The best leaders listen first By Tony Spong
As
marketers, we know the importance of listening to customers and knowing what problems we solve for them. So, when clients tell us that agencies aren’t listening, one must be more than just a little concerned. Who should do the listening and what should they be listening for?
Broken talent models One of the first things you learn at AAR is that clients buy teams of people backed by an agency, not an agency full of teams of people. So, what we are really dealing with now is less about broken agency models but much more about broken ‘talent’ models, and its these that haven’t kept pace with how marketing has and is changing.
We’ve spoken at length and delivered many seminars over recent years focussed on helping agencies to re-invent the client lead role and we are seeing signs that change is taking shape, but there is some way still to go if we are honest.
There is, of course, no silver bullet but clients are struggling to access the breadth of skills, experience and diversity of thinking needed to survive and thrive in today’s challenging world.
It’s certainly not been easy during a pandemic, and now a talent crunch, but out of adversity the road sometimes becomes easier to travel down.
The CMO and agency client lead face the same challenges but the fundamentals still apply. Their focus is building teams that have the collective insight, strategic mindset, commercial knowledge and technical expertise centred around a customer-centric growth agenda.
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