A Word on Client Service.

“Great work entails risk. Most clients do not want to take risks; they prefer a safe retreat into the world of the merely good, or worse, the dismissively average. Still, if they are going to take that risk, they are much more likely to do so with agency people they trust. And trust is the very foundation of a great relationship. And that’s why I say a great relationship leads to great work … Some of what follows (in this book) is about working with agencies, but most of it is about building client trust.

“And this, in the end, is why client service matters. It matters because the work matters. And creating great work is what drives and inspires all of us every day.”

– Robert Solomon, The Art of Client Service

The Short Version of How to be a Great AE

Well, perhaps this isn’t the short version, but the only version:

“It’s become apparent that you are excellent at making the clients feel their needs are being met, but Mr. Cosgrove has the rare gift of making them feel as if they haven’t any needs.” – Lane Pryce, to Pete Campbell.

Where’s this from? You guessed it, Mad Men.

Write About What You Do.

We know our industry pretty well. We also know that we learn every day. So we write about what we do. We’ve found lots of clarity in writing about our business. It’s had a lot of subtle effects that are becoming more apparent as time goes on.

Writing helps you crystalize your ideas.

It helps you take a stand on topics. Forcing yourself to put your thoughts into words makes you decide how you want to be seen by your clients, and by your employees. It’s a cathartic process. Coming up with the perfect word to describe what you’re writing about can be salubrious. You’re defining your business and pinning down the adjectives that make it what it is. You can think all day long, but when it comes to actually formulating those thoughts, it can be tough sometimes. Writing helps.

Writing heals wounds.

We would never write specifically about a client’s misdoings on our blog. We do, however, write generally about the experiences we have in dealing with clients frequently. It helps us to distance ourselves from our problems, and analyze them. If you can be scientific and educational about a topic, it helps remove the emotion from it.

Putting your ideas into a blog gets your ideas out in public.

At first you might be timid to have an opinion on things, but it’s the best thing you can do. Don’t be afraid to be opinionated (to a point) on your blog. We never talk politics, or religion, but we try to cover any topic that interests us and that we think might interest our readers. People who read your blog, whether it be clients, potential clients, employees, or potential employees will feel like they know more about you. The best defense you have against losing clients or employees is to make them your friend. The best way to recruit new employees or clients is to convince them that you’re nice, and that you know your stuff.

Writing shows passion.

People make decisions based on trust, and knowledge, among other things. If potential clients visit your blog and see that you have tons of relevant posts about your industry, and have a real voice behind your writing, they’ll know how passionate you are about your work. It’s not easy to fake that, and the amount of depth (both in thought and fact) behind your posts will further illustrate how much time you put into creating it. It’s easy to get caught up in an article if you’re interested in it in the first place. The final draft will show.

Story Time!

What’s the story of Coca-cola, or Hewlett Packard? What’s the story of BMW? We’re not asking about the history of the company, or the founders. What we mean is, what story have you told yourself about those brands and what they mean? Is the management at BMW rigorous about quality? Cutting edge design? Are they a bunch of obsessive Bavarians that get a buzz out of driving fast on the Autobahn, making their engines growl?

What on earth gave you that idea? It was advertising actually…

We don’t know of anyone who doesn’t like to be told a good story. One that’s engaging, and interesting. One that’s believable. It’s entertaining, and because of this, most people will repeat it or at least act on it. That’s where marketing comes in.

Consumers are an interesting bunch.

They change, they flip flop, they make irrational decisions. Most of them, though, just want to believe the decisions they do make are sound. The truth is, people choose what to believe. If they think it will benefit them somehow, they’ll justify the story so that it positively and directly affects their lives. More importantly, they’ll make the purchase.

Our job as designers, copywriters and programmers is to develop a story about a brand, product or service that consumers can’t resist. Obviously, certain stories will appeal to certain target markets, but having specified those markets, we aim to paint a picture, depict a product that makes consumers confuse wants with needs. Seth Godin says it best in the title of one of his books: All Marketers are Liars.

We’re not really liars, though, right?

No, we’re not liars in the sense that we want to tell false information. We’re not liars because we want to mislead people. We don’t want to do these things. We just want to tell a story as it directly relates to the consumer we’ve chosen to go after. That may include an angle on the story that reaches a far spectrum of the truth, but it’s still there.

In Godin’s book, he branches out to say that it’s not really the marketers who are liars- it’s the consumers! The marketers are just storytellers and because the consumers decide what to believe, they often lie to themselves when they want something. It’s important for us marketers to keep in mind the bigger picture and the story we’re telling.

Would we believe it? Why do we buy the things we do as consumers ourselves?

The 5 Things All Studios are Afraid of, and How We Remedy Them.

Giving out pricing

We’ve toyed for a very long time with opening up our pricing system. To be quite honest, we can nail down the exact cost of many jobs through a fairly formulaic process. It would take a day or two to apply programming to this https://entermotion.com/estimates to make it give you exact numbers. We could even assign a percentage multiplier to account for how busy we are at any given time adjusting rates accordingly.

We haven’t done it for one reason. To assign direct pricing to our services commoditizes them. We sell our creativity by the hour; nothing less, nothing more. We empathize quite directly with our potential clients who desire a starting place in regards to pricing, but it just can’t be done while staying true to the original intent of our business.

Still, our pricing is not a closely guarded secret. If you’re a competitor, call us today. We’ll quite directly tell you what we charge for various services. We’re not concerned at all with our competitors knowing our pricing, we’re only concerned with making our creativity, angst, smarts, love, ideas, and history into another item on the shelf at WalMart.

Losing a big client

The 80/20 rule applies to most things in business. 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your clients. If you’re in the unfortunate position to have a high percentage of your profit coming from a single client, it can be scary.

The best advice we think you can take is to just ride it out, knowing that it might stop. We’ve been through that cycle several times, and it seems things always eventually equalize themselves. You should look for those brief windows of opportunity to make the profit that is according to the risk.

If you make a substantial amount of profit during a brief ride on a big client, it will help sustain you through the inevitable turn to a more sustainable ratio of earnings.

Not finding great employees

Terrifying right? You have several rock stars in your company, and you’ll never find another one, right? Maybe…

Good employees are incredibly hard to find. We get 3-5 resumes a week on average. But we still fire clients, turn down work, and have a staff of 7. We often give test projects, review portfolios, and correspond with potential new hires. If someone calls, we say “yes, we’re hiring!” but we very rarely hire anyone.

Right now, we would love to hire a great identity designer, a great programmer, and maybe a new AE. But we just haven’t found the right match yet for any of the positions. (oh yeah, and our intern went back to KU, so that would be nice, too.)

Are we worried we’ll never find another rock star? Not really. We’ll keep talking to people, looking at portfolios, and giving test projects. Eventually, maybe we’ll find another great person to fill a position. When we do, we might take on a bit more work, but until then, we can keep our throttle, and our pricing set to our current capacity.

Giving employees too much power

Each employee you trust with vital company info is an opportunity to get burnt. Each time you get burnt, you’re more likely to trust less. We know of several studios who got their start based off of their former employers benevolence, and ignorance. It’s business. You win, or you lose.

We really like this quote from the Tao as it pertains to trust:
“If you don’t trust the people, you make the people untrustworthy.”

We’ve been burnt. We’ve heard rumors about us. We’ve lost clients to former employees and partners. It doesn’t matter…

We’ve never lost a thing that we wouldn’t have willingly given if we had been honestly asked. The people who work at Entermotion right now are shining best friends. If something goes afoul later, so be it. The important thing is that we don’t stand in the way of each other doing the most amazingly gratifying, and good work we can do right now. Deceit and paranoia are crippling and foolish things to keep in a creative environment.

Losing quality

First off, please do fear this. Don’t ever stop fearing it. Quality is the one thing that you have to offer. Almost anybody can crap out a digital file these days. There are so many software crutches on the shelves that you could buttress all the businesses with poor taste up for a hundred years with just one shelf at a Best Buy.

We’re designers, programmers, copy writers. It’s a proud devout industry based on consistency, craft, excellence, and expertise. There’s simply no better profession in the modern workplace than to be involved in the design of identity, collateral, text, programming, or graphics.

But as you accept the tenets of our profession, you have to make one simple, and unwavering covenant with your conscience. You absolutely must compromise once in a while. You work diligently to hone your tastes and quality control to an explicit edge better than your peers, but it’s the client who pays the bills. Never compromise your basic principles on a big picture item, but you must gain perspective on how to lose an occasional battle and still win the war.