Strengthening your PR agency’s role in business decisions

Agency Leadership Podcast

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss PR professionals wanting a seat at the table when it comes to business decision-making.

They explore the need for PR professionals to build relationships across departments, understand business dynamics, and communicate openly with other stakeholders.

The conversation emphasizes the value of collaboration, learning from each other, and navigating interdepartmental challenges to drive business growth and improve client relationships.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “You should have relationships with people from different departments, and you should not bristle when they want to give you input on things because they look at things through a different lens and all it’s going to do is help you.”
• Chip Griffin: “The vast majority of PR folks, in house or agency side, don’t know enough about business to be true business strategists.”
• Gini Dietrich: “If you can have an open enough mind to invite them to your table, to be able to have those conversations and to listen, I think you’re going to have the opportunity to grow budgets, grow relationships, grow trust, grow all of the things that you need to do to be able to maintain clients for a really long time.”
• Chip Griffin: “You can have an opinion as a consumer, as a user, as a general member of the target audience. But that is different from professional advice based on expertise.”

Related

• Handling clients who disagree with your agency’s advice
• 7 reasons clients ignore advice from your agency

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’d like a seat at the table.

Gini Dietrich: Okay, no problem.

Chip Griffin: Actually, I guess I’m already sitting at a desk here. And so I guess we have a seat at the table with each other at least.

Gini Dietrich: You’d have to move the puppy, but you could sit at this, in this chair at this table.

Chip Griffin: Well, I’d also have to travel like a thousand miles, so. Little things.

Gini Dietrich: Well, fair, yeah. You can have a seat at this table.

Chip Griffin: Well, thank you. You’re welcome. I appreciate that. But no, we are going to be talking about a seat at the table because that is something that PR pros, not just in the agency world, but in house and all of that, are almost always advocating for.

I hear over and over again, you know, we, you need to give the PR folks, the communicators, a seat at the table for big business decisions so that they can be in on the advice. And at the same time, I’ve observed that most PR folks bristle when non PR people want to offer their input on PR activities, right?

So if the CFO or the accounting team or the product team or the sales team wants to weigh in with the in house communicators or with the PR agency, they’re like, Hey, we’re the experts. Leave us alone. So I thought it would be worth exploring this a little bit, both from the perspective of how do you, and should you be involved in business decisions?

And also, how should you react when others want to participate in your decision making and your activities?

Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny because Muckrack just released their state of measurement report and I’m doing some content on it right now that hasn’t, that’ll be published in a couple of weeks. But one of the findings was that they are, that most communicators are and marketers to some, a certain extent, are creating a measurement reports in silos.

And they’re not talking to the executives. So they’re not talking to the finance team and they’re not talking to the sales team. And communicators aren’t talking to the marketing team and vice versa. And so. You’re, you’re doing this and you’re reporting metrics in this silo that doesn’t make sense for the business.

So extrapolate that out. If you’re doing that, why would you expect to have a seat at the table if you’re not willing to have relationships with sales and with finance and with HR and with the executive team to be able to do even that, let alone strategy, right? So these are the kinds of things that I think we have to be thinking about is… first of all, you should have relationships with those people and you should not bristle when they want to give you input on things because they have a different, they look at things through a different lens and all it’s going to do is help you.

Are there going to be times where you sort of roll your eyes inside your head and, and because they, what they’re telling you is not going to work? Sure. Yeah, like for sure. But you should have relationships with people from those teams. If you want a seat at the table, and you want to measure the right kinds of things, and you want to be taken seriously.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think you really have to start with being open to dialogue and encouraging those other departments or stakeholders to be open to dialogue with you. And so that means you both have to be in a mode of listening and understanding. And that will absolutely help you in the work that you’re doing in PR.

I think we also need to understand, frankly, what our own limits are. Because one of the other things that I’ve observed is that a lot of PR folks feel like they ought to be giving business advice. And the number of agencies that I’ve encountered in the last couple of years who have said to me, Well, you know, we’re really not just PR strategists, we’re really business strategists.

And really, we take a much broader view, and that’s why we get hired. Let me just say that the vast majority of PR folks, in house or agency side, don’t know enough about business to be a true business strategist.

Gini Dietrich: Correct.

Chip Griffin: And that, that’s just a cold, hard truth.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so if you’re going to be offering that advice, you need to be doing it from a position where you actually understand what you’re doing and what the implications of it are. Because you may see it one way, but you don’t have the same knowledge that’s on the other side of the table.

The same is true for you. So when someone comes to you and says, you ought to pitch this to the Wall Street Journal, they’ll, they’ll love it. They’ll take it for tomorrow’s paper. And you say, well, I hear what you’re saying, but… So you need to be ready for that same reaction when you come in, particularly if you’re someone who, you know, you don’t necessarily think in business and financial terms on a day to day basis. Which frankly, most agency owners, not just small agency owners, but most even mid sized agency owners are not really thinking about P& Ls and business tactics and all of those things in the, in the same way that their clients are. And so you need to be really careful about understanding what is the limit of your expertise so that you’re not, you’re not going so far outside your lane that you lose credibility.

Gini Dietrich: It’s kind of like the 25 year old life coaches. I’m sorry, you’re a life coach? You’re 25 years old. What, what are you gonna coach on? Right? You haven’t lived yet. See, it’s the same kind of thing, and I know I’ve told this story before, but for about 10 years I sat on the, on the board of an organization here in, in Chicago that was very financial oriented.

And so the other members, the other board members were accountants, CPAs, there was an HR person and me. And for, we would, we’d have quarterly half day meetings and for three hours of the meeting, it was all, because it was a, of an accounting firm, it was all financials. And I used to sit in those meetings with just like deer in the headlights kind of look because I was like, I have no idea what’s happening here. And then they always reserve the last hour for, for me, but you know, those first three hours I had to sort of endure. And in the beginning, I would take notes furiously on terms that I didn’t understand, or things that they were talking about that I didn’t understand.

And then I would come back to my desk, and I would Google, and I would research, and I would learn. And then I’d go to the next quarterly meeting, and there’d be something else new. But after about two years, I started to really understand what it was that they were talking about, and I understood business growth and business development in a different way, because I was surrounded by these finance people.

And I, I always encourage people to do the same sort of thing. You don’t necessarily need to be on the board of an organization, but perhaps you have, you have a mentor who’s in accounting. Or you have a mentor who’s a leader at a different organization. Like, find people that you can surround yourself with so that you begin to understand how businesses grow, what kinds of things, like I I’m sitting on a board of another organization right now.

And it’s really fun to watch the CEO because he has it perfected, this formula perfected on how they grow. And he knows exactly if we do this, this and this, we’re going to reach X in revenue. He knows exactly. And he also knows what hurdles they’re going to have to get over. And so those kinds of key learnings, especially for a professional services firm that can’t be that exacting, it’s really, it’s, it opens up your eyes and it teaches you things that you wouldn’t necessarily get running your own business.

So find people that you can surround yourself with that will give you that kind of education so that you can sit at the table and understand what they’re talking about and provide counsel from your lens to help the organization grow.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, there’s absolutely huge value in improving your own knowledge and understanding of business concepts.

It’ll help you in your business. It helps you in the advice that you’re able to give clients. It helps you in refining your own communications strategies, frankly, because you understand how it all interacts in a better way. It’s also one of the best arguments for specialization as an agency. Because if you are working with similar types of businesses or organizations on an ongoing basis, you start to understand the vocabulary, the challenges, the opportunities.

You understand the mechanics of how the businesses and organizations work. And all of that helps you. So there’s, there’s a huge value to that. And I want to be clear. I am not in any way suggesting that you don’t have anything to contribute to the conversation when it comes to business decisions. I think PR absolutely has things to contribute.

But you need to contribute from your area of expertise and not go in and tell people, this is how the product should be changed. Right? Because, ultimately, that’s not advice, that’s an opinion. Right. And there is an important difference. You can have an opinion as a consumer, as a user, as a general member of the, the target audience.

But that is different from professional advice based on expertise. Both have value, but there is a big difference in both how you would communicate that and how it will be received. Yep. And so if you are focusing on how you can convey your perspective, understand the difference between those two.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s really smart.

And you know, one of the things that to, to the start of this recording, which is, you know, we say we want a seat at the table, we want a seat at the table, we want a seat at the table, but we’re not willing to do the extra work to be able to get there. So figure out what it is that your organization, your client’s organizations do to grow.

One of the things that I do is I have at least a twice a month phone call or Zoom meeting with the VP of sales for all of our clients. And the reason I do that is because I can get an insight into what they’re working with, what they’re struggling with, what their prospects are saying, and how we might be able to help, right?

So, those conversations are invaluable and my team will always be like, I don’t understand why you’re having these conversations. And I’m, and I explained that it gives us the insight that we need to be able to help them grow further. And it also provides opportunities for me to say, Oh, you know what? Why don’t we do X, Y, and Z and, and then we can, we grow budget because when I can go back to the CEO and say, Hey, The VP of sales and I were having this conversation and we think we might be able to do this or we’d like to test this.

You almost always get extra budget to try that kind of stuff. So it gives you an opportunity to be able to, to grow the client as well. So it’s just, it’s not a bad practice. Yes, it takes some time. Yes, you have to learn all of the things, right. And we all are all meeting’ed out, but I do it twice a month.

I don’t do it every week. And it provides me the opportunity to just look at, at things in a new way that I wouldn’t necessarily see because I don’t have a sales lens.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I know that there’s huge value in those kinds of conversations and, and the more that you open yourself up to that, the more that you’re willing to give a seat at your table to some of these other folks, the more willing they will be to not only give you that seat, but to listen to you.

And so that means we have to be willing to listen even to things that we think are kind of crazy. We need to control our impulse to roll our eyes at least right in their face. You know, after we hang up from the zoom call, we can be like, Oh my God, I really cannot believe…

Gini Dietrich: Cannot get this in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow.

Chip Griffin: No. But you need to, to treat it respectfully and you need to help educate them, not in a condescending you don’t know anything about what I do kind of way, which is often the immediate impulse when someone asks for something, because we know people ask for crazy stuff when it comes to PR and marketing. We know that they just don’t have a grasp for how long it takes to do things or, or any of that. And that’s fine. We need to help educate them, but we need to do it in a way that is respectful of them.

Because they bring expertise to the table too. They bring valid advice and opinions to the table too. And it does, what we do matters to that. And, and if we’re, if we’re doing what we think is great from a PR perspective, that’s fantastic. But we’re not going to succeed if it’s not driving other things in the business.

So we need to have that strong relationship. And so I, I love that you, you’re talking to folks outside of the communications team at your own clients, right? That is a perfect example of what agencies should be looking for more ways to do. Even if occasionally you hear things that you don’t want to hear. Because it’s, it’s useful to know that that’s what they’re saying, right?

It does me no good to know that, you know, the sales team is having a whisper campaign after I’ve already been fired, right? If the sales team is agitating about how bad we’re doing our jobs, if we’re doing marketing and creating leads, or if we’re in, earned media and, and they don’t feel like what we’re doing is helping them.

I want to know that as soon as possible. Yep. Because I can counter that. Or adjust my strategies, or adjust my reporting, or do something. If I only find out after my contract’s ended, what good has that done me?

Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Yeah. I think one of the things, too, that you start to learn is how, what’s the word I want?

Protective? Different departments are of their own fiefdom, because we’re human beings, right? And it, I think it gives you some valuable insight into how, exactly what you just said, you can report results. Because, we had a situation a couple of years ago where the VP of sales and I were working really well together and we were generating a ton of qualified leads. But the sales team wasn’t, wasn’t converting them.

And so I was reporting on all of these leads that we were generating, qualified leads that we were generating. And then there was this huge drop off when the, at the conversion point. And sales felt like we were blaming them and in my reporting, which I wasn’t, I was just showing the, the data, right? And what I discovered is that while they were qualified, they were too small, the VP of sales felt it was too small for them, for those, for his team to follow up on. And so instead of what, what we came to eventually, it was hard, but what we came to eventually is creating a DIY kind of process for those kinds of leads so that we could continue to generate those kinds of leads, but they would create their own, they would go through their own process.

And then the sales team could focus on higher level, bigger types of clients. Had we not, had I not had such a good relationship with the VP of sales where we had, I mean, we had some down and dirty drag out fights where I was like, you’re not converting and he’s like, these are not the right leads. And we like, we were both banging heads and we were really stubborn, but we finally came to this conclusion that there was an opportunity for us to create a whole new path for sales.

Through some of the content that we were creating and the, the journey that we had created. So we wouldn’t have gotten to that and we probably would have been fired had I not worked through that frustration with that VP of sales.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I mean, it’s a normal dynamic in any business organization that sales blames the product or service delivery people or the marketers for producing leads, you know, it’s always someone else.

Nobody ever jumps up, the PR agencies included, and said, Oh, I’m Yeah. I kind of sucked at what I did last quarter. That’s, that’s why things are where they are. Everybody always says that they’re doing the best that they can. And everybody, by and large, is doing the best that they can. It’s those conversations you have with those other stakeholders where you can figure out, to your point, how you can make those little adjustments

that don’t even, a lot of times they don’t even require a lot of effort that can improve the overall outcome. But if both sides aren’t willing to come and have an open conversation and both sides aren’t willing to make change based on those conversations, you’ll never get there. And so I don’t care if the organization that you’re working with, they all think PR is stupid.

They think you’re doing a horrible job. Treat them with respect. Treat them as if what everything they’re saying is credible. It will help you in the long run and you will get better results if you are the bigger person and you walk into those conversations and try to have them openly and honestly. And yeah, you take whatever arrows come.

I mean, it’s going to happen.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I really like what you said about inviting them to our table. So if you can, if you can have an open enough mind to invite them to your table, to be able to have those conversations and to listen, I think you’re going to have the opportunity to grow budgets, grow relationships, grow trust, grow all of the things that you need to do to be able to maintain clients for a really long time.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, look, I, I always say this: Clients, they’re like kids. You’ve got to lead by example. And so, you know, if you want your kids to start sharing food, you have to offer to share your food with them first. Share your food with your clients. It’s awesome. Share your food with the sales team, with the product team, with whomever it is who would like to offer, the CFO, whoever would like to offer their opinion and perspective, Listen openly, share your food.

Gini Dietrich: I love it. I think that’s really good advice. Let them have a seat at your table first.

Chip Griffin: So with that, I’m now hungry, so I’m gonna have to go have some lunch. Me too. So that will bring to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And that’s Olivia Benson, and I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.