Comment by bigiain
12 years ago
Wrong wrong wrong! Even if you don't want to participate in their way of doing business - there's an _enormous_ amount of very high value skills you can learn from them.
"A bunch of salespeople in suits tossing around buzzwords so they can land a job taking advantage of a big company's big budget. Everything is a pitch or a comp or a big lead."
That is indeed exactly the difference between most "agencies" and most small design firms/freelancers.
The agency has salespeople who know how to value and sell the work a freelancer can do, for an order of magnitude or so more money that that freelance will negotiate for themselves. You might think "I could give that company what they want in a few days with WordPress, a great theme I'm already very familiar with, and a solid day's worth of graphic design and css futzing - I'd do it for a friend for a few grand, but they're a big company so I'll see if I can get away with charging them $8 or $10 grand…". And you'd quite likely lose the job to the agency who comes in talking about Business Goals and Website Goals, Audience Demographics, Conversions, SMART metrics, Information Architecture, User Interface and User Experience design, Content Inventories, Conversion focused and SEO focused copywriting, Social Media integration, broader alignment with current marketing activity, leveraging existing business relationships and co-branding key messages - they'll spend two weeks (billing by the hour) talking to key stakeholders and decision makers at the client (while dressed, as you point out, in smart suits), then submit a proposal for a $280,000 project and, in case the budget doesn't stretch that far, a simpler $150,000 version. And they'll also have the known-effective "sales closer" tactics, probably something like "we've got a few slots open in out pipeline next quarter, I'm pretty sure if we could get this approved and signed before the end of the month I could talk finance into a 12% discount on a full upfront payment…"
The _good_ agencies will actually deliver a lot more business value that a freelancer with a good design eye, a folderful of WordPress themes, and a GoDaddy hosting reseller account.
A _bad_ agency will just have search/replaced the company name in their previous pitch powerpoint decks and web project proposal docs - and deliver a not-very-varefully-planned canned-theme WordPress site anyway, probably farmed out for $8k to some freelancer with the promise of heaps of future work and some great exposure…
Knowing which clients are going to get $100k+ value out of a project, then pitching a proposal based on value delivered, rather than hours worked. _That's_ what a successful agency does. (And what most freelancers have very little idea how to do.)
No, not really. From my anecdotal experience, which does include many a project exceeding the amounts you cited, it usually goes like this (paraphrased):
Agency's army of spineless sales people [1] spends a lot of time ass licking many people, one of them happens to love his anus tickled in that manner, then he dumps a bag of money to them, they spend 90% of that money pumping ads, and 10% on development of what's supposed to masquerade as a 'marketing campaign'. Anus-tickle-lover still gets a nice spreadsheet at the end of the month ('Yay, profits!') and they all live happily ever after.
Well, not all. In-house developers crook their spine to the will of their masters and get an occassional team-building event paid for, and outsourced developers get eaten alive in the witch's cabin.
[1] It helps if you're a handsome woman. A fact, sir. No citation needed. Desired even.
Heh - I suspect the main difference between your description of the process and mine is that I'm in a "third cup of coffee, should be on my way to the office" timezone, and I'm guessing your in a "finished at the office, savouring the third beer" timezone, and hence we've got slightly different sates of mind and social inhibitions. But I'm sure we both know exactly what each other is describing.
(Surely you have seen the occasional great non-literal-ass-licking salespeople working for genuinely great marketing agencies? And agencies that deliver _spectacular_ word and achive magnificent results for clients? I'm quite proud to have been told I came in second with pitches against a few agencies I'm particularly impressed by in my small space here… But I will beat them one day, Oh yes…)
Upvote for not taking this seriously.
But no, I don't have office, don't usually drink (can't, destroyed a bunch of parts of digestive system).
occasional great non-literal-ass-licking salespeople No. To be perfectly honest, no. Not once. They're pretty disgusting to me.
genuinely great marketing agencies Sure. Rarely, but yes. They don't do FB Ads and AdWords tho.
I'm quite proud to have been told I came in second with pitches against a few agencies I'm particularly impressed by in my small space here… But I will beat them one day, Oh yes…) I'm happy for you being happy and enthusiastic. I was once too. But, I'll take the liberty to advise you - leave the space. Immediately. It's a sulphuric pit. You don't age well there.
Well, all that doesn't hold water unless you're on of them. Are you?
Shhh, nobody was supposed to know landing huge-ass contracts involves sucking dick. On a serious note, I guess bigiain's point was that freelancers that know better usually have no clue about bringing business value to the table.
Good point. The internet is a wonderland!