- Type of work is agreed too long in advance
- Volume of deliverables is set for too long a period
- Style of work is agreed before you’ve had a chance to learn about one another
- Meeting time devoted to activity reviews
- Lengthy paper reports that nobody reads
- Bargaining about the value of time spent vs work done
- A risky endevour (it’s a lot of cash to shell out on a regular basis)
- Something that needs to be directly linked to your sales efforts
- A constantly moving feast of activity
- In need of constant measurement, adjustment and tweaking
- Everything we do is a ‘Program’ (a ‘Marketing Acceleration Program‘ in fact)
- This program is geared to do one thing: move you forward
- We only ever plan on a maximum of 90 days activity
- We only ever ask for 90 days worth of funding (and so share your financial risk – if you’re successful within 90 days, then we are too)
- We only ever commit 30 days of activity to paper
- We don’t do time reports (but we’re crazy about delivering stacks of value activity)
- We don’t do paper reports of any kind
- We assess our work on a 30 day basis by asking one question only: ‘did we achieve everything we wanted to achieve (and if not, why not)’… and we do this face to face with our clients
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Comments
John February 6th, 2008
Never seen retainers work – they’re just a convenient way for, typically, 2 big companies to settle the bills and keep the Excel development team in business. I’d rather my agency spend time on doing the work, iterating it quickly and staying in constant communicant* with me. The results are the arbiter here – if they suck, then we part company. But if they rock, then lets roll! And if thats means I’m being tweaked – then even better!
* this should have said “communication” but i misspelt and spellcheck came back with “communicant” which appealed to the Blade Runner in me.