Why You Need to Rethink RFP Processes for Sustainable Growth with Leah Power

00:00 - Leah (Guest)
They've got these banker boxes of 90-page decks underneath their desk that they are never going to read because they asked 25 agencies, which might seem like not very much, but you have to read those decks. Are you the person that has to read those decks? You won't want to, and so then you say, oh, I can't do that, I'll wait until the creative presentation. But even if you allow 10 people to come to the creative presentation, holy, that's a lot of info that you have to then sift through at the back end. That's why then, from a scheduling perspective, they go off the rails. You'll talk to agency and say, hey, you were in a pitch a little while ago.

00:41 - Mike (Host)
What happened with that, don't know. My name's Mike Landa 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. Leah, thanks ever so much for joining us on Hegel and the ICA joint podcast for this session.

01:11 - Leah (Guest)
Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm really looking forward to this.

01:13 - Mike (Host)
Over a few weeks. We exchanged emails, had a couple of calls and said, rather than writing some blog that probably no one will read, why don't we do an audio version instead? So because the audience is listening going. What's going on? Leah, do you want to explain who you are, what you do and something unusual about yourself?

01:29 - Leah (Guest)
Absolutely so. I am EVP and I handle strategic agency operations at the ICA, which is the Institute of Canadian Agencies. We support and represent agencies across Canada. A lot of what I do is about encouraging agencies to articulate their value. I support them in understanding, negotiation and help them to be strong, thriving businesses. My background was agency side for about 20 years before I came here and on the operations side of things I did all of those things for each individual agency that I was at and then thought I'd switch my attention to the industry in totality. That's why I'm at the ICA. Something interesting about myself I have three Shelties, which always is confounding to people. I often get asked if I am a dog walker when I walk my dogs and I'm like, yes, I limit it to Shelties, I only dog walk. For Sheltie owners, we're capped at three. Very good, I would love more, but that's my strange. Yeah, why Shelties?

02:38 - Mike (Host)
They're crazy dogs, I was going to say so, for those people that don't know the Sheltie breed and I certainly don't we have Spaniels. They're crazy. What's unique about Shelties?

02:47 - Leah (Guest)
They're very, very sweet dogs. They come from the Shetland Isles, obviously Shetland sheepdogs. They are just very smart and I think anytime you get a smart dog they are always working things out. They know exactly what you're doing. You can't pull the wool over their eyes at all. They love to herd. They love to triangulate us, so we'll always be around the room, like at the exit, making sure we can't leave. They love when we come home, not a fan of when we leave. So they love keeping everybody together. They love the family unit.

03:23 - Mike (Host)
They do. Spaniels are very similar. They love the family unit. They do. Spaniels are very similar. They love the family unit definitely. So we've got a discussion, a kind of headline topic Before we get into the headline topic, about agencies and BD unrehearsed Leah, because that's far more fun Just in terms of where the market is in the Canadian market over the last kind of 12, 24 months. Where is the market? What's going on from an agency and brand perspective? Do you think?

03:47 - Leah (Guest)
Yeah, I think that it's been a struggle. The past 24 months definitely 12 months have been a struggle. We're all trying to figure our way through the chaos, the economic chaos. We're trying to find our place. We're trying to keep our businesses strong. Inflation has been a problem. Inflation, of course, is going to hit any professional services business because it takes more to pay your grocery bill and your mortgage, and so what are you going to do? You have to pay your people more and sometimes that reality does not flow down to your contract in real time that you have with your client. And so we have seen a lot of brand movement from agency to agency, and that's not always great. That's not great for brands, it's not great for agencies. We like consistency, we like year over year being able to build, and sometimes that over the past 24 months there's been a lot of movement.

04:47 - Mike (Host)
Let's now get into the subtopic of agencies. Need stronger BD strategies that focus on long-term relationship building rather than just RFPs, referrals and hanging on to existing clients and a bit of organic growth. Do you want to just talk about what you see in terms of BD strategies overall, and then we'll dig into something about account management about trust-based negotiations, etc.

05:10 - Leah (Guest)
Yeah, I think a lot of what the business development strategy is across our industry here in Canada but I think it's applicable to the US and the UK as well is that it really has been driven over the past two, three decades by the RFP the commodity price-based RFP and that has done a couple of things to our business development. It's made us very short-term thinkers. It's made us use our fast brain. We get into situations and we're looking at page three of the RFP and they've asked for X, y and Z and I've got to get it. I got to do it or I'm going to lose. So it makes us race to the bottom.

05:54
Any race to the bottom is going to put us into a commodity mindset. It's really devalued what we have to offer brands and what we have to offer clients. So I think it's not just about that. Rfps are commodity, but it just creates a bad environment. For how are we going to move forward and do what is actually needed for this brand? How are we going to get the best out of our people and our agency to actually take us where we need to go? So RFPs are fine At the end of the day the whole mechanism, the process.

06:33
If you need another agency, if you're going into a different strategic market, you don't understand it, or you have a product that you're coming out with that you need a different agency, that's fine. I get agency search, I get RFPs, but it's the current structure of them, it's what is asked within the RFP, that makes it short term. I don't hate on them, I don't hate on the idea of agency search, but it's what we're asking. It's what we're asking for in the search. That makes it short term, that makes it commoditized and that isn't getting us to a good relationship.

07:11 - Mike (Host)
As an ex-procurement director as you know, I used to be in procurement and as a vehicle, a tool, a mechanism for sourcing supply of third parties across any category. They're a good tool but, like any tool, in the wrong hands they can be dangerous. They can be the inappropriate tool to fix certain problems. I mean, I saw one this morning that my view was that RFP is being used for the wrong reasons by the client, I believe as an independent third party looking at it, and I think you're right. I think the problem is that the answer is always well, let's RFP it. It's over $100,000 in spend, let's RFP it. Well, why? What about talking to the incumbent and renegotiating? What about running a workshop where you've got three agencies, each have got two hours, and we're going to get all the stakeholders in a room and we're going to scope out what we need and we're going to work out who's best at solving problems interactively. There's all sorts of mechanisms you can use to appoint a third party.

08:13 - Leah (Guest)
I agree and I think a lot of times people get kind of robotic about the thing and think, well, it is now 36 months and our bylaws say that we have to, and you're like well, I bet, if you look at the bylaws and you look at the policy, really pull it out instead of just saying, well, bob told us 10 years ago that this was the way it was supposed to work. Look at the policy and I would guarantee you it doesn't say that.

08:44
It usually does not say that it will usually say you have to challenge what the status quo has been for the 36 months.

08:53 - Mike (Host)
You have to demonstrate good governance.

08:55 - Leah (Guest)
You have to govern and you have to have put some stress on it, on this relationship, and stress, test it and determine is it fit for purpose for moving forward. There are a number of ways that you can do that, but I think for me, fundamentally, my issue with the RFP process is because the work on the part of the evaluation team is held until the end of the RFP schedule. It's held to the end after we've had the spec creative shown to us and then we'll figure out what we want to do, which one we like, love the term, like where the fit is, and we'll figure all that out after the fact. I think an RFP can still be well used, but it's got to be the evaluating team determining what it's looking for. On the upfront, do the work before you send the 50-page RFP out to 100 agencies. And obviously in those two things the 50 pages and the 100 agencies I have issues with.

09:59
Obviously that's not going to help you make a decision. My goodness, if you were buying a dress that way. Yeah, show me a hundred dresses and I'll figure out which one I like. No one shops that way, with no criteria.

10:13
Right, with no criteria, With no like. Show me every single dress that's ever been created and I'll decide which one I like for this specific event that I know I want, or even better, I'll tell you the ones I don't like, yes, and then when you get through all 100, then you go, I don't like any of them.

10:31 - Mike (Host)
Oh really, let's start again. Let's start again.

10:34 - Leah (Guest)
I will take exception to one thing that you said, and I am not a proponent of workshops. Ah, why not? I will tell you why. For me, that is just a fancy way of saying that you want spec work from the agency.

10:50 - Mike (Host)
Ah, and when you say spec work, what do you mean by spec work?

10:54 - Leah (Guest)
Spec work is anything speculative, so anything that I would usually make money at, that you're asking me to do at either a reduced price or for free. But, most importantly, you're asking me to do something that's high value and you're asking me to do it in a vacuum, in a dark room, with no proper briefing, with no relationship, with no understanding of what your goals are, your objectives, where you want to be in three years, where you want to be in five years, what the trajectory of the company is. I haven't had time to listen to the analyst calls. I don't understand what's on the mind of the CEO. I don't know the CMO. In fact, you're replacing your CMO in three months after I win this RFP. So there are a number of things. I understand how we got to thinking workshops would be great, because it's better than just delivering creative.

11:50 - Mike (Host)
Better than presenting Presenting slides, for sure.

11:54 - Leah (Guest)
But I think you're still evaluating someone without all the information that they need and it is akin to a recruitment situation where you're recruiting a CEO. Do you have the CEO do a workshop or do you have them actually send you their qualifications? Do you look through and get referral statements from different people that they've worked with and do you probe and challenge how they're saying they're qualified for the position?

12:26 - Mike (Host)
This is a good topic, so we've got some other questions. We'll come back to those in a second Leah. I was in the recruitment industry for a while. I worked for a big recruitment outsourcing company. I got some insights into how the industry works.

12:38
If I look at parallels between the agency world, the recruitment world, the consultancy world, the reality is there are some firms, people that are very good at pitching, so they're very good on their feet. They're very good at writing their qualifications down. They're very good at writing pitch decks, whatever it might be, and so in the agency world you get to choose a agency. I'm not going to say partner, because that's a bad word in many ways. You're going to pick an agency. You're going to work with partner, because that's a bad word in many ways. You're going to pick an agency you're going to work with. You're going to spend $300,000 on their fees in a year and the only experience you've really got of them apart from you knew them from a previous existence maybe is what they've written and what they've presented for two hours, I'd argue that's a shocking way to buy anything that's expensive.

13:22 - Leah (Guest)
I think that that's fair. But I think that when you've written a case study that really examines and tells the story of an agency's journey with a brand and I would say you don't even have to name the brand you can talk about the industry that you worked in, you can tell your story, tell how there were bumps in the road, tell how you overcame those bumps in the road and show where it was effective the results Because at the end of the day, that is what people are buying. They are buying the results and they're buying the competency.

14:02
That's what we want when we're recruiting someone.

14:04
We want the competency and we want you to do this thing. We want you to move us forward. Every business is looking for business growth. So, even if you're an executive assistant, how are you helping us to achieve business growth? How are you going to do that? How are you going to take care of the CEO so that they can manage? We're all part of the cog that is business growth, and the agency is no different. And I would say that then what you're doing during the interview process which, come on, if you're hiring someone that's making $300,000 a year, you're probably interviewing them three or four times before you finally make a decision with a number of different people at the executive leadership, and so you are interrogating the case study which is their resume. You're interrogating that and you're asking them very direct questions. When I consult with clients about how to manage an agency search, I say to them ask them where it went wrong, because there is nothing that goes from A to B in life ever that doesn't have a bump in the road.

15:11
And that's what you want to know, because bumps happen In agency. It's just as chaotic as every other industry. So you have turnover. Clients say all the time, I hate the turnover. And I would push back and say they don't hate the turnover. They're not babies. They know that people have free will. They're allowed to go from one job to the other. So what is it about turnover? It's the way the turnover was handled. It's not the turnover, it's the execution. It's that my account went to the dogs after this person left. Who's handling what? Where did it go? Was the next person that took over onboarded correctly, or do I, the client, have to onboard them?

15:53 - Mike (Host)
Exactly.

15:54 - Leah (Guest)
No client wants to do that and so you're interrogating those things, just like the recruitment. You're saying okay, so it says here that you have this competency. Tell me how, tell me what. Tell me where were the negative things? Where?

16:09 - Mike (Host)
were the positive things, and how did you get through that? So do we agree that the RFP process that's run most of the time is substandard at best and often broken?

16:17 - Leah (Guest)
We do agree it is substandard and I think it is because there was no real thought around. How do I take this thing that's been used for commodities and make it fit for purpose for this thing that is custom, costly and really important to my business? It is us finding someone who's going to help us with our investment. A couple things happen, in my opinion. When they brought in RFP and I think you can talk to some of those companies that started the procurement process with marketing firms they were the ones innovating and some of them will say, oh, we really did a disservice to this. And what happened? Oh, we kind of shot ourselves as brands Exactly as brands In the foot. Oops, because what happened was they just applied something for commodity to professional service. As I say, it's not fit for purpose. Now, if they had a rethought it and actually made it something that was to procure an investment rather than procure an expense, we'd be in a different place right now.

17:30 - Mike (Host)
We certainly would. So, for example, a tool that was used for commodity purchasing true commodities nails, screws, wood. Reverse auctions were invented and procurement used reverse auctions for buying true commodities because you can truly standardize. You can specify exactly what the nail looks like and what job it has to do, and you can specify the volume and delivery locations. It's a well-defined, true commodity. There's a market price for steel in the marketplace, so you'd argue that could be a good use for a reverse auction.

18:06
Absolutely, using a reverse auction with agencies on their rate card is the most insane thing I've ever heard of in my entire life. It makes no sense. I say to agencies don't participate, just don't participate. Or if you do, I mean God, if you have to go on rate card, geez, we're just buying rate cards again. But if you are going to just like sell rate cards which I think is a really bad idea the rate card that you put into your bid, put that into the reverse auction and leave it there. Don't do anything, don't follow the herd, don't have a race to the bottom. Because I know, having been on the other side of it when, occasionally, I've been involved in them, and Because I know having been on the other side of it, when occasionally I've been involved in them and I refuse to use them after a while. We're not forced to use the lowest price. It's just a mechanism to drive the price down, with no relationship to quality or deliverables or scope or anything. It's crackers. What are your thoughts?

19:05 - Leah (Guest)
It is crackers. I don't understand it. And at the end of the day, can you imagine if that's how we hired people?

19:13 - Mike (Host)
We're going to hire a CEO. I know let's get four of them on a reverse auction about their comp package. That's a great idea, sounds good. Oh, my word.

19:23 - Leah (Guest)
Can you imagine?

19:24 - Mike (Host)
Let's do it, why not? What's the worst that can happen? Well, the worst is you hire a crazy person. Maybe not great for, I don't know, business growth Maybe. Maybe it's not a good way of selecting someone. Maybe it's a bad idea.

19:39 - Leah (Guest)
Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe it's a bad idea.

19:42
I think what's interesting as well is that the RFP when you're talking about sourcing nails, you want as many people to tell you about their nails as possible. Because you're dealing with professional services. You actually want something that just explodes procurement's brain when I say this. You want people to self-select out. You want agencies to say that's not for me. You know why? Because it is time consuming to look through an agency and what they have to offer. You know why? Because they're all unique. You know why? Because we're all made up of people. There can't possibly be one agency that is exactly like another. Yes, we can get into a whole big conversation about differentiation.

20:37 - Mike (Host)
We could? Yes, It'd be a long discussion.

20:39 - Leah (Guest)
It'd be very long. That's for a different podcast, maybe. But we're made up of people and we're made up of different executive leadership committees and different CEOs and agency leads, and so we're going to be all different. We're going to go at things in a different way, and so you want agencies to be able to make a go or no-go decision, completely opposite to a commodity RFP. You want everybody to participate In an agency search. You want as few people as possible to participate, because what ends up happening, mike, is that people cannot handle the amount and this is what I'm talking about the evaluation team, the work on the upfront of the search or on the back end of the search, and when there are too many agencies involved and they've got these banker boxes of 90 page decks underneath their desk that they are never going to read because they asked 25 agencies, which might seem like not very much, but you have to read those decks.

21:45
Are you the person that has to read those decks? You won't want to, and so then you say, oh, I can't do that, I'll wait until the creative presentation. But even if you allow 10 people to come to the creative presentation, holy, that's a lot of info that you have to then sift through at the back end. That's why then, from a scheduling perspective, they go off the rails. You'll talk to agency and say, hey, you were in a pitch a little while ago. What happened with that, don't know.

22:12 - Mike (Host)
No idea at all.

22:13 - Leah (Guest)
Never heard back, exactly Because the team is in a tailspin.

22:18 - Mike (Host)
I wasn't a creative director in an agency. However, what I do know is, if five agencies come to let's say three, let's say three. Let's say we've been smart and down selected to three and you're going to come and present to us. And we've given you a little caselet and you're going to come and present and part of the presentation is we've said could you bring some creative ideas? What I used to say was please do not spend weeks and weeks. I do not want free creative. That's not what I'm after. I want to understand how do you come up with ideas? What kind of process do you use? Give me a feel and show me some examples of work you've done that we might see as being relevant. That's about as far as I want to go. And so three agencies turn up.

23:01
One agency has decided to spend six-person weeks building an entire creative strategy for a whole set of campaigns unique to us. And I'm sat there going we told you not to do this. The creative team inside the client is going wow, oh my God, this is amazing, absolutely amazing. I've never seen anything like this. They're hired and I'm going holy crap, what am I going to do now? And there's no guarantee that that agency can recreate the same magic tomorrow, next month, the next six months, and there's a whole bunch of other things that are important apart from just the creative bit. Again, I think it points to that the approach is wrong, it's broken. It doesn't work for buying professional services. What are your thoughts?

23:54 - Leah (Guest)
It's an addiction, sir.

23:59 - Mike (Host)
We're selling drugs? No, we're not. No, we're not. I can't help it. I'm addicted.

24:03 - Leah (Guest)
I'm addicted as a creative. I can't help it. I'm addicted. I'm addicted as a creative Like listen. I hate to say this because I understand. I've lived through many, many, many nights of this kind of behavior Literally nights.

24:15
Of folks getting into a room and wouldn't this be cool? So, yeah, you bought something cool. They came up with something really neat. There's a name for that. It's called art, and what you don't want to buy is art, because you are looking for something that is going to drive your business forward. Absolutely, you are not looking for a pretty picture. So they're two different things. That's brilliant.

24:48 - Mike (Host)
Leah. That's the best description I've heard of it by far and away the best description. Beautiful art is important in life, beautiful creativity is important in life, but that's not how we should be necessarily selecting an agency partner to work with over a three-year period.

25:04 - Leah (Guest)
Because there's a lot of important things that you've got to figure out. And I think what's interesting getting back to kind of how we opened up this conversation about business development and why do agencies struggle with business development? And it is because they are so intent on the status quo. We're going to do the same thing that we did yesterday and it is not going to get them where they need to go. Unless a BD department within an agency is actually doing something different and being different and standing up for the value of their agency, they won't survive. I will stake my reputation on that over time. They will not survive because the agency cannot support something that isn't driving the business forward.

25:58
And so we see in these departments at agency a lot of turnover because they can't be successful. You can't be successful as a creative professional services firm operating within a commoditized environment. If you do want to sell a commodity, great, because there's lots of commodities out there. Listen, things become commoditized every day and chat, gpt and AI is going to root out commodity within the agency just the same way an Excel spreadsheet did. Yeah, exactly, I'm an accountant by trade and back in the day, what accountants used to have to do for networks, and anyone who was at like a HQ knew that they had to consolidate everything. I remember my boss telling me he used to tape up the big ledger paper. That's right, he used to tape it up around the room and actually write in.

26:50 - Mike (Host)
That's how they consolidate it and tick things back.

26:53 - Leah (Guest)
You get an Excel spreadsheet. That's done. But guess what? It didn't mean that we have less CPAs.

26:59 - Mike (Host)
Didn't mean the accountants were out of business, exactly.

27:02 - Leah (Guest)
In fact more accountants.

27:04 - Mike (Host)
More accountants, more accountants.

27:05 - Leah (Guest)
I think it was John Wren that said and I worked at Omnicom for a number of years that you can never have too many accountants. Whether he still believes that or not, I don't know, but he had said that at one point. So, fundamentally, it's going to root that out. So you can't charge someone for the act of taping up a ledger paper and writing in anymore Good, great. But if that's the only thing that you do, okay, you're going to have to be honest about that. I tape up ledger paper, I hand consolidate, All right, but that's commoditized. There's no value in that. So if you were going to offer that as something that your agency does, a commoditized piece of work, be honest about it. Don't try and sell it and sell it at a profit that is so egregious that it's unsustainable.

27:58 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, I mean back in my strategy days and training at Cranfield. You look at Porter's model on strategy. If you're going to produce a commodity, that's fine. But to win at producing a commodity, assuming that all the quality standards are equal, you have to be the lowest cost producer in the industry.

28:14 - Leah (Guest)
Yep, and you hit the nail on the head though, the standard of quality being equal, yeah, so you better have a high quality, exactly, and the lowest price, and be my guest Sell a commodity, that's fine, but don't give your strategy and your creative concepting away for free. That's been my message to agencies and, as a finance person working at an agency for a number of years, my head would explode every time the contract would come across my desk and strategy is like two hours, what? That's impossible. It takes them two hours just to do a little bit of research on the brief, knowing it would take 15 hours.

28:54 - Mike (Host)
You're just giving it away for free.

28:57 - Leah (Guest)
And then billing out the account. Coordinator.

28:59 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, Great, Right, so business development as a topic, I think we should have another podcast when you've got some time, Leah, as well. I've got lots of topics we could talk about. Anyway, around business development, if you were speaking at an agency conference and this is a slightly unfair question because you haven't had time to prepare for this but if you were speaking at an agency conference in Canada and the topic was business development strategies that work in 2025, and there's no one answer for every agency because, as we said, every agency is unique but what are the themes that you'd be talking about?

29:33 - Leah (Guest)
about which business development strategies are winning and which ones are losing- I would say go after your existing client base, understand the place of account planning and what that means to business growth. That it is about understanding your current client's environment, goals, strategies, objectives, what the CEO says on the analyst call, where they want to be in five years and how you can help them get there. That's where your business development strategy should be what other product extensions could come, Help them innovate. Understanding how to get new consumer bases. Understanding how to get brands that you're not currently working on. If you're working for a client that has 10 brands and you're working on one, how do you get more brands? Really thinking from that perspective, rather than pitching for something that you may not see. A return on your investment 24 months, maybe, and with relationships lasting three years, that's not great. We want to see really long-term relationships between agency and client, and that is for one reason and one reason only Because you get better work. The work builds on itself year over year and we have so much research System.

31:04
One has done an amazing amount of research to show why that long agency-client relationship is good for the brand. Of course it's good for the agency, but at the end of the day, that's not what's important. We want to do the best work. We want to move the brand from A to B.

31:25 - Mike (Host)
So we have empirical evidence that says that that is true Absolutely. If I draw a parallel in the consulting world, take this as an example Imagine the CEO of a Fortune 100 company that's worked with one of the three big strategy houses globally. I won't mention their names, there's no need to. You know who they are. Do you think they go to retender every three years to reappoint a new strat house? No, they don't. They have very longstanding relationships with their clients for very good reasons, because they're the best thinkers probably in the world solving those kinds of problems. They have amazing relationship development skills and they go more than the extra mile to create true value for their clients. And they charge a very high premium to do that. And clients pay, and they only pay because it delivers results.

32:16 - Leah (Guest)
And so you need to be able to articulate those results. And articulating the results and understanding the results can be difficult. It's not as simple as what it was 70 years ago.

32:28 - Mike (Host)
That's not an excuse not to do it.

32:30 - Leah (Guest)
It's not an excuse not to do it. It's a little bit more complicated but I think we can do it. When we look at competitions like Effie that are about understanding the effectiveness of a campaign, it really stretches an agency's brain and capabilities to write that story of that campaign and, very connectedly and well articulated, how the result met the objective. And, to be honest about the objective, we didn't know about that objective or there was an unintended consequence, positive or negative, and what that was, and that's always going to happen. But being able to articulate that back to the client and that's always going to happen. But being able to articulate that back to the client, being able to show where the value was, it's an important muscle to flex and to grow and to understand. And that resides within the account department. And the account department has such a unique place. They are a unique cog in that agency wheel and they are responsible for so much and I think that the skillset in that department has devolved over time, unfortunately, and so one of the things that I do a lot of work with at the agency level is to get them rethinking what that group's mandate is and what they're there for.

33:57
And I think that you know I mentioned account planning. That's one of them Account management. You've got to have good account management, because I would say that the account management is often what will lose a client for an agency. It's not that the work didn't work, it's not that it wasn't good, it's not that it wasn't creative, rarely. Is that the reason? I would say it often goes to poor management of the account. The processes are not either put in place or followed well. The structure is not great. We talked a little bit about turnover. People aren't onboarded properly.

34:32 - Mike (Host)
Poor communication turnover.

34:34 - Leah (Guest)
People aren't onboarded properly, poor communication, poor communication not understanding each team member's role and the team members not understanding their role. So there's lots of places where that trust starts to erode. After the pitch is won, you've got a little bit of a grace period and then the trust starts to erode and I would say that you cannot get to where you need to be as an account team without trust. You cannot do all the other things that you need to do without that. So you have to have that. You can't challenge, you can't find other areas within the business to explore, you can't innovate, you can't test, you can't explain to them why you want to test, because they don't trust you. So trust is the ultimate foundation and I don't think you can have business growth and therefore you don't have a functioning business development strategy if you don't kind of have these fundamental things in place.

35:33 - Mike (Host)
I remember being taught the trusted advisor model many years ago. Trust has got a very specific set of elements to it. You have to be credible, so your counterparty has to see you as credible. Got to be reliable. Do what you say you'll do on time. You have to have a relationship, a professional working relationship, and then you have to all divided by. You've got to focus on them far more than you focus on yourself. If self-interest is high, then trust is low. The more I think about myself, the less my counterparty trusts me.

36:07 - Leah (Guest)
And I would say as well what I tell account departments is that likability is a myth. We use the term I like them, I like that group, I like them, I like that group, I like her, I like him. It means nothing, but at the end of the day, it's credibility, and credibility means so many things. And credibility, I will tell you absolutely trust, is not based on someone did something right. 100% of the time that's impossible. You would never say I love my friend and I trust them because they're perfect. There's no friend in the world who's perfect. There's no spouse who's perfect. There's no relationship you are in where each party is perfect. But what they do is to build the trust they tell you when they've made a mistake. Two is to build the trust they tell you when they've made a mistake and, fundamentally, is the easiest way to build trust right?

36:57
Think about it In our own personal relationships. The easiest way to trust someone is for them to say oops, I really did something wrong, exactly, and I'm going to tell you about it right away and this is how I'm going to fix it. Does that sound like a good solution to you? Oh, no, you don't like that solution. Okay, let's talk about it together. Oh, but at least I came to you quickly, I told you what happened and I provided a solution from my perspective, and now we get to collaborate. Just do that Exactly. That's easy, doesn't it?

37:30 - Mike (Host)
Leah on that point. I think we should close Leah on that point. I think we should close Leah. That's been fantastic. I know you're really busy. I really appreciate the time you've taken. I think it's been a really interesting discussion. I think there's more we could have in the future. That's down to you whether you've got time, but I loved it. I really enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much for joining and for doing a joint podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

37:51 - Leah (Guest)
Thank you, Mike. It was a great conversation and lots more to talk about.

37:56 - Mike (Host)
Lots, lots more to talk about.

38:02 - Leah (Guest)
Leah, where can people find more about you? They can find out more about what we're doing at wwwtheicaca.

38:07 - Mike (Host)
And on LinkedIn. I know you're on LinkedIn as well.

38:09 - Leah (Guest)
I am on LinkedIn, leah Power. You can find me Easy peasy.

38:13 - Mike (Host)
Thanks, leah. 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.