Are you surprised? Are you delighted?

Are you working closely enough with your Agency?

It can be challenging to move away from a “surprise and delight” model of engagement to a collaborative one. You know what we mean when we say “surprise and delight”, right? This is when you brief the agency and then the agency creatives go to work behind the scenes, resurfacing after one or more weeks to reveal their big idea. 

And then it doesn’t land. 

You can’t act on it. 

The big reveal becomes another Discovery and now you’ve lost two weeks of planning time. 

Yeah, that.

Does this model still have its place? Yes. When you need a bold, unshackled, liberated idea that is not tied to budgets or performance. For example, you may be trying to learn how Creative your agency can be or you need that Wow factor to capture funding. But this is the exception and not the rule. Your success, and ours, is found in partnership.

When you move your agency to an iterative, collaborative, partnership model - everybody wins. Relationships are stronger. We become equitably informed and aligned. We all agree on what success looks like. The partner model does require early and frequent check-ins with larger groups of stakeholders, more time in the Discover + Define phase. Admittedly this can be hard for some who really just want to skip to “the fun part” but thankfully, increasingly, teams are finding the value in front-loading Strategy, spending the time…nerding out, getting it right.

When allies, your internal and agency teams become one. On the agency side we more quickly (and more accurately) understand the business, your motivations, your opportunity, your obstacles. We also better understand You. The humans behind the effort. It's true that investing in strategy and insisting on collaboration will initially create more work - but hang in there! You will be rewarded when the rest of the project takes half the time with half the revisions. Spend the time aligning and defining a path forward, with stakeholders and, in particular, executives.

Our Customers - which increasingly include cross-functional roles and surprisingly hands-on C-Level Executives -  want to work with strategic partners, not vendors. They want someone who can come alongside them and actually talk through a problem or bring new ideas to the table.

There is a way to do this right. We’re happy to dive into the How. Just ask getsmart@thestrategyschool.com.