Peer to Peer Action Group Events

How to make yourselves ‘the one’…

in a world of commitment-phobic client/agency relationships

With clients increasingly keeping their agency options open, building strong relationships quickly is key to both pitch and project success. In this session, VerityRI will draw on their 20+ years of experience and 60m+ data points to unpack what clients are really looking for (even if they can’t articulate it), how that’s evolving, and the practical solutions to the pitfalls agencies most commonly face.

Our Speaker: Emma Hillary is a fully qualified coach, and Head of Growth & Marketing at Verity Relationship Intelligence.

Verity Relationship Intelligence help turn client relationships into commercial advantage. Drawing on 22 years of expertise and over sixty million data points, their relationship management approach leverages industry benchmarking, proprietary analysis, and human consultancy, to drive understanding and action. Helping protect revenue, sharpen competitive differentiation, and accelerate sustainable growth. 

Brilliant Campaigns Start Here:

The Strategic Foundations Behind Award-Winning Work

Key Topics:

• Finding the real problem – looking beyond the brief to uncover the challenge that really needs solving
• Turning research into insight – understanding audiences, behaviours and the human truths that inspire great ideas
• Identifying the strategic opportunity – discovering the role, tension or space your brand can uniquely own
• Building the foundations for creativity – how strong strategy leads to bolder ideas, better campaigns and measurable results

About the Strategy & Planning Action Group

Led by our Member Lead Emma Hodgkinson, Chief Strategy Officer at Common Thread Group – This group offers a chance for anybody in membership with a role in strategy and planning to form a community. If you’re a planner, strategy director or similar and could benefit from peer to peer interaction within your speciality then please come along.

Meet the independent agencies you could work with, hear directly from clients, and turn new connections into commercial opportunities.

The Agency Collaboration Group (ACG) is coming together in person for its first live session, bringing independent agencies from across the Alliance community into one room to connect, build relationships and explore how we can win more together.

As clients increasingly look for broader capabilities, specialist expertise and more connected agency solutions, collaboration gives independents a powerful opportunity to compete differently – combining their strengths while keeping the agility, expertise and entrepreneurial thinking that sets them apart.

At this interactive afternoon, you’ll hear directly from a panel of client-side marketers about what they really want from their agency partners, how they view multi-agency collaboration and what makes a joined-up independent agency offering work.

But this isn’t just an event to sit and listen.

A major focus of the session will be face-to-face networking designed to help you discover agencies with complementary skills and capabilities whether you’re looking for a specialist partner for a pitch, expertise you don’t have in-house, trusted agencies to refer or outsource work to, or new opportunities to collaborate on client briefs.

Together, we’ll explore:

• What clients want from independent agencies and where collaboration can create a stronger proposition
• How independents can combine capabilities to compete for bigger opportunities
• Finding your collaboration partners – connecting with agencies that complement your expertise
• Building trusted agency relationships for pitches, referrals, outsourcing and shared opportunities
• Turning connections into action and creating a stronger collaborative network across the Alliance

Expect an interactive, practical afternoon with plenty of time to meet other agencies, understand what they do, share what you’re looking for and discover where there could be a natural fit.

Because the next opportunity your agency needs might already exist within the Alliance – you just need to meet the right people.

Beyond the pitch
Building teams where commercial thinking is everyone’s job

Many agencies treat commercial awareness as something that sits with senior people. Juniors and mid-level team members get pulled into pitches but the everyday commercial thinking, spotting opportunities with existing clients, understanding the value of what they deliver, having confident conversations about scope and fees, that’s left to someone else.

So the organic growth that’s sitting within existing client relationships often doesn’t get spotted and agencies can be slower to notice when client revenue is at risk.

The session will cover both the why and the how:

– Why commercial awareness needs to be a team-wide capability, not just a senior-level responsibility
– What actually holds junior and mid-level people back
– Practical ways to build commercial thinking into everyday work, not just pitch preparation
– How commercially aware teams are better at protecting revenue and retaining clients, not just growing it.

Anna Golding our member lead & Business Director at PrettyGreen will be joined by Emma Ewing of Big Fish Training…

Our speaker:

Emma Ewing is an internationally recognised career coach and founder of Big Fish Training, a company that has been helping PR professionals succeed for over two decades. Through her leadership, Emma and her team have equipped thousands of individuals with the skills to excel in their roles, deliver measurable results, and advance in their careers.
Emma’s practical, results-oriented approach helps people at all levels identify actionable steps to achieve better outcomes and, more importantly, leaves them and their teams feeling happier and more engaged at work. She also runs a monthly free webinar, often accompanied by expert guests, which is designed to give people a step-up with their skills.
To get in touch, please go to the Big Fish Training website or find her on LinkedIn here