Steps 5, 6 and 7
5. Surface your working team
There are pitch teams and working teams. Pitch teams are the agency's smoothest, senior, accomplished veteran players. They are smart, glib, practiced, and polished. Working teams are the munchkins behind the scenes you rarely see in a pitch. In many cases, an agency will not empanel a working team until they win the business, so in many cases, your working team is a fantasy.
Require your working team to be the pitch team. This will ensure that you get a clear look at the people you'll be working with. Allow the senior supervisors to help, but insist that the agency identify and engage the account executives, account supervisors, and frontline creative, media, or technical people who will actually work on your business. Be sure to meet the digital producer and/or the project manager because these individuals will really run your business and your budgets day by day.
6. Probe for process
Mechanics, skill, and speed determine productivity. Agencies are notoriously slower and more expensive than client organizations and frequently have ad hoc processes that can leave you vulnerable. Figure out how the agency works and how it takes in and processes the information you give it. Compare that with your internal processes and your productivity tolerances.
Are you willing to wait four weeks for a five-paragraph email? Will a mini-site or a landing page take 30, 60, or 90 days to complete? How many levels of editorial review and QA will those banner ads get? Will they traffic drafts digitally or on paper? Will they deploy secure intranets or just use FTP sites? Ask for process briefings and go through the agency process carefully to understand who does what to whom and when. Give them hypothetical assignments and ask for production time lines.
7. Identify agency partners
In this climate, it makes little economic sense for agencies to retain full-time people to manage occasional or contingent tasks. Almost every agency relies on freelancers, vendors, and partners to round out their service offerings. List the tasks they do themselves and those they share with vendors or partners. Compare the home-grown tasks with your top priority needs. Then ask about the freelancers and vendors and how they manage these partner relationships. Require case studies to show productivity and business results.
