BSMS 55 - How to reduce agency fatigue

Brian Graf: Okay. Welcome Stijn. Thank you again for being on, you know, today we're talking about how to reduce agency fatigue. I wanted to take a step back, for all of our listeners and just make sure we're all on the same page. Would you mind explaining what agency fatigue is and we can go from there.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, thank you, Brian. And it's a term that I didn't come up with. I think I've heard it many times in very different contexts. So it probably can also mean a lot of things for a lot of people. But what I found is, especially when you come in. It's either a marketing leader or a marketing agency and you are an external resource, whether you're the fractional CMO or you're an interim leader or you are the agency doing a project.

Clients are typically a little bit worried that this is, I think happens with every consultant, almost that they come in and they ask 40, 000 questions before they start to actually work. And it's not completely fair because when you. Onboard someone, a new employee, for example, they also get a couple of months typically to ask questions, to be on board, etc.

But when you outsource work, especially very technical projects, you of course want a PR agency or a paid search advertising agency to just hit the ground running. And so agency fatigue refers to when you outsource work, whether you do that with a gig economy designer. Or with an agency that runs a whole project for you or a fractional CMO that you want to limit the amount of times you have to answer the same questions.

Because all those agencies and resources and external consultants will, will have some, some very valid questions around how do we position ourselves? What is our brand voice? What is the Go to market strategy here? And, those are questions that are often best answered by actually the founders or the CEO.

And you don't want them to have to do that multiple times. So agency fatigue is referring to when you work with multiple parties, that a lot of that has to be repeated again and again and again. I think that's what the word for me reflects. 

Brian Graf: I think just to add on to that, I've seen it happen with Kalungi, but I've also seen it with some of the clients that we've helped when they were hiring agencies as well, where kind of all of the boxes are checked and the strategy's good, the agency's credible.

The interview's gone well, everything that you can think of is in a good spot, but the company will kind of slow play the hire a little bit and kind of go back and forth on if they should hire them and add a few more interviews that. Just because I think they are afraid of what you just talked about.

They're afraid of a slow start. They don't maybe don't quite know what they're getting themselves into and aren't, aren't sure that they can manage them to a good outcome, even though, you know, the agency has put every foot forward, that should give them that confidence. So it's, it's real. It's something that we've seen pretty regularly.

Stijn Hendrikse: When you outsource work and the reality is we do this all the time. Whether we hire someone. As a 1099 instead of a W2, we basically choose to be less committed but we still want the work to be done perfectly. And, but when we outsource it, we have a little less control than when we insource it.

So, there's then the constant kind of tension between how much do I help the other party to be successful Versus how much do I expect them to do that themselves. Because that's why I hired them. That's why you're hiring. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, exactly. That's why they're there. So why do, I guess to add to this, why do you think agencies get a bad, you know, reputation in this regard, right, and contribute to this agency fatigue?

Stijn Hendrikse: Well, there's the typical consulting pitfall for asking more questions than adding value is a, is a tricky one. And it's absolutely a valid concern for, for the hiring party. I think in 2024, you should expect that you, when you bring in a specialist, when you bring in someone who's done this before, who you bring in for their, you know, expertise, for their experience, that you want them to come with a plan, to come with a playbook, to come with a set of.

recommendations, best practices, benchmarks, whatever you want to call those, but you want them to come in with a good balance of very valid questions that are about getting to know you and really understanding what the challenges are, but also coming with a lot of kind of ready to go approaches that help you do things faster than when you would have to learn it in house.

So I think that is where kind of the balance has to be struck. And I, and I think the work that you as the hiring party can do. It's to make sure that the foundation that you can provide, the knowledge you have around your existing clients, the way you think of your ideal customer profile, your marketing and positioning sort of strategy thus far, is as well articulated as you can.

And if those things are not necessarily clear, then you should allow an agency or an external partner to come help you get that, get that right, but then document it. So that the next time you hire someone or, and it could just be an internal new hire as well. have something tangible that's written down that's easier for other people to absorb than you have to sit in another full day of strategy workshop.

Brian Graf: Or even just helping your internal team work with that agency the right 

Stijn Hendrikse: way, 

Brian Graf: right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, to add on to your point about strategy, right, if you're not wowed by the The, the agency strategy that you're hiring is probably not a great agency because as Stijn said, every agency should come with a really clear plan.

I would say also, you need to balance that plan with a very clear path to success and a way to execute that plan. And we've said in other podcasts, you know, there's, there's a lot of information out there now, and I think it's easy. It's very easy for consultants and also agencies to come in with what seems like a really strong plan and a lot of really good ideas and then not have the systems in place to back it up.

So you do need to kind of do your diligence there and make sure that, of course, while there are really good ideas, there's a really solid plan to make sure they get executed. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, and then this is one of the reasons we started Kalungi. Where we pair up the marketing leadership and the agency execution in one place.

So there's no finger pointing at least between the people who set the strategy and who make some of the more fundamental decisions and the people who actually have to deliver on that. 

Brian Graf: So what have, just to brag on agencies a little bit more, one more question, what have been some of your biggest frustrations with agency fatigue in the past and, you know, how has that impacted you?

You and you are leading companies, you know internal and as a fraction. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, there's the agency fatigue. That's very easy to describe, like I don't want to do another two day workshop Which I did like four months ago at the PR agency we hired. Can you go talk to them and if you're now maybe talking to like the agency to do your website or do a rebrand?

So that's one part. The other part is I Think of this as and we mentioned it a little bit before but there's a lack of accountability You That is often a function of how much control you have. Either party has rights and I think what you want as the client you want the people who do the work to be accountable for the actual impact right the results and that's I think a very fair expectation.

But when you do that you want to also give them enough control over the variables that they need to be able to influence whether it's deciding you know what type of tactic to execute on or when or how much to spend on this versus that. What type of resources to use. So you want to give up enough control for the other party to actually feel that they can take that accountability.

And that goes to another part, that if you outsource something that you don't really understand yourself, it's much harder to give up that control. Because it's kind of an unknown. Oh, I am going to hire a PR agency because I have no idea how to do PR. And I kind of, I don't even know what good looks like.

So when the PR agency says, well, these are the KPIs that we recommend that you hold us accountable. There was a metric we used at Microsoft called top stories, top stories, and they were defined in a certain way. They had to be in a certain level of publication, but a certain reach, a certain level of quality.

And, and they would say, well, we signed up for 400 top stories this year across the globe. In 20 different countries. And, if you can define that really well, Great KPI, great way to hold a PR agency accountable, but the only way for you as a client to know if top stories for you is the right metric is if you actually know a little bit about PR yourself.

If you, and at Microsoft, of course, the people on our team, on my team, were PR experts. Professionals. So they understood how to hold the external agency accountable to that metric. If you don't, if you're hiring a paid search agency for the first time, you really don't know what good looks like. What is the tendency?

You either get, it's hard to hire them, and you end up in a whole bunch of tug of war on what are the right KPIs and things like that, very inefficient. Or, what also happens, you hire two agencies, two PIP, like one for paid social and one for paid search, to kind of have this false sense of competition, where you're now, because you actually don't know how to hold them accountable.

Let me just go higher too and let me kind of play them against each other, which actually might sometimes work, but it's again, not necessarily that effective. So when you think of all of this, a little bit of doing it yourself and learning just enough, it could be even just reading up on it or reading a couple of articles, listening to a couple of podcasts.

That's why we do podcasts in some of these areas, Brian, where we. I want you to, our listeners, when they hire a page search agent, they can go to one of our podcasts. I think we have a literal, actually an episode of this, about how do I hold my agency accountable, to give you a couple of tools of what questions to ask, what to really drill into, and which areas to actually leave alone, because they're not really worth, you know, looking under the covers, because you're not gonna, even if you discover things that you don't like, you're not gonna be able to make them very actionable.

So it's not a good use of time. But yeah, so back to the point, outsource what you master. And if you don't master it yet, try to master it at least a little bit before you go on the hunt for people to do the work for you. 

Brian Graf: I mean, again, if you, if you don't, right, you'll, you'll either end up being completely at the mercy of the agency that you hire, right.

And so you won't be able to tell what good is or how good of a job they're doing and be able to hold them accountable that way, or it, you can not set them on. Kind of not have them focus on the right KPIs. And it can be a distraction and it can push them in the wrong direction or you Try to have them teach you as they go which might be helpful for you to learn But it's really gonna slow them down.

And if you want that it might be costly Yeah, if you are hiring them for results They're gonna be spending half the time educating you instead of generating those results for you So it is really good to do your homework and just get that base level Understanding so that you can make sure that You know, all the ducks are swimming in the right direction.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, because if you get too uncomfortable with the KPIs because you don't understand them, or you don't understand how the agency is performing, and what the work is that they're going to do, what ends up happening often? You get these vanity KPIs. Like, let me go measure how many reports they send me, or how many hours they work, or how many times they have a meeting with me.

Or let me go count the times they update the campaign. Which all, of course, are KPIs that measure. Effort maybe or time spent but yeah, it doesn't help you understand Do they have the right person on the job. Are they thinking about the right strategy? Correct. All those things 

Brian Graf: It'll also help you to understand what the right KPIs are to hold them accountable with.

Like as you'll, especially if you're hiring a marketing agency, you'll want to likely get them as close as you can to revenue. But what is the right level that's fair to them that's within their span of control, but also gets you results. If you're hiring a pay per click agency. It may not be fair to assign them to revenue or even to marketing qualified leads, but maybe if you know enough, you can say, Hey, you need to sign up for this number of clicks, knowing that our conversion rate is X.

Which will generate X or you would need to sign up for. this number of marketing qualified leads with the SLA in place with your internal team that they will run optimizations on the landing page. That level of knowledge allows you to directly connect your agencies to the results that you want to see, whereas you wouldn't be able to if you didn't have it.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, and I think what also often helps really is that it's not done a lot. If you have a lot of, like, what is the right number to ask for or to expect, then just focus on getting a number. a number that they are very convincingly measuring correctly, that is dependable, and then just ask for that to improve over time.

And, and hold them accountable for the After you, let's say the first month you get a good baseline and then you hold them account for both giving you a relatively good forecast. Say, Hey, what do you now expect to do next week or next month? And then you, you hold them account for two things. One, how accurate is that forecast?

And in the first month, it might not be that accurate, but then you want that accuracy to go up over time. And of course you want the number to increase in And both things I think are extremely valuable and they will allow you to see things improving. And, and then whether it's the numbers 10 or 15 or 400, it doesn't really matter that much.

I think just those two things, are they able to forecast it better? As they go along, as they learn more, and of course, is the number getting better? I think those two are a great start. 

Brian Graf: Yeah. And this is another thing where doing your homework can kind of pay dividends, because marketing, in some instances.

You can, an agency can come in and run some quick wins and you'll see immediate impact. But there are many other cases where it's a, marketing is a long term muscle. And knowing the discipline and some of the complexities that can go into it. We'll show you either that. It is worth being patient, right, to see those results in the long run, and it will be well worth it.

Or, this should be a quick win, right, and the agency isn't moving fast enough and, you know, we need to make an adjustment. So, that can be really helpful to look for as well. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, and in the opening, I think you mentioned another part of agency fatigue to like change orders or things and I think right now You were just hinting at maybe when you don't have the patience when you keep changing things You will not see a lot of result or you will never have a good benchmark to measure things against right because the goalposts will Keep moving.

Brian Graf: Yeah, so you need to align with the You almost need to, you know, not to be morbid with it, but you need to give the agency that you hire enough rope to hang themselves with, just as you would an internal employee. If you're going to micromanage them the whole way through, you might as well, you know, you might as, you're not hiring a strategist anymore, you're just hiring a tactician.

But you need to be able to hire them. Trust the strategy that they deliver. And then of course, holding them accountable to deliver against that strategy. But that is tactical impatience and strategic patience. You do have to have the long, the long game in mind. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Do you have any tips on when people hire it?

What are the questions that when you work with your clients, Brian, that when they ask you, okay, that's exactly the right question you should have asked. References come to mind. 

Brian Graf: Yeah. References come to mind. I think it is just the, the. The question that sometimes I wish people would ask and I have to bring up or they ask and I'm really happy about is, how does your strategy tie to execution and what are the, what are the leading indicators that will lead up to the result that I'm looking for?

That shows that they're kind of have the right mindset about an engagement or working with us, but it also shows that they're strategic. And they're, they'll hold me accountable, but also I can show again, marketing can be, it can be a long term muscle. And it allows me to execute the plan that I want while showing progress, even though.

It may be long term goals that we're, that we're shooting for. And it gives me the hope and the confidence that they won't be changing my scope or changing my focus every month. Because they haven't closed one Logos haven't moved yet, but we have a six month sales cycle.

So the impact of my work won't come for a while, but they can see how the plan is impacting sessions and contacts and, you know, marketing qualified leads and pipeline right down the funnel that shows them that it will ultimately impact what they need. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah. And those are great. If you ask for like a 30, 60, 90 day plan.

Getting those examples in there, Brian, which are really results and not activities, because when you ask most agencies to give you the 30-60, you'll see a lot of the activities, and some of that is totally helpful. Because you kind of want to know what you are going to do, but then adding the, what are the outcomes of that?

Even if those are leading indicators, it doesn't have to be MQLs. It could be, hey, our conversion percentage of this specific part of the funnel is increasing. Yeah. Or the amount of. The clicks are increasing in this specific channel. Those are, of course, leading indicators for the MQL. But I think getting that like results versus activities in kind of a 30, 60, 90 day format, it also solves for something else.

I think once you start a new partnership with a new agency or a new outfirst contractor, there's a tendency in the first couple of weeks, because everybody's really excited that we're going to be less focused on the actual progress. So getting more of that. That specific, you know, what are we gonna get done early on will just force urgency.

And hitting the ground running instead of hitting it crawling and then having to go run Almost a little too hard later on. 

Brian Graf: To your earlier point though, I think references, especially if you are going to hire an agency, references are a must. Also, you know, asking the question, what other companies that are similar to my situation have you worked with, right, and how much expertise do you have in my industry or my segment.

If you're a B2B company hiring a B2C agency, probably not the right move. But if you're a software company, hiring a finance agency, probably not the right move. So just making sure that they have that deep, deep knowledge that can really easily transfer their skills to your specific instance is really useful.

What do you think sets agencies up for success? We've, we've kind of talked about, you know, what you shouldn't do, but what do you think, you know, if you're hiring a brand new agency, what are the things that you can do specifically to to really make sure that they can hit the ground running, right, and integrate really well into the team and have the best chance at producing positive outcomes.

Stijn Hendrikse: I think as a founder, owner, CEO of, in our case, we usually work with B2B SaaS companies. You need to understand what your ideal customer profile really is. What's the definition of a perfect client for you? And, the tighter you can define that, the better, and it will set up both your PR agency and your paid search agency, or your website builder or your logo designer, pick.

Pick whoever you're hiring internally or externally will really set them up for success. And if you cannot clearly articulate that, then having one of those people who you hire help you get that written down and well defined is very, very valuable. And then after, and that's kind of the who's it for question.

And then the other one is what's it for? It's your positioning, your value proposition, and you can start with either, but you need both. And then the last of the three would be kind of out of the, Who's it for? What's it for? Comes like this, I guess this is not tactical execution, but it's kind of the bridge towards tactical execution.

Some kind of a messaging framework that turns your value proposition and your kind of personas into how you now position yourself with this given persona. It's where they basically intersect. And having that Well defined will, will really make it easier for you to, when you have a, let's say you have a paid search agency and they're, they're buying keyword centers that are completely irrelevant for both the ICP and the personas that you're targeting and what you think you do, what pain points you solve for, what are your goals.

Key kind of differentiators. It's super easy to then hold an agency accountable to get the right ads in front of the right people, right. Or for a PR agency to get the right stories in the right publication, right. But you have to get that foundation in place first. 

Brian Graf: Yeah. I mean, to add to that, it's. You almost have to treat agencies as employees when you're thinking about hiring them.

And if you're gonna hire a paid media agency, for instance, you shouldn't expect them to build your overarching marketing strategy. They're a cog within the machine that you build, and so, as Stijn was saying, right, you really need to have a set strategy that that agency can work within.

And you need to build, give them the materials they can, they can use to be successful. A paid media agency is not going to be the thing or the group that you want building your messaging and positioning guide. You want them to take that and enact it into ads. And if they have to spend time doing that, A, they're going to get started slower.

And B there, it's not going to be as good as if you were to put, you know, a fractional CMO or a CMO in, in charge of building that overarching strategy, really understanding the customer, right. And building the right messaging and positioning for that. So I think that's, that's a really important detail and it can be, it can be hard.

Because you want to, as a founder, you want to get going fast. You want to. add as much value to your customers and you want to be able to add, you know, quickly add to the pipeline. But if you don't sharpen the ax first, right, you'll end up spending a lot of money on agencies and wasting a lot of time that you didn't really need to if you, if you had the right order of operations.

Stijn Hendrikse: And it's the really most important investment you can make as a founder, CEO, In your complete go to market. It's not just for the sake of hiring an agency or an external contractor. 

Brian Graf: Yeah. Figure out what the strategy is. How does marketing work with sales then within marketing? How do each of the pieces fit together, including the agencies?

I think other than that, it's also really important once you've hired the agency. Like an employee, right, spend time to be able to onboard them, to give them the right context, to give them the right materials, and make sure that your team can also spend time to be able to support them, right, if we're gonna use the paid media analogy.

If you hire a paid media team, But don't have a team to support them with really valuable content, then their hands are going to be tied. If you, if you don't give them the right landing pages to support their paid campaigns, right, you're going to get a lot of clicks and they're not going to go anywhere.

So making sure that you have either the resources available on your team or that you have the time, right, or that they have the span of control to be able to really impact the result that you want. It's really critical. 

Stijn Hendrikse: One last thing, and this is just more of a side comment on how you hold agencies accountable because we talked about paid media here as an example.

There are still PPC paid search agencies out there who get paid by Google instead of paid by their clients, like a share of the media spend. Don't fall for that. It's like you pay your realtor and then I think even realtors are being slapped on the wrist now in the last couple of months. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, paying them for basically the wrong incentive. And of course, they need to drive more qualified leads that turn into sales meetings, just like any other marketing effort. And if the size of the media budget is a proxy to how much work they do. Figure out another way to kind of make that part of the way you pay.

But it has to also include, well, the conversion and the quality of the leads, etc. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, I mean think really hard about how you can properly incentivize agencies. Having a paid media agency be paid based on your Google spend. Not necessarily the best incentive. They're just going to want you to spend more.

Or having, even having an agency bill you based on per hour. That's just, that's just how many things they're doing. That's not actually how much they're impacting your bottom line. So thinking through what, what the metric is, you want them to move and how to tie their, their focus and, and their pay if you can, right.

According to that metric, it is really important. All right. A couple more questions for you, Stijn. Is there any agency fatigue? Part of the whole concept that you mentioned is having agencies working together. And finger pointing and lack of accountability. Is there any, any nuance or any tips that you have for CEOs or founders that need agencies to work well together and setting that up correctly so that you get a good outcome?

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, it's tricky. We often walk into situations where there is a. Either let's create a competitive mindset. You have a founder, COO, CEO, someone who's not necessarily a full time marketing leader because they're not ready. They haven't really hired that person yet. And they have a web agency that maybe doing organic and maybe some SEO optimization.

And then they have another agency that's purely like a performance marketing agency doing maybe paid search. Sometimes another one that there's people Social and then another agency that is doing like supporting the sales organization with maybe appointment setting some form of outbound and then the philosophy is kind of, yeah, we're letting all these four kind of compete with each other a little bit, and I think part of that it's fine.

There's not necessarily a benefit to that. But the challenge, of course, is that all these four will be doing message testing. They will be doing an A B test on an email that they used to nurture. They all have to nurture the leads that they generate and ideally, not on different platforms.

Ideally, all with the same HubSpot instance. And ideally, these channels reinforce each other. If you have a great organic lead conversion, and you now want to nurture them because they haven't converted to, maybe to a sales conversation yet. It might be okay to do some follow me home, kind of retargeting with YouTube, whatever ads, which of course is paid search.

Or, or some form of pay per click. And so you want to be able to have the sum of the parts of all these channels be bigger than the individual parts. And that is hard when you have, like, all these agencies kind of competing with each other. So if you have a strong marketing leader at some point who manages that, I think you can, you can make this work.

And you can make sure that the learnings But Facebook ads are people clicking on, they make it better. They make it back to the people who run Google search ads and whether it's some insights in messaging that works or display apps that seem to resonate. Did you share those learnings? Or at some point you basically say, well, let me give more control to one agency or one party and give them both paid search and paid social and maybe also organic and basically a full digital agency and maybe even some, Some of your PR goals but then, of course, you want to hold them accountable for things that are deeper in the funnel.

Total MQL volume, things like that. But yeah, that's a tricky balance to strike. And it goes back to our earlier conversation about control versus accountability. Having a little bit of competition is good. But I prefer to have integrated agencies who do multiple channels so they can make some of these decisions and you can hold them accountable for that.

And then maybe you let them compete, you let two different agencies compete for two different parts of the market. Maybe for two different verticals or for two different, even different countries. Things like that are maybe easier to do like Apple to Apple benchmarking and competition. Then, then spreading out the, the, the methods, the channels into different agencies, because then you just lose a lot of the, the the synergy.

Brian Graf: Yeah, and having multiple agencies rely on each other for results is a perfect recipe for finger pointing. And, because of the competitive nature of agencies, right, they, they could replace, one could replace the other, they don't necessarily want to work together and it can, it can cause some bottlenecks.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, there's no incentive for them to make each other better. 

Brian Graf: Correct, yeah. So having that, that hierarchy in place. So if you have a strong marketing leader or one agency is above the other and controlling the other, then that helps quite a bit.

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