I was introduced to Wendy Riches over 6 years ago at an industry function in Dallas. From the start, it was clear that she was one of those special people who could absolutely energize a room and engage people at the highest level.
 We have remained in frequent contact over the years. As anyone who knows Wendy will tell you, she is a natural relationship builder on both a professional as well as a personal level.
In case you don't know Wendy, she heads up D’Arcy’s global marketing services network, which specializes in bringing brands to life in ways that drive consumer purchase behavior. As President, Wendy is charged with leveraging D’Arcy’s multi-disciplinary competencies, which include relationship marketing, promotion, interactive and direct to consumer marketing.
Wendy came to D’Arcy two years ago from Hasbro, where she was President of global e-commerce and direct marketing. Prior to Hasbro, Wendy served as Chairman and CEO of OglivyOne North America. Her career in marketing started at Save the Children in London. Wendy sits on the Board of The Direct Marketing Association and is a well known speaker on the subject of customer loyalty and branding on line.
Last month I talked to Wendy at length about some of the challenges of growing and building teams of specialized professionals in an increasing complex global environment.
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Team-building starts with having a very clear vision and goal. Agencies have always wanted to cut the throats of their competitors. The agency business is a very competitive industry. But I actually think agency people have got to learn to work together now. The pace of acquisitions and mergers means that the desire of agencies to completely "own" their clients is a bit unrealistic.
Sometimes you can do it. It's going to depend on the nature of the clients' business -- whether you as an agency actually have the best practice in all the disciplines to offer. And then it's also going to depend very much on the client themselves.There are clients who do want one stop shopping and there are clients who don't.
So, you have to be able to think more about the client's business than about your own. And it could be that you need to reach out and work with a competitor -- which is something that the Internet taught everybody about. Partnerships have become very, very important.
That plays into another big trend in the marketplace, which is globalization. We've all talked about it for years. But every year it becomes a bit more real. There are fewer boundaries in Europe now, where we now have one common currency. That's a huge step towards being able to trade seamlessly across borders. The same thing happened in America some years ago with NAFTA.
So, people have got to be able to think about global partnerships now. They've got to be able to think in a much broader context. That requires being able to approach things in a very lateral way and to think "outside the box." A lot of the old safe areas simply aren't there anymore.
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Agencies have always wanted to cut the throats of their competitors. But agency people have got to learn to work together now.
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It requires people with a trained mind and a discipline, but who are also able to see opportunities for their clients in other places. It requires people who are not afraid of joining with others and experimenting a bit. It's becoming really tougher and tougher in the mature markets. The competition is increasing really for the same consumer all the time, so the ones who are going to be successful on behalf of their clients are going to be those who come up with new thoughts, new areas, new partnerships.
I also see tenacity as more important today -- because it's much tougher now. It's much easier to go down the same route all the time. In my particular business, direct marketing, it's been difficult to get clients to think outside the television box. The solution always has been a thirty-second commercial because, for a packaged goods client, they can see what that does to their sales.
In actual fact, there are so many ways now of reaching consumers. The power of thirty-second TV spots, in terms of driving a response, has dropped considerably. So, now people are beginning to recognize that there is another way, but it still requires quite a lot of tenacity and saying, "look, I believe in this and let us try it." If you actually get somebody to let you expand, you can prove yourself right. But then you've got to execute flawlessly.
Maybe the other thing that goes along with that is not only the tenacity to be a change agent -- and get people, colleagues around you, get your clients to agree to do things differently -- but then to be able to stick with it and make sure that what you deliver is absolutely flawless.
Imagination and intuition are also tremendously important. We should never forget that we are in a creative business. The things that make great creative people are freedom of thought, imagination, and intuition. It's intuition about the marketplace -- sensing the right moment to do something a little bit different. It's intuition about your client -- sensing when your client is ready to try something different.
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Frankly, without our creative product, what we do doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
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Frankly, without our creative product, what we do doesn't amount to a hill of beans. But creative people -- others have said this before me -- but managing creative people is a little bit like herding cats. Very often creatives need to have an element of the maverick in them to be great creatives. So how do you get them to be part of a team?
You need to think about the balance of the team. You need some bottom left-hand quadrant people to help the creatives to bring their ideas to fruition. For example, at one time I was finding it very difficult to work with somebody from planning who had a much more disciplined approach to life. I was much more inclined to go on a gut feel. In actual fact I think this planner was finding me quite difficult to deal with, too.
But when we both understood that each of us brought something very significant and very different to the party, and that if we put those two things together, instead of trying to get the other person to think like the other, we could bring our two opposing points to the table, and take the best out of both of them. We would then have something that was "2 + 2 made 5."
That was a sharp lesson for me and ever since then I've always looked to have different types in teams and to make sure that each person recognizes what it is the other one brings. If you do these things, and you get a great team running, then people really don't want to leave it. They're happy in their jobs, they're happy with their colleagues. .
Dennis Troyanos is the founder of The Troyanos Group, an executive search and consulting firm specializing in recruiting senior-level relationship-marketing professionals. Dennis has led many highly- acclaimed management workshops for the DMA and National Center for Database Marketing. He has facilitated CEO roundtables and written numerous articles on the subject of interviewing, hiring and retaining top performers. Dennis can be reached at dennis@troyanosgroup.com or 914-997-1907.
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