Marketing Agencies Have Just One Asset: People
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
See, we’re a services business. We don’t sell products that offer us immediate revenue; we don’t have machine-based assembly lines that spit out ready-to-buy offerings; we don’t make money from royalties or licenses; we can’t send out a bug fix for a solution that will fix something that happned in the past. We are in the hardest business in the world—where every bit of revenue is earned from the sweat, ideation and toil of all of you and your colleagues. Our work is prone to mistakes that just be fixed; we don’t have the option, in many cases, of second impressions; in our lower margin business, it takes TWO MAN YEAR’S worth of work to sell business that pays the salary of less than 5 employees.
These are not small issues; these are mountains that we scale everyday, and that knowledge is paramount to how a loss of business should affect us. Everything you do with and for a client counts towards that all important win. Everything you read, everything you learn, everything you touch, and every skill you pick up builds equity in our sales process. Every minute counts for or against us. How we use that minute is what makes the difference. We’re NOT in an easy business. And while the primary focus of our business is to *serve* our clients, our primary method of *staying* in business is to continue to win them.
See, services is all I’ve ever worked in. I kid you not. I started my first services business when I was 9. The VCR had just made its advent into India a few years before, and the concept of watching movies at home was becoming a sign of the times. Video rental shops were popping up all over the place, on street corners, above restaurans, in grocery stores. The problem was, a lot of the tapes had no information about the movie in it—just a title, and maybe the name of a star. Sometimes, they’d have ‘action’ or ‘comedy’ scrawled on them. Movie databases were non-existant. One day, when my father expressed (grunted, rather) his dissapointment at switching on a movie called “Condor Man”, expecting it to be some code name for a WWII fighter pilot, and seeing a funnily-clothed superhero instead, I had an idea.
Using my father’s typewriter, I made up a form that people could add their comments about a movie on, and at the top, was space for identification of the movie itself—the name, stars, type, suitable for kids, etc. I had my father come and sign off on me being able to rent movies at a local store, and he helped me negotiate a 40% discount on the rental, as long as I maintained a certain volume of rentals. We got me a small suitcase I could load up behing my bike, and my father chose several movies for me that he thought represented a nice assortment of genres. We entered the information from the credits and his knowledge into the top of the ‘video data sheets’, and I was off on my way, just on my street to start with. Everytime someone rented from me, I would make the profit (from the 40% off), but if they’d make a legible, good comment on the Video Data Sheet, I’d give them 20% off, still making a small profit. Eventually, I had enough information on the video data sheets that they started to get famous on my street. Within a couple of months, I had hired my sister for a couple of hours of work to type up the Video Data Sheets into updated copies that were dated. We made Xerox copies of these every month, and I would sell subscriptions to houses for 6, 12 or 18 updates.
Soon, I had friends from other houses on the street working with me, and 5 of us could cover 6 blocks within 2 hours every day. We had the system down pat! We started a frequent renter’s club, and a “best reviewer” deisgnation for one household every month. That month, that household would get a 2-for-1 deal whenever they rented. For every review that we got, we’d assign “tickets” to a household, and when someone got to 10 tickets, we’d give them a free rental. Then, I got my first computer, and boy, did that change things! We called our business “VideoWalla” and, for what it was, it was a resounding success. When school got tougher, and I had to stay home studying much more, a local large video store bought out entire database of “Video Data Sheets” for what seemed to us like a ridiculously large sum of money. It was great!
So the point of that story was simply this: Good product marketing figures out what a person wants, and gives it to them. Great service marketing figures out how needs evolve, and constantly updates offerings to match those evolving needs. The latter is incredibly hard to do well. You should be proud of the work you do. But you should also be aware of how good you are at your job, and what it’s going to take to do it better.