By Ross MacRae, CEO, AgencySource
Keeping in touch with former colleagues is a great practice for any marketer, as success in advertising is often based on not only what you know, but who you know.
Within the last five years or so, many brands began setting up “in-house” production teams, and a growing number of former advertising agency producers and creatives are moving brand-side as a result. Doing business with a person you once worked alongside is a decided leg up in any client dynamic, and most agency folks would welcome the chance to collaborate with a former colleague. In an advertising environment where industry moves happen every day, former colleagues may become clients or cross-agency collaborators. Setting a goal to stay in contact with valued contacts – while it’s an idea that most would agree with enthusiastically – is often tougher to implement than one would think.
In cases when agency creatives move brand-side, their former colleagues – and other agency new business teams – may not receive notice of their new contact information, especially if they weren’t close personal friends. In many cases, the employees at their prior company would love to continue working together in some capacity, as agencies still have to collaborate with brand teams, but this is a hard goal to reach without correct updated contact information. During a time of rapid hiring shifts, it’s important to implement strategies to prevent former colleague relationships from falling by the wayside.
Keeping-in-touch, yearbook style, helps agencies maintain strong – and ideally, personal – relationships with brand decision-makers, especially if a former employee is now at the brand they aim to attract. Agency leads need to retain these brand contacts so they can deliver on long-term sales strategies, forecast industry shifts, and plan their new business steps accordingly. All too often though, agency marketers see a colleague move to a coveted brand-side position, and they immediately want to get in touch.
Conversely, a colleague may leave the agency and move to the brand side, becoming all but forgotten, until a moment arises when former co-workers realize they urgently need to contact or pitch that brand and have no immediate contacts there. It’s unfortunate when old work friends suddenly realize they no longer have an email address for someone they know and only that person’s personal email is displayed on LinkedIn. Being busy and stretched thin themselves, that well-meaning former colleague may intend to stay in touch but the scramble to track down contact information after every shift proves a gargantuan (and ultimately unrealistic) task.
Fortunately, even personal contacts and business acquaintances can be assisted by technology. As lightning-fast as the realization that a departing executive is no longer someone you have an email for, the tech in question can find the exact coordinates you seek.
An advertising-specific contact resource, combined with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, commonly used in sales departments, can help track agency-to-brand movements – and a vast array of other valuable industry information – gives a wide range of users, from coordinator-level to the C-suite a way to reliably S-I-T (Stay In Touch). Agencies investing in such tools and making them available to their staff beyond sales teams allow valuable connections to stay intact even during the most tumultuous season of hiring and moves.
CRMs are designed and tailored to bring the insight needed to adapt, strategize, and ensure continuity, with data brought right to the users’ fingertips. Fortifying talent and client relationships, specialized CRM tools place the thought of “I’d like to stay in touch,’ into decisive action – allowing contact information to be updated at the speed of a new hire.
