The Agency Gatekeeper
Blair recommends five things firms need to be effective at qualifying new business opportunities in order to prevent the over-allocation of resources against early-stage buyers.
Links
Slapping Down Your Childlike Glee
Mastering the Value Conversation
Critical Questions Your New Business Person Should Be Able to Answer
How and When to Talk About Your Firm
Transcript
David: Blair, I'm actually excited about this.
Blair: You always sound surprised when you review my topic and think, "Well, this is actually pretty good."
David: Yes. I'm just like, "Did somebody else write this or this is--" [laughs] We're talking about the agency gatekeeper. The little twisted thought in my head is what if the agency's clients have gotten a hold of your advice about how to get past the gatekeeper and they use this against us? Have you ever thought about that?
Blair: No.
David: The advice isn't that good anyways. [laughs]
Blair: I think that agency clients just don't give a shit about them. I remember having a conversation with a principal advising them on repositioning the firm away from what it is that they did for their largest client. They'd had this client for 20 years. His concern was if they changed their claim of expertise on their website, their client of 20 years would look at it and go, "Oh, we're no longer a fit here. Goodbye." He called the client. He asked them a version of, "Hey, would you be bothered if we changed our claim of expertise on our website?" The client said, "I don't care. I've never been to your website. In 20 years I've never been to your website."
David: [laughs] We're overestimating our role in the world and how much people care about us. Today, that's our message, folks. If you have a warm feeling about what your clients think of you, that is bad information. You need to quit thinking about that.
Blair: Exactly.
David: All right. The agency gatekeeper. The theme of this is, basically, it revolves around the idea that entrepreneurs are so in love with opportunity that they need somebody else between them and that opportunity to smack them in the face and say, "This is real or this isn't." Is that a good summary? Do we still need to go through this whole half an hour or is that good?
Blair: Yes, it's a good summary. We still need to go through it. There's a lot here. The topic is really qualifying, and qualifying is vetting. I think that the people doing the qualifying of prospective clients in the firm should behave as the gatekeeper. It's their job to keep the bad fits out. We all know what it means-- Well, we in sales, anybody in sales know what it means to get past the gatekeeper.
There's a lot of sales training in the world on that very specific topic, getting past the gatekeeper. We see the client as having these gatekeepers. They manage the process and they keep us, the agency, at arm's length from the actual decision-makers. Those of us on the front lines, in business development, we're trying to get past this gatekeeper to the real decision-makers.
Well, we should be thinking that same way about our business because, as you alluded to, David, it's in the nature of creatives and entrepreneurs, in general, to just want to do everything. Anybody who might be a possible fit, we just let them pass. I'm saying, no, we need to be more rigorous about who we let past us to the point where they start to suck up the valuable resources of the firm. Now we can end the podcast. That's pretty much it.
David: This dovetails with a statement that I've heard you make in other places, and that's really to identify the most costly mistake in agency business development. That relates to this, which is interesting to me because the idea of wasted resources doesn't strike me as maybe the most-- but you're saying that one of the most serious issues is what? How would you phrase that?
Blair: The most prevalent, most costly agency business development mistake is the overallocation of resources to early-stage buyers or poor fits, people who are interested or people who you really shouldn't be doing business with and you go too far down the road of letting them into the firm where they suck up the valuable resources, the time and attention of the big brains in the firm. That is the most common mistake. We do not vet rigorously enough. We are not qualifying to the degree or with the formality that we should be.
David: I just talked with a prospective client early this week. He mentioned something that just really blew me away. It wasn't around the spending of time like you just described, it was a spending the money. They're spending $70,000 a month on sales, outbound sales. What occurred to me after I heard that is that, okay, if you're spending that much money a month, you are not going to be in a mood to say no to any opportunity that presents itself. You almost have this built-in incentive to view that spending of the money as not a waste, and so you're going to pursue everything. One evil leads to another. It was just really striking as I was thinking about what we're talking about today.
Blair: That's an interesting point of view, and I suspect you're correct. You increase some cost bias and you start to have this conversation with yourself about, "Oh, maybe these really are a good fit, or it seems like a long shot. Maybe the odds really are in our favor." You talk yourself into these things. There are different reasons you do that. One is, as you've already alluded to, it's in the nature of creative people and entrepreneurs to get excited about new opportunities.
You find yourself rationalizing. Maybe let's just go a little bit further, let's have one more meeting, let's drag this meeting out a little bit longer. Maybe there really is something here.
David: Sunk cost.
Blair: Similar to that, when you start spending money, and time, and attention, there are other issues too. The way you pay your business development people affects how rigorous they will be in the vetting. It's a complicated issue. We want to create an environment and a codified understanding where we understand that qualifying is vetting, and we have an established framework for vetting, and when we are vetting our prospective clients without turning it into a power play, they know they are being vetted, they understand that, they sense the discernment from our side of the table rather than the neediness, the childlike glee. We did a podcast on that called Slapping Down Your Childlike Glee.
David: Love that title, yes. Can I just touch on one thing? I want you to put this in the context of the many episodes we've done about the conversations, and that framework, and where this fits. I just don't want people to miss the fact that you stated this is about early-stage buyers, not late-stage buyers.
Blair: Well, two things here. Rather than early-stage, I use that term a little bit differently. An early-stage buyer is somebody who has not yet formed the intent to take action, has not decided that they're going to hire your firm or a firm like yours, they're still tire-kicking, but it's early in our interaction with the client. Chronologically if you think of the business development function, chronologically, first, there's lead generation driving leads to us or reaching out via outbound.
Then once there's an engagement, once there's a conversation, the very next step is vetting. We are talking about early on. We did an episode on our model, one without pitching, which is the four conversations where I explained that we viewed the sale as the series for linear and discreet conversations where one neat leaf follows the other, and each conversation has its own objective, and there are frameworks for navigating to that specific objective.
The first conversation, we'll set it aside, it's called the probative conversation, but it's really about lead generation. It's had through your agents of thought leadership and referral. After the lead is generated, there are now three conversations, and those conversations are the qualifying conversation, which we're talking about today, followed by the value conversation, and the closing conversation. You think of it as, okay, we're going to have three person-to-person conversations here.
Again, we did a podcast on this recently about models. All models are wrong. Some are useful. I'm not saying there are always three conversations, I'm saying it's helpful to think of it this way, but that first human-to-human conversation after the lead has been generated is the vetting conversation, and that's what we're talking about.
Once you have vetted this client, this lead, and you determine this is an appropriate client, and there is an opportunity or a project here, then you move to the next conversation, which might actually happen in the same conversation. That's the value conversation. Then we create a proposal, and then we deliver that in the closing conversation. We are talking early on, we're talking about vetting.
Once the client has been vetted, our attitude can change a little bit, but we don't get overly excited. We never get overly excited about an opportunity. We allow our passion and enthusiasm to shine through appropriately without giving our power away. Early on, in particular, we don't get whipped into a frenzy, we don't get overly excited, we are in discernment mode, we are in critical vetting mode. Yes, we're talking about early on in your interactions with new clients.
David: We're going to talk about the five things that are needed if you want to follow this advice about vetting and so on. There's one thing in here that really piqued my interest, and that's the idea that we're not trying to hide the fact that we are vetting clients from them. They should be respectful, obviously, but they should feel like they are being vetted. Is that because that's a part of what experts do? This was a very curious thing in your notes about don't be afraid to let the client feel like they're being vetted.
Blair: Yes, that's exactly it. A generalization that I make is you can show up in your relationships with your clients and prospects as the expert or as a vendor. How would the expert behave? The assumption is if you really are very good at what you do, you're probably busy, you probably don't work with just anybody, you probably require a certain amount of financial investment, you're probably really discerning and honest about your assessment of whether or not you can help and create value here.
That's what that conversation should feel like. They should feel like they're being qualified. This isn't a power play moment. This is a clinical professional vetting of is this worth spending my and our time on it. If the answer is yes, then the tone changes a little bit, but you don't get carried away, you don't get excited. You are in vetting mode, and the client should understand that. I'll just build on that.
One more building block is you should have a framework for doing this, and it should be clear to the client that you are following the framework. That just says you are organized. You have these conversations all the time. The implication is, well, a lot of people are reaching out to you in hopes that you can work with them. I find in our training when we teach people frameworks, the natural intuition for a lot of people is to make those frameworks invisible.
There is a sense that in the sale we have to be brilliant and we shouldn't be working with tools like guides and notes, et cetera. It's just a ridiculous notion. Be organized, have a framework, and it's okay to have that framework be visible. What I mean by that is if I've got a qualifying conversation framework, which we'll talk about, I might say, "Now I want to move to this set of questions over here." I might say, "Just bear with me a moment, I'm taking notes."
Things of that nature that communicate to the client, "I know what I'm doing. I do this all the time. I'm a professional. I have these questions I need to get answered before we can decide if it makes sense to take a next step together."
David: Our audience is a mix of people who are confident, overconfident, underconfident. For the underconfident folks, if this strikes you as a little bit arrogant, and here's a tip to think about it, just believe for a minute how effective your work is with the right client. Just imagine how much more effective you are if the partnership is really, really good. Now take the next step and say, even if it's just internal, you don't want to be associated with a client engagement that is not effective. It just is unsatisfying for you.
That gives you the freedom to think about this without any arrogance at all. It's just, no, you care about making a difference for clients and you've done this enough. You know where you can make a difference and where you can't. That's just a very logical way to do it that doesn't have any arrogance at all.
Blair: I would just build on that. Adding to your second point there, which is if it ends up being a bad engagement or you don't end up doing business with this client, you end up wasting the time of senior people in the firm. That's on you. I think as an industry, in most agencies, that's not communicated enough that the people doing the qualifying, if a bad fit gets past you and the creative director ends up getting all excited and spending hours on this and cranking up the pitch machine or whatever happens, and then it flames out and everybody looks around and goes, "Well, this was stupid. We never should have been pursuing this anyway."
That's on you. It's your job to keep these bad fits out. Let's go back to the client's version of the gatekeeper. The person who is running the selection process is trying to keep you away from the CMO or the CEO or whoever it is. If they let everybody past them and end up setting up meetings with their bosses, they're going to lose their job.
David: They're going to get fired.
Blair: Yes. We should live with the same fear. That's a bit of an overstatement. I'm just trying to make this point that as a qualifier, you have a responsibility to keep the bad fits out.
David: Let's dive in. There's five things here. The first one you're calling dedicated qualifiers. My little snarky thought when I read this was, so you agree with me, entrepreneurs cannot be trusted with opportunity.
Blair: [laughs] Five things you need in place to be able to be effective at qualifying these new business opportunities. Number one is you need to formalize, in the firm, who is responsible for qualifying these new business leads. You need to do the same when it comes to organic account growth, growing existing accounts. That's different. We'll just set that aside.
That's typically the account manager. Sometimes it's the project manager if there is a PM and an AM, but it's usually the account manager. When it comes to new business, you need to formalize who takes these calls. It doesn't have to be a senior person in the firm. It can be quite junior and it can be more than one person. There is a certain personality aspect that you want.
You want somebody who is somewhat linear and process-oriented who can follow a methodology, who is unafraid to ask the direct business-like questions. We want people who are capable of vetting. The qualifying conversation is the vetting conversation. We're qualifying the lead to see if an opportunity exists and then determining the next step. We want somebody who can bring a framework to bear and have a vetting conversation.
David: It's not only that they need to be dedicated, but the person who's dedicated needs to be the right person too.
Blair: Yes. They're not emotionally overinvested. That's a key thing here. They don't get carried away.
David: We need to be hiring people that work behind the counter at the automobile registration in the city. These are the people we need.
Blair: That's exactly the DMV people.
David: What's the second one here? The first is dedicated qualifiers who are the right people. What's the second one?
Blair: You want to be an effective qualifying organization. You need to document your criteria on what is a good fit client and what's a bad fit client.
David: Oh, this is my favorite one.
Blair: You have to think this through and write it out. There are different ways you can do this. At Win Without Pitching, we map out what the ideal client looks like, and then we have red flags. We have only a small number of absolutely will not work with if this criteria is in place. It's more about red flags, but in the listener's organization, you might want to clearly articulate who you will not do business with.
This needs to be written out, everybody needs to understand it. The qualifiers need to have this at hand. When one of these red flags or absolutely will not do business with gets passed, the qualifier needs to be held to account.
David: Everybody needs to agree this is an exception, we think it's a logical one to make. I'll give you an example. Normally I don't think you'd want to work with somebody spending their own money, but some people spending their own money are great clients. Maybe you make an exception or if you don't have access to the decision-maker, that would be an absolute red flag for me. There are exceptions that you might-- or they haven't used an agency before. Well, there's going to be some really great clients and you're the first agency, but most of the time that's not true. Should these be public?
Blair: Oh, that's a great question. I get this quite a bit and I'm sure you do as well. I know you know some firms that actually have a page on the website that basically says the criteria you need to meet as a client. I think it's a case-by-case basis where you would consider making at least some, if not all, of your qualifying criteria public on your website is when you are in a situation where you are spending too much time qualifying and qualifying out bad fits.
Your marketing is so good or so productive that it's driving a high volume of inbound inquiries to you, but a fair percentage of those are not a good fit. That's when you start to think about making your qualifying criteria public like who we work with, our best clients, or even on the Contact Us page, hey, reach out if these things are true, don't bother if these things are not true. You don't have to cover every scenario. Generally, it's more about the spirit of things.
David: The theory we're operating on here is that we are a little too eager to chase opportunity sometimes. I don't know if you agree with this or not, but the other part of it is that sometimes prospective clients are more honest about the fit than you are and so you're almost saving yourself from it. The idea is that a prospective client would knock themselves out of the running legitimately before you get a chance to compromise. That's one theory around making it public. Whether that should happen all the time or not is another question.
David: The first one is dedicated qualifiers, who are the right type. Second is documented criteria on good fit or bad fit clients, has to absolutely be documented internally. Whether it's external or not is another question. The third one is what?
Blair: The questions you want answered. I wrote the questions you want answered before you agree to apply resources. We do this thing in training. I ask this question when we get to the qualifying conversation. We might have a mix of biz dev people and account managers and I say, "Pretend you're all account managers or subject matter experts, and you've got this brand new business person, and this new business person is very excited, and they excitedly invite you to a couple of new business meetings with prospective clients."
At first, you're thinking, "Oh, this is great, this person's really doing a great job," but the first couple of meetings they end up going along, and at some point you realize, "Oh, I shouldn't be in this conversation. This is so clearly not a good fit." You start to get frustrated with your new business person.
Then when you leave the last meeting where once again your time has been wasted, you turn to your new business person and you say, "Hey, I'm busy. Before I agree to attend any more of your stupid new business meetings, you need to be able to answer these questions for me," and you hand that list of questions over to the new business person. Then I say to the group, "Okay, what are the questions?" We do a group exercise of 20 people coming up with between 20 and 40 questions, most of which or at least half of which everybody would agree, "Yes, that's a good question.
We should get that question answered." In fact, we come up with too many questions. What the exercise proves is everybody knows what questions need to be asked, but the way I was taught to do new business, to the extent that I was taught at all, the method that I inherited was, "Don't ask too many questions to which the answer might be no. Get the meeting. Get off the phone and get a meeting."
Now, the pandemic and technology has changed, most meetings are no longer in person. That's too bad it's taken all these decades to get here, but this idea of let's get to the vetting questions first before we have them trapped like a caged animal in our office. Eventually, we will wear them down. We will find something, some amount of money for them to spend with us on something even if initially it's not a good fit.
David: Yes. Your job is to find as many unqualified clients as possible. Here's an interesting model that I'd love to learn more about. I'm so curious about how other service industries do things and how I can apply that learning to what I do. The PI, Personal Injury, attorneys are really interesting to me because you have two things happening. They've got billboards and TV ads everywhere. It seems like they are eager to talk to any possible person who could present an opportunity for the firm.
On the other hand, you balance that with the fact that they are never going to take a case on that they don't think they can win. There's this wide-open invitation, and then there's all of these questions that narrow down and they are asking these questions purely in their own self-interest. Do we want to waste our time in this case, because we're not going to make any money unless we win? There's something about that model I want to learn more about.
Blair: Well, and you're pointing out the contrast in intentions and attitude between lead generation and qualifying, vetting. The act of lead generation, the metaphor I use is you're turning over rocks looking for something that's alive under a rock so that you can eat it, and you're turning over rocks as quickly as possible.
There's this level of energy and enthusiasm and activity that comes from lead generation, but as soon as you uncover something that you might possibly eat, now you slow down and your attitude changes, you become really discerning. Is this poisonous? Will this thing kill me? Where has this been? Et cetera, whatever. The metaphor starts to break down here. Lead generation is almost this frenetic high-energy activity, and qualifying is almost the opposite of it.
David: You need to take somebody else along on the hike who has a Wikipedia-type mind who says, "No, don't eat that. Next."
Blair: Yes, that's why I hike with biologists.
[laughter]
David: One who's preferably a little slower than you when you're running away from a bear. That third one we were just talking about is questions you want answered before you agree to apply resources, so very specific questions.
Blair: Yes. The point I want to make on that is we don't need to list what those questions are. What this exercise that I talked about proves everybody knows what the questions are, you know what the questions are. Why aren't we asking them? Are we afraid we're going to offend them? Are we afraid we're going to kill this deal unnecessarily? No. The point about turning over rocks, and then you uncover an opportunity, now you actually tried to kill it, you become ruthless in the vetting at this moment.
If it's worth spending time on, then you can relax, then you can move forward in more of a open, honest conversation with the free exchange of information, but you go from uncovering leads to slowing down and vetting leads. We know what the questions are, let's just get them down on paper and then organize them.
David: Dedicated qualifiers who are the right type, documented criteria on what a good fit, bad fit client is, questions you want answered, and not just have the questions, but use the questions, and then the fourth is a framework for organizing your questions, or would it be okay to use the word model in here too?
Blair: Yes, totally. You've got your questions. We do this exercise where we get all the questions down on the whiteboard. Now you just need a framework for organizing them. We use a version of BANT, which stands for Budget Authority Need Timeframe. That's fairly standard in the broader sales world, but I assume there are other models.
I actually don't know of any, but you just take the questions and organize them. We add context questions. Context questions would be, "How did you hear about us? Why us? Tell me a little bit about the organization, et cetera?" You get the context of the situation, and then we get into what we call the four quadrants. We don't handle them in this order, but it nicely spells the word BANT, Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe.
You take all your budget questions. Do you have funds allocated for this? Great. How much? You put them into the budget quadrant of your qualifying conversation framework. Because you have a list of questions in that quadrant does not mean that you ask all those questions. These are not scripts. You should never be following a script in a sale. They are arrows in your quiver or tools in your toolbox. They're questions that you get to choose from to get to the ultimate question of what's the budget.
Have you allocated funds, and if so, how much? Budget, Authority, where we cover the issues of who are the decision-makers and what is the decision-making process, and then what's typically called Need. What is the need? The client typically comes to you with a stated need. Now we want to uncover what that stated need is, and then we want to put that need aside, and we want to go deeper into what the client really wants.
Many clients come to us self-diagnosed and self-prescribed. Like any professional, imagine we were a medical professional, we were a doctor, we would say, ''Okay, I know you think you need quadruple bypass surgery. Let me just put this over here and let me ask you a few questions." We don't call the need quadrant Need. We call it desired future state, and that's something we've talked about on multiple episodes.
What is this person's desired future state? What do they want to be true in the future? Then the T stands for Timeframe. When do you need to make a decision, and why? When do you need to be in the market? When do you need to have a solution, and why? The why is a really important component of that. Very quickly, in a nutshell, this is a pretty good organizing framework for organizing all of the questions that you need to get answered. It's not rocket surgery.
David: Rocket surgery. It's not just questions but a framework for them. That's fourth. The last point is an understanding of the next step. That's obvious what that means, but are there any keys in here that are important to understand that?
Blair: Yes, you need to map out what appropriate next steps are in your firm. Just think about this. You ask your qualifying questions and the first area on the flow chart is like go/no go. Is this worth spending time on or not? If it's not, you say no, you refer to somebody else. You say, "Hey, I don't think there's a very good fit here. Can I suggest somebody else?"
If it's a go, then from there you have to decide are there missing decision-makers that you need to get to, do you move right into a value conversation with this person? This episode here is not meant to be an exhaustive review of what these next steps are. You just need to map out. These are the ones that you will let past you to have a conversation with somebody else on the team. Maybe it's somebody else having the value conversation.
You need to determine who do you hand this off to. Before you hand off, are you setting up a meeting with missing decision-makers, et cetera? Another thing you want to consider and map out is if there's a formal pitch or selection process, is it this person's job to try to derail it or is the next person going to try to derail it? That's it in a nutshell; the five things that you need to have in place to become a better qualifying organization.
You need dedicated qualifier, so you need to map out who's doing the qualifying. You need to document the criteria on who is a good fit client for you, who's a bad fit client, who will you never work with, what are the red flags? You need to identify the questions you want to get answered before you agree to apply resources against the opportunity. Then you need a framework for organizing those questions and then an understanding of the next steps.
David: This strikes me as one of those instances where the episode where you talked about the after-action review would be so critical because you're having to make some judgment calls in the heat of battle. Just as you walk out or you get off the phone, I could see you having a quick conversation like, "Is that what we should have done? Should we have said this is the next step?"
Especially on this last one, the next step, you really have to think pretty carefully because you don't have a chance to go confer with each other and then say the next step. Ideally, you're just doing it right then, in the meeting or on the phone.
Blair: I think there should be a systematic review of all of the opportunities, including the ones that you or your team members said no to. I was in a conversation a bit a year ago, maybe it was two, I don't remember, with one of the largest ad agencies in the world, and we're talking about pricing. When it came to general new business, and how they handled new business, I was trying to communicate a point, but I said, if I were your global head of new business development, I would say no to stuff and never tell anybody.
The problem in a large organization is there's so many people who would say yes to something that doesn't make sense for the firm to pursue. Now, I was trying to make a point to somebody, the point that I've just articulated, but in an independent firm, that saying no, it should be communicated what the qualifiers have qualified out and there should be a review of, "This one, when we ended up writing a proposal, in the end, we were never going to do business with these people. It wasn't a good fit. Let's talk about that qualifying conversation you had. When you handed it over to me and said, 'No, this is a really good one. This checks all the boxes,' which boxes did you mean? You've always wanted to work on a beer account. Was it that box?"
David: If you've never worked on packaging for a craft brewery, you are a failure as a creative firm. This is going to be one of my favorite episodes. I think the message is so fantastic and it's wrapped up a little bit in this lifelong trope that we need to understand ourselves really well. One element of understanding ourselves is that we tend to lose our objectivity when it comes to opportunity. These are the things that save us from ourselves. Is that a fair summary?
Blair: Yes, well said.
David: Good. Thank you, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.