One of the most formative experiences of my account management career was when as a relatively green account director, I joined a network agency and was put on a high-profile account the agency had just won.
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The Context

The clients, burnt out by bad experiences with their other agencies but facing a highly competitive landscape, were eager to work with us and briefs were coming in fast and furious from different stakeholders and business units. Whilst the overall scope was for digital campaign work, we were getting anything from retail ads to data analytics briefs and digital platform projects.

On the agency side, we were severely understaffed, with a young team and rapidly declining morale. Exhausting 80-to-100-hour workweeks had become the norm. This perfect storm of demanding clients, resource shortages, and internal politics resulted in inconsistent and sometimes subpar work. To compound matters, some projects were high-profile, leaving no room for failure. The pressure to deliver revenue clashed with the internal web of politics and processes that hindered our progress.

How do you rally and motivate your team in such challenging circumstances?

It wasn’t an overnight transformation, but we slowly but surely implemented strategies both with the client and within our team / organization. Some strategies took up to 12 months to stabilize. However, our efforts eventually led to our recognition as one of the client's most valued agency partners in our first 3 years of partnership and secured us a more extensive role in a subsequent AOR pitch.

Strategies for Motivating Your Team in Challenging Times

The strategies can be divided into two streams; externally, what we implemented with clients and internally what we implemented within the team.

What We Implemented with Clients

The following are initiatives we worked through with the clients. They were important from a team perspective because they helped restore a sense of control to the team (that had been feeling increasingly disempowered by the cycle of work) and they helped the team and clients get on the same page.

Improve and Optimize the Brief Process

As mentioned, briefs were coming in fast and furious and for different types of work. A lot of briefs were beyond our stated scope and the speed and velocity of work was through the roof. Internally resources were being drained trying to do different types of work. This led to multiple client revisions and client dissatisfaction.

Analyzing this, we realized, the root cause was UNCLEAR briefs. We broke down the different types of briefs we were getting and set out to standardize different types of briefs for different of work. We then set aside regular time to educate both agency and client teams on the different types of briefs to use and how to use them. Fortunately, the agency developed an entire library of templates we could leverage and customize for the clients’ requirements. It was not perfect, but the brief standardization process went some way towards reducing revisions and ensuring the client and agency teams were on the same page.

Manage Multiple Rounds of Revisions

On larger scopes or fixed, clients can take for granted that their agencies accept that multiple rounds of revisions are par for the course. I agree in some cases, multiple rounds of changes are inevitable. For example, it our situation, the retail side of the client’s business meant that changes might be required last minute as the client team responded in almost real-time to competitor offers. However, this really hurts the agency’s resources or financial position if it is a problem across all work.

Internally, we analyzed the profitability of each brief and the rounds of revisions each brief went through. On certain projects where the number of rounds of revision were excessive, we proactively went back to the client to discuss compensation for the additional resources spent on the jobs. These were often not easy conversations. But when they saw the amount of work done (we would print out the presentations and correspondence – reinforcing why keeping black and white is critical!), most clients were happy to come to an agreement to pay for some of the additional work, if not all of it.

Set and Enforce Expectations on Urgent/Last-Minute Work Demands

Another related issue we tackled was urgent work demands. It became very common for us to get client requests at 5pm on a Friday. This often resulted in us either pushing for the team to put in overtime over the weekend or having to source for additional freelance resources to do the work. Cost-wise we were not penalizing the clients with an extra fee for urgent/last-minute work. At the same time, we were incurring additional costs on our end be it for bringing people into the office to work or paying freelancers. From a morale-perspective, this just added to draining the team.

We managed this in 2 ways:

1. We coached and empowered the team to not REACT but RESPOND to such client requests. Important questions to ask in these situations:

What is the deliverable actually needed?
What is happening on the actual deadline that requires the deliverable to be in place?
Who needs to see the deliverable by the deadline?
Is the client available to providing feedback during the weekend/urgent period?
Are the costs approved?

2. We introduced and communicated to all clients a levy for urgent, weekend, and holiday work
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Part 2 of Motivating Your Team in Challenging Times