The Alliance of Independent Agencies in partnership with Don’t Forget To Look are delivering an on-demand content series, covering a range of topics impacting Agency Profitability.
Don’t Forget To Look was founded two years ago by Stuart Dunk, who previously spent 14 years of his career in procurement, 10 of which in marketing procurement at global brands including Betfair, Danone, Reckitt Benckiser and Nike.
Having started his career agency-side, he wanted to return to serving Agencies by helping them increase their confidence and capability in all things that relate to their work with brands, especially their profitability.
After consulting and surveying dozens of agencies on which topics they’d derive most value from in this broad ballpark of “Agency Profitability,” we landed on the following four topics which were voted for by the agencies who took part:
- Negotiation, Influence + Persuasion
- Value Based Selling
- Working efficiently & effectively with Marketing Procurement
- Pricing
The videos are being launched bi-monthly from mid-September, and are available to both ALLIANCE and NON-ALLIANCE members, on the Alliance’s website.
Alongside the videos, we are also offering day-long, face to face workshops on each of the 4 topics. We are already delivering these and seeing some fantastic feedback and results!
To register your interest for the videos and our day-long face-face workshops on the same topics, please fill in the form at the bottom of this page.
Module Highlights + Key Learnings
Negotiation, Influence + Persuasion
- Curated insights from some of the great authors and trainers on this topic
- How procurement are taught negotiation + how they prepare and execute them, & what that means for Agencies
- Negotiation Types + negotiation ‘tactics’ used by buyers, + how to respond to them
- Many thought-starters and principles from which your Agency can apply your own authentic voice over time with practice
Value-Based Selling:
- VBS as a Mindset
- Pricing is a small element of the wider topic – an end-point to VBS
- Every touchpoint reinforces (or reduces) the feeling of VBS in the brand
- Segmentation and Positioning as pre-requisites to successful selling
- Relative success of brand-led or agency-led processes: RFPs v’s networking, peer intros and targeted outreach
- Our aim for the brand: feeling excited and comfortable / reassured, + seen & heard
- The only true differentiator: Expertise
Marketing Procurement:
- Who are Marketing Procurement? Professional Procurement, their training and approaches, & the impact on Agencies
- Decision maker’s v’s Process Owners. Same or different? Who is our Customer?
- Pre-determining factors to why Brands treat Agencies a certain way, and how to spot (and avoid, or harness) them. (The same for how Agencies see / treat brands)
- Hearts + Minds: Flex the language to Procurement (and / or to Marketing). Savings focus v’s ‘the rest’ of Value
- An intro to Impactful Outreach and Influencing Procurement
Pricing
- Value-Based Pricing
- The shift away from input based prices (rate cards)
- Offering multiple prices to increase chances of reaching a deal
- Positioning before Pricing: are you seen as the Experts?
- What are the best Agencies doing to get great at Pricing?