Hiring a PR agency with Shannyn Lee | On Top of PR podcast

Learn how you can build and maintain a relationship with a PR agency with our guest Shannyn Lee

Guest:

Our episode guest is Shannyn Lee, director of coaching at Win Without Pitching. Shannyn spent a decade in senior marketing and communication roles in Fortune 500 companies before moving to a business development leadership role.

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About Shannyn Lee:

Shannyn spent a decade in senior marketing and communication roles in Fortune 500 companies before moving to a business development leadership role at a well-regarded Seattle design firm. She also spent four years at Catapult New Business where she worked with agencies of various disciplines and size, building and leading their business development programs. Her time on the front lines of agency business development coupled with many informative years on the client side, has given Shannyn a unique perspective into what marketers are looking for in agencies and what agencies must be doing in order to compete and win.

Guest’s contact info and resources:

• Winwithoutpitching.com
• Win Without Pitching Youtube

Sponsored by:

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.
• Burrelles has a special offer for On Top of PR fans. Check it out at burrelles.com/ontopofpr.

About your host Jason Mudd

On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

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Transcript:

- Hello, and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. Today we're joined by my friend and trusted advisor, Shannyn Lee. Her organization is Win Without Pitching. She's a trainer and coach for agencies to help them win clients that are a better fit for them. Today I'm turning the tables on her and asking her what do clients need to know to be able to hire the right agency. I think there's gonna be an interesting conversation as I challenged her in her thinking and she's giving expert insight and based on a lot of experience. So I think you're gonna really benefit from this episode and I wanna thank you for tuning in, and here we go.

- [Narrator] Welcome to One Top of PR with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer.

- Hello, and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host Jason Mudd and I'm glad to be here and today we're joined by Shannyn. Shannyn is with Win Without Pitching and Shannyn it's so good to have you on the show. Welcome. I'm glad you're here.

- Thank you. I'm happy to be here. And as you know, the last time we were together in the same room was in Miami, before this whole crazy pandemic struck so, I'm glad we had that moment to have some margaritas and talk about sales but it's good to be here on the podcast with you.

- Those were some great margaritas weren't they?

- They were. They were so good.

- I could go for a couple of right now.

- No kidding.

- Yeah. So Shannyn, do the audience a favor and just kinda tell them a little bit about your experience and what you do in your role with Win Without Pitching.

- Sure. So I'm the director of coaching at Win Without Pitching and we are a sales training company and we focus on helping creative professionals, marketing services professionals, to feel more confident in the sale and do a better job taking care of their potential clients to be during that sales process to really make sure that there's a good fit and that they can create the most value possible for their clients. So that's what we do. My background is a blend of a decade or so on the client side for companies like AT&T Wireless, Safeco insurance, working in marketing, investor relations, PR, communications roles, where I hired agencies. And then I flipped over to the agency side and worked for a branding and design firm where I did the selling. Met Blair Enns along the way, the founder of Win Without Pitching and through lots of fortunate events ended up becoming his director of coaching. And I've been here for about six years now teaching people how to sell.

- Well, I'll tell you and Blair do a great job and we're thrilled to work with you guys on the regular basis and certainly have improved our process and our, you know, new business efforts here at Axia. And make sure that when we're engaging with potential clients that we're identifying if we're the right fit for them and they're the right fit for us because it has to be a mutual fit or else it won't work. It's kind of like, you know, a lot of people use the illustration of, of a marriage, right? And so if two parties are not a good fit for each other, it's not gonna last. And so we like to avoid getting into the wrong relationships, if that makes sense. So, Shannon help our audience who, you know we sense are mostly on the client side, help them understand what they're gonna learn from our time together today.

- We're gonna try and take the Win Without Pitching approach to selling that we work on with agencies who are trying to sell to you, the client. We're gonna try and flip it on its head for you today to think about why agencies may be doing what they're doing during the sales cycle, how you can be a good partner to kind of meet them at that sales table in a way that brings a lot of just honesty and transparency and conversation, and why maybe some of the things you're asking these firms to do during the sales cycle, isn't like in either of your best interest. And so I'm gonna try to think about the client side a lot and think about the agency side a lot and try to bring them together in a little bit more of a productive and fruitful way to talk about, should we work together, can we help you?

- I love that. That sounds great. I'm already interested in hearing what you have to say, Shannyn so-

- Me too. 'Cause you're challenging me. It's a really cool challenge you've put on the table and I'm excited to get into it because I think everybody will benefit.

- Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, as you're alluding to it's very healthy to turn the tables a little bit, right?

- Yeah.

- Reposition the value proposition and candidly think different about, you know, the inverse, if you will or the opposite of your typical line of thinking. So, Shannyn I'm a brand manager or a chief communications officer, chief marketing officer working at a mid-market to enterprise size company. I'm either currently with an agency, looking for an agency or maybe just considering, should we even be having an external partners. So, kinda speak to me for a minute here, as you know what are some of the best practices you might give or offer to that person that's working on the brand or client side?

- Yeah and I guess it's depending a bit on what you need and what you want if you're that brand manager at that mid-market company. So if you're looking for somebody to help you with an effort around the corporate level brand, for example or maybe a product launch, or maybe a PR initiative, if I'm that brand manager want to be finding an agency, a firm a freelancer or whatever the case may be who has expertise in my business, who has expertise in maybe the market I serve or the demographic I serve or the region that I'm in, along with expertise around whatever problem it is I'm trying to solve; marketing campaign, PR campaign, branding efforts. So I'm looking for somebody that's specialized to start. I don't want a generalist on the case, so to speak.

- Right. So that's your first step is define an expert.

- Hmm mm.

- I can't agree with that many more for sure. And you know, that's one thing that I love about as I've evolved in my role at the agency is having that clarity of what is in our lane and what is a detour, right.

- Yeah.

- And being able to identify that earlier. So, you know, speaking of Miami we had an opportunity in Miami come our way just recently and it just never felt like we were the right agency to give them the best value. And so at some point, you know during that initial conversation earlier on, you know we politely just kind of excused ourselves and said can we send you other people, other contacts we have in the industry who are probably gonna be very excited about this and very experienced about this. But it wasn't until we were in that first meeting and fortunately it was a Zoom meeting as opposed to you know, going down to Miami to get to know them that, you know, it was just very clear that, you know we might be able to win this business but I don't think we'd be the best choice.

- Yep, exactly. And that's another thing that you're looking for honestly. So when you're trying to find that expert you're asking others that, you know, peers, others in the company, friends out there in the world who might they know who have had similar challenges to you and firms that they've engaged with to get help or you're searching on Google and this is a good test actually. I need a brand firm who understands financial services and specifically the millennial market. And you're Googling that. And if a firm is well positioned they should appear high in the search rank. And that tells you something. That tells you that they care, it tells you that they write a lot about their area of expertise and they do a good job of marketing themselves. That's a good sign. So, that's like the next step to it. And if I I'll pick up where you kinda left off there about walking away if it's not the right fit, that's another thing to consider when you're in a conversation with a firm, you want them to be honest with you about can they help you solve this problem or not. And I think a lot of times you can kinda trust your gut here and you can kinda tell if you're being sold to, if they just wanna close the deal-

- Right.

- And they don't really have you and your best interest in mind.

- Sometimes in my experience I've found too when you try to, you know, refer them somewhere else because you're being candid and honest, you know, hey we're not the right fit. This isn't work we're passionate about. We don't have the experience here or, you know, whatever, something just turns us off about the business. Then I feel like it's almost like you can't, you know get rid of them because you've been so radically candid with them they want that and they desire that and they're like, look we need someone like you to help us out. And so I've seen that kinda opposite effect too, whereas like, no, no, no, no, no. We are not gonna be a good fit and it's not a money matter, it's not this or that. It's just, you know, we know in our hearts this is not our focus or our passion area.

- This is a really important thing that you bring up Jason, because what you're doing is you're making yourself more desirable to the client, right? So your power goes up and they take a step towards you,

- Right.

- Instead of a step away. You're creating this healthy tension actually in the sale. And that's a good thing. You in that moment have to decide, well they still see me as having the ability to help them. And you may still hold your ground and say, nope, this just isn't a fit for us because you don't sacrifice your mission. You know what you're the best at and you're not gonna try to, you know solve for something else that maybe isn't in your wheelhouse. But what I would also say is if you come across a client who really sees your abilities and has the vision to see how you might be able to help them even if it's outside of your area of expertise then the next move there is to be honest with that client, hey, okay, like you get that we aren't the expert here and I'm gonna be very transparent with you about that. We think we might be able to get in and make a difference but you're just gonna have to be willing to let this be a bit of an experiment that we're gonna try. Are you okay with that? That's a possibility.

- And what does that do, Shannyn when you ask them that question?

- Well, it forces them to be honest I think. It forces them to really have that gut check of, oh, okay, yeah. They're right. Maybe I don't wanna be a guinea pig. Or no I actually still believe they can pull this off and I wanna give them a chance because we need some different thinking on this 'cause what we're doing just isn't right and I'm not finding another partner who I think can help us.

- All right. That's good. I'm gonna give you an opportunity to explain Win Without Pitching. What does that concept mean and why does it matter to our audience?

- So Win Without Pitching is all about helping that creative professional, marketing professional, PR professional feel more comfortable selling, first of all, and what I mean by that is giving them the freedom and the space to come to the table with you the client, to have a conversation and not be forced into an RFP process, or be forced into this dog and pony show of pitching where they're just presenting, but they're not present, they're not listening, they're not digging to understand your problem to see if they can help. So it is an approach to selling that reverses that kind of power struggle that can often take place between a client and an agency during the sales cycle and it lets that agency lead. It lets that agency show up and be the expert because that's what they're being looked at to do is to be the expert and really guide the sales process to in fact, see if there's a fit and see if it makes sense to work together. And it's a way to also protect agencies from having to do spec work, do a bunch of work for free in order to prove themselves to win the job. That's not fair. That's not right for a lot of reasons and it's taking advantage of the creative profession in our mind. And so we're really on a mission to flip this and try to create a more honest, transparent selling space where the client gets to know the agency better, the agency gets to know the client better and they in kind of full transparency with each other can decide should we keep talking or not?

- That's great. You're reminding me of a few things. One is that the research I've seen shows that most, most client's side folks don't have a lot of experience hiring agencies.

- Yeah.

- So it's something they do one to three times in their career. There are exceptions where people do it all the time but there's a lot of incidences where people just, it's not something they do. And if you've never done it before, you don't really know how to do it well.

- Yeah.

- And so then they tend to lean on procurement models-

- Yep.

- Or what they sense is the right way to go about doing it. And you know, and so I think what we're, what your organization is doing is kind of challenging some of that traditional thinking, some of that, you know, vendor and versus kind of a, you know, a trusted advisor thinking that transpires. And so, you know, if somebody is listening and maybe they're either admitting, I have no idea how to hire an agency whether I've never done it before, or man every time I do it, it's not a good experience. And I think to myself about, you know, the RFP, the dreaded RFP that comes, you know. The client sends it over the wall to the agency the agency gets it and goes, okay there's about 40 hours worth of work. And-

- yeah.

- And the client has no idea that it takes that long to prepare and then they have no idea that you know that 40 hours, you know, every agency they sent this to is working on suddenly becomes a really large number. And so, but then what happens and this is the part that just makes me wanna face palm is you engage these agencies to spend 40 hours preparing and then you're overwhelmed when they send it back over to you, right, the workload of going through those proposals that you're you don't even one, have time to read all of them, right? And two, you feel just buried in work because of it but really all you're doing is reviewing the work that they had to put all that effort into. And so your model tries to take all that away to make it more efficient for the agency, but candidly more importantly, more efficient to the client so they don't have to read these 40 page documents or whatever it might be from three, four or five different providers.

- Yeah. You're 100% right. This approach should make it better for everybody. We don't want it to be hard and onerous on that client either frankly. And I know what you mean by how hard it is to be the client in this situation because I've been in that seat and I've been in, in large organizations where I had to follow a procurement process. And you as the client have so much pressure on you during the day that hiring of a firm to help you with a problem is one of a million things on your plate. And so that's part of it as well. And no you're right, many people haven't been trained in how to go about this process similar to many agencies haven't been trained in how to sell properly. So it's like, let's come together on this and make it easier for everybody. And I think that's part of it is when you come across an agency that understands how to do this they are gonna make it easier for you and you should let them because what they're trying to do is follow a framework of, is there a fit? What is the value we can create? What is it that we need in order to like, continue to move in the process? Who's gonna be a part of the decision, right? Like there's all these elements that come together if you let them lead. The other piece of it too, is you're right, that these agencies are tiny compared to your big corporations in most cases. Billion dollar corporations asking a million dollar a year agency to stop everything they're doing to fill out an RFP, that's a soul crusher. That's gonna cause problems on a lot of levels for the small business.

- Right. Yeah, for sure. Well, Shannyn this is a good time for us to take a quick break and come back on the other side where I'm gonna ask you how might a brand manager avoid the procurement department and go about doing it the way you're recommending. And then of course, we're gonna ask you about that horse that's in the background on your shelf there. So we'll be right back in just a moment.

- [Narrator] You're listening to On Top of PR with your host, Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted advisor to some of America's most admired and fastest growing brands. He is the managing partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social and web strategies for national companies. And now back to the show.

- Welcome back to on top of PR and Shannyn Lee is with us explaining the whole Win Without Pitching model and how it is actually to the benefit of the clients as well as the agencies that they're getting to know. So Shannyn help us understand this idea of, you know possibly circumventing the procurement department when procurement is either the go-to way in your organization or the only way you would know how to go about hiring a outside PR advertising marketing digital agency.

- Okay. So three things come to mind for me. In a lot of organizations people in that brand manager role or whatever those, you know, marketing branding types of roles are, do have some spending authority. And that may be that they can spend up to $49,000 for example, without having to get procurement involved. So understand what your spending authority is and it may be an opportunity for you to get an agency in the door, through a small test project or maybe a paid diagnostic, for example, to really get to the heart of what's going on with whatever challenge you're up against. And it gets some money exchanging hands and prove the value of the agency that way. So that's one idea that I know can work. The other idea is try to educate procurement. I've done this successfully twice when I was on the client side. And one of them was during a commodity paper printing buy for annual reports that we didn't think we had a shot, but we went for it. And we educated the procurement lead as to why you needed to pick the right printer to print the annual report and especially when the CEO wanted his picture to look good in a 100,000 copies of printed annual reports. And we just got well ahead of it and took several months, frankly to educate this procurement lead and we won in the end because he learned something and he was open to it.

- Nice.

- I'm not saying that's always gonna work but it's worth a try.

- [Jason] Yeah, yeah.

- The other thing is employ any and all social capital you have within your organization. If you have good relationships with senior executives go make your case for why you don't wanna run this through procurement. I think you just have to get creative about circumventing when you can.

- Okay, that makes perfect sense to me. You know, I'm kind of thinking through some of your ideas here, or some of your comments and kind of other creative ideas I've seen is where maybe a client, you know, like you said they've got an amount they can spend without procurement. And so then possibly breaking the work up into chunks that those chunks are small enough that, you know you don't have to go through procurement if you do it in parts and pieces. And you know, I've also mindful of, you know I've had clients who say, well, I'm not authorized to do a $10,000 payment. And so again, you could break that into two half payments that they're easily able to authorize. The other thing I would say is I would encourage folks to get to know the agencies that they're thinking about inviting first and start having a conversation. I know for our agency and others that that's the first thing we're looking for is have we had a conversation with these people or these contacts before they just suddenly send us a 60 page, you know, RFP? And if they're not available or accessible we won't even pursue it at all. But what I would prefer to do is get to know them a little bit and say, yeah this business is worth going after, right? Or and on their side, yes this agency is somebody I'm willing to invest the time in getting to know more in seeing a proposal from them. So I think being open to conversations and ideally possibly limiting the number of agencies you've invited based on that pre-qualification versus a cattle call. I know one time a public university invited us to a, you know, proposal Q and A session. And so I just happened to ask, well, how many people did you invite? And they said 68 agencies. And I started packing my stuff up to leave the room you know, and they like, well, what's wrong? And I said, you invited 68 agencies. And I mentioned earlier, each agency that's gonna pursue this is gonna spend 40 hours preparing a response. That's a lot of wasted energy. And when I, and I think I asked them earlier, you know what did you do to pre-qualify the companies? And they said, oh, we just did a search for every agency within such a geographic mile from this location. And that's when I knew it wasn't for us, right Shannyn.

- Yeah, yeah. I think in those moments to the degree that you can be brave you just call out how absolutely ludicrous that is. And you just let them know not only are you wasting so much valuable time on your end but to your point, Jason, add the hours up that you're putting this group of businesses through.

- Right.

- All of those hours could be spent doing something different, right? Like just point out how crazy that is, right.

- Right. It just doesn't make sense.

- Yeah, yeah. All right, so let's talk about the horse in the background here for a second 'cause I keep getting distracted. Is that a childhood toy?

- This is a Briar model horses. Maybe some of you know what these are but I grew up with horses. I'm a horse nut. I still ride horses to this day and that is a model horse that my parents gave to me as a gift one year and I haven't opened the package because the joke started that it was a $10 purchase and then I had it sitting on my office desk at the last company I worked for and people would go by and scratch it out and write a $1,000 and scratch it out and write $25,000 So it just became this joke. But part of it is also it's a very famous horse that I really love a lot and so I just wanna keep him pristine and in his box so that he doesn't get chipped up.

- Sure. Well, thank you for sharing that story and a little bit more about you and your personal passion Shannyn.

- Yeah, you bet.

- Yeah, so as we're starting to wrap up a little bit here do you have any additional thoughts you wanted to share?

- I think the other thing that is really important is being able to have a really candid conversation about money. I think we all need to talk about money earlier and more often and let that agency know, like here's the funds that we have allocated for this project. It doesn't need to be some poker game that you're in the middle of. Like, we just need to know what's the budget. You have a budget, you need a budget, the agency needs a budget in order to do the work. And have an eye towards watching if that agency is thinking about value that they can create versus just billing you based on time and materials.

- Yes, yes.

- This is a big tell.

- Yeah. Yeah, I really like that. And if I can kind of share some advice based on experience it would be that it's okay and actually preferred to tell the agency, you know we don't have approval to pursue this yet. Like we're just doing initial exploratory conversations because I can tell you as an agency when you hear that later, you're, you know it's not what you wanted to hear, right? It's not that this was just a concept that we had that we were in early exploration. Thank you for the proposal and the detailed work that you did, right? And so, you know when that doesn't come up during the conversation that's really not a way to build a long-term relationship.

- It's not and a smart agency that really knows how to sell and suss out if you should keep talking is gonna ask you a lot of those questions early. So when they do it's because they have a reason, it's because they don't wanna over allocate a lot of resources to a sale that isn't going anywhere. That's a smart business. That's the kind of business you wanna work with.

- That's right, that's right. And Shannyn also, I've noticed sometimes that, you know clients and brand managers or prospects, you know, they want a proposal, right, and they just want you to send it. They don't really wanna invest in the process, in the conversation that comes with that. But yet I found that the clients who really want you to walk them through the proposal and your recommendations are the ones who ultimately get the best product whether it's from us or from someone else because they didn't just get quotes and assume what some of those things mean or send an email to ask questions. But there was really an opportunity for the agency to walk through the rationale and their thinking and their strategy behind even the recommendations that they brought. So you're more of a neutral third party. Can you kinda walk through the benefit of doing that versus just receiving responses or bids?

- Yeah. I think that a document never can speak for itself and especially when it comes time in the sale to talk about the money, how are we gonna get this done? There should be a serious conversation and you should let that firm have their time to share and explain and answer your questions 'cause you're about to make a financial and time and risk commitment on some levels. And I think the other thing is the reason oftentimes clients don't wanna let that happen is because they've been burned in the past and they've opened access to the decision-making team and the agency has come in and just sort of like not done a good job and gone on and on and made that, that internal stakeholder sort of look bad so I can get sometimes why they protect the internal decision making team and serve as a gatekeeper. If you've had that bad experience share that and ask that agency, okay, I can get my head around letting you walk through the proposal with the team. Can you give me a dry run? What are you gonna say? Can we partner on this to make sure that you know what the watch outs for, what this person might be sensitive to? Come at it together so that you're all walking in that room knowing kind of, what's gonna be said so you're not caught off guard.

- And what I think what we're both describing is a more collaborative process,

- Yep.

- Right? Versus more of a order taking and, you know a commodity quote kind of process. So what's the thin line or the fine line between, you know, spec work and pitching and then having a series of collaborative conversations between the agency and the client?

- For me, it's a really clear line. The minute you start giving ideas away without getting paid for it, that's when you need to stop. It's one thing to have a series of conversations and share your opinions, your belief your experience in your area of expertise but the minute you start thinking about that client and addressing their challenges that's when you need to start getting paid. So like, it's just a clear line to me.

- Hm mm. And so to that end, I know your organization advocates for four questions and you know, or four conversations I should say.

- Hmm mm, hmm mm.

- Could you summarize those four conversations?

- Sure. The first is the probative conversation. This is what I was talking about earlier in our conversation where this is where the agency's not a part of the conversation yet. You're finding out about them through their thought leadership, through the research you're doing, through good recommendations of others that have worked with them. So it's that agent of their speaking on their behalf without them being present that's how, you know, they're the expert. Then you make the call and say, I need help can we talk? Then the qualifying conversation happens. You both need to be qualifying each other. You both need to be deciding, is this the right fit to help me get my challenge solved? Once you decide that then you move to what's called the value conversation. This is where it becomes really fun and frankly, really valuable. It's the value conversation where that agency is exploring what is the most potential value they can create for you? And they're doing this by understanding your vision, by figuring out what are the metrics we're gonna use to deem this successful and then what might be a fair range of compensation that we can work within to go back to the office and think about how might we solve this and then come back to you in the closing meeting which is the fourth and final meeting and present these options to you for how we might work together. The closing meeting is facilitating a choice and picking the choice that makes the most sense for you and then moving forward to do the work.

- I love that. It sounds so simple.

- It does, yeah.

- And you know, it's one of those things. You know there's some things in life that we don't have to go and get trained on or get certified in or to get a license to be able to do, right? One of those is always jokingly, you know having children and certainly one of those is getting into, you know the sale and buying of services from different companies. So, Shannyn this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for sharing and bringing your smarts to the table. If our audience wants to connect with you what is their best way to reach?

- I think the best thing to do is just to go to winwithoutpitching.com. You're gonna find loads of free resources, thought leadership, lots of information on what we do and then you'll also get to a YouTube channel that we have if you wanna ask a question or listen to some responses of questions that we've received. I put one actually in LinkedIn today that Jason had asked.

- That's right.

- So that's the best place to go.

- Excellent. Shannyn again, many thanks for joining us. I really appreciate you helping our audience stay on top of PR and we look forward to staying in touch. And again, thanks for all you do and thanks for you and your team at Win Without Pitching.

- Thank you, Jason. This was fun. I appreciate you putting a new challenge in front of me to think about how can we best help that client as well. Thank you.

- Yeah. That's what we're focused on, right, is helping clients and brands succeed in the very competitive marketplace.

- That's right.

- Yeah. Well, this has been another episode of, On Top of PR. We are thrilled to have had Shannyn on the show with us. And again, many thanks to Shannyn for participating. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with one of your colleagues. And if you have a topic you'd like to hear more about from us, simply just contact us and let us know or leave a comment. We're constantly listening for your feedback and we're always eager to help. Again, this has been Jason Mudd, helping you stay on top of PR.

- [Narrator] This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and check out past shows at OnTopOfPR.com.