How An Open Mindset Ensures Successful Negotiations with Kris Tait

Mike Lander (00:00.314)
Chris, thanks ever so much for joining us on Higgle, the B2B sales to the podcast. Delighted that you're here.

Kris Tait (00:05.686)
Yep, looks good.

Kris Tait (00:25.218)
Thanks for having me, like.

Mike Lander (00:27.058)
So, first of all, a bit of background about yourself. Obviously, what do you do? Who do you work for? And then if you count something slightly unusual about yourself that people wouldn't know.

Kris Tait (00:38.266)
Excellent. Yeah. I'm happy to kick off with that. So, so my name is Chris Tate. I am the managing director at Crowd in New York. I have been with the Crowd business actually for 12 years now. So I started off when there were only five people in the business back in the UK down in Shoreditch, moved over to New York in 2015 and now we have over 500 people in the business, about 100 in New York.

Mike Lander (00:58.007)
Whoa!

Kris Tait (01:02.058)
One of those great stories of going from a few people up to 500 and experiencing it all. And I still love it here. So as part of that, I've been a sales professional for that whole time, to be honest. And I went traveling around the world for a year back in 2008. And when I got back, I just inherently knew that I wanted to get into sales and I didn't know what kind of sales and it was internet sales. So that's how it all started. And I started selling some SEO.

Mike Lander (01:03.93)
That's an amazing story.

Mike Lander (01:32.503)
Okay.

Kris Tait (01:32.742)
And I was blown away by how Google worked and that's the rest of history. And I think my interesting fact about myself is very related as well. So there's probably two things. I used to be very, very shy as a kid, very introvert. Didn't, you know, I didn't, didn't like go into group conversations easily. And, and, you know, you would think that's very weird for a salesperson, but

Mike Lander (01:50.606)
Snap. That's so as I. Yep.

Kris Tait (02:01.006)
couple of things. So the first thing I attribute to that is university and standing up in front of massive lecture halls and having to present and being so scared, but building the confidence for that. And the second thing, which is an interesting fact, and by the way, I could have said I am an endurance athlete here, but I used to be a butler in the buff. And that is very scary. A butler in the buff. So

Mike Lander (02:17.623)
Right?

Mike Lander (02:24.994)
Say that again Chris, you were what?

Kris Tait (02:30.178)
That is incredibly scary. That is walking into a room of people with not a lot on and serving cocktails sober. So that built a lot of confidence for me in my career. But there you go.

Mike Lander (02:49.37)
Chris, I've never, I didn't even know it was a thing. That's brilliant and thank you for being so open. Fantastic, that would build your confidence. That would definitely build your confidence. So before we get into the questions, just don't spend too long and obviously you can't reveal everything about what happened. But when you went from five to 500 people, can you just like describe for kind of people listening?

Kris Tait (02:57.195)
Ha ha.

course.

Mike Lander (03:18.93)
What were a couple of the big things that really accelerated that journey? Because that's a really unusual story. Most agencies don't get even close to that. Can you work out what it may have been?

Kris Tait (03:32.13)
So that is a brilliant question. And just reflecting really quickly, I honestly think a lot of it is attributed to the mindset in this agency. Right from the founders being this kind of, we sort of celebrate success for about three minutes. And then we go, OK, what's next? And I honestly think that is a massive part of it. Because.

Mike Lander (03:43.)
Right.

Mike Lander (03:51.96)
Right.

Kris Tait (04:00.674)
Um, you want people to work for you that are like that, and you want people to understand the journey and the ambition that we have. Um, and, and by the way, a lot of people are not in that mindset and it's totally fine and, and you can only be in that mindset for a certain amount of time as well, right? Like, you know, you can't do that forever. Um, but I think that has been a lot of the, the thing that I always think back to of what, why, why do we keep going and why do we, I was so ambitious to keep

growing and delivering amazing work. I think that, honestly, in essence is what it is.

Mike Lander (04:35.37)
Yeah, that's brilliant. And it's not what I expect you to say at all. I thought it might be something about, oh, you know, we had these amazing clients and there was an anchor and then they referred as, no, actually it's about a collective mindset. That's what makes the biggest difference. Fascinating, thanks Chris.

Kris Tait (04:40.83)
Interesting.

Kris Tait (04:50.634)
Yeah. And one last thing on my business is that everyone is a shareholder as well. So it just creates this mentality of ownership and mentality of we're in it together and we're all going to benefit from it as well.

Mike Lander (05:06.794)
Exactly. And then again, I think a really, really important point about collective ownership. So a few questions. So we've got kind of like another like kind of 20 minutes or so. First question. So are you seeing an increased number of RFPs and less formal kind of client briefs recently? And also, why do you think this is the case? What do you do to kind of qualify those opportunities from the ones where you're just being used for benchmarking? Because you must get, you know,

We got all these RFPs now, it's getting bigger, but some of them, they're not real. How do you focus on the ones that you can really win?

Kris Tait (05:38.466)
PFFT

Kris Tait (05:45.782)
Yeah, great question. So we always have a mix of the more casual briefs and the official RFPs. And again, going back to your question, I've looked at the data just to back up what my thought was, but it's slightly more in favor of those client, sorry, casual briefs.

Mike Lander (05:54.618)
Do you know what the mix is, Chris? Just out of interest.

Mike Lander (06:02.253)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (06:09.727)
Okay.

Kris Tait (06:11.35)
That's going back to the point that you sort of said around referrals and doing good work and honestly that, that mentality of always being out there and trying to build conversations and relationships in this business. So we always get that level. The challenge with those is they're very hard to predict. It's really hard to predict how many, when they're coming, you know, you sometimes get a lot, you sometimes get none. Um, but it's probably 60, 40%, right? In terms of, um, the 40% being the official RFPs. Um.

Mike Lander (06:29.113)
Yes.

Kris Tait (06:41.382)
And the challenge with the casual ones, both I guess, is that are they real? Like are they just getting a prize, wasting our time, and how do we qualify them? So great question and over the years we've got a lot better at this. And I actually want to give some credit to a guy called Blair Enns, who I know you know as well and know really well.

Mike Lander (06:48.363)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (07:04.047)
Ah, no blood runs very well, yeah.

Kris Tait (07:06.802)
Yeah, so I attended a breakfast session with him in New York with a bunch of agency partners. And, you know, I hadn't read anything about him. I hadn't read his books. And it really, honestly, blew me away in terms of his approach to these kind of conversations, his approach to using pricing strategically. And we took, I was honestly so inspired that I went back to the office, spent a whole morning just thinking about how we could apply that to our business.

And I came up with something called crowd discovery, which is essentially an antidote to this issue of how do we know that it's real? How do we understand the brief really well? And how do we stop people just wasting our time and ghosting on us? So it's essentially a really good process where we look at media, we look at audience, we look at analytics and we have a bunch of diagnostic things that we do. And previously, we used to do this all free. Always free. Yep.

Mike Lander (07:53.088)
Exactly.

Kris Tait (08:05.954)
please let us pitch for your business. And now we outline the fact that this is very, very important and hard work to do and it takes time and there is a cost behind it. So we don't pitch anything for free. We'll do this diagnostic analysis for you. And at the end of it, you know, if you're happy, you'll pay us this money. If you're not happy, take it away and go on with yourself.

So it's been really, really good to just put that marker there. Like, yep, we're absolutely happy to do this. It costs money. Um, but you know, what do you, what do you think? And the objective is so that it makes the brand's pause and go, Oh, yes, we actually really do want to work with the crowd, but maybe we're not willing to pay that or, or sure we're willing to pay that. And for me, it's to make sure that, um, the, the power and the choices in our hands, if we want to work with these people.

these brands not, oh yeah, sure, just give us all of this stuff for free and we might tell you if we want to work with you.

Mike Lander (09:07.53)
Exactly. Correct. Because they might just be simply benchmarking. Or they might just be someone internally has said, well, you know, what's going on in the marketplace? And I will be spoken to crowd recently. No, we haven't. Well, let's ask them a load of questions and see what they see what they come back with. See what insights they've got. It's not they're not real opportunities.

Kris Tait (09:30.766)
And we've all wasted so much time on non-real opportunities. In sales, we're very optimistic. We think everything is an opportunity. And we get really excited when someone wants to speak to us. And over time, you realize that they're not all opportunities. And we need to qualify them.

Mike Lander (09:34.98)
We definitely have.

Mike Lander (09:50.546)
Exactly. So next question, which leads on from that. What are your three biggest reasons for losing RFPs or client briefs and what can you do about it?

Kris Tait (10:03.138)
So good question. And again, I honestly feel like I'm learning all of the time here. Like every time we do something and get feedback, we're learning and we build it into the next process. But a few of the ones that we have won or not won recently have been because of three things. Well, maybe more, but let's talk about three. So answering the brief too literally, we used to be so good at that and we thought we were doing our job. We'd...

Mike Lander (10:22.159)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (10:32.15)
We'd, you know, answer each question so detailed and exactly what we thought they wanted and be like, we did a great job on that, surely we're going to win. And we wouldn't win. Um, so that's one thing. Not taking enough risks is the second thing. Um, you know, we've answered briefs brilliantly. We've been told that if this other agency didn't exist, you would have won. And I'm like, okay, so what did the other agency do?

Mike Lander (10:42.711)
Ahhhh

Mike Lander (10:47.363)
Yep.

Kris Tait (10:57.154)
They didn't really answer the brief. They took a big risk on going down a route and answering a, um, a different question to what they were asking and, and one in the business. Um, so that's definitely something we always take into mind. Do we have the two or three aha moments in this pitch? Um, and then the third thing is just not telling good stories. Um,

Very good technical slides, everything makes sense. The technical people in the room love it, but there's not a story pulling it all together. And I think the challenge that agencies have here is that we often get asked to turn things around very fast. We have to pull people in from various different teams and they're working on clients and we have to get to a really succinct story really quickly.

And sometimes you have four or five people telling their own little story within a presentation and not one story. So we work really hard on that.

Mike Lander (11:55.566)
So there's loads of questions here, Chris. So first one is, of all of the things that you answer in a year, the briefs, slightly less formal, and the RFPs, how many of those are what I would call creative led? The client's looking for some kind of creative materials. It could be like a launch of a new brand, or it could be market entry, or it could be a relaunch. But it's a creative led exercise which has media attached to it.

Kris Tait (12:01.158)
Hehehe

Mike Lander (12:25.666)
versus those which are, I don't know, shopper marketing, experiential, SEO. So what's the kind of, what's the mix? Because I think that matters in terms of what you've just said.

Kris Tait (12:42.454)
So the mix has changed over time for us. I'm very interested to hear why you think that matters. Very interested. So I'll answer first. The mix has changed for us over the years because of our positioning in the market and the service offering that we had. So everything used to be very focused on performance media for us, which was the searches, the socials, the programmatic displays and the SEOs. Over the years, we've built the capabilities in a more integrated strategy and planning department

Mike Lander (12:48.344)
Okay.

Mike Lander (13:00.473)
Yes.

Kris Tait (13:11.458)
the data capabilities that every agency of course needs now. And the, the pitches that we are getting on are more brand and planning and, and this bigger media led, which is, which is great for us. That's the position that we want to move to in the market. Um, we rarely get on pitches that are led with by creative is what I say.

Mike Lander (13:31.746)
Rarely. Ah, okay. So I was speaking to Gareth Turner, who was the ex marketing director for Weetabix. And he's run, he ran loads of campaigns and he's now independent and runs his own business. But I was talking to him and he said that when they run a creative pitch, for example, he doesn't want the agency to put in hundreds of person hours and nail the creative brief on day one, as in when they pitch.

Kris Tait (13:40.63)
Hmm

Mike Lander (14:01.786)
He said, that's not what I'm looking for. But what I am looking for is, I'm looking to see how did they get to the answer they got to, what kind of process did they use, and is there an essence there of, I can see their creativity. So that's an example whereby, to your point, they may not have answered the exact same question on the creative brief. They answered a slightly tangential one, but you can see where their thinking is going. So the direction of travel is correct. So I think that's interesting about when that's a creative lead.

When it's not a creative lead pitch and it's more performance-based, for example, but at some scale, the reason I say I think it's different is, I've got three things as an ex-buyer. So you know I'm an ex procurement director, Chris. So I was on the buy side when you're on the sell side. So I'd be writing this RFP and I'd be talking to the brand director and I'd be creating the RFP in some detail. What I don't write in there, what I don't write in there is this. So how I score it is,

Kris Tait (14:46.155)
Yep, yep.

Mike Lander (15:02.638)
Put the creativity to one side for a second. First of all, did they understand the brief? Did you broadly answer the questions that we asked? So if you didn't answer the brief at all and didn't answer the questions, clearly that's gonna go down badly. Let's assume you did, yeah? So you broadly answered the right questions and you've definitely understood the brief. Then I'd say, okay, did they provide evidence against that? So when Chris says something, did he back it up with some data?

Because if he didn't, it might just be a great story, but there's no evidence to back it up. So that gets you two thirds of the marks. The last third of the marks is, I think, what you just alluded to, which is, did you bring some challenge and some insight to our thinking? Because we may have got this brief wrong. We may be answering the wrong exam question, because we set the wrong exam question. Because your knowledge of the sector

Kris Tait (16:00.011)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (16:01.91)
and your knowledge of your capabilities is far greater than ours. And if you challenge, so if you answer the right questions broadly, understand the brief, you provide evidence base and then you really challenge our thinking and answer a question we never asked in a way that we never thought about. Now you're memorable and now you've added real value. And now I'm thinking, crowd someone we need to follow up with in a bit more detail.

because the stuff in here we just haven't thought about. Does that resonate?

Kris Tait (16:34.826)
Sounds easy, right? Yeah. No. I, uh, 100. I know. No, it really, it really does. It really does resonate. And we've, we've had all of that feedback before, you know, either doing one and not two and doing three, and you've missed out on that. You've not proved that you've done it before. So yeah, it really does. It really does resonate. And it just made me think back to Blair again on the, on the, on the piece about diagnosis. Like often you get these briefs

Mike Lander (16:38.766)
It's so easy, Chris. I don't know why everyone doesn't do it. Yeah.

Mike Lander (16:54.458)
Correct.

Mike Lander (17:03.15)
Yes.

Kris Tait (17:05.118)
It's just a brand self-diagnosing themselves and we don't know if that's true yet. So that's why it's so important to do that kind of discovery and analysis. And the thing that I say to brands now is that if we do this discovery, we're going to be in a much better place than just guessing and answering your brief. And no one can argue with that. It's just whether they want to take the leap. Um, but yeah, it's great, great feedback. I appreciate it.

Mike Lander (17:07.802)
Correct.

Mike Lander (17:26.17)
Correct.

Mike Lander (17:29.614)
So something else, Chris, so let's see if you agree with this or not. A lot of agencies don't. They think I'm a bit mad. But my view of briefs is this. Brands like agencies. Brands are short on time. They're sometimes forced into processes that they may not want to run. And that was on one of Blair Ends' podcast recently. And they write, therefore, the brief that comes out, it's not 100%. In fact, it's probably 75%.

I believe agencies' role is to enhance the brief. Your role in life is to tell me what I have not thought about and to expand the brief beyond where my thinking is and then kind of play that back to me to see if the enhancements are correct. The fact that an agency sits there and says, well, the brief was a bit rubbish, so that's why we didn't win. I'm like, that's just wrong.

That's just a cop out by agencies. What's your thought, Chris? Ha ha ha.

It's a genuine statement, I genuinely believe it.

Kris Tait (18:36.078)
Until the last... So until the... I agreed with you until the last thing you said and then I was like, huh it got my back up a little bit because so I think I do agree with all of your principles. I think I agree with you like 90%. The last 10% is... Yeah, obviously on the agency side everyone's busy and we get these briefs in and we really want to do a good job of answering them.

Mike Lander (18:54.296)
Right?

Kris Tait (19:05.815)
Make them good.

Mike Lander (19:09.818)
Absolutely Make them good and make you I

Kris Tait (19:09.984)
That's what I'd say.

Kris Tait (19:15.042)
Make the process nice, make the process good and productive. Not just a brief, but what are the meetings? What are the chemistry things? Sometimes you don't even hold a chemistry meeting and that's not good, right? And you're trying to pick a partner. Yeah.

Mike Lander (19:27.734)
It's not respectful. And I think on a serious point, you're spot on, which is if a brand's gonna run a process to appoint an agency and they're genuine about, you know, appointing someone they've not worked with before rather than reappointing the incumbent, the only way in my view that's gonna work is, for example, you have to have some kind of half hour, 45 minute hour meeting.

before you ever, ever put pen to paper or hands to keyboards, before you ever do that, if they won't give you an hour with the budget holder and the procurement person, if that's who's running it, that's a really bad sign. That's a really, really bad sign. Because the idea that you can do your best work and do the longer hours that's required to fill in the RFP and put in your best thinking.

Kris Tait (20:15.457)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (20:27.182)
The idea you can do that off a piece of paper that I've written not being the budget holder, and without you having access to the people who are going to have to live with the outcome, is frankly ludicrous, I think.

Kris Tait (20:45.854)
Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed.

Mike Lander (20:49.186)
But it happens a lot. Apparently, Chris, for some of the big brands, they're still saying, here's the RFP, you can't talk to anyone, best foot forward. And then when we decide to shortlist, yes, you're sitting in front of a panel. Well, that's no good. That's not how to get the best work out of an agency.

Kris Tait (21:07.126)
No, I actually am just I think earlier in the week, I was listening to something from Tom Denford, ID comms, saying that like, you know, meat media has become quite boring in the pitch process. And you know, it's all just very systematic and AI and bidding. And he's just saying like, bring the humanity back to the process, bring the chemistry, bring the partnership and can we work together and the people back to the process. And I just couldn't agree more with that. That's what it's about.

Mike Lander (21:19.672)
Right.

Mike Lander (21:25.984)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (21:31.597)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (21:34.818)
Correct. And when we say partnership, again, you know, a lot of agencies talk about having a partnership with a client. The reality is a lot of it isn't a true partnership. Partnership to me is we're both taking some risk and some reward. We're both benefiting from a collaborative approach to solving a problem that's not been solved before. And there's benefit for both parties. And therefore part of your fees are at risk, but if it goes well, there's a bonus. And...

For me, I'm making the investment, which may or may not pay off. And if it does, then we can win big. But that's about having an adult to adult conversation and sharing some risks together. I completely agree. I think the humanity is going out in the process. I think that's very sad.

Kris Tait (22:20.114)
Yeah, agreed. I mean, that kind of brings us onto procurement. I don't have, we've got time to quickly talk about procurement. Great. So I think, yeah, I think like it'd be good to just talk quickly about some of the, some of the approaches that we take when we get to procurement. Um, you know, obviously I've learned over the years that we shouldn't get frustrated when we get to procurement. This is a, it's a positive thing. No, you know, we're in negotiation, which is, which is good. Um.

Mike Lander (22:24.118)
Yeah, we have. Yeah, no, we'd love to. Definitely, definitely, Chris. I always want to talk about procurement.

Mike Lander (22:44.75)
Correct. Yeah.

Kris Tait (22:49.71)
And I think one of the things that I always try to do is start with the S and start with an open mindset to what's going to be discussed. And not a very, and I used to do this. I used to be like really stern and no, that's not happening. And I thought it was the right thing to do. But I think, you know, yes, sure. Don't be too soft in your stance. Be firm, but be open to where this discussion is going. And, you know, typically it's a good thing that.

Mike Lander (23:03.083)
Right.

Mike Lander (23:13.592)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (23:18.202)
Sometimes you think procurement are asking you 15 things and you've not been able to ask for anything back. But that's a really good thing in my mind, not a bad thing. Like, why do I say that? So it means that if they're asking for like several different things, we can then have something to go back against them with. So if they need a fast start, we need a certain term. If they need a discount, we need a longer term. If they need results fast, then we put skin in the game and get a bonus.

And, you know, just working on those things with them. And I think like giving, like give to get, right? I'm very, very open now in my procurement discussions versus my younger self.

Mike Lander (23:47.802)
Absolutely.

Mike Lander (23:58.158)
So interestingly, I think a couple of things there. So I think what you're describing to me is a trade. The negotiation is you're very happy to give something providing you get something in return. I think every procurement person you talk to would go, that's fair, yeah.

Mike Lander (24:15.886)
Just out of interest, what difference has that made to the outcomes from those negotiations over the years? As you've matured as a negotiator, from when you started in sales to where you are now, very experienced commercial leader, what's the difference in the outcomes over the longer term?

Kris Tait (24:38.59)
Yeah, that's a good question. And I'll start it firstly with the fact that sometimes procurement people tell you exactly what they need before you've even spoken. It's just like, I'm going to come and listen guys, we need 20% to go back and think what you can do. And okay, great. We know what we know what they need. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to get there. And sometimes we're negotiating with procurement people who honestly don't know what they're buying.

Mike Lander (25:05.965)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (25:06.326)
And I don't know your thought on that, but it's like really tough. Um, yeah, so it's really tough. And I think, um, yeah, to your first question, the outcomes of the outcomes have gotten better because I just understand some of the things that I can push and pull and some of the things that I can secure, right, whether it's longer contracts or different commitments. Um, and over the years as well, we've got much more in tune to putting our fees up.

Mike Lander (25:08.726)
Yeah, I can respond to that. Yep.

Kris Tait (25:34.69)
for performance and what that means and how we measure that. So when we think about performance fees, it's not always tied to like a metric within the performance marketing world. It's not like, oh, we're gonna hit this cost per acquisition and you pay us extra money. It's more about like, are we delivering our promises and are we upholding everything that we said we were going to do? Yes, there's revenue involved there, but really it's like the service and the responsiveness and the quality that we're doing.

And often we do it on a scorecard. We have like a quarterly scorecard. Um, the brand scores us on it. And if we are not meeting their expectations, we won't get paid some of the fee.

Mike Lander (26:14.922)
Yeah, yeah. And then that's very balanced, very fair. You asked a question about why sometimes procurement people that you meet don't know the subject matter that they're negotiating around. So, one of the things that happens, and I talk about this a lot with people, is if you look at, let's say you're dealing with a retailer, say, and in that retailer, this procurement person,

Kris Tait (26:27.522)
Do they actually know?

Mike Lander (26:44.206)
They've been in procurement for 20 years. So they're seasoned procurement people. For the first 15 years of their life, they bought apples, potatoes, bananas, and milk. Big categories. And every cent that they negotiate a better price on, given the volume they buy, makes a difference to the gross and net profit. So imagine if I spent 15 years in direct procurement.

and I want to become the regional Chief Procurement Officer. Well, if I've never bought indirect goods and services, that's a bit of a problem because the CPO runs all of directs and indirects. So what you'll find sometimes is you meet someone who's been moved into marketing procurement. They've been enrolled for about six months. Their track record is in direct goods and services. They're rounding their career before they move into a bigger role in the next three years.

So when you meet these people, they don't know a great deal about marketing procurement. Their natural tendencies are to go back to what they know and that tends to drive them down often unit price and cost rather than investment and package service. So I think part of it is an education process. And ideally, Chris...

18, very difficult to do in practice, but 18 months to two years before you negotiate with the procurement person, ideally you want a relationship with them. You want to add value to who they are, and you want to inform them about where the industry's going that you work in. And that way, when you get to meet with them and you get to negotiate with them, they're more likely to be receptive to your views. Difficult to do because if they're transitioning in their career,

How do you spot if they're gonna be moving into indirects from directs? But you can look at their career path and you can look at their postings and you can look at what they're talking about on LinkedIn and it gives you some clues. So that's why often they seem a bit, wow, you're not 21 straight out university, you're 40, but you don't seem to understand the category in detail. That's sometimes why.

Kris Tait (29:04.174)
Yeah, that's really good, really good advice, especially from just noticing that, spotting it very quickly and being soft towards it and the education side is I think a really, really strong approach. Like if you can make them better in their job and their career, not, you know, like in a, yeah, exactly, not condescending or anything like that, just bringing them along with you.

Mike Lander (29:17.227)
Exactly.

Not in a teaching way, but in an educational awareness way.

Mike Lander (29:26.264)
No.

Mike Lander (29:29.666)
So last question we had, so briefly, you could probably do a whole podcast on this, but briefly, price increases. How do you deal with price increases?

Kris Tait (29:41.61)
At the minute, not a lot. No, that's not true. It's been a weird for you guys, hasn't it? And I don't know what's in store for us in 2024. Maybe it's going to be 25, 26 before things normalise. So we'll see. But I think over the years, over the last 12 years, we've had a brilliant boom. So I think really, again.

Mike Lander (29:43.01)
Ha ha ha!

Mike Lander (29:48.526)
Ha ha!

Mike Lander (29:52.588)
It has.

Mike Lander (30:04.248)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (30:09.526)
just from learning over time, it's not just, hey guys, you're not paying us enough and we're really doing a lot of work for you and can we have more money? Definitely tried that, does it work?

Mike Lander (30:17.49)
I'd go, yeah, I'm sorry to hear that Chris, but the answer's no.

Kris Tait (30:24.19)
Yeah, so we Chris, no, so I think normally you get, oh yeah, really sorry to hear that Chris, but no. So, which obviously changed our tack there and we approach it with data. So we have a brilliant BI team here that provide all the insight we need to go into these negotiations. So with some clients, we have commitments in terms of FTEs and hours, with others we have commitments on the performance side.

Mike Lander (30:25.847)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (30:50.626)
But generally I would go into one of these discussions and have all of the data at my disposal. Normally I would have a chart to show what we're delivering for them versus what we said we'd deliver for them on a monthly basis. Alongside that, I would show them the wins, the value of our work, and obviously the results that are coming out of that, and talk about the current pacing of how things are going. And just tell them the story of, look, we can, of course.

Mike Lander (31:10.413)
Bye bye.

Kris Tait (31:19.574)
do this extra work for you. Like we have the resource, we have the capabilities. What we're struggling with right now is the fact that, you know, we're pacing at this volume where you're paying us 20K and we're delivering 30K worth of work every month. So let's have a discussion on it. Let's see where you really need to lean into in 2024, where you think there are some efficiencies and open up the conversation about what they need and want rather than quickly saying, we need more money. And open up and see where it goes. And...

That has been really successful for us because there isn't a lot of places that they can argue with what I'm saying. The data is there and they feel the service and they can see the wins, but it puts it back on them to say, well, what's your priority and where do you want to go?

Mike Lander (31:56.186)
Correct.

Mike Lander (32:04.218)
Chris, I think that's kind of a bit of a model answer really, to be quite frank. I wouldn't have anything to add to that. I think that's what I've spoken to a number of people about, including people like Jeb Blount who wrote a book on it called Price Increases, How to Negotiate Them. Yeah, I think you're spot on. You have to lead with data and you have to give a logic. And your evidence point, Chris, is working. Clients are responding well to that, not just putting out your begging bowl.

Kris Tait (32:22.21)
Good.

Kris Tait (32:33.174)
Yeah. And the other, like, it's really easy to go, oh, inflation, our staff prices went up. That's not a good reason. Like, it's true, but it's not a good reason. So we avoid that. We avoid that at all costs. Like, we never say that. So, yeah.

Mike Lander (32:39.166)
No, it's not.

Mike Lander (32:48.046)
Brilliant. So Chris, if there's like kind of one or two pieces of advice you were gonna give to agency leaders that are not at 500 people, but they're at kind of 50 people, which is the typical tipping point, 50 to 1, 5200. Commercially, what would you say to them about how to drive the next phase of growth commercially?

Kris Tait (33:16.854)
Um, so one of the...

Kris Tait (33:22.946)
Let me think on this for one second and I'll give you two. What, one of the things that I think we've been really good at over the years is never, never turning down an opportunity, never like not speaking to an opportunity and doing it in a really productive manner. What, what, what I noticed happens in the U S especially is like market has moved around a lot. And

If you're, if you dismiss an opportunity too early and in a rude way, like we don't have time for that, they're too small, then those things come back around quite often. And one anecdote from us is that we just landed in the U S we had a client who used to pay us two, $3,000 a month. And it was, it was, it was all good. And that lady went to be a head marketer AMC networks.

and emailed me like, hey, would you like to work with AMC? I was like, oh my God. And in no time they were paying us 200% more than that. Sorry, 200 times, 200 times more than that. And it's just crazy. So that one is just net, you know, pay it forward, have all of these conversations, make sure you, if you can't work with them, offer them something else. Offer them some of your time, offer them some of your.

Mike Lander (34:19.843)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (34:42.354)
expertise to pull them along and these brands will come back around. Um, and then the other thing is, um, you know, we have moved from, as I said, our price used to be like $2,000 a month. Now it might be like a hundred. And within that, you need, you need to build really good products within the capabilities. So why are you different? Why can you offer something different within paid search that no one else can? And that is really hard. Um,

Mike Lander (34:53.686)
Yeah.

Kris Tait (35:11.318)
But you need to be thinking about productizing some of your services. You'd have to sell them as products, but how do you differentiate yourself? So you can increase those, those value conversations from our minimum fees to be two now at six and why though, why? So, so that's why, that's why I would say.

Mike Lander (35:31.47)
Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed this. It's been really good. Bit of challenge, bit of pushback, some really great insights and a bit of fun. So Chris, thank you ever so much indeed. Where can people find out more about you?

Kris Tait (35:44.366)
Please follow me on LinkedIn. I have a Twitter as well, and we can share some of those in the notes. Thank you so much, Mike. It's always fun to talk about sales.

Mike Lander (35:49.998)
Brilliant.

It is. Thanks, Chris. OK, I'm going to stop recording.