The Creative Business Forum, by TAVO Media Group
The Creative Business Forum is a weekly business podcast, hosted by Bryant Walker, Founder & CEO of TAVO Media Group. The Creative Business Forum welcomes business owners, leaders and innovators from around the world to share more about their professional and personal challenges, ideas, skips and leaps throughout their careers, while also striving to develop and implement creative-solutions to everyday and not-so-everyday challenges.
Learn more about TAVO Media Group by visiting https://tavomediagroup.com
The Creative Business Forum, by TAVO Media Group
Transforming Reactive Account Managers into Proactive Client Leaders with Lori Bartle
Unlock the secrets to transforming reactive account managers into proactive client leaders with Lori Bartle's expert guidance. In an industry where historical challenges and digital influxes have reshaped the landscape, our conversation with Lori, a highly respected advisor and collaborator to agencies, shines a light on the path forward for account management. We delve into the essential shift from task-oriented mindsets to strategic, growth-focused leadership that can ignite success for both agencies and their clients.
This episode isn't just about identifying problems; it's about setting meaningful objectives and fostering strong client-agency relationships. I share personal experiences and resources that underscore the importance of a deep foundational understanding of client needs, and how such insights can lead to powerful strategic alignments. If you're ready to elevate your approach to client leadership and drive meaningful growth, this dialogue with Lori offers the wisdom and actionable strategies you need.
The Creative Business Forum is produced by TAVO Media Group and is intended as a forum to highlight, spotlight and showcase cross-industry leaders and innovators with a story to tell. We share and celebrate their journey and encourage our listeners and followers to engage with our guests, support their brands and share their stories. We're building our community and want you to be a part of it!
To learn more about TAVO's agency services, please visit our website: TAVOMediaGroup.com
Hey guys, this is Bryant Walker. Thank you so much for listening to the Creative Business Forum. I am joined today by Lori Bartle. She's an advisor and collaborator to agencies nationwide and we'll talk a lot about what that means and the value she brings to agencies and the thought process around that. Lori, thank you so much for hopping on.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad to be here. I'm excited about this conversation.
Speaker 1:Likewise, let's dive right in. Let the folks know a bit more about what you do, and we'll go from there.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, I've been an agency lover and lifer up until, I guess, june of this year. I started on this little transition about a year ago. I have spent most of my career in the account management discipline, observed a lot of changes over time, and I have a mission. I really. I see some things that are broken in our industry and there are lots of theories about what's going on. My theory is that account management hasn't gotten enough love over the years and, as a result, it's gotten off track. I'm here. The mission of my organization is really to develop proactive client leaders that can function as cultivators of growth for the agency and the client. I think it's a game changer for agencies if they come with me on this journey.
Speaker 1:I love the idea of account management being cultivators. It's such a that conjures up so much imagery around what that entails, the ownership that that takes to really foster growth within the agency as an organization. I agree, and I've seen it certainly throughout my career and even on my own agency. At times there is this sense of just being, I don't know, overly reactive. I think a lot of it has to do with the data points involved, the ever-growing amount of data that we all have to consume and synthesize and present to clients, and it's become very focused on reporting, reporting, reporting, reporting. What are some of the reasons that you find, I guess, a tribute to why agency services or client services might be broken, or at least the perception of being broken at an agency?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, it goes way back. I think it's taken probably 15, at least 15 years for us to get to this point. It started in the Great Recession when the depth charts got trimmed. A lot of the middle was cut out, so the senior people kept their jobs and the young people did. But since that time we've all been living in a do more with less mandate, and there hasn't been enough training not, I mean virtually no training really for long, long periods of time.
Speaker 2:You've got an increasing project work. I mean just it is what it is that discourages the account management team's opportunity to really dig in and learn the business. Oftentimes you're handed a brief and you may or may not have an opportunity to really peel that onion back and see if what's really, if what they think is the solution, is really the solution or even the problem. You've got what else? Project management has risen in terms of its importance, and that is great. Believe me, as a young account manager, I would have killed for a project management partner, and now we have it.
Speaker 2:But unfortunately, the lines have become blurred and that's not good for account management, because now we have agency leaders questioning what are they doing? I mean, I've got a project management group. So the value that they bring is no longer clear within agencies, which is obviously a problem. And then, to your point, the explosion of digital and just a tremendous tactical load of work that is hard to you know. It's hard to find space and time to do the higher value thinking. So there's a lot of reasons for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hear you, you know you touched on something before I actually hit record, but I wanted to make sure that this is not lost the opportunity for account management to be leaders in the organization and really be that true client liaison. Because, let's face it, it's not going to be the creative director, it's not going to be the head of project management and it's certainly not going to be the C-suite. So account management really is I use this line a lot like the last line of defense and that's probably a really bad way to put it, as I say it out loud.
Speaker 2:I think it is. It should be proactive. Stop being that.
Speaker 1:It's the proactive partnership, it's that leadership within the organization and so it's that true partnership where account management, account strategists, they are the liaison. So when a creative director has got that big idea, then the account management team should be able to say this actually isn't what the client needs right now. I'm able to give that pushback and I don't know that a lot of agencies give account management that freedom or that empowerment.
Speaker 2:even Well, it needs to come from an informed point of view. It needs to. You need to have earned the credibility to have that point of view with your partners, and I believe that we can achieve that with this group by zeroing in on the business. You've got a lot of signs and signals out there in the industry that there's not enough of a connection to the business and we're too focused on the brand, if you will. There's a new agency that launched just a few weeks ago. It's called the Actionists. We are the Actionists and it's by marketers for marketers, because they believe the business piece has been left behind. And that's what I think.
Speaker 2:There's nobody better positioned within an agency to be an expert in their client's business than your account team. Right, I mean, you need to be immersed in it, living it, breathing it, exploring it, so you can connect the dots. And when your teams come to you with what might seem like a crazy idea, that's not crazy, guess what? Because of X, y and Z, that works. So let's bring that to the client. That's what's missing Because, again, right now they're caught up in very executional, mired in executional work. I think they're over-processed. I've got all kinds of theories about it, but we need to reframe this role in order to distinguish it from project management, and the business expertise is how we can do that.
Speaker 1:You mentioned the brief process earlier and it was part of a bigger conversation, but I wanted to go back to that. That's something that, admittedly, I have struggled with the different agencies and we are going through the process of refining it at TAVO as well is, at its core, who owns the creative brief? And I think in its historical terms, at least in my experience, creative owns the brief and then account management relays that to the client for feedback, gets the approval yes, no, maybe. So Does edits creative, does another revision and then boom, we have our creative direction approved. All systems go more or less, and I know there's some nuances and it'll differ from agency to agency. But I think again, more to the point, at least, where we are headed is that account management should own more of that creative brief process and rather be the buffer before going to the client and just being the intermediary, and more so that liaison that actually does have a sensibility about what is best for the client. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I think it's about objectives, brian.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that's where, again, identifying the problem that we're trying to solve and we have to have.
Speaker 2:If you've got a really strong client leader, then you have somebody that has the wherewithal to say to the client time out. I mean, I don't really know if what you're describing as the problem really is the problem and that's what you want. You want somebody that has the ability not to challenge the client but to collaborate with them and make sure that that thinking is sound before you bring it to the agency. We can't just be facilitators here's what the client is asking for to the rest of your team, and I think a brief, a great brief, is a collaborative process. I do, depending on the structure of your agency, you're going to want input from just about everybody, but I think our value comes in making sure that what's at the top of it, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to accomplish that we've had some. We've had the ability to bring a critical eye to that and make sure that it's a worthy that it's a worthy and sound objective that we've established.
Speaker 1:So, going back to objectives, just to put a finer point on it, more for me, because you're being crystal clear about it. But I want to make sure I'm on the same page, because I think I agree with you in that, historically, the brief is so task-oriented it's we're going to create an ad for X, y, z, and here's the target audience and here's the tone and go. That is fine, but that's the foundation and the bigger piece of that is why are we doing this as the objective?
Speaker 2:That's right, exactly. It's interesting. I've started to remember my path in this industry and I only recently just kind of had this epiphany. But I didn't come up through account management, I didn't start as an account coordinator, I actually worked on the client side a couple of times. Then I got into the media side of the business and those experiences really helped me to have more of a, I guess, well-rounded point of view and it did sort of train me from the get-go to be able to say that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:You know, like what you just said, and it's like you have to. You know you have to, obviously with all due respect, but you know, sometimes we're asked to do crazy things and you need somebody sitting in that chair that has, again, you know, a backbone, some backbone and some confidence in their own ability to process information, to be able to say why would you know, like you said, that makes no sense? What if we explore it this way? Let's bring this team, let's have the conversations, and I do think that sometimes when you've got broader experience beyond just the agency, you've got more to work with, and so I have that, I had that luxury. We've got to be able to train people you know, to be able to have that sort of the confidence and what those little voices are telling them.
Speaker 1:Well, it comes from experience, it comes from structure and I mean you know more to the point of what you're talking about. You know, as marketers, we get brought into these meetings with the C-suite and the board and usually most of the time not everyone's in there. You've got someone that's got a really big opinion that matters, that's not in the room and they come back in the 11th hour with what about hoverboards? Like, well, I don't know what about hoverboards, well, let's do something with hoverboards, and who cares? But as marketers it's always like the reaction is like you know what, we'll look into that when, in reality, why waste the time on something that's not a viable option for what that bigger objective is or was? And, being very true to ourselves, what the objective is and what we're focused on and certainly we want to be agile and adjust to the times in the market. At the end of the day, if you're deviating too much from your strategy, then the strategy doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right. Yep, and there's a great book called Good Strategy Bad Strategy that I advocate people read all the time, where it's almost a script in some ways for how to gently push back when somebody's trying to tell you their strategy is essentially their goal. Right, I mean, yeah, that's great. Ambition is not strategy, ambition is a goal. So, anyway, there's a lot of bad strategy out there in the world and you have to have something to draw on to be able to push back and reframe the conversation in a more effective way.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so, Lori. Help me understand and help anyone listening to this understand. How can you benefit them. Let's say we got some agency owners and operators listening. How can you best support and be the coach that they didn't know they needed? Now they can't live with it.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm trying a lot of things. It hasn't even been a full year, so I've been experimenting with a number of different things. Right now I'm finishing up the first cohort of a new program that I rolled out called Building Business Acumen to stay on that path.
Speaker 2:It's inspired by my own, my favorite course from the MBA program that I took and it's a six-week program using real-world, real-client examples and I have direct feedback loop with the participants in the program. I have to tell you they're loving it. They see the difference, they recognize oh my gosh, I never really took the time to go back and start at square one with understanding this client. So there's that. So I've got group programs. I've got a best practice methodology called the Bespoke Playbook.
Speaker 2:Again, I learned this by making early mistakes where I thought that I could go in and just talk to people for two hours about all the great wisdom that I've amassed over the years and it became like Charlie Brown's teacher, if that you know, the blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:So the idea behind the Bespoke Playbook is that I'm setting it up it's a reverse engineered workshop, if you will, where I'm bringing topics forward and my goal is to just guide the teams and let them create their own playbook for how they're going to create state-of-the-art communication for their clients, how they're going to do competitive analysis in a meaningful way, so that they have that you know intel to draw on in their daily work.
Speaker 2:So it's about best practices, but they create it. They bring the agency's vibe and, you know, uniqueness to it and, at the end of the day, you know we codify it in a document that's branded and it can be used for goal setting, for accountability purposes, even for training, and, you know, straight up advising. I mean, I'm building a couple of account groups from scratch with some digital agencies who have recently come to the realization that project management is great, but, you know, again, for the purpose of building growth, they need something more. So there's a number of different ways that we can partner. It's incredibly organic at this point, bryant, to be honest. So, but it's real exciting and I'm open to thoughts and ideas as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground, lori, obviously you provide a lot of value to agency owners and operators. I'm thinking also of even account managers, someone that's in that service side of the business that's listening to this. What are some FAQs or some questions that you can help solve right off the bat and get people to have that aha moment of what value you can help bring to the table and help them see the light as it relates to the bigger, broader side of client services.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, stop thinking of yourself as client services and start thinking of yourself as client leadership. To be consistent, the question always comes up like what is it Right? What is client leadership? And I have three things that I really in doing the research over the past couple of years cultivators of growth, influencers of creativity, leaders of collaboration those really are the three things, bryant, that client leadership can really drive value by becoming experts in those three areas, and so they're all very different and very unique and offer different opportunities for learning and growth, but really that's the core of client leadership.
Speaker 1:I love how concise that is and it's easy for people to wrap their heads around. I love the repackaging of client leadership over client service, because you're right, I think, the more I think about it through that lens, service inherently is reactive, like what can I do for you today, sir or ma'am, how can I help you? How can it be a service, whereas leadership is? You're a pace setter, you're a thought leader, you're helping to set the pace and set the tone for growth that is missing in the industry.
Speaker 2:It is the discipline delivers great service. That's not the complaint of clients, but they need to know where we're going right. And beyond my brand, can you help me with my business? There's a whole slew of other things that we can be thinking about beyond service and management. Believe me, there's plenty of people around an agency to help with the management of things we need to be thinking about leading our clients.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. So, Laurie, how can people get a hold of you?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a website that is called CultivAgencycom. Cultivagency is short for Cultivating Human Agency. That's my stated purpose, because human agency when you mentioned earlier proactivity, brian, proactive, self-directed action that's what we want. We want people to feel empowered to take action. Right, that's my purpose. Cultivagencycom is my website. I'm on LinkedIn. We all know how to reach each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll find you. I'll be sure to link to your page and everything in the show notes and on our site as well. I really appreciate you being on. You got my mind working about your shop. It's good, very, very good. Well, laurie, thanks so much for hopping on and we'll be in touch.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate it, brian. It was fun, thank you.
Speaker 1:Bye.
