After a calendar year where I’ve watched my wife scratch and claw her way to the start of a new photography business, I’ve been fascinated and awestruck by the events that led her to this point. I’ve felt a call to start my own journey to acquire some sort of a trade.

Liz has a bright intelligence and an admirable work ethic. She has been a star student at each stage of her education, and clearly headed for big things. However, after marrying me, having our second daughter, and subsequently being tied closely to home, fear began to grip her that she would never be able to use those gifts. So she determined she’d start to cultivate a new talent.

At first there wasn’t a clear path to earnings for her. However she pressed forward and started speaking with photographers she knew. She watched YouTube demonstrations of the hardware and software key to a photographer’s trade. She enrolled in some evening and weekend classes. She started shadowing other photographers.

Eventually she started volunteering to shoot family portraits for free. There were some bumpy first engagements, but people began offering to pay Liz and soon there were enough requests for Liz to justify charging all those who requested her time. Her rates went up gradually and she began to seek to add additional skills. She took additional classes, worked with photographers who were much more experienced and realized a whole world of skills she could acquire.

She decided she wanted to work year round in a studio so she contacted all of the photographers in the area, going so far as to show up in person to every single studio she could find. She lucked out to find a boudoir photographer who was willing to hire her. This “taboo” opportunity turned out to be a real gamechanger and eventually Liz graduated to opening her own studio.

Despite a masters degree, (my younger self would think this would be enough to do ANYTHING) and many years of business experience, I don’t feel that I’ve ever truly acquired a trade or a real skill to the extent that Liz has. I want a creative outlet and a true trade. Today marks the first day I’ll be writing and publishing on a regular basis in order to refine my craft.

Hop on or off this train with me, I’ve hopped off many times already.

What is a persona?

A persona is a depiction of an individual that represents a segment of an audience. This segment can be a customer or non-customer, or at any stage of their relationship with a given organization. Originally, personas were described in terms of demographic statistics, like an age range, a gender and an income bracket. However soon marketers understood that characteristics of their users were a better way to describe an audience — and these characteristics could span multiple demographic groups. Quantitative data can actually limit the insights derived from the exercise if used exclusively.

Qualitative data is the real key to understand a segment of an audience. Interviews and open-ended surveys are designed to draw out the needs and intents of an audience. Across a healthy sample size, insights are drawn and then decisions can be made about the number of relevant personas to distinguish.

Like mentioned above, Personas are often depicted as if they were an individual, given a name and attached to a photo. This is a fictional person, of course, but having a dossier of a persona is a valuable aid to teach others in the organization about the audience they are selling to. Accordingly they can apply insights from this exercise to better perform their task in the organization.

How are Personas currently employed?

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. -Steve Jobs

Companies that ask their customers what they want and then give it to them are doing the base level minimum for survival.

Personas inform creative decisions about design of apps and websites, brand management and advertising. The best organizations use personas to better address the needs of users that they didn’t know they had. Henry Ford understood the latent need of his user base as he built a business around automobiles when his users wanted a faster horse.

Why haven’t sales organizations emphasized personas?

Sales departments traditionally work very differently from marketing departments and others. Sales is typically an area of a business where execution and repetition is king. There is a belief that sales processes should be template-ized, that there’s a single right way to get deals closed. In most sales organizations, salespeople are encouraged, cajoled and threatened to stick to the script.

Creative brainstorming is often left to the Marketing, Advertising and Product management departments. Freelancing and experimentation by a sales rep is ok if it closes, but that same “creativity” could be very problematic for a frontline salesman who deviates from the script only to lose a deal.

How can Sales departments benefit from understanding personas?

Sales organizations have a large degree of leeway in handling communications with their customers. There are conversations that salespeople have that extend beyond the working relationship between the two agencies. Many clients expect to have a personal, friendly working relationship with their salesperson and they feel good about working with a human being.

In those situations, it’s optimal to understand the expectations, needs and intents of many different kinds of users. Maybe a key characteristic of one kind of buyer is they expect warmth and personal touch from the company they engage with. Accordingly a salesperson could open each conversation with some thoughtful questions about how life outside of work is going. Other buyers may have an expectation of strict rigor from their chosen vendor and the salesperson can focus his energy on tight presentations and error proof proposals.

No other department at a company has more face time with clients than the sales departments, yet largely salespeople are only armed with understanding a single buyers’ mindset in most organizations. Building up a more nuanced and understanding salesforce will be critical to driving a great user experience from a human sales force going forward.

See how we help transform organizations by developing personas today at punchkick.com.

The battleground for buyers’ dollars has shifted from cold phone calls, coffee meetings, and conference room sales pitches to online digital platforms. In a time where white collar work is done almost entirely in front of a computer, the balance of power has shifted from vendors to buyers as information has become a free-for-all. Buyers find data on any topic in a few keystrokes, while the criteria for that data being “authoritative” and “trustworthy” evolves. Now, many organizations are changing to incorporate new ways to design their digital platforms and processes to best serve buying habits of today and the future.

In the past, salespeople had better information than their customers. These salespeople knew how to use this knowledge to access decision makers and progress conversations towards a signed contract. To understand bundled features in a used car, number of processor cores in a server processor, or even get specifications of a home to buy, a buyer had to meet with a salesperson to gather everything required to understand a purchase. Customers benefitted from insights provided by a salesperson and could get answers to questions they didn’t think to ask.

Conversely, buying in the past could be a long process, with multiple meetings or follow up calls to get the needed information and complete a signed contract. Lengthy sales forced customers to depend on a limited number of sales representatives and trust ranked high on the list of buyers purchasing criteria. And unfortunately, there were occasionally bad salespeople that sold some lemons and got away with it.

Many of today’s customers shy away from reliance on a salesperson in favor of open access to information online. Though most buyers realize that information is just as easy to put online as it is for buyers to access (and bad information persists online as well), buyers have most control and are increasingly moving to the online sales channel.

According to Hubspot, the buyer’s journey is boiled down to the following 3 steps:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision

In the past, buyers relied on salespeople through all three phases. A process used to look like this:

1. Awareness: Potential buyer answered his desk phone even though it was a number they didn’t recognize. An engaging Sales Representative was on the line with a really informative message about “x product”. The product sounded interesting enough to schedule an in- person meeting orand demo.
2. Consideration: Buyer shared the conversation with a few colleagues and connected the dots that x product would probably simplify x process at his company. The BuyerHe comes prepared with questions and a ballpark idea of what it should cost, or what he the buyer can afford. An in- person meeting and pitch then proceeded with the same pitch deck that the sales representative presented to every client. The Sales Representative’s solution seemed to be valuable to the Buyer’s organization. Pricing was discussed and it was 25% higher than was expected. Buyer concluded the meeting asking for time to think about it.
3. Decision: Buyer performed a quick online or phone book search for competitive solutions. Buyer next contacted the competitors and asks for pricing in order to make a comparison, but is told that they must meet with a sales rep for a demo and overview. Buyer ultimately decided not to have to sit through multiple additional meetings in order to get competitive pricing. The original Sales Representative called back to followed up weekly for the next month and the Buyer agreed to purchase the solution even though it’s 25% higher than what had been budgeted.

The majority of the actions in that anecdote were spurred by the sales representative, from beginning to end. The salesperson’s ability to make verbal arguments on the spot and follow up are key drivers of the close. Salespeople were prized for their charm, ability to think on their feet, and diligence in follow-up.

Today’s buyers are able to go much further in the process with information and tools available online and without contacting a sales representative. A sample purchase today could look like this:

1. Awareness: After several weeks of frustration around a process at her job, a Buyer takes it upon herself to find a solution. Through some fruitful online searches she is able to quickly find solutions in many forms, custom built options and pre-built products. The Buyer makes a list in a shareable document and shares with her team. Her team members suggest other criteria that the Buyer should consider and also add some other solutions to consider. The list of possible solutions quickly becomes unwieldy.
2. Consideration: In order to narrow down the list, the Buyer spends time looking at helpful forums where individuals voice their opinions on solutions they’ve used. Gartner and Forrester are consulted for head to- head comparisons of the technologies. The Buyer spends time on a handful of vendor websites reading whitepapers, viewing video demonstrations, and reading up about the expertise of the vendor teams. One vendor has a trial version of the product and the Buyer spends time looking through the feature set after downloading it. After some triangulation of positive data points about these vendors between multiple sources, the buyer narrows her list down to five potential partners that could help fix the broken process. The Buyer designs a set of questions and required information to gather from these partners. With this preparation in hand the buyer requests that her vendors complete this questionnaire in order to do a head- to- head comparison.
3. Decision: The Buyer studies the vendors’ responses and compares the prices head to head. Some vendors are then given a chance to present their proposals in person. There are a few questions sent back and for and the proposals are refined. The final vendor is selected and the deal is negotiated to close. In this process, the Buyer received enough data to feel like they chose the best solution.

With so much additional information available to buyers online, the sale proceeds very differently. The buyer finds the need, the handful of potential solutions, and drives the conversation on their own timetable. Of course, the RFP has been around for a long time, but buyers can break the rigidity of old RFP process and engage the sellers at the buyer’s convenience. This can actually be a better sales experience for both seller and buyer if both are on the same page.

A strong digital analytics strategy and understanding of psychographic personas can provide great insight into what those engagement points might be. Information has to be tailored and created with the goal of informing the consumer. Buyers know when they are being sold to and will resist being pushed too hard in any direction, rather they like to feel they are discovering the best solutions on their own.

Periodic, scheduled, and generic marketing campaigns are no longer sufficient. Marketing campaigns need to transition to always-on automated marketing campaigns that meet the consumers where they are in context of their own buying journey.

To continually adapt to changing buying processes, organizations must utilize the vast amount of customer data at their disposal to gain a 360 degree view and be ready to quickly adapt. Data for many organizations is siloed and hard to access across the organization. It should be centralized and easily accessible to knowledge workers at your company. There is also a huge amount of unstructured data hidden in scanned documents, comments on the website, and a multitude of other places. Companies are starting to invest in tools for search and visualization for unstructured data, but they are slow to get into the hands of the salespeople.

Accordingly, in any interaction with potential customers, websites and mobile apps must be designed to accommodate new processes and engage at the right moments in the buyer’s journey. The digital experience should of course be smooth and aesthetically pleasing but always recommend next best action for the client to encourage progression through their awareness, consideration and decision.

All of the factors above equal great opportunity for organizations that are willing to invest in great user experience for an evolving relationship between B2B buyers and sellers. For more information on how we’ve helped our partners adapt, visit us at punchkick.com

Agencies need to keep up with bleeding-edge industry trends

Reading the blog and marketing materials that an agency publishes will help a CMO or CIO stay informed, and it goes without saying that a potential development partner should indeed be producing evidence that they synthesize and embrace new trends in their industry. Strong agencies have an abundance of knowledge and access to influencers in the marketplace. As part of their business, agencies need to continually attend and participate in digital marketing conferences and work hard to maintain thought leadership.

However, these are all channels that are publicly facing, and offer knowledge anyone can access without signing a long-term agreement to work together. So why is up-to-date knowledge important? It’s inevitable that, in the middle of a product development cycle, these two things will almost certainly happen:

1. Another company or competitor will release a well-regarded new product that features a key innovation to add value to consumers. This new product will necessarily influence the reception of any other product released that doesn’t feature that innovation — try releasing a non-responsive website in 2017, for example.
2. Apple, Google, or Facebook — or any of a dozen other market-makers — release an update to their operating system, their browser, or a new piece of hardware that will substantially impact the design and development of the mobile product before it’s finished.

In a rapidly changing technology space, it is critical to have a partner who can absorb and quickly react to these trends. In fact, it’s even better to have an agency partner who can anticipate and proactively address these trends before they happen. A strong agency consultant will offer an informed perspective on their clients’ positions relative to new innovations and ideas, and will help clients determine which changes are good investments and which others aren’t fully ready for prime time. Agencies speak with hundreds of organizations to discuss a wide variety of diverse projects over the course of a year, so they must keep up-to-date to stay relevant. They’ve undoubtedly been approached with similar projects before, and so their teams have already done some unique research on the topic.

Having the right partner can mitigate the risk of having to adapt to external change from a process standpoint. A good agency can bring in additional team members with new expertise in technology and marketing to help a project that may need to be pivoted. Relying on internal resources may not provide the full skill set needed.

An agency partner is best equipped to offer UX insight

When using only internal resources to drive product development, there is a natural tendency to develop an echo chamber when team members are working together over a long period. These team resources support the “party line,” are more likely to support established UX ideas from their colleagues and superiors, and are incented to avoid disagreements or debates about the best UX direction. While a manager may think they are putting together a product team with diverse insights, over time these differences in opinion erode through shared work within a single company environment.

Melissa Douros, Senior Manager of Digital UX at Discover, had this to say about the benefits of outside perspectives. “When we listen to people who don’t think the same as we do, it starts a conversation which pushes us to think different and ultimately grow.”

An agency can straddle the line between bringing an outside perspective to product development while still being interested in that product’s rapid deployment and success. They are able to objectively advocate for end users, a role that can’t be filled by an organization’s current employees due to institutional pressures and biases. There may be a bit of discomfort with insight provided by an outside group, but ultimately it will yield large benefits to the project.

Agencies attract the best technical talent

CIOs and CMOs are painfully aware that there is a struggle for technology talent across the board. CIO.com reports that 49% of companies expect IT talent shortage in 2016. For those organizations fortunate to have strong technical talent in-house, there will always be a long line of internal teams waiting for their time. But that’s hardly every company, and most are accustomed to jostling with other departments to get IT attention on their project..

Agencies are typically able to attract talent with flexible working conditions, unique perks, and the opportunity to focus on innovative technologies across a diverse range of client projects. Software development can be repetitive and tedious for engineers in a single-brand environment, while agencies offer their developers an opportunity to work on a variety of projects to break up the monotony, challenge their skills, and provide growth or learning opportunities. Agencies also have the opportunity to hire software developers at any experience level and accelerate their growth through hands-on mentoring, placing the appropriate developer talent and expertise on those projects which demand it — a luxury that many brands cannot afford or don’t have time to explore.

If time to market is important, an agency is typically best equipped to move quickly

This is also related to the previous point: strong agencies are hiring machines, having the ability to hire quickly and handle the rapid sourcing and assessment of technical contributors when projects have to scale up effort quickly. They anticipate when active projects need to augment a team and are prepared to move agilely when new projects begin. These agencies maintain a bench of developer and UX talent, and thereby are able to offer great training and opportunities to develop thought leadership as mentioned above.

The elephant in the room — cost

While an internal team may appear not to require the same budgeting and procurement processes that paying an agency would, clearly it’s inaccurate to say that internal resources come for free. As a leader of an organization, it would be absurd to think that employee time and effort cost nothing. These are internal resources with institutional knowledge, experience, and access that are unique and should be treated accordingly. Even when engaging an outside partner, these internal resources play a critical role in making this partnership work.

There are many different types of agencies to partner with for digital product development. This includes offshore firms that drive costs down by employing developers in countries with currency exchange favorable to the United States. Though there are downsides to this kind of engagement, it is a way to get work done with a reduced topline cost.

However, to get the benefits of the agencies described above an organization will need to take a holistic view of cost. Frequently, using a strong agency partner will appear to cost more. Obviously, staffing top talent isn’t cheap, and offering premium services is invaluable. But what about opportunity cost?

In a crowded marketplace where customers have numerous choices at their fingertips, it’s not enough to satisfy minimum requirements for what constitutes a mobile app or website. Only truly innovative companies and organizations now earn users’ engagement. To generate new users or to more closely engage current users, it’s a necessity for a digital product to offer unique value and innovative new experiences. And while a great app or website is certainly possible for internal development teams to deliver, sometimes it makes the most sense to hire a team that specializes in delivering exactly that.

To see how we’ve worked with clients to make unique and engaging apps, contact us at punchkick.com.

Some time ago I worked for a Big Enterprise Software Company with red branding and a chairman/founder that was famous for saying,

“It’s surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn’t feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.”

Sorry, wrong quote. Try this one in a conversation with a reporter:

‘“I really should never talk about myself,” he said “Frequently I’ll be interviewing with somebody or talking and in about 15 minutes they’ll interrupt me mid-stream and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re nothing like I’d thought you’d be.’”

Alright. Maybe some would read those quotes and draw the conclusion that this particular executive might live in a slightly different reality than the rest of us. Maybe others are chuckling, glad that this isn’t a person that is affecting their lives. Executives like this get to make decisions about tools provided to their sales force.

Love Your Salespeople

I was trying to dig up a rumored quote by this famed executive that went something to the extent of “I don’t need to pay salespeople, this software just sells itself!” There remains no way to prove it was actually said out loud, but the feeling permeated the organization. Salespeople were expected to fall in line and be grateful.

The general response of the sales team was lip service to the organization’s overall stated goals and minimal adherence to the preferred sales tactics. A real us versus them where the way to get back at management was to get paid commission (or at worst, simply maintain employment) with a minimum amount of work.

Nourish Salespeople with Good Access to Data

I had heard the mantra about salespeople not being needed recited from multiple sources in sales at the Big Enterprise Software Company, typically in reference to how long it took for anything to get done or how poor the tools were we had to work with. As far as the tools went, it wasn’t all bad, in fact there was immense amounts of data stored in the databases.

However key pieces of data often went untouched and unused as separate pieces of data were stored across many different systems, each with their own onboarding and login, sometimes requiring a separate password. Some reports exported to excel, others to plain text, others could only be retrieved in PDF format. I had to then create my own spreadsheets and manually paste and filter this information in order to have anything useful.

It was tedious work but it was so satisfying at the end of the day to have a robust spreadsheet with all of my customers information. I was so proud to show it off to my manager and ready for the congratulations for a job well done. I was going to be paraded around as an example of good diligent work. Plans for a training program were starting to germinate in my brain.

Instead however, I got yelled at for not getting enough calls done for the week.

Dump any Process or Tool that Interferes with Closing Business

Dump it yesterday. Throw it out of a moving car at a high speed off a cliff into a pit of flaming .

I learned quickly that the only thing that mattered to middle management at the Big Enterprise Software Company was to not get singled out by their VP by missing any of the 587 metrics that were reviewed in front of the group in their weekly meeting. I later learned that the Sales VP’s only pleasure in life was humiliating Sales Directors in public because they themselves had endured those same paddlings.

Nobody knew why 5 whiteboard architecting meetings a week was so critical to the business, but most sales reps knew how to get credit for them without actually doing work. Sales reps budgeted time during the week to complete every metric they could get noticed for if they were below threshhold.

In their free time we hustled for sales using their own talents. Sometimes we actually sold something.

New digital marketing hires are faced with the daunting challenge of creating both quick wins and successful long-term initiatives for their new organization’s growth. New hires at the director level and above usually come in because something isn’t working in the marketing function of the company, or there’s an initiative from the past regime that needs to be rectified. In some cases, a new marketing hire is the first ever to specifically focus on the digital aspects of marketing for his or her new company.

Digital content platforms and sales channels seem to be a logical place to start, but can require a long implementation or endure lengthy sales cycles before showing measurable effects on revenue. The challenges associated with measuring marketing impact is in line with research demonstrating that attribution is the top priority for marketers in 2016. However, strong user experience and user-centered design best practices have consistently demonstrated improvement on revenue attributed to marketing.

But it’s true that one of the key initiatives to have an early and lasting impact is to enhance the user experience of a company’s digital products. Digital marketers have a responsibility to optimize company websites and microsites, digital content, and social media. As marketers build trust within their organization, they can drive the experience of both internal-facing tools and provide input into the company’s core products — whether it’s in the technology industry or any other. The subsequent evolution of a digital marketer, the growth hacker, gets involved in the product development phase from idea inception. But a marketer has to begin at the beginning.

Stakeholders

Great marketers know the environment of their organization’s stakeholders, and spend time with them to listen. Marketing content from the past should be absorbed in their spare time, but face-to-face time with a variety of stakeholders should be the priority. Some of most important work is in the internal selling that will drive influencer buy-in and funding for new digital marketing projects.

Effective communication with salespeople, creatives, and engineers is critical. Salespeople need to be persuaded that delivering marketing-tested messages will generate sales and, in return, they will provide great customer insight. Product engineers need good data about how users are engaging with the product and what potential users need. IT teams will provide valuable input about internal resources and systems that can be leveraged effectively. Marketers should even collaborate with HR to ensure that job candidates have a great user experience during the application process so they become positive influencers too.

Stakeholders can also be a great resource for their particular perspective on how customers think and behave. Building great customer experiences comes down to more than understanding these users at a demographic level — instead, it’s critically important to empathize with and design for users at the psychographic level, understanding their needs and intentions. Audience research is an effective tool to generate these insights, but building upon the experience and institutional knowledge of customer-oriented stakeholders is a great start for new digital marketers.

User Research

Understanding an audience is key to just about everything good that can emerge from a marketing department. “You are not your user” is an oft repeated mantra in marketing departments that emphasize the need for research as a reminder that a marketer can never look at their own product objectively. User research is a gold mine that marketing can return to for direction over and over again whenever they get stuck.

A marketing function needs to start with a 360-degree view of demographic characteristics of its audience for digital platforms — including age, gender, income level, and so on. That data could come from a variety of sources, and it may also identify blind spots in current analytics — or the lack of useful analytics altogether. Effective use of analytics is imperative in driving long-term digital strategy.

Additionally, good marketers perform original research about the thought processes and intentions of their users. Psychographic research can span interviews, focus groups, surveys and user testing. This research enables a marketing department to develop real insight on customers and potential customers. Leverage these findings to build marketing personas for optimal return on investment. Developing these personas can be a significant quick win to share with your business stakeholders while time and energy are also focused on long-term projects.

Resources

Any new marketing hire must know the capabilities of internal resources and be realistic about where help is needed. Does this company have a dedicated team for these digital platforms? Unless the core operation of a marketer’s business is digital product development, it’s unlikely that a company can provide truly differentiated and innovative internal resources for web and mobile apps. Additionally, how soon IT resources can be allocated and how fast they will work will always be outstanding question marks.

It’s important to find expert partners to accelerate the improvement of user experience for web and mobile products. Considering that current staff and processes got the user experience to the point where change felt necessary by company management, it seems unlikely that they would be able to do something significantly better unless conditions change drastically.

Expectation setting is also something a marketer has to take on. Start conversations with partners early to validate ideas and identify potential red flags with them. This ensures that budgets are set correctly and that your stakeholders have a better idea of time to market.

Innovation

A good user experience must be ambitious and original. Business Insider reports that originality is rapidly becoming the key factor in usability scores. Users judge a company’s app both on what it does well and what it does differently than its competitors apps. Good marketers understand the competition’s digital marketing inside and out to identify where the bar is set.

The good news is that both findings from user research and careful monitoring of analytics combined can become a great source for experimental ideas. Innovation can be a repeatable process, and as new products are released, they will produce new interactions with users and new analytics data to help enhance current and future products.

For more about how we’ve helped new digital marketers get big wins with UX, visit us at punchkick.com

Why new digital marketing hires should make UX their top priority was originally published in Punchkick Interactive on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prior to her kidnapping Patty had been an Art History major, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the publisher. She was engaged to be married and looking forward to career and family. Having no prior affiliation with radical political groups, Patty’s subsequent behavior became known as one of the famous manifestations of Stockholm Syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome cases are rare. They were originally named after a case where hostages in a bank robbery in Sweden were held in a bank vault for nearly a week. Just a few days into the standoff, these hostages began to assertively defend their captors against the police negotiators rather than fight for their own freedom.

One can’t help read about these incidents and feel a great amount of empathy for these victims who survived a horrifying ordeal; thus the comparison that follows should be taken with a grain of salt, maybe even a handful:

Some time ago I survived a unique sales cycle. The climax of the experience came as my sales manager interrupted me at one point saying “Stop! Who the hell do you work for?”

At that point I was fighting on behalf of my would-be captors, rather than for their money. They had won me over.

This was a ambitious client who wanted to start business line to go head to head against some of the world’s biggest brands in a very highly regulated industry. I quickly recognized that the challenge in this project would necessitate a large engagement — I was excited and gearing up to win a very memorable deal.

The challenge in the upcoming project also had an interesting effect on our buyer: she was such at wits end that she didn’t exercise the typical restraint on communication I’ve come to expect of my customers. This Marketing VP told me about challenges in her personal life, as well as hesitation about the viability of her own business plan and the competence of the business executives pushing for this. She was excited about the challenge and had high expectations for any partner supporting this.

It was on a call early on where she screamed at me, insisting that I was wrong about something we had carefully researched. Should I never talk to this crazy person again, I wondered. I mean, who threatens a salesperson rather than just never talking to them again? Instead I dug further to get to the bottom of this particular technology question. Ultimately the workaround was found and she got what she wanted.

Sales representatives are accustomed to guarded communication with potential clients. However in this case, I never doubted where I stood in this relationship, at various points she told me that we were in the lead for the deal and at other points she freely yelled at me when I didn’t answer a question to her satisfaction. She called at all hours or weekends as questions or new details came to light. Alternately, she could be very warm and friendly and she knew me well as a person.

At one point she told me if a certain condition couldn’t be met, that I might as well withdraw from contention. I snapped out of my trance for a second when I started feeling guilty, but caught myself. She couldn’t fire me yet, I assured myself.

My communication style also changed, I started to speak more openly with this client than I had with others in the past. My boldness in these meetings surprised myself.

With this level of familiarity, I couldn’t help but feel part of her team. Much like Patty Hearst and her captors from the Symbionese Liberation Army, my client’s problems and challenges became my cause, something worth fighting for. I began to get impatient with team members who I didn’t feel were meeting the standard that this project would require. I fought with my managers and finance to get the best deal for this customer, largely putting aside trying to tilt the deal exclusively in our favor.

My managers fought back, but I was of the mindset that this was all part of the struggle to beat the competition for my client. This deal had become almost like a banner to march behind, something that had become bigger than either of the two companies or the individuals associated.

As the deal got signed, and the project was kicked off, I felt a great sense of victory. I had completed a very difficult task, and had fought and won some epic battles. Though exhausted and shaking my head, I looked forward hoping that future projects could draw out such a passionate energy from me again.

Though in later years, Patty Hearst recovered from her ordeal and softened some extreme political stances, her famous line endures: “For me, my awakening came when I was kidnapped.”

You have the near-impossible assignment. You have been tasked with finding an agency to build a new digital product or redesign a flailing website or mobile app. Finding agencies is not a problem — your inbox is full with offers for “an introductory conversation,” and a quick Google search will reveal how hard agencies are fighting for search engine optimization. What you have to do is find the perfect agency partner that completely meets expectations for your digital project, something that is becoming increasingly hard to do.

By giving you my best advice on how to select an agency, am I trying to make my job as an agency representative harder? No, I don’t believe there are “secrets” of the digital agency world to spill — this can and should be a simple process. Agencies who deliver great work will reveal a lot about themselves in early conversations. A good partner will work with you toward the end goal of getting your project headed for successful launch.

First, ask yourself: am I looking for a partner who will add value and work with me to build something great, or am I looking for a low-cost option that checks the boxes? If your answer is the latter — and there are many projects that should fall in that category — ask yourself if you really want a full service agency and not a contractor you could find on Fiverr.

Second, know that the flexible points of negotiation from a top digital agency’s perspective are the time to deliver, effort required, and feature set. Be very suspicious of an agency that would quickly concede to discount their hourly rates. Sometimes a great volume of work justifies a discount on hourly rates, but you should be curious why their services aren’t in higher demand and they need to take the hit to win your business. Good agencies manage supply and demand of strong consulting resources well.

How do Time-and-Materials versus Fixed-Cost approaches affect a project?

“Time and materials” is a common approach to budgeting a project. The agency provides an estimate to the client, with the caveat that the client will only pay for actual hours used. Clients are sold the idea that, with tight project management, the project will come in under budget and they will save money. In reality, however, time and materials shifts the majority of the cost risk to the client. The price pressure of negotiations effectively ensures that the final number is the lowball estimate. For this reason, time and materials projects are notorious for running over budget.

Some agencies are willing to commit to a fixed fee proposal to guarantee scope and timeline, assuming that scope is fixed. This is the way that Punchkick approaches enterprise projects. It’s a win-win to ensure that our clients get the scope they want on time and on budget, and we have a success story we can brag about.

Transparency is key to getting the best proposal from your agency

Be upfront about your budget, your decision-making process, and your timeline so that you can fairly evaluate your agencies on a level playing field. Be prepared knowing that signing a new agency can often take multiple months, as multiple stakeholders at your company will need to buy in, you’ll likely adjust your requirements during the process and legal and procurement may push back.

Get multiple proposals — and be careful that if you exert pressure to reduce price during negotiations, you understand exactly where your agency is cutting back. Are they taking thinner margins, or are they swapping in junior developers, or cutting corners on certain features? These are things you had better know.

Expect a detailed proposal from your agency so you understand where major effort is anticipated — and ask follow up questions about anything that sticks out for any reason. Be curious about wide variance on any point between multiple proposals. Don’t dismiss anything, and have follow up conversations so you understand the reasons. You’ll always benefit from multiple perspectives.

Have a plan for what happens after the product release. Know beforehand if this is a product that you want or can take in house to maintain, or if you intend to continue the agency relationship to build the next version of the mobile product. Your agency should certainly adapt working cadence, paired programming, documentation, and training to fit your desired outcome post-launch.

Finally, always seek references and review prior work. And talk to the references. Perhaps most critically of all, ask good questions. Be very clear with your agency on the following:

1. Will this be developed in native code or with a platform (Xamarin, PhoneGap)? The quality and longevity of the app varies widely depending on their answer.
2. Will this be staffed by full-time employees, or by subcontractors from design, development, or QA disciplines?
3. Will any team members be overseas or offshore?
4. Who will be my point of contact for issue escalation?
5. What is the communication cadence throughout the project?

Summary

Be as forthcoming with your organization’s own limitations as you expected agencies to be during your initial discussion. If at any point in the sales process you feel your agency is not being transparent with you, expect that same behavior during a project. If there is no pushback from your partner in the initial conversations, expect them to withhold bad news past the point of no return during the engagement. Lack of communication and dishonesty during early conversations inevitably leads to major budget overruns, missed deliverables, excuses, and a bad relationship between client and agency project teams.

On the other hand, with a good agency partnership, you should expect a relationship like that of a trusted advisor. Have confidence that the shared experience and knowledge of two teams working together as one can yield great digital products that mutually benefit your company and your agency.

Read more about mobile best practices on punchkick.com.

How to Find the Best Mobile App Company for Your Next Digital Product was originally published in Punchkick Interactive on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.