Apr
Recognizing your agency’s skills
Bruce MacLellan
While on a family ski trip to Whistler, British Columbia, recently, I toured the Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre that opened in the village less than a year ago. It’s a fantastic building filled with displays and artifacts from these two First Nations peoples.
The orientation film is also first-class. Both the Squamish and Lilwat groups have lived in the mountain ranges and valleys for hundreds of years and came together to create this centre. We had a tour guided by a young woman who is the granddaughter of a former chief in the Squamish nation.
During the tour, she mentioned that the village elders identified characteristics of young people and streamed them into certain roles based upon their strengths. Interestingly, good leaders and good talkers were different streams.
It reminded me of a recent competitive business pitch that we won. In delivering the good news, our new client noted that a couple of our team members did not do very well presenting on their feet. It’s always great to hear feedback, but my first reaction was to say we are offering a communication services team, not public speakers.
I understand that we have to be able to present ideas and explain our thinking, but standing in front of an audience is actually a rare occurrence in the services we are hired to provide. I believe we need a mix of skills and experience on every team, and exemplary public-speaking can’t be required for all.
Make no mistake, good talkers can be an asset but it is also important to have clever creative, superb writers and great media relations stars. I encourage organizations hiring a new agency to assess people for the real roles that they will play.
There’s a reason lots of people refer to new biz pitches as dog and pony shows… Stacking the deck with great presenters who might not ever actualy touch a piece of business is short-sighted and misleading. Q&A (which should include clients fielding questions from the agency) is just as important as the actual presentation when evaluating an agency in my opinion. It’s true that not everyone in PR should be expected to be awesome presenting on their feet on feet, but fast thinking is part of the gig and needs to come across when having a two-way conversation.
“The pitch” is a great way to choose an ad agency or, better yet, an ad campaign. The first-impression approach reflects a primary tenet of effective advertising: if I don’t like what I see and hear right away I probably won’t buy the product.
Public relations is about building momentum intelligently. Organizations can make a more informed PR agency choice if they take time to discover an agency’s intelligence, strategic sense and creativity.
A great value of good public relations is fluidity – the ability to respond and tweak strategies and tactics based on changing conditions. A more fluid approach to picking a PR agency makes a lot more sense to me.
I wonder if that client was hiring an IT services company if would she expect everyone on the team to have great presentation skills? Or should she just want them to be able to write code like nobody’s business. I’m guessing those of us in communications are held to a different standard. Which is fair to a point. But the ability to pitch a reporter or communicate day-to-day is not the same as presenting in front of a room full of people who are deciding whether or not to hire you.
Also, I have to wonder if the people he pointed out were the more junior members of the team? In our industry we want our young talent to master the day-to-day work first (pitching, writing, strategic thinking) and then develop the skills to present that work to current/potential clients. Which I think makes sense. The advantage of meeting the entire account team at the pitch is that you’re going to meet those people who are excelling in their work, but may be still developing their presentation skills.