Avoiding Complacency Through Agency and Consultancy Dynamics with Dino Myers-Lamptey

00:00 - Dino (Guest)
Often an organization is brilliant for many reasons. They've done something, they've created something amazing. But then they kind of get a bit obsessed by it and then they take their eye away from the competition a bit. You know how brilliant the competition is, and then that customer they once had goes and buys from someone else and has an experience. And sometimes the truth in that business isn't the truth outside of it. But the way in which you can kind of land that truth is by asking the customer.

00:29 - Mike (Host)
My name's Mike Lander and you're listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released. Days when new episodes are released. Dino, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast.

00:51 - Dino (Guest)
Hello, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:54 - Mike (Host)
I got to know you, I think, through Rich McCarty, correct? Yes, correct. So Rich is obviously a very good friend of both of us. I love Rich and his BD thoughts. He was on the show a while ago. So, without further ado, so that the audience finds out who you are, who are you, what do you do and something unusual about yourself.

01:10 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, sure, thank you. So my name is Dean Amais Lamptey. I am the founder of a company called the Barbershop, which we describe as a strategic, creative company. We problem solve for clients across media and creative, and we work as both an agency and consultancy. In the way in which we work, I also wear a couple of other hats that I'm kind of proud of. I'm a trustee of Brixton Finishing School. I sit on the Marketing Society board. Yeah, that's it.

01:34 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I sponsored that, obviously at the dinner. Yeah, which was brilliant. It was such an amazing evening.

01:39 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, amazing, amazing organization. Yeah, amazing, amazing organization. And I sit on the Marketing Society board and I also have a non-exec position for MGOMD, advising them with a leadership advisory board, a group of outsiders that come in to give them kind of outside inspiration into the business.

01:55 - Mike (Host)
Very good, excellent. So anything unusual about yourself apart from those things?

02:00 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, there's probably a few things I could pick on. Anything will do. Yeah, probably my go-to is the fact that I don't float and I scuba dive without weights, which is something I found out when I learned to scuba dive. Yeah, wow, yes, yeah, so why?

02:16 - Mike (Host)
didn't you come back up? I suppose you used the air tanks.

02:20 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, the air tank will get me back up, but in terms of finding that buoyancy and finding that balance Tricky. At the start the weights were just too much, so at the end of it it was yeah, don't use the weights Very good.

02:34 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, exactly. And also I see you've got vinyl in the background, you've got a turntable, which is a shared passion.

02:39 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, the vinyl is now kind of digital vinyl. Yeah, the vinyl is now kind of digital vinyl. So I've got digital decks as well as the old ones as well. So you know, it's nice to play the odd vinyl every now and then.

02:54 - Mike (Host)
But really practically digital kind of wins out for doing anything in public. So we now as a family I've got a turntable, I've gone back to collecting vinyl, so our son who's 12, has now started collecting vinyl as well. So we stream a lot. But also who's 12, has now started collecting vinyl as well, so we stream a lot, but also on a weekend he'll pick up a vinyl and say let's play that, and we sit and have a chat or play a board game or do something.

03:13 - Dino (Guest)
So it's really nice.

03:13 - Mike (Host)
It's a great format for actually prompting a conversation, because, of course, the album tells a story.

03:19 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, that's it and I think that it's nice to see that it's come back. In that sense, I mean I think the price point is a lot higher than it used to be. But it's good, because you know, albums just the shuffle nature of everything now, the playlist nature of everything. You never see, hear an album from start to finish, the way the artist kind of designed and intended it. Exactly right, it's nice to be on vinyl, to bring that back.

03:42 - Mike (Host)
We were talking about this last night. So, listeners, if you're into vinyl, great, if you're not, bear with us for a minute Talking to my brother-in-law about this last night. About, basically, the artist designed the album of circa 10 tracks, about 40 minutes, to tell a story, and in that story there are chapters that aren't very good and there are some chapters that are brilliant. And that's the beauty of listening to an album all the way through you get to hear what was going on effectively as they wrote the album.

04:10 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, that's it. And actually another kind of point while we obsess about vinyls is even on the singles yeah, singles, you know LPs that were singles you always had a different version of the track on the B side. That's right. So it was always something nice and surprising and different. Often it could be rare. You just don't find that anymore. You just can't flip from one track to the other version. Nowadays on digital music you have to kind of hunt out that different version. It's a shame really, because sometimes there are tracks where the B-side was more popular eventually than the A-side.

04:42 - Mike (Host)
That was exactly right. Yeah, I remember that very well. So anyway, before the listeners think this is a music podcast, it's not. It's about agency growth. So first question, dino, so what's the difference between agency and consultancy sales, and how do you draw the line between discovery and delivery in consulting selling? Let's pick up the first question what's the difference between agency and consultancy sales?

05:04 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, so let's pick up the first question what's the difference between agency and consultancy sales? Yeah, so when we describe our kind of blend of both, in terms of the fact that we're consultancy and agency, we talk about the fact that agencies are very good at executing and doing things, doing things on brief, and consultancies are very good at writing the brief and kind of understanding, the getting to the nut of the problem, kind of diagnosing the problem and then writing the brief. There's a difference in terms of how the client might approach us, depending on what hat they think we're wearing or what problem they think we need to solve. You know, often it is in an agency. It starts with an agency requirement. They often have a marketing budget and they want to do a campaign. But the clients that we probably work best with are the ones that also open the door for the challenge of the brief and that can go into lots of different areas so it might go beyond the core.

05:53
Just do media for us. It might go into this is a broader marketing problem. We need to look at.

05:59 - Mike (Host)
So this is really interesting. How do you get into that conversation? So I have this a lot with agencies. So, first of all, a lot of agencies think selling is just a bad word. But actually what we're doing is in consultative selling is we're opening up a discussion with a client and I always think it might take me three months or three years before a client works with me, Because actually it's an inquiry-based, active listening, questioning process, I think. How do you open up that conversation? How do you experience that?

06:33 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, I mean. So the first thing I would say is that labeling and how you position yourself is probably one of those key things at the start In terms of how you define what you do and what you are. And it can be if you were going to a pitch consultant or someone like Rich or an intermediary, they might kind of be a bit nervous at this kind of positioning that is not as focused as you might like. So if you're an agency and you say we do media buying or we do creative services or we do events, it's very specific, it's very clear. It has a box around it effectively. Yeah, it has a box around it, that's it. And people come to you for those services and that's all they want and expect. And if you try and have a conversation outside of that, they go hang on a minute. That's not your expertise, right?

07:16 - Mike (Host)
Exactly, I didn't ask you about that. Yeah, I didn't ask you about that.

07:22 - Dino (Guest)
I just want to buy this thing. So it takes labeling and positioning yourself as something that's a bit more broader and open than that, and that means taking away a little bit of the focus that you might want. Someone might advise you to have that focus right, label yourself as this thing, but actually it takes a little bit of. It's a bit of a risk, really, because you're saying we don't really know what you want and you don't really know what we offer, but we're telling you we can do a number of different things.

07:47 - Mike (Host)
So just a thought, dino, on that the positioning. I think it's a really important point. If you position yourself in terms of results, it opens you up to a much broader conversation.

07:58 - Dino (Guest)
Like I say.

08:00 - Mike (Host)
I basically improve conversion rates and average order values. So it's quite high level at the beginning, but it gets me into very different conversations. How do you find it? What's your advice around that?

08:12 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, I think so. I mean I think the closer you can get to understanding exactly the thing they're really trying to do. You know, a lot of the time the KPIs on briefs can be the wrong KPIs right In terms of people, can get carried away a little bit by the task of doing activity rather than the problem they're trying to solve. So the thing about it is that makes it quite difficult for potentially anyone just to kind of pick this up and do it. It's because it's a way of thinking that gets you into an uncomfortable place where you don't know the solution and you have to be comfortable with sitting with that for a little while until you've got some more clarity.

08:46 - Mike (Host)
Ambiguity sitting with ambiguity is a core consulting skill. I would say it absolutely is.

08:51 - Dino (Guest)
yeah, and it's just probably through experience that you know you get there in the end. Right, you kind of got a process of going through it that will get you to a place that Exactly. It's almost deliberate that you have to get to that kind of uncomfortable place where you're asking questions that the client might not want to answer or they haven't got the answers for, or whatever else, just to get that full picture.

09:11 - Mike (Host)
You have to stop jumping to solutions in the early stages, totally.

09:15 - Dino (Guest)
Totally. You have to, you absolutely do. And then the other challenge with it all is that sometimes clients think they know what they want, or they want something specific, or they like the idea of a solution because they don't like the ambiguity. So they like that kind of what's the idea, what's it going to look like, what's the thing going to be? It's that whole thing of just being comfortable with, as you say, ambiguity and knowing that it's a process, but at the same time you've got to give them some reassurance that it's not something you're going to go away with and take months and months, and months, and months and months to sit on and the business is going to die in the process.

09:45
You've still got to move fast, you've still got to have something that is pretty rapid. And I think that we've found, for instance, that sometimes when you're selling strategic and consultancy services, it can be quite hard for people that are very campaign focused and output focused to understand what is the work that you're doing and what is it going to achieve. And what we've found sometimes with clients, as you kind of mentioned, it can take two, three years to sell something in and we've found that actually even when someone's defined a bit of a problem, they know what they need to do it can take a long time for them to get that internal confidence to sign that thing off, get going and to do that thing. And we've actually developed effectively a product recently which is inspired by my kind of business partner who had an agency consultancy before that was focused around workshops and it was called the Rapids and it was about effectively sprints, doing sprints with businesses where, you know, over the course of a few days or five days, you know they take a business from A to B and have some kind of defined solutions and then they would walk away from executing effectively. It would just be a bit of a plan on a page and the key things that we realized that were really good about that was they just got every stakeholder. That was important for either saying yes to the decision, making the thing happen, or being a blocker and saying no for some reason Exactly Getting them all on the same page to agree.

11:00
Okay, what are we trying to do here? What's the purpose of what we're trying to do? It can be half the battle, because a lot of the time in businesses, people are busy doing whatever and they can lose sight of. What are we all here to do and how do we need to coordinate and collaborate to make that thing happen, and what do we need to empower externally to not slow anything down? So we've come up with this product we call it Leaps, and the idea is that we've come into businesses and work on a very clearly defined problem, whether it's a customer problem, a brand problem or a communications problem.

11:33
So is it a problem with your advertising and your media that you've got to knuckle down? Is it about making the case for doing it in the first place or actually just looking into the detail a bit more? Is it something to do with the brand and the way the consumer sees the brand. Is there something that we should be doing about brand positioning work there? Or is it a customer problem? Is it that you've lost sight of your audiences or you don't know enough about them? Or is it even like a loyalty issue? Is it the full spectrum of what it could be in a customer?

11:57 - Mike (Host)
So back to the Einstein thing how do you define the problem? If I had an hour, I'd spend 55 minutes finding the problem Before you do your workshop. How do you shape the problem? How does that work? How does that process work?

12:12 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, that problem of diagnosis is an important one, and there's things like Michael Porter's Five Whys is probably a very simple way of kind of you know, talking about it in terms of it's that inquisitiveness. Sometimes people don't like to feel like they're being grilled in that sense as well, but it does get you to the right place and sometimes, because people don't necessarily like that, we use different techniques to pull out insights from different people in an organization.

12:36 - Mike (Host)
So Dino, just for the audience, for people that sat there, going five whys. So just explain how the five whys model works and why it's so powerful.

12:46 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, it's a really simple kind of process which is almost like anyone with kids probably does it. Anyway they do Instinctively. We do it as human beings, that's it. We do it instinctively, which is, you know, you've got a question and someone gives you an answer and they say we're doing this because of this, and then you ask them why? Nothing else but why? And then allow them to explain, and then, when they finish, ask them why again, and you do this process five times before you realize that okay, hang on a minute, the real reason at the start probably isn't the real reason at the end and you've got to take the crux of the problem and the issue.

13:26 - Mike (Host)
So it's also root cause analysis, basically, isn't it?

13:28 - Dino (Guest)
Is that?

13:28 - Mike (Host)
what you're doing is you're starting with a big problem or a big question or a big thought and then, as the consultant inquires with the client, you drive back down the root cause of what that thing is and what you thought might be the problem actually isn't the problem at all. That's it.

13:45 - Dino (Guest)
And there's other kind of similar kind of techniques that the listeners might have heard about. Things like first principle thinking yes, exactly, things like that are quite similar in that sense they're stripping things back, just going, not making assumptions.

13:57 - Mike (Host)
There's also you know, it's a bit of a by the way- as a quick note for the guests, this guy called Shane Parrish, who I follow, has written a brilliant book about critical thinking. So anyone listening who wants to understand more about these kind of models and frameworks and ideas for challenging, read the book.

14:15 - Dino (Guest)
It's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book, shane Parrish, that's an excellent recommendation, and the thing that's important for listeners to understand, though, is there is a bit of a skill in critical thinking and asking the right questions in the right ways, and you don't want to get to a position where you're asking without purpose, right.

14:33
You're kind of just asking and you're not thinking hang on, I haven't got to the bottom of this, right.

14:37
You know when you're doing that, while you're going hang on, this just doesn't make sense yet it doesn't kind of I haven't got the full picture yet. That's why you're doing it, and it's that kind of of skill of balancing what people are prepared to say and what they're not, and then, sometimes, you might realize that, hang on, someone doesn't want to say something, so you've got to go to someone else for that information. So, for instance, one of the things that we developed and do, we call it a co-workshop, where it was actually inspired during COVID time, when we couldn't get into the room and just do workshops with people face to face, and we knew that a lot of it was going to have to be remote, and remote workshops on Zoom were pretty well. They weren't reflective of the real thing, because what tends to happen is people can't talk naturally and have kind of breakout. You know talks and discussions and you can't see the different energy in different parts of the room and that dynamic.

15:24 - Mike (Host)
And you can't go to the coffee machine and have a coffee when someone's got something on their mind, because they're an introvert and they don't want to speak out in the audience. That's it.

15:33 - Dino (Guest)
And it becomes very hierarchical as well.

15:35
So you know the most important person does the most talking and everyone else thinks hang on, I'm not going to say anything unless I'm given permission to. So it's a bit of a bad dynamic. But you know, we were forced to do it and we still do it and we still see the value, because there are some values in it. But what we did and we created was what we call a co-workshop, which we did coaching courses to learn the technique of effectively listening and and getting stuff out of people you know, and finding the root of the problem through another means. And what we would do is we would work out who the key stakeholders that were going to be in the room and we'd have individual interview sessions with them, which would feel like coaching sessions, just like listening. You just like listening, you know, 30 minutes beforehand to you know, around the question, the topic that we were going to be in a room discussing.

16:16 - Mike (Host)
We used to call them EFIs executive focused interviews.

16:19 - Dino (Guest)
Amazing, yes, perfect. And then, and what happens is everyone in that environment just tells it how it is. They say what's on their mind, they get everything off their chest and then you begin to join the dots between the different conversations and see, oh, hang on, this is a real issue that's going on here.

16:36 - Mike (Host)
And importantly, this is pre-workshop one-on-one. Everyone gets the same kind of template and then you anonymize it, pull it all together and then in the room say did you realize that collectively you believe this, that's it, or collectively you have no?

16:48 - Dino (Guest)
alignment, yeah, that's it. Or collectively, you have no alignment, yeah, that's it. And when you have the situation where maybe the most senior person is talking about something and you've got all this information that suggests the contrary, then you can stand up and talk about it without putting anyone in it, sticking anyone in it. You can say, oh, you know, the feedback we've got is that it's not exactly like that, and I think that's a really powerful thing actually. And that's just the process of kind of challenging the brief a bit. Challenging the problem, getting permission to find a bit more. The other technique of getting permission to go a bit further is always what the consumer thinks.

17:20
The one thing an organization often does is they get a little bit too internal and they drink their own Kool-Aid. Right. And often an organization is brilliant for many reasons. They've done something, they've created something amazing, but then they kind of get a bit obsessed by it and then they take their eye away from the competition a bit.

17:37
You know how brilliant the competition is and that customer they once had goes and buys from someone else and has an experience, and sometimes the truth in that business isn't the truth outside of it, but the way in which you can land that truth is by asking the customer and coming back in and saying, all right, we understand, this is your objective and this is what you think and these are your insights. But actually we've done a quick dip or we've asked these people, we've asked the buyers of XYZ and this is what they're saying, this is what their views are. A business needs to be very customer-ric and have that kind of independent customer view coming into the room, and if it hasn't, then that's a suggestion to start things, to kick things off really.

18:16 - Mike (Host)
So, dino, we've had like a really interesting set of rabbit holes, broad discussion about agency versus consultancy selling. How would you summarize it? If someone said to you I don't know what the difference is, explain really briefly. How would you explain the difference?

18:32 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, I would explain the difference by saying agencies are incredible at getting stuff done. You know creating ideas, understanding kind of creativity and delivering and executing creativity. You know making it happen. Really creative individuals inspired by lots of different companies and brands in places of high energy.

18:52
The consultancies are really good at driving efficiencies and doing the critical thinking part in terms of understanding the context within the business more broadly, making those assessments as the value and the purpose of doing something or not doing something. So I think the two can work well together. What I would say is that I'd be cautious of consultancies that just do everything but don't do anything specifically. Amazingly, in terms of you know, there are certain categories, let's say, like marketing and advertising, which is not often the strength of a traditional consultancy, because it's very hard to understand how to measure and understand values like creativity and what that really means, how much you're prepared to invest in it versus not. It's a bit more of an art sometimes than a science in that regard, and consultancies are better when things can be put on spreadsheets and understood mathematically.

19:48 - Mike (Host)
Interesting. So just my take on it, just for what it's worth as well. Having worked in both quite a lot, I think an agency that delivers agency services as you described marketing agency services brilliant at what they do venturing into becoming a consultancy isn't for the faint-hearted they are often. If you look at the teams that deliver those services, they are very different types of individuals. Not better or worse, but they're different types of individuals and you can't respray one, an agency person, to be a consultative seller. It doesn't work, in my experience, completely.

20:23 - Dino (Guest)
And I think that part of the problem that agencies have a lot of the time is because they're focused. They're focused in a certain area. It can often mean that the business model is kind of underpinned by doing that thing, and just the fact that that is the case means that it's very hard for that person that has been trained to sell and do that thing to suddenly go well, what if we don't do that thing? What if we can do something completely different with that sort of problem?

20:47 - Mike (Host)
Exactly, but they can turn into much, much bigger strategic relationships. But you've got to have the skill set and be patient. I think Absolutely. I'm conscious of your time, dino. Our time is like 20 minutes in. We've got about five or seven minutes left, so I'm going to go straight to the last question, which is this what's your experience and lessons learned in winning without pitching and winning with pitching? And to be clear to the audience, what I mean is winning without pitching, the consultative sell. There isn't a formal brief, you're creating it. Winning with pitching, often driven by procurement, often a well-known thing they need, I guess. So what's your experience of winning without the pitching and then winning with pitching RFPs?

21:34 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, sure.

21:36
So the first thing to kind of just prelude in this is that you know my career started at the biggest media agency, mediacom, and then I went to what was a small but reputable place called Mike Leaders in Bednash, a strategic, you know, comms planning agency.

21:50
And then I went to PhD Rocket. So Rocket was part of the sister agency of PhD, now called Hearts and Science, and then after that I moved to the Seven Stars and helped to grow that into the biggest media agency, uk independent media agency, sunday Times, best 100 companies to work for all the stats agency of the year. And then I worked at Mullen Lowe running the Media Hub which was aiming to bring the full service dream alive again, all the different component parts. And the reason why I say that is because I've experienced pitching in all sorts of different companies and shapes and sizes and different strong points and weak points and across the way we've always had relationships with different intermediaries and different things like that. So my experience is loaded and grounded in those times, but also in the most recent time of the last five years running my own thing.

22:46 - Mike (Host)
And just to pause on that for a second. So what you're basically saying is you've worked on the very biggest strategic consultancy sales and you've also dealt with in the media buying world very, very process-driven, rfp-driven, large-scale sales processes yeah, that's it.

23:06 - Dino (Guest)
With big multinational, global companies, epic brands yeah, that's it which these pitch processes take a long long time. The first thing I'd caveat and say is that I enjoy the pitch process. I enjoy pitching and I love the challenge of it, but also I've sat on both sides, actually as well. I've sat on the client side advising a client as well about their selection of a creative agency. We kind of have that service if the client wants us as well to help out, and it's fascinating seeing on both sides and seeing how it works and how decisions are made.

23:38
The thing that I would say is that in our industry, I think, pitching is an inherently unfair process. It's rare that the best idea wins. What happens is sometimes in the creative agency side, there can be an idea that just captures everyone's attention and they've just got to do it. But in terms of on the media side, it's incredibly rare for that to happen. There's a lot of factors that coming into it, that assessing whether they decide to go ahead with the agency or not.

24:09
But the reason why I say that pitching is a bit of an unfair process is because in our industry, I believe, the thing that you're really buying and the most important thing is trust and relationships, because there's so much that can go wrong when you trust someone to spend millions of your pounds, and there's so much in the industry that is hard to understand.

24:32
The issue is transparency with third-party suppliers and all the rest of it. You can't see most of the stuff that you're buying and you have to trust that the spreadsheets and the things that you're getting as reports are accurate, are truthful. The only thing that you can see is your sales and maybe your customer surveys of how people are reacting to things, but in some businesses that's not instant. You've got to wait some time to see that effect as well. So a lot of it comes down to am I going to enjoy working with these people? Because are they going to be doing the things that I want them to be doing? Are they going to be having my best interest at heart, negotiating with me at heart, and not just spending the money like it's somebody else's money, spending the money like it's their own money?

25:14 - Mike (Host)
And, I think, are they more interested in me as a client than themselves. That's exactly it.

25:19 - Dino (Guest)
And what tends to happen is, if you're an experienced marketing person and you've been around a few different agencies, had certain experiences, if you've had a good relationship that has worked, I think you're out of your mind.

25:32
If you decide to change that relationship, there might be some kind of reason where the work is just not good enough anymore, or the company's got a bit too big for you or whatever else, or you're too small for that company and, yes, that's a valid reason. But you almost have to state that reason and be clear on it so everyone else knows that it's a fair contest. Otherwise, you're looking for someone that you can trust, that you've known has delivered in the past and will deliver when you call upon them in the future. And I think that when you put the hat on to say, what does it take to lose that process? If you've had a previous relationship with a good client and you know their personality, you know what they like and the expectations, what does it take to lose that pitch? It takes an awful lot. It takes a complete disaster really.

26:13 - Mike (Host)
Or it takes arrogance.

26:14
Dino oh yeah, yeah, the arrogance that we believe it's ours by right. Yes, and this is just some window dressing that we have to go through and that's when it can go, when you make us. It happened recently to not one of our clients, another client where the advisor had said be careful, it's a real, real RFP process. Everything is at stake. You're well positioned, you should win, and they apparently decided that they were going to be the agency that won because they're the incumbent, and they showed up relatively unprepared for discussion.

26:52 - Dino (Guest)
I mean that's pretty criminal. When you go into a pitch, you've got to have your you know to treat it with that respect right, in a sense that you know, even if you know the most important person that's making the decision, there's other people that are going to influence that decision and you can't not pay attention to all those important players.

27:08 - Mike (Host)
You have to assume it's a new client. You have to assume it's a new client. You have to assume that you're pitching for something new and you're on the back foot of it.

27:14 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, that's it, but it is yours to lose. But you've got to make those assumptions in the right place and not make the wrong assumptions. And I think that in that instance, I think that the understanding of a relationship, of a brand and that kind of history should be a superpower advantage really for you to go into that pitch and just kind of really impress them and storm them.

27:35 - Mike (Host)
I mean, the data tells us the incumbent wins over 65% of re-pitches and that means 35% of them. Either there was a big reason why the CMO changed or their delivery wasn't quite on par, but some of those will be. They just didn't show up correctly.

27:52 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, which is pretty tragic. So I think that the thing about pitching is you've got to try and make sure that you've got as fair a contest as possible, and you know I mean you want to, as a modern term was an unfair advantage.

28:08 - Mike (Host)
You want an unfair advantage. You want an unfair advantage.

28:11 - Dino (Guest)
You know more, you understand the problem better or you've got some kind of inside knowledge that is helping you tackle it, tackle the problem better, get to the root of the problem. And I think that the issue and the challenge with a lot of pitches that are led by RFIs and RFP processes and we see this unfortunately quite a lot, and then we have to kind of walk away from things is that they would say something like, for example, what's your experience in university advertising campaigns? And we'll like, for example, what's your experience in university advertising campaigns? And we'll go well, we've existed for five years, we haven't had a university, we haven't won a university. How do you get a university without winning a university? That kind of thing, right?

28:46 - Mike (Host)
That's a whole different podcast.

28:47 - Dino (Guest)
but I agree it's a whole different problem, yeah, and of course it's like well, I've worked on one in the past, the agency X or Y or Z or whatever, but that isn't the story that you're looking for. You're looking for this agency and this model and this mold and it's just, unfortunately, it suits the person that's big enough, that's got that case study that puts it in.

29:08 - Mike (Host)
But as a buyer, I'd be like that's perfectly reasonable. I want an agency that's got deep sector expertise in higher education. I think you're spot on, Dino. When you get the RFP, what you should say is, well, that's not for us. Then there's a way of turning it down that keeps you in the game. But again, probably a separate podcast. But qualify it out Because you're never going to win that Because there's an agency out there that's done 20 higher education universities in the UK with brilliant results.

29:43 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, you'll always come a close second before you even start writing anything yes, yeah, completely, that's it, that's exactly it, and the good thing about a brief like that is if they say it, and that's what is the determining factor. I think that the challenge with sometimes and again back to that, you know the brief is not necessarily well written or clear, in a sense is because sometimes that weighs on people's minds a lot more than than others. Yeah, so you know, you have some industries that like music, for example, that they want that sector expertise and they are very happy to be in the same agency that has got their competitors in there and all the rest of it. They know the dynamic of the way it works. It's just a way of launching music.

30:20
But there's some that deliberately look for non-clashes right, that's right, and it's like they deliberately look for we don't want to hear the fact that you've done this with this other car brand, right, we need a place that is unique. So it's been about really clear about that right from the start, so that people don't go into it thinking, oh yeah, we've got equal chance here and then it's like, oh yeah, the other people had a better case study on a car brand and we're a car brand and we like that, and it's like, okay, hang on a minute.

30:45 - Mike (Host)
Clarity at the start would have helped, but your job as a seller is to find out, before anyone writes anything Early doors, how critical anything early doors, how critical is sector expertise, for example?

30:58 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, that's it. But that's kind of going towards the consultancy end as well, in a sense that winning without pitching the Blair Ends.

31:05
Thing basically for the audience yeah, that's it, and it is about a classic thing is to try and you know almost like rewrite the brief to find the real problem and then show how you can answer that problem. And you're really putting a proposal together about how you would tackle the problem and giving them confidence in the fact that your process and means to get to the answer is a better way, without giving all your answers, without giving the pitch away, in a sense, in fact I don't know if this helps, but to the audience again, I've kind of stopped writing proposals and I write discussion documents and you said about labeling at the beginning is important.

31:43 - Mike (Host)
If I call it a discussion document and say to the client, please contribute to the discussion document, they put their thoughts in it. If I say it's a proposal, then they just circulate it and I never hear back from them.

31:54 - Dino (Guest)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a really good tip and it's a really good piece of advice. I mean, one of the things that we kind of say but probably don't do enough is and this is back to the whole when you're in a pitch situation Again, like right now, we try not to pitch. We kind of pitch where we feel again we've got an unfair advantage, where we're kind of asked to do it by someone we hopefully know, but the old process of pitching, I always used to say, when we have this chemistry and whatever else, I'd constantly be in rooms with people that would be like right, what are all the questions? We're going to ask this, that, and I'm like good, it's good for us to prepare the questions, but let's just bear in mind that the answers are what we want to hear and what they want to say, not necessarily the answer to our questions. We want to hear them talk about the most important things in their mind.

32:36
Right, that's right. So we've got to try and ask certain questions that can open them up, and then we might flex it and probe on the things that they seem to care about the most. That's almost the beauty of it. It's that kind of coaching skill. If you let someone talk enough, they will tell you the answers they will. They will tell you what they want, they will tell you what, and too often people don't do that. Too often people are just too obsessed by their own questions and just asking questions for the sake of questions and not really listening to the answers properly to go actually they didn't really talk about this thing and they want to know more about this.

33:06 - Mike (Host)
I mean, it's a form of therapy I don't want to get into. The therapy is a very specific and very technical area which I'm not qualified to talk about clearly. But it is a therapeutic approach and very technical area which I'm not qualified to talk about clearly. But it is a therapeutic approach which is your. I'm more interested in what you've got to say and my job is to ask you the right questions to help you unravel this complex puzzle.

33:28 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and I mean it's not a bad thing to mention therapy in a sense, because you know we talked about coaching and coaching is on a spectrum of therapy and mentoring, for example, and really, yes, the means of getting the information out and getting people to share is similar in terms of people tend to go to places that they didn't necessarily think they'll go to by giving them time to talk about it and giving them time with their own thoughts, to actually explain things, and they might realize that, hang on, what we wrote down isn't actually quite right. It should be phrased like this instead to actually explain things and they might realize that hang on what we wrote down isn't actually quite right.

34:00 - Mike (Host)
Exactly, it should be phrased like this instead being the head of questions and not being the head of answers is a good place to start, I would say yes, yeah, so that's it and that's it.

34:06 - Dino (Guest)
And having some kind of part of your process that really does like you mentioned in terms of the discussion guide, or something that really does get them to contribute right from the start, it will give you an unfair advantage, because it is two-way then, and I think that's really powerful. So, dino, we're 35 minutes in.

34:24 - Mike (Host)
We could go on for quite a while.

34:26 - Dino (Guest)
Yes, we might do a part two.

34:30 - Mike (Host)
If you were an agency leader listening to this and you were doing, say, 3 million of kind of fee income you were growing, but it was a tough market and you were thinking, say, 3 million of kind of fee income you were growing, but it was a tough market and you were thinking about this whole consultative approach versus more of a package solution, retainer approach, what would be your advice about how should they start From this conversation? What are the three things that you'd say to them they should start thinking about if they're going to consider going on that journey?

34:54 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah. So the first thing I would probably say is start with their existing clients or let's call them a network of friends to ask them the question about what it is that they're not getting that their skill set could probably help out more with, and that kind of transferable skill. Is there any kind of briefs and things that we could be helping with that's getting stuck in the business? I think that's probably the first thing, because that would be their insight gathering of what's the appetite for this. How do people currently see them, Whether they see them as being someone that can operate in that more consultative space or not, and more often than not, they'll get probably some good advice in terms of the type of consultancy they could probably offer. And then the next thing I would do is look at your team and your people and think have we got the people that can do this right? Have we got the people that are comfortable with this ambiguity and can go in and ask those right questions?

35:47
Because it might be the case that there's a need to hire or train someone or give someone some freedom to be that person to then see them do it. There's probably something like that, but you need the resource to do it as well, and so I think that's really important. And then the third thing I would say is related to time, and don't expect instant returns on it. These consultancy projects do take time to convert, and they can. You know. What can derail them a lot of time again is changing staff and the client side and things like that, Changing strategic objectives and whatever else. So you do need some patience to do it. So don't kind of just have massive objectives in massive sales targets in the area. Start in a measured way and give yourself time to do it.

36:32 - Mike (Host)
Dino, it's been a real pleasure having you as a guest. Thanks ever so much for joining me. Where can people find out more about you, Dino?

36:37 - Dino (Guest)
Yeah, so our website is weartbscom and if you go there you can find relevant contact information or they can email me at dino at weartbscom, and obviously places like LinkedIn are always good, Dino thanks ever so much.

36:53 - Mike (Host)
Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host, mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.