How to Hire A Digital Agency

The RFP process for hiring a digital agency is 22^nd century Kabuki. Highly trained, costumed and perfumed players sing and dance well rehearsed traditional lines in ritualized set-piece scenarios. Unfortunately the process rarely predicts the texture or substance of the subsequent client-agency relationship or the quality of the services likely to be delivered.

The process for finding an agency partner ought to be less arduous, more fun and more likely to foreshadow the working relationship. Yet getting there requires a willingness to break with tradition by confronting your demons, identifying genuine needs and political or psychological realities upfront and structuring a search process designed to elicit critical information about an agency’s competence, finances and operating style while and laying bare the tone and texture of how agencies operate day-to-day. 

Identify Your Practical Needs. Do you need a big brain, tech savants, masters of media, social media experimenters, an army of coders or just reliable arms and legs to execute your strategy, compensate for your too lean staff or interface with your IT guys? Understanding the real need and the division of labor between you and your agency is the first step in the RFP process. Be clear about how much control, direction and outsourcing you intend to do. 

Next recognize that different agencies have different levels of name recognition, positioning and points of origin which shape their competence, their processes, their ability to engage and their price. No single agency is great at everything. Every agency has its core competences and its good and bad days.

Don’t Re-fight The Last War. Often RFPs seek to overcome and compensate for the failures and disappointments with a current agency. Yet be careful not to over value  or over correct for these specific issues since they are likely to be a product of a particular agency-client pathology; partly a result of  your technical, political, personality  or marketing landscape and a partly a matter of casting, chemistry, timing or emphasis by the agency.

Focus on the mission – what needs to be done. Do you need a dramatic increase in market share, an improvement in eCommerce conversion, regular technical tweaks, media optimization, a more systematic and integrated campaign management approach or a complete brand re-stage? The task required compared with the state of the business ought to be the prime directive in shaping your agency search.   

Take the Political Temperature. You have to decide how much brand equity, brainpower, speed, creativity, media intimacy or technical chops you want, need or are willing to pay for at the outset. Do you need quick-and-dirty or famous-and flashy? Are you looking to impress the C suite or are you looking to augment or compliment the skills of your staff? Ask yourself how much validation or blame will you assign to the agency 

Then compare the needed skills with the budget you have to spend. How much of the budget are you willing to spend on travel, out of pocket expenses and infrastructure? Do you want a marquee New York agency owned by a global holding company, an independent firm with a hot reputation in your vertical or two renegade guys in a room completely dedicated to your brand? What will your management accept, appreciate and buy? 

Once you clarify your own needs and the desires of your management, you are ready to structure the RFP process. Give yourself 6 months. Assume the exercise will take 90-120 days and that a subsequent notice, transition and contracting period will be of equal length. Some firms prefer to outsource the search effort others do it themselves or construct a hybrid division of labor. The critical variable is a sense of control. Pick the solution that gives you optimal control of the process and the outcome.  

Cover the Basics. The three fundamental questions you need to answer in any RFP process are: a) who are they; b) what are they truly good at and c) can we sue them if they screw us?  Every agency worth its salt has standard language to answer these questions and financial details and references to substantiate their fiscal viability. You have to ask these questions but you’ll be surprised at how similar the answers are and how little real differentiation you get when comparing responses. Everyone is fabulous, with the greatest teams skilled at every task you can imagine. Everyone has great case studies, screen grabs, intricate process maps, snappy bios and ironclad financials. 

This material is the basic ante; table stakes in the game. All this material should be understood as a check off rather than as critical variables. Those who can’t produce this kind of information on a dime aren’t ready for your serious consideration.

Surface Your Working Team. There are pitch teams and working teams. Pitch teams are the agency’s smoothest, senior, accomplished veteran players. They are smart, glib, practiced and polished. Working teams are the munchkins behind the scenes you rarely see in a pitch. In many cases an agency will not empanel a working team until they win the business so in many cases your working team is a fantasy. Require your working team to be the pitch team. This will ensure that you get a clear look at the people you’ll be working with. Allow the senior supervisors to help, but insist that the agency identify and engage the account executives, account supervisors and frontline creative, media or technical  people who will actually work on your business. Be sure to meet the digital producer and/or the project manager because these individuals will really run your business and your budgets day by day. 

Probe for Process. Mechanics, skill and speed determine productivity. Agencies are notoriously slower and more expensive than client organizations and frequently have ad hoc processes that can leave you vulnerable. Figure out how the agency works and how it takes in and processes the information you give it. Compare that with your internal processes and your productivity tolerances. 

Are you willing to wait 4 weeks for a 5 paragraph e-mail? Will a mini-site or a landing page take 30, 60 or 90 days to complete? How many levels of editorial review and QA will those banner ads get? Will they traffic drafts digitally or on paper? Will they deploy secure intranets or just use FTP sites? Ask for process briefings and go through the agency process carefully to understand who does what to whom and when. Give them hypothetical assignments and ask for production time lines. 

Identify Agency Partners. In this climate it makes little economic sense for agencies to retain full-time people to manage occasional or contingent tasks. Almost every agency relies on freelancers, vendors and partners to round out their service offerings. List the tasks they do themselves and those they share with vendors or partners. Compare the home-grown tasks with your top priority needs. Then ask about the freelancers and vendors and how they manage these partner relationships. Require case studies to show productivity and business results. 

Illuminate Experience. If they did for somebody else, it’s likely they can do it for you, too. Identify your top priority needs and seek out analogous work that the agencies have done. Map their experience to your needs. Be as specific as possible. Carefully examine the planning process and the business goals and connect the dots. Look at creative examples and media plans. Get them talking about how they came up with the ideas in competitive contexts. You are looking for insightful thinking, smart execution and the ability to redeploy these skills on your behalf. And while experience is not 100% predictive of future results, all things being equal an agency that has done the task you need has a greater chance of doing it again right for you. 

Look for Efficiencies. Will the agency learn how to do things on your nickel or do they bring well-established learnings, relationships, procedures and added value to the table. Ask the agency about standing relationships and deals with technical vendors, media outlets or infrastructure suppliers. Ask them to outline and document approaches and philosophies on topics of importance to your marketing effort. You are looking to leverage their experience and their network to your benefit. Your goal in investigating these relationships is to assess the likely added value you get by selecting a particular agency on the basis of its experience and contacts. 

Be as specific as you can and be relentless in follow-up questioning. Ask pointed questions like ---Do you believe rich media yields incremental conversion? Do you prefer one web platform over another and why? Which off-the-shelf CRM solution have they used most often and why? Which media will grant you (and us) most-favored nation deals? Ask for examples of skillful media and vendor negotiations and then ask for the marketing and business impact of these financial efficiencies. 

Check References. No one will give you a bad reference. But ask probing questions about the nature of the relationship, the timing of projects, any claimed victories and/or the day-to-day working experience. Ask pointed questions about the leadership, the working team, timing and costs. Ask specifically about the things that went wrong. There always are a few. Sometimes understanding how an agency recovers from a screw-up is the most illuminating insight into their operation. 

Once you have satisfied yourself that the short list agencies have the requisite experience, relationships and energy, its time to get creative. In many cases your finalists will have equivalent experience, relationships and skill sets. They will have jumped the financial bar and provided strong references. You’ll need to devise an ordeal to establish true differences and to gauge how well you are likely to work with each of them. 

Road Test the Finalist Agencies. Don’t ask for spec creative or free strategic thinking. Instead ask agencies to participate in a live 90 minute strategy session. This more than anything will give you a live feel for what it will be like to work with any given agency team. 

In structuring the live working session, follow this formula:

 

1. Prepare real data to identify and document a real business issue or scenario that they agency will face. Supply this to the agency 1 week ahead of the session. Be sure all participating agencies have signed NDA agreements in advance.
2. Insist that only 2 senior people and the working team assigned to your business can participate.
3. Limit the session to 90 minutes. Set a clear outcome for the meeting. For example, the meeting should yield a campaign theme and 3 tactics to address this particular marketing problem.
4. Have your team, the people who will interact with the agency each day participate in the session.  Run it as if the relationship existed.
5. Use an independent leader. Don’t lead the session if you are assessing the outcome.
6. Devise a scorecard that accounts for the quality of the ideas, the creativity of the team, the experience demonstrated and the chemistry between the participants.
7. Measure how prepared the agencies were and what outside data, information or experience they brought to the party.
8. Try to understand the relative contributions of the senior agency people versus the working team members.
9. Ask your people which team they liked the best and why.
10. Weight this exercise relative to the other intelligence you’ve developed to make a final decision.

Finding the right agency partner can be a crucial step toward getting better business results. You want to break through the expected and sidestep the pat answers. The process should force contenders out of their comfort zones. Agencies have significant differences in style, skill and leadership. Using these concepts  should give you a head start toward identifying them and comparing them to your individual marketing needs .

    

Comments

[Chris Pape]

Great article - you sound like you've been down the path a time or 1000. We especially agree with the concept of asking agencies to participate in a strategic session. So many brands ask for a sample of design... when they should be looking for great ideas and strategic thinkers. Great design is the bi product of a thorough strategic plan.

[Shane]

This article was awesome. Great to get a very detailed explanation on what to look out for when scoping out a new digital agency, it cna take a lot of time a patience to get the right agency. This article really helped understand what I need to look for. Thanks.