Gareth Turner, Ex-Brand Marketing Director, on How to Win More Pitches

Mike Lander (00:00.716)
Gareth, thanks ever so much for joining us on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast today. Really delighted that you're here.

Gareth (00:02.686)
Yep. Correct.

Gareth (00:22.242)
Thanks, thanks for having me. It's great to be invited.

Mike Lander (00:24.872)
It's not our first dance as you said, is it?

Gareth (00:27.732)
No, no, I'm going to try and forget everything we spoke about before and come at it fresh.

Mike Lander (00:33.849)
You're always fresh, Gareth, you're always fresh. So a bit about your background and what you do now, and then something unusual about yourself that maybe our audience wouldn't know.

Gareth (00:45.47)
Okay, so my background, 25 years plus in FMCG really. So I was a long time at Heineken where I did a number of roles there. I was lucky enough to do the last set of Peter Kay adverts for John Smiths and did some great work with the performers. I'm very proud of that. Golden Arrow winning adverts to give them their full title.

Mike Lander (01:00.367)
Oh, amazing.

Mike Lander (01:05.815)
Wow.

Gareth (01:07.998)
I was at Arla Foods for seven years, did a number of roles there including the UK marketing director for Butter, so brands like Lerpac, Anchor and Private Label, it's a big piece of business for them, and then did a global repositioning rebranding for the Arla brand. Then I was at Weetabix for three years, head of marketing at Weetabix, did a few interesting things there like the Beans on Bix tweet which sent the internet into meltdown.

Mike Lander (01:36.643)
Hahaha!

Gareth (01:37.774)
in 2021, I think that was. And then I jacked it all in. I jacked in a great job to go and set up on my own. And I now have a company called Big Black Door and I work with marketeers to get their marketing sorted. So that could be with time poor experienced brand directors, marketing directors, CMOs, who just need a trusted pair of hands to do this thing. And so I can do that for them. I'll do some great work, if I say so myself, with some...

Mike Lander (02:05.514)
Very good.

Gareth (02:06.422)
some brands or it could be with people who are just a bit confused, perhaps people who are earlier in their brand journey that just don't know where to start when they've got so many opportunities that all seem plausible. We just need someone to point them in the right direction. So we can do that for them as well. In terms of a something unusual or passionate, if you, I don't know if you can see in the background, so I live in Leeds and I am still a Crystal Palace.

Mike Lander (02:22.552)
Brilliant. And something unusual exactly, something that you do exactly at passion.

Gareth (02:35.538)
season ticket holder for my sins and this is as good as it gets. Mid-table mediocrity is as good as it gets for Palace. So I don't get too many games, but I still keep those tickets. But I'm a terrible footballer, but I played rugby when I was younger. But I love watching the Palace and I help out with the Northeast Leeds under 10s, which my son plays in. And you know what? It's a great distraction from work. It's...

Mike Lander (02:58.188)
Brilliant.

Gareth (03:05.606)
so rewarding to see the progress that those lads are making. So they're playing some great football at the moment and they're very proud of their journey.

Mike Lander (03:13.232)
No, it's fantastic. And helping the next generation, I think is a critical role in life for all of us. It's really important. That's a whole separate podcast episode probably. Anyway, so before we start the questions, Gareth, Beans on Bix, what was Beans on Bix?

Gareth (03:22.458)
Yeah.

Gareth (03:30.378)
Well, I'd say I'd like to claim credit for it, but it really was my team. And we did a tweet in, I think it was in 2021, I think it was, where we put some Heinz baked beans on some Weetabix and put a tweet out and it went mad. We had 1.3 billion impressions of that.

Mike Lander (03:55.465)
1.3 billion?

Gareth (03:56.674)
Billiard, yes, correct. It went mad for a week or so, yeah. It was on a tweet, yes. It was, I'll share the link with you, Mike. You can put it in the notes to prove it. It's probably bigger than that now, but that was some time ago. And yeah, it won lots of awards and it was on TV. It was debated, it was discussed in the House of Commons. It made it as a question on Ante Deck's Saturday Night Takeaway. It was a once in a career moment.

Mike Lander (03:59.688)
What? On a tweet?

Mike Lander (04:07.017)
Yeah, please do.

Mike Lander (04:23.145)
Wow.

Gareth (04:26.466)
that and I should always, I've made a mental commitment to always acknowledge Elaine Wan, who was my ABM at Weetabix who made that happen and Frank PR who did it for us. So those two people deserve the credit, not me. I'm just riding on their coattails.

Mike Lander (04:46.159)
So, very, very briefly, where did the idea come from? Where is the inspiration?

Gareth (04:52.834)
Well, the truth is that was just one execution from a longstanding campaign. So Weetabix, when I was there, I don't know, I'm not that close to it anymore, right? But when I was there, they had two strands of comms. They had brand equity comms, and they had a strand of comms, which was recipe inspiration, idea, ways to eat your Weetabix. And so this was just one more quite extreme way of.

of demonstrating that. So it was about trying to be more relevant. There was a number of projects that came together and we might talk about one of these later on, but a number of projects that came together, we went into social media in a way that we hadn't done before. And we pitched for an agency to find that. And that was Frank who won that. And those, you bring all those things together and they encouraged us to be bolder with our communications. And we had a number of ideas or they had a number of ideas. And...

Mike Lander (05:26.554)
Yeah.

Gareth (05:47.302)
and this was the one that ignited the imagination. We had a week of activity. The first one was actually Marmite. So this was the Tuesday, the beans on Bix. Monday was Marmite. I thought that was the one that was gonna go the gangbusters, of course, right? But no, that went broadly unnoticed. And then Tuesday kicked in. It was B.

Mike Lander (05:52.234)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Lander (05:55.563)
Yep.

Mike Lander (05:59.767)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (06:08.92)
Amazing. So that's a nice segue into agencies and the whole conversation we're gonna have. So, can I start off with the question that we prepared, kind of two or three questions. So what are the biggest reasons agencies win and lose client briefs and what should they do about it in your experience as a buyer?

Gareth (06:31.162)
Yeah, and so yeah, I should I should say that all this is just it's just one person's view and so I wouldn't want anyone to change that what they do on the back of my ramblings. But if I think about if I think about how I score pitches, there are

Mike Lander (06:37.857)
Correct.

Mike Lander (06:45.224)
or your brilliant insights rather than ramblings, Gareth. Yeah.

Gareth (06:56.59)
There are a number of things, there are a number of sort of sections and there are loads of little lines in that, but at its best.

Mike Lander (07:02.408)
And this is in your role as a CMO, head of marketing, head of a brand in that context.

Gareth (07:08.594)
Yeah, yes. So I think we've briefed in a pitch, right? So we'd have briefed an agent, a number of agencies, hopefully not too many. And we I have a scorecard. And in that scorecard, the number of sections, there's probably a section on have they understood the brief? If they don't want the brief to be

regurgitated verbatim. I just need like one slide just to understand, make sure that you've understood what it is you're trying to do. Have they got the right strategy? Is the work okay? Have they got to the right, yeah, a plausible route? And can I work with them? Chemistry. The chemistry is a bit of a, it's an emotive term, but yeah, can I see myself

Mike Lander (07:38.719)
Exactly.

Gareth (08:04.478)
working with them. I just need to get a sense that I can work with these people going forward, that there's been some process or plan that's happened in the background that gets us to that work. I'm not that worried about whether the work's right or not because in essence, a pitch presentation is almost like that first stage creative presentation.

Mike Lander (08:26.264)
So this is a really important point, I think. I think a really important point because a lot of agencies will put huge amounts of effort into the creative for the pitch. But what you're saying is, yeah, sure, you need to show up and you need to show up with your talent and you need to demonstrate what you can do. But I think, am I right in hearing, you're not looking for the answer, you're looking for, do you have a way of getting to an answer?

Gareth (08:28.678)
Okay.

Mike Lander (08:56.02)
and have you got the creative chops to impress us, even if it might not be the thing that we use in the end. Is that where you're going?

Gareth (09:04.015)
Yeah. Yes, yeah, definitely. And because if I, you know, in a, in a, let's say it wasn't a pitch, it's a normal, it's a brief to an agency and you get the, if you're lucky, two or three stages of, um, creative development, you never get the answer in the first, the first presentation. So why would you expect to get the answer in, in a pitch? You got even less months getting it in a pitch, but I just need to, I need to get a sense that, okay, you, you could do good work.

Mike Lander (09:24.14)
Correct.

Gareth (09:32.822)
I suppose that's not in doubt, right? Cause you're in the mix, but is it plausible? And can we work together to get to work that works for all of us? That is maybe slight nuance, maybe actually they've just missed something that you really wanted in the briefing. That's a fault of the brief, by the way. That's not a fault of the agency. If in a...

in a perfect world, the brief is a collaboration that doesn't really work in pictures. And that's the one of the many problems with pictures. And we should remember that no one likes pictures. So it's very well publicized that agencies don't like pictures. I totally buy that. But we don't like them either. It's the drain on resource for agencies and clients. If you think about all the chemistry meetings, the...

Mike Lander (10:10.092)
That's right.

Gareth (10:30.466)
the presentations, the tissue meetings, all this stuff. It's just days and days and days. And then you've got the emotional challenge of telling someone they haven't won, telling two or three people they haven't won. So that's, no one enjoys. It seems glamorous when you're an ABM setting out, right? But it's not glamorous at all, it's hideous.

Mike Lander (10:48.001)
Sakeareth!

Mike Lander (10:53.612)
So Gareth, in that case, and there was some research apparently done by Forrester recently, which I've not looked at yet, Blair Ends pointed to it. If that is the case, then why are so many pictures run?

Gareth (11:08.11)
I don't know. I've never run that many pitches. I've run some. So I referenced earlier on the Weetabix social media pitch that we had, because we didn't have a strategic partner for social. And so we needed to find one. And so actually it's a pretty good, it is a good way of, if you make it as close to real life working as possible.

That's why it takes time to do a good one. That's why there's a lot of effort required. You need to brief properly. You need to be available for people to have a tissue meeting, to check in on stuff, to answer questions, times three or four, how many agencies you're briefing. So it is important to keep it as close to real life because then you're back to the sort of four sections I might have in a flooring. One of them is chemistry, or how can I work with these people? Well...

Mike Lander (11:43.785)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (12:01.781)
Exactly.

Gareth (12:06.622)
you get a better sense of that if you've worked with them for a period of weeks. So I think that why you would have a brief would be, I think if there's a genuine, you need to find someone to do something new or I mean, yeah, again, this is, sometimes there's a, sometimes there are other forces at play in a business that say you need to have a pitch. You know, sometimes your boss,

Mike Lander (12:09.974)
Yeah.

So.

Gareth (12:36.522)
says, I'm not happy with agency X. And as the brand director or head of marketing, you need to just, you have to make these things happen. And I think you can do that in an honest and transparent way with agencies. You can treat everyone with respect and not, if it's a cost saving exercise, then let's have that conversation and be honest with people. That's a, this is, we're not sure we can afford agency X anymore and they've got an opportunity to choose to pitch or not.

Mike Lander (13:05.056)
So Gareth, on that point, and I can say, I think with some authorities and ex procurement director, in the situations you've described, I think the last one about, well, we just need to save some cost. There are much easier and better ways of saving money than running a pitch. If I was tasked with saving money, I could go, as long as the agency's doing great work,

Gareth (13:27.05)
Yes.

Mike Lander (13:33.464)
I can go to the agency and have a conversation and structure all sorts of interesting commercial deals that benefit the client and benefit the agency. But recognizing if we're going to reduce our total spend, as David Meeker was saying the other day, then you're reducing your investment. Well then your returns are going to go down. But if that's just the pressure that's on the business, you don't need to pitch that. I can do that in different ways.

Gareth (13:38.935)
Yes.

Gareth (13:55.638)
Yeah, correct. I think I think Weetabix a good example of doing things the right way. So I want to keep it broadly open, right? But they had that conversation with an agency once. I'm not going to tell you what discipline etc. It was but it was you know, we said look, I think we're spending too much money here. And you know, we sort of jokingly called it, you know in transparency with the agency. It's the pitch that isn't a pitch. We

Mike Lander (14:11.582)
No.

Gareth (14:24.994)
We just being honest, we need to save some money here. Help us out and you can do that by reducing the number of people, the hours. Are we not giving you feedback in the right way? What can we do to help you save some money as well? Yes.

Mike Lander (14:25.932)
That's right. Be creative.

Mike Lander (14:35.56)
Exactly. Are we causing you to be inefficient by doing five or six reworks because our team aren't responding in a timely manner?

Gareth (14:42.903)
Yes.

Mike Lander (14:44.844)
So practical things like that.

Gareth (14:47.838)
Yep, indeed.

Mike Lander (14:50.492)
If you just switch sides for a second, so if you were on the agency side and you were pitching, because it was a new piece of work or you'd scored it using your RFP scorecard and you were like, yeah, we're going to go for this. If you were the lead on that pitch and you were preparing for that pitch as an agency, what do you think of the two or three things where you go, we've got to nail these two or three things or else we aren't going to be in the top two? What would you say they are?

Not prepared, but...

Gareth (15:20.078)
Chemistry, yeah, some basics, right? But yeah, chemistry is important. I'm not sure how helpful that would be to say to a member of the team, we need to be better at chemistry. I mean, I don't know exactly what that means in tangible terms. In terms of research, right? Well, and what they're... Okay, we might touch on this later on, but yeah, what's going on for them?

Mike Lander (15:36.544)
But things like researching your client on LinkedIn, finding out what their backgrounds are.

Gareth (15:47.938)
What's going on with the business? What are the pressures in that business? What's going on for the category? So there's some of that stuff, I agree. For me, the big thing is the process and the logic flow in that deck. So give me something that's memorable, because you can think about what I'm doing in that day, and let's be generous and say it's a day. It might go across two or three days, depending how involved it is. I'm probably seeing three.

Mike Lander (15:47.957)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (16:05.715)
Exactly.

Gareth (16:17.494)
presentations, I'm telling you, a lot of them are gonna be quite similar. It's gonna be, so give me something to differentiate yourselves, make well, or to make yourself distinctive, perhaps to you. Is what's the hook? What's the thing? Or they were the one that did the thing about, it was all about the thing, right? And so that give me something there and make the logic, the logic flow. I can think of an example in a pitch that I was involved in many years ago where

Mike Lander (16:27.209)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (16:33.6)
That's right.

Gareth (16:46.882)
there was, we loved the agency, there was some great strategy. There's a chemistry good, great strategy. And then they showed the creative and it was like they just met in the car park. The creative or no resemblance to the strategy that had gone before. And we felt, and. So.

Mike Lander (17:01.448)
Right.

Mike Lander (17:07.256)
I was having this conversation this morning. It's bonkers. Why would you split strategy and creative? It's crackers.

Gareth (17:14.418)
But given that I'm more interested in, I need the strategy to be right, and the strategy would, and just show me that you can do that, that you show me a plausible route in. And so what got us worried there was that, well, you've been working sort of separately and you've crashed these together, and is that how you work? And it then, it sets alarm bells ringing elsewhere. And I'm thinking, well, how, what sort of robust conversations are going on in the agency about the work that's being shared? And then when...

Mike Lander (17:30.045)
Exactly.

Gareth (17:42.37)
So you've got agency A doing that and then agency B who is showing great strategy, probably not dissimilar, but then showing how that work then could be executed. Well, okay, this suddenly looks a lot easier for me now as a client. So, yeah, make sure that it all hangs together. Given that you don't need to do, I don't think people need to do loads of detailed work.

Mike Lander (17:54.44)
Exactly.

Gareth (18:10.594)
Just to show, give me a sense of what this thing looks like. Or just some words on a page, just some words on a page, a script. Just a script. Yeah, you don't need to, I don't need to have it all videoed and mocked up and all that sort of, I just need to, okay. Now I see how that might be executed.

Mike Lander (18:28.992)
Yeah, exactly. So.

Gareth (18:32.226)
across a variety of media actually for me. So what, again, I think the times are changing, but five, 10 years ago, all I would see is a TV script. But you know I've got radio, I've got outdoor, I've got social media, I've got all these other, I've got PR, I've got all these other channels. And yet you're leading with a TV script. It'd be lovely to see a six sheet as the lead.

Mike Lander (18:35.428)
Uh.

Gareth (19:00.438)
the lead piece of creative in a full, a full media mix.

Mike Lander (19:04.216)
Exactly. Okay, second question. So what role should procurement play when securing new agencies?

Gareth (19:16.622)
So my view on that is that the procurement role is a support role. Ultimately, the decision is a creative, strategic marketing decision to appoint an agency or not. So what's the role of procurement? The role is to keep my process robust, defensible, keep me honest.

Mike Lander (19:36.298)
Mm-hmm.

Gareth (19:43.102)
I'm treating people with respect and that I'm not taking the mick with people. And then, I mean, we've spoken about this before on some previous conversations we've had, but the job then is to get the best deal possible from the supplier I've chosen within reason, right? And so, yeah, there's no... I was on a panel once and somebody said...

but procurement made the decision on which agency to appoint us. Never, never in my experience. And I may have told people, I may have told them that procurement made that decision, but the reality is that that's a cop out from me for something else. And so because pitches are often quite close. That's the other thing to bear in mind is that I may have scored, the number of your scorecard, let's say there's three people pitching, you might, I don't want them, let's say it's out of 50, I might get someone at

Mike Lander (20:15.866)
Hahaha.

Mike Lander (20:20.541)
Right.

Gareth (20:42.238)
at 40, someone at 39, someone at 25. At 40, 39, that's just a judgment call on something. So, you know, there's, and I probably haven't got a good reason to tell the person who's on 39 why I didn't get it, or it may be, okay, that doesn't kind of feel right, so I'm just gonna go with the 39 anyway. And, you know, it's a way of benchmarking, but it's not the absolute. And so because we're dealing with opinions, that's quite a hard thing to feed back to people. So,

Mike Lander (20:50.328)
correct.

Gareth (21:11.646)
My job then, once I've made that decision, is to get the best deal possible and to, yeah, that's where the procurement team come in. That's where the best ones have helped me out over the years. And sometimes the agency says, no, not, you know, this is the deal we're offering. Do you want it or not? And I've had an example where the procurement director has come back and said, we tried. We can't get it.

we can't get anything better out of them. Our recommendation is that they're quite expensive, but it's your call. And noted, accepted, but I think their work was so significantly better than everyone else, then I think we should go with it. An example of that in a similar vein is, I mentioned Peter Kay at the start, right? So when we did that at John Smith's, we were in the pre-production meeting, and...

Mike Lander (21:48.536)
Exactly.

Gareth (22:10.678)
Um, and Peter Kay turned us down, uh, for doing it. He didn't want to do it. And because his career moved on and he's been this sort of superstar versus where he'd been previously in his previous set of John Smith's ads. And so he had somebody else lined up and, um, in the production meeting, which we go through the, all the, the document and we get to casting and there's this person and, uh, they said, yeah, we've had a phone call Gareth.

Mike Lander (22:20.948)
Yeah.

Gareth (22:40.302)
I've been a phone call from Peter's agent and he's changed his mind. He said, I'd do it. And he was, I want to say, I can't do the maths quickly on my head. He was about five or six times more expensive than the person we had agreed on. And again, I wasn't the decision maker with that. I was, I was working with a brilliant, a brilliant marketeer who's gone to very, very great things and he said, yeah, we'll do it. Um,

Mike Lander (22:52.053)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (22:55.82)
Wow.

Gareth (23:09.75)
because that was a creative decision. People would have been saying, yeah, they were good. They weren't quite as good as the Peter Kay ones. And that's not what we wanted. So yeah, and it gets cut through. It got us PR. Then got Peter Kay was when we announced, we were bringing Peter back because he'd gone away and they'd gone down another route. Bringing Peter back, he was then on the BBC. He was doing his talk show sort of appearances mentioning it.

Mike Lander (23:12.973)
Correct.

Mike Lander (23:32.437)
Yep.

Gareth (23:39.446)
He presented the Grand National Trophy that we sponsored as well, and that got prime time coverage. So these were all the things we wouldn't have got if we had gone with somebody else who was brilliant, but just wasn't Peter Kane. That was the thing.

Mike Lander (23:54.304)
And again, I think that underlines two points to me. One, it's a strategic investment, not a cost to be minimized. And two, the very idea that you would pick the lowest cost producer versus a higher impact but more expensive solution is bonkers, isn't it? We're not buying nails.

Gareth (24:02.742)
Hmm.

Gareth (24:21.642)
Yeah, you're looking for. No, you're looking for the cut through and effectiveness and if I went down an efficiency route, then yeah, I may, I may just go down the cheapest, but there's a, there's a balance, you know, is can we, can we get more cut through? Can we make, can we do a better ad? Can we, can we get better, better sales as a result of this? And we believed we could do that.

Mike Lander (24:32.288)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (24:50.452)
So third question, conscious of time. So how can agencies build credible relationships with you as a CMO outside of the kind of RFP pitch cycle? Because it's an age old problem is how on earth does an agency kind of like, you know, start to get to know you and you start to get to know them?

Gareth (25:02.711)
Yeah

Gareth (25:10.638)
So I did a couple of years ago, I did some thinking about this and I ran some research and into what were the drivers of the best and worst client agency relationships. And the number one thing was a mutual understanding and that's for clients to understand agencies, but the question you asked about agencies and clients. And that's about understanding the brief and.

the business that kind of goes without saying but you'd be surprised that not everyone does that but then also the human that's behind that job so you know i've got cmo on my on my on my business card on my email people start business cards probably not on my email address but what does that mean and what is that what sort of business that person is it a conservative

Mike Lander (25:54.924)
Hehehe

Gareth (26:07.934)
ambitious and or are they just seeing out time until retirement? Is the business doing well or not? Is the marketing perceived to be doing well? So there's this whole sort of stuff going on, the stuff that's going on behind the brief, might help you to understand the sort of things that are going on for that human being in that.

in that job. It could be they've just been promoted into that job and they're feeling a bit exposed. It could be that they haven't been trained. It could always different things. So understanding that then helps your client look great in inside their business. And I think that's the job of an agency is to make their client look amazing internally, where relevant. And when I say look amazing, that could just be.

Mike Lander (26:57.708)
Correct.

Gareth (27:05.162)
Yeah, not a risk taker that could be. It could be. Yeah, deliver, deliver safe work that could also be amazing for that individual in that business, but you need you need to understand what's going on for them and maybe help them protect reputation or to navigate some tricky internal situations. And I had that. I wasn't a CMO by any stretch of imagination. When I was working on the Bulmers brand.

Mike Lander (27:13.161)
Yeah.

Gareth (27:34.934)
I was struggling to get some work signed off internally. I was struggling to get a sign off of a big project. And the planning director at that business, the agency, sorry, saw that and asked me a few questions about what was going on. They could have just sort of said, why can't you get that signed off, Gareth? What's going on? That's your job to get that signed off. But he took me to one side and sort of said, look, actually, I think you can probably compromise on that. Let that go.

Mike Lander (28:01.892)
Right

Gareth (28:04.438)
I know that's not true to consumer insight, that thing that your boss is telling you to put in, but let's keep bigger picture here, Gareth. We can win the war here, let's lose that, choose to strategically lose that battle. And that was a moment for me to see the bigger picture and be pragmatic in getting stuff going forward. I had made my case for this thing. I could have dug my heels in it and we were just battling.

Mike Lander (28:11.284)
Yeah.

Gareth (28:31.518)
or we just try and move on. And so that was an example of someone who really understood me, the challenges that I was having internally. I was in a new role and the business was under a bit of pressure at that point. And that was a great example of him seeing the human behind the job title.

Mike Lander (28:37.818)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (28:53.196)
So there's a very good piece of work done many years ago, 10, 20, 30 years ago, I think, by a guy called David Meister, called the trusted advisor. And when I was in professional services at the very beginning of my career in 93, we were told to read the book and then talk about the insights. And it stuck with me for like 30, 40 years, about

Gareth (29:16.252)
Mm.

Mike Lander (29:22.684)
where you're trying to get to as an agency, as a consultant is the trusted advisor to the client. The fact that you would open up, if I was the lead for the agency, that you would open up to me, talk about your internal challenges, and then ask my advice. That's where you want to get to. But to do that, you don't do that in a week. That can take, I mean, in my case, the longest time it's taken is 10 years.

Gareth (29:28.363)
Yes.

Gareth (29:39.403)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (29:53.044)
And obviously between three months and 10 years, there's a spectrum, but you have to invest time in understanding these senior people.

Gareth (30:00.414)
I think you can, I think there are two routes into that. So I think when the reality is that most agencies gets invited in, in what I'm gonna slightly rudely call in a point and shoot capacity. I need an ad making, I need some media buying, I need a shelf barker. Can you do that for me? Yes, we can, great. And then over time, you might get invited in to be that trusted advisor on your structure.

Mike Lander (30:14.153)
Yes.

Gareth (30:29.566)
If you're an agency, I think you can fast track that slightly by being, by understanding the broader business, understanding the broader business challenges, making introductions by challenging. Have you thought about doing, I noticed you're doing this. Have you thought about doing it another way and just being a bit, a bit challenging, but in a nice way, you know, I'm not saying you don't want to be a dick, but you can, you can still be challenging or offering, offering an insight into a problem. If you got.

Mike Lander (30:52.329)
Exactly.

Gareth (30:59.234)
I don't know, industrial action going on, it might not be your area of expertise as a comms agency, as an advertising agency, but blimey, if there's industrial action going on in a business, trust me, there's not much else going on in those management meetings other than going, how do we resolve this industrial action? So what can you do to help them? If there's production challenges, what can you do to help them? What's your...

Mike Lander (31:16.012)
That's right.

Gareth (31:27.23)
rather than coming in to sell more advertising, understanding that and saying, I see you got challenged with production. Actually, I think there's an opportunity here for you to, whilst your capacity constrained, you might wanna do this with pricing or that, you might wanna prioritize certain retailers or just have a perspective on a broader business, a broader business perspective will help you to be then invited in more to be this trusted advisor rather than just always staying in that point and shoot bucket.

Mike Lander (31:29.611)
Yep.

Mike Lander (31:40.905)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (31:55.86)
And then, I mean, even some basic stuff, Gareth, like if they're a PLC, read the quarterly reports, understand what's going on for the business to your point, read the CEO statement, the CFO statement, the CMO statement, you know, listen to what the analyst is saying, look at the analyst reports. There's loads of things you can do to work out what's going on in the business.

Gareth (32:14.946)
Mm.

Gareth (32:20.838)
or and put in place a quarterly catch up where you're not talking about the work, but you're talking about a mutual understanding. So I was very clear that's a mutual understanding on each other's businesses. And so we had that at Weetabix with our lead agencies. And it was a two way conversation. So we would talk about what's big for us. But then the agency would encourage them to tell us if they were pitching for stuff. So.

Mike Lander (32:23.912)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (32:31.798)
Yeah.

Gareth (32:48.318)
If I can't get hold of Fred, who's working on my account because he's tied up with a big pitch for some business, well, just tell me that. Tell me that, that's okay. Tell me, you've got business to run too. Just tell me about it. Tell me about you got a staff turnover problem. What can I do to help you with that? Is there, there was another agency who was losing, losing their staff to, from agency side to client side. And they were losing good people. They didn't want to lose.

Mike Lander (32:56.746)
Let me know.

Mike Lander (33:01.1)
Correct.

Mike Lander (33:06.667)
Exactly.

Gareth (33:17.454)
I said, but can we help you with that? Can you, why don't you embed some people in our business? And does that give them, does that scratch the itch for them for six months as like a swap? Can we get some of our team into your business as a role swap?

Mike Lander (33:21.493)
Right.

Mike Lander (33:32.416)
Brilliant. So Gareth, I love our conversations. And it's that kind of like, it's like we're having a bit of a coffee over a few questions that we kind of thought of in advance. So in summary, what do you think, what's the big takeaways for agencies in summary from this conversation?

Gareth (33:52.146)
or you um I suppose don't

don't undervalue the chemistry. I've only got one big takeaway, right? It's, I'm calling it chemistry. And that's understanding and in its broadest terms, you know, the business, the human, the challenges, the brief, you're scratching beneath the surface of what's being provided in a word doc, if you're unlucky. But, you know, and that will give you better chemistry. That will give you, whether you're pitching for work or whether you're an incumbent, I think you've got.

Mike Lander (34:16.171)
Yeah.

Gareth (34:25.738)
you've got less chance of losing it if that person sees you as a confidant and an advisor and you've got more chance of winning it if within a two or three month period you've suddenly become this sort of person who's in a nice way challenging my thinking.

Mike Lander (34:41.532)
Exactly. Gareth, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much. Where can people find out more about you?

Gareth (34:49.363)
I'm pretty prolific on LinkedIn. You can find me there or on my website, bigblackdoor.com.

Mike Lander (34:54.912)
Brilliant. Gareth, thanks for joining us on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. It's been amazing.

Gareth (35:00.354)
Thank you.

Mike Lander (35:02.152)
Right, I will now stop recording, and hopefully it should say, it's.