How to be a better client

Welcome to Spark, a newsletter from Vivace. We curate and publish the most interesting thinking and ideas from our community on themes ranging from business and finance to culture and creativity. Send pitches and feedback to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Hello Spark reader,

This week we’re lucky to be featuring Eileen Lynch—our former Marketing Leader and CMO at Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv respectively, as well as a current partner at Broadridge, where she leads Investor Communications Marketing. Eileen’s marketing leadership has been inspirational for many of us here at Vivace, so we’re thrilled to be able to share some of her insights in Spark.

Throughout her career, Eileen has led large-scale, global marketing at leading organizations, across Brand, Marketing Strategy and Planning, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Organization Design and Performance Measurement functions. She shared her thoughts on agency relationships and being a better client with former colleague and friend of Vivace, Katharine Ramsden.

—Ryan

How to be a better client

Over your career in brand you’ve worked with many agencies and partners. What are the hallmarks of a good partnership?

Great partnerships start with a shared vision, agreement on priorities (i.e. are we both solving for the same challenge?) and respect for what each team brings to the table.

Accountability from the client side requires what you would expect: knowing the customer and the competition, deeply understanding the business challenge and the marketing opportunity and, importantly, ensuring your leadership is aligned with the opportunity at hand.

Identifying the right agency partner requires careful consideration and an appreciation of both the art and the science of creating great work:

Is the agency culturally aligned with us?

Can I see this agency as a natural extension of my own team?

Does the agency admire our brand and are they excited and passionate about creating great work that will help us win in the market?

Those intangibles are in addition to technical skills: knowing your industry and your business, knowing how to create amazing narratives, and understanding the channels and platforms that will accelerate your success.

What are some of the critical challenges for organizations that you have worked on with agency partners?

The financial and risk business of Thomson Reuters was split off and became Refinitiv. That required a new brand, a new identity system, a new customer proposition and narrative, and a redesign of our product portfolio. We brought together the expertise of a few different agencies, working as part of a holistic team, all focused on igniting the power of brand to drive financial value.

Another challenge I have tackled with trusted agency partners is the simplification of a GTM product portfolio, ensuring customers can quickly and easily find the products and solutions that will help them win in the market. That meant cleaning up the portfolio, building a simple architecture that bundled like-minded offerings and creating a naming strategy that drove consistency and clarity in how products were presented to the marketplace.

There are countless examples of agency work focused on simplifying our digital offerings; creating state of the art end-to-end digital experiences; simplifying how customers and prospects learn about our company, our products, our thought leadership and success stories; or even how customers service their accounts—all without leaving integrated digital ecosystem.

Some of the most interesting agency work I’ve done is around Customer Experience design. It required an agency with a deep understanding of how customers interact with us at every key touchpoint. We started by defining what we wanted the experience to be and then analyzed user engagement across all touch points. We identified the points where we could simplify and align experiences, enhancing productivity while engaging and amazing the customer.

What are some of the keys to success when managing agencies? 

Start with a team of people that you respect, understand the skills they bring to the table.

Ensure you are all working towards the same end goal. Winning in the marketplace aces winning at Cannes.

Hire grown ups. Have adult conversations. Be comfortable being honest and direct with each other

Know what the agency is good at. Hire agencies and talent that can give you what you need.

Be sure you are giving them clear and actionable information they can build on: is the strategy clear? Is the brief specific and compelling?

Have some fun. Create an environment where the team is excited to be engaged and do their best work.

Give them room to think and execute.

And equally, how do you manage and align the needs and expectations of internal stakeholders and teams, alongside your agency partners?

The most important first step is to have internal alignment and agreement on what you are solving for. Manage internal expectations—be clear on who is ultimately responsible for making decisions and keep those people engaged.

Listen closely to feedback and, at the same time, be prepared to fight for good work.

In your experience, where are the lost opportunities between agencies and clients?

Lost opportunities are usually the result of lack of alignment. Be sure both parties are focused on the same outcome. Sometimes the lost opportunity is good work that died along the way because of hundreds of small cuts.

Eileen Lynch is the former Group Head of Marketing at London Stock Exchange Group, where she co-led the transition and integration of LSEG and Refinitiv communications and marketing. Before joining LSEG, she was the Chief Marketing Officer at Refinitiv, and earlier in her career, she led Corporate Marketing at Thomson Reuters and Merrill Lynch.

Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Send us your shout-outs and strong opinions to include in next week’s edition at [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace, a global B2B creative studio and consultancy that helps businesses drive meaningful brand and commercial impact. Get in touch if you’d like to chat with any of the team. Have a great week ahead.