. They're just, they're so driven by the success metrics that have been put on top of them that they, they almost have to take part if they get given an invite and they don't take part someone's going to turn around and say, well, why are you not doing this? Why are you not trying? You can win this. You can win this, even though they've got no chance. And so it's funny, I'm doing one at the moment with a pretty big, you know, national provider, and it's a pretty, pretty meaty creative pitch.

And we were really, as a team on the client side, we were really, really deliberate and disciplined in who we invited. And, you know, I've been contacted by pretty much every agency in the land since we found out we're doing this one to say, well, can we be in? It's like no, because you can't win it and there's No point in you being in this if you can’t win it, it’s just it’s not worth your time and and the client doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time, you know they’re respectful, so I don’t know, go back to the ditch the pitch thing, it’s never going to get

ditched, um, the only hope we can have is that we improve it, yeah, well, and I think it’s mutually beneficial for agency and brands if it gets improved because brands don’t want the cost of dragging it out either, right, I mean they want immediate impact, so part of that is, I, I have some clients who will call, you know, they don’t work with a consultant, they’re trying to lead the pitch on their Own and those are always a little scary, honestly too, because a consultant can really streamline it and force some decision and process in it, but um I i oftentimes will say to them like you can't afford to do this process the way you want to do it, you don't have the time or you can't waste all the money on this; like this is going to be very expensive for you.

Like, have you considered a different approach? And that's the problem, is you know if you think about it, if you ditch the pitch, you said okay we're not going to have any pitches anymore; new business would be run one only through relationships, direct relationships. So, how would anyone ever grow? How would any agency ever start to come to the fore with new work and new ideas and new thought? You know you created a new agency in curiosity. How would you get new business? You'd have to go in and break those relationships down somehow. So for you to succeed, someone else's got to fail. I think the thing with the pitch process it should be a fair game; it should be a fair crack at the whip for everybody.

And that's why I go back to: you've got to be discerning as an agency and say 'no', you've got to be disciplined and say, 'actually this client isn't somebody we want to work with this industry isn't someone I want to work with or maybe that, that particular search consultant. We don't like the way they do it; maybe they're making the numbers. I'm sorry to say that some of my competitors don't do a great process; um, a lot of them do great work but some of them don't. And so it's it's really up to you; you've got to figure that one out. But um, I'll go back, ditch the pitch nonsense improve the pitch; I think maybe that's improve it, make it better.

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Dan Jeffries: How clients can be better clients 

All right, let's go back to the game board all right, we'll go to number nine. Nine what advice do you have for clients to be better clients? I mean, we heard better briefs, so that was great advice. What else would You give them, I think the main one is treat the agencies like human beings, it's so often I see, I see clients in you know big busy industries just treat agencies crap and it's like why are you doing that these are people, um, You know I think if you treat an agency like an extension of your team, you're more likely to treat them well, unless you treat your team like crap as well, um,

but that, that would be the main thing for me is get, treat them like human beings, treat them with a bit of respect and also trust them to deliver, so like I'll go, I'll go around a little bit when you first have an agency relationship, there's got to be a lot Of checks and balances because the client and the agency don't really know each other that well, they're getting to know each other there has to be a little bit more oversight checking, maybe you know mid mid response coming back okay here's what we're thinking here's where we're going, you know those working sessions need to be a bit more embedded but as the relationship progresses and the agency starts to know who you are and the key, you know, the key principal actors on the agency side, the you know, the creative directors that the lead creator, the lead strategy people, the lead account people understand more and more about The client, I think there's a little bit to say.

Let them go, let them do their job, that's what you're paying them for, and that's what you're paying them for, and that's what you're paying them for. Don't you know? I say, don't, don't have a dog and bark yourself, it's daft. You may, if you're paying these people to do something, let them do it, let them do it really well. And then when they come back, course correct, and then let them go. It's funny because there's some, there's some CMOs and chief creative officers and clients who are just brilliant at working with agencies. They just get it; they treat them well; they're treating Respect, they treat them with um, you know, they let them go and do their work, they trust them, and invariably, the work tends to be better.

And the other thing is, when you do that, it's the agency can be held truly accountable if the agency delivers subpar work then you hold them accountable. You say, we gave you everything, you come back with rubbish, well, we're gonna, we're not gonna get many more chances at that one, and so I think it's a fair way to go. I think the problem is clients often don't know how to manage like that. They like the control because they're fearful of it going wrong. So, main one would be treatment. Treatment with respect, and then the other one would be trusting-that's important. All right, back to the board, uh, number one, number one. Okay, after a brand breakup, how can an agency wrap the relationship with grace?

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Dan Jeffries: How an agency can wrap a client-agency relationship with grace

Any breakup advice you can give, yeah, I mean my best advice would be remember it's a tiny industry and you'd be amazed how many agencies do not wrap it up with grace and they kind of set the hair on fire as they leave. I mean, the main thing to do is make sure you've got a very clear understanding of what the expectation is on you as an agency that's exiting the business-is there a handover to new agency, is there, you know? Transfer of assets is there, whatever it might be. Really clear with the client what the expectation is and you know there are some agencies that do it well where they come to the client, they say, 'Look, we believe that this is what you need us to do between now and the end of the year because that's the end of our contract.

We'll wait for you to put us in touch with your new agency, we'll work with them, you know, and we'll do it in the right way, that's the you know I suppose the the golden way of doing it, I know it's because, the reality is that when an agency loses business, the first thing a good agency does is they go, 'Okay, who's the best talent I've got on that business, and where can I redeploy them across my other client base to be effective for my agency and for those clients? I'd do it. And so the problem is you end up often in a situation with clients where those last two or three months together, it's it's the junior people in the agency, it's people who may be not the the best people in the agency, and the client feels it.

So I think in the way that in the way that agencies have invested in just in developing transition plans for when they win a business, they should probably invest a little bit of money into transition plans for when they lose a business, and what are the Expectations on them and how are they going to stay professional in doing it because I'll tell you something now, the amount of times I've seen clients say, 'I'd work with that agency again now they can't work with that agency. They can't work with that agency. They can't work with that agency. They can't work with that agency. They can't. Come into a pitch and we'll say, okay, well any agencies you want to work with? Normally there's a couple they say, 'any agencies' wouldn't work...

I would never work with those again. I work with them at this company and they were awful. When we start, fire them and that stays with that agency forever. I mean That that person will never be turned, they're always going to say that agency wouldn't touch him with a barge pole. All the people at that agency have gone now. By the way, but because there was no discipline at the time, it's staying so. I think invest the same amount in developing transition plans for leaving as well as coming in, and I think it's important to invest the same amount in developing transition plans for leaving as well as coming in. And the other thing is, you know, retain the relationships because you never know; it might go wrong with the new guys, and they'll call you back next week.

It is so true, um, in, you know. A little vulnerable moment for me, but last year we lost a pitch. It was down to the final two; we lost, for you know whatever the reasons were which we learned from, but it hurt like you sometimes you lose them and you're like, 'God, we were just that was so perfect for us, it was going to be so good and now it's a year post to them hiring a new agency, and I got a phone call a couple of weeks ago like, 'Hey, by the way, there you go.' I know, and I'm like, 'We lost with complete and total grace left on the best of terms'; you know sometimes that can come full circle.

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Dan Jeffries: Closing remarks

So I'm excited by that; it's a small you know, people will remember you; it's so true, all right. So, one of the ways that we love to wrap these is with a little 'this' or 'that' rapid fire session, um, and you just tell me the first thing that comes to mind, okay! All right, so your first one here, we go: a golf trip or a triathlon? Golf trip every day of course! Five hole-in-ones! All right, a creative review or a media review? Creative. Fish and chips or burger and fries? Okay, sunny LA or sunny UK? Yeah, sunny LA, there's no sunny day all right! Last one: a hole-in-one or a new biz win? I mean five of them, man! I still can't believe that! Well, Dan, this was awesome.

Thank you for spending the last hour with me; I really enjoyed it. Thanks for your transparency and Your brutal honesty as always, I expected nothing less. What's the best way for our listeners to get a hold of you? Um, my website jeffriesconsulting. com-it's not very creative but it's you know it's me, it's uh, it's really easy to find. Uh, it's actually a new website; looks quite nice and there's I think my email address is in there or you could find me on LinkedIn or you know any of the usual nonsense... I shouldn't we'll link to all of that in the show notes. Appreciate it all right? Thank you, really enjoyed it.

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