This episode runs 28 min.

David and Josh discuss the very important People section on your website.

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 Mentioned in This Episode 132: Website People Section

• You should include your people on your website
• But, won’t our competitors steal our best people?
• Who to include in your People section
• Photo options: headshot, full body, business, biz casual, casual, 
• Include bios or bullet qualifications or Q&A
• People do business with people they know, like and trust
• Relationships can and do begin online (no, not Tinder)
• Where to put your people beyond the People section
• Have Ambassadors for markets and service lines
• Can your People section help your firm win the talent war?
• Photo group shots or just individual photos in case people leave the firm
• Video protraits
• What about people that refuse to have their photo taken

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

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Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

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Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast. It’s insight applied.

David Lecours: Hello and welcome to PSM show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m David Lecours and I’ve got Josh Miles with me here as well. How’s it going, Josh?

Josh Miles: Going well sir, how are you?

David Lecours: I’m good, I’m glad to be back on the podcast. So today I have a topic that’s a perennial one and it relates to featuring your people or your staff on your website. Is that something you’ve ever dealt with?

Josh Miles: Oh my goodness, when it comes to websites there are always like three or four big emotional topics and there are a few things more emotional I think than people on websites.

David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely. I just want to remind our listeners that we have a title sponsor and they support the underwriting and the technical production of this show and that sponsor is SMPS, who reminds us that business is transformed through marketing leadership. If you want to find out more about SMPS check out their website where you can see their people smps.org. If you want to see our people, Josh and I, check out our website at psm.show.

Announcer: This is PSM. It’s insight applied.

David Lecours: Okay, Josh, let’s get into this. Of course, the first question that always comes up and it takes many different forums when a firm our audience is working on updating their website is it should, in fact, they feature their people on their website? I have strong opinion about this but first I want to hear yours.

Josh Miles: You know, David, I think it’s a funny question in particular when we think about especially the more design firm leaning groups in the AEC world where they’re really good at finding amazing photographers who take amazing photographs of buildings that are completely devoid of humans. I think when it comes time to add the photos of their people on their website, I think the gut feeling for most firms is they’re scared to do it. Why do you think that is?

David Lecours: Well, I think, in general, people are self-conscious of their own image, which is funny. In that we now live in this world of selfies and Instagram and Facebook, and man, in those mediums people don’t seem to be hesitant to post their own photos. But for some reason, there’s this very strong line in the sand of that’s personal and this is professional. As a professional, it’s all about our work, it’s not about me. I guess the irony of that is the thing that I always hear is like, “Hey, we’re in a relationship business. People buy us for us and it’s that personal connection.” Yeah, I feel very strongly that firms should feature their people. Now there’s lots of different ways we can do that, and we’ll talk about those, but, yeah, at some level you’ve got to feature the people that are doing the work.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I guess I would take it a step further too and say you probably should have some people in those beautiful [crosstalk 00:03:18] buildings as well because we didn’t make the buildings just for photos. We made them for the end user. I had the opportunity recently to attend a design intelligence conference called the Design Futures Council and they were talking about maybe the flipped idea that your hospital client is not asking you to build them a more beautiful hospital, they’re asking you to join them on their quest to cure cancer and building this new hospital is really just a step in getting to their goal. I think that super important piece of keeping the people in mind is huge for the industry as a whole. There’s nothing more personal than the people who are actually going to be doing the work and being able to introduce that team to everyone who’s checking out your website.

David Lecours: Yeah, for sure. Now one of the resistance or push backs I sometimes get from clients is, “Hey, if we feature our people on there, our competitors are going to steal them.” What do you think about that, is that a valid fear?

Josh Miles: If I had a nickel for every time I heard that, that piece of feedback. Well, I think in all seriousness, this is going to sound a little bit smarter lucky, but I think if firms worried as much about what it took to keep their most valuable people and worry less about having them poached, I think it wouldn’t matter. They could have the home phone or their … like anybody has a home phone, they could have their cell phone numbers printed under their bios and have nothing to worry about because they’re creating such an awesome culture and such a great place to work. As a side point, there’s this little thing called social media where maybe your best people might be on there too and that might be a better poaching ground than your website anyway.

David Lecours: I know, I always tell it like, “Well, look, your competitors already know who your great people are, your great people are visible experts. They’re out there speaking and writing and they’re on LinkedIn, and if it was so easy to just poach them because they happen to be on your website, yeah, then there are bigger problems that need to be resolved first before you consider whether or not you put your people on your website.”

Josh Miles: Somehow not showing the photo is a great defensive move though.

David Lecours: Right, yeah. They can’t see them but how can they hire them?

Josh Miles: Right.

David Lecours: But, yeah, I think it is so important but we know that people buy from people they know, like, and trust. The best way to get to know people and get to like them and get to trust them is to get to feel what they’re like. What I found is that these relationships now are beginning online, yes, there’s no substitute for meeting somebody in person. But it’s not an either or situation, you can meet somebody online and then meet them in person, or you can go vice versa. So we need to fluidly move in and out and having somebody available online on the website is such a great start. Not just for recruiting for projects but I’d love to hear your thoughts on having your people on there as a recruiting tool.

Josh Miles: Well, I think something that we’ve talked about in AEC marketing links over the past few years is this whole idea of a talent war and I think failing to showcase your people and your culture on your website is just a huge miss unless you have a horrible culture or a horrible place to work. If you’ve got a great company and a great place to work, I think the more that you can show that off, your team and your culture are some of the few meaningful differentiators who would be employee. I think it’s a huge wasted opportunity just to not show what that looks like.

David Lecours: That’s a really interesting point, it seems obvious but nobody else has your people. I know that we can’t differentiate solely on our people. I’ve never met a firm that doesn’t think that they have the smartest people and the best people. But there’s this makeup of each individual personality that when combined does make your culture and does make, hopefully, the firm different. I don’t think that can be understated.

Josh Miles: Okay, so this is maybe the most emotionally instigating question that gets asked around the boardroom table around websites, which is who should we feature on our website?

David Lecours: Yes, right.

Josh Miles: Whether it’s a large firm or a small firm or multi-office, multi-location, huge, massive firm, how do you consult with your clients and how do you recommend coming to a conclusion about who gets featured on the website?

David Lecours: Yeah, I used to say it was a pretty … Well, not easy, but easier decision and it was just based on size. If the firm was say 50 people or larger, featuring everybody was just instantly off the table. I’ve changed my view on that because the last two sites we’ve done, one was for a firm that has 175 people and one was a firm that has over 300 people. In both cases, we decided to feature every single person in the firm. Now, I don’t recommend that for everybody, it’s not for the faint of heart. It requires you to create individual pages for each of those people. But it was really important to those firms and so I guess it comes back to like everything, strategy. What is it you want to emphasize and doesn’t make sense? There’s definitely benefits to having everybody on there for recruitment and retention.

David Lecours: Everybody can then literally point to a URL to their own individual page and send that out to friends and family. We’re always trying to explain what we do for a living to our parents and having that link to your particular page on your company’s website is a great introduction to go there.

Josh Miles: See, mom, I’m actually on the website, that’s how you can sell.

David Lecours: Yeah, I am working, I am working. It’s a hard decision because you don’t want to alienate people and so then the question becomes where do you draw the line? Like, okay, let’s say the firm’s decided, “We’re not going to feature everybody but we’re going to feature VPs and above or directors and above.” I think you have to pick an arbitrary line and then decide, “These are the folks that are going to be featured.” I would say at minimum like let’s say I think you’ve got to feature your people, but the minimum, not number, but the minimum level of people that should be included are people that have some form of client level contact. That could take a lot of forms, that could take business development, marketing, of course, I mean, those people absolutely have to be on there. But also it could take the place of project managers and it could take the place of account people or it depends on how you’re structured.

David Lecours: I think if you have client level contact, you’ve got to be on there because during that client dating process where prospective clients are trying to get to know your firm for them to be able to do the research and get to know your people, the people that might be leading or working on your project through your website is a great feature.

Josh Miles: Let’s pretend for just a moment that there’s some really great argument as to why your people shouldn’t be on the website and I mean specifically in terms of individual bios. Let’s say we have maybe it’s a privacy issue or maybe it’s we do super secret projects and we can’t have our people who have security clearance. Something goofy like that, who knows. How else could a firm demonstrate culture through photography or through people if it’s not through bios?

David Lecours: I think event type of situations where you’re having like internal events or maybe you’ve put on an internal conference. I think you can communicate culture by showing off the thought leadership that you’ve shown. But, yeah, it is tough if you cannot show any individual photo of a person. Then maybe it needs to be some illustration. I don’t know why I’m going there but like in TV situations, crime dramas in particular, where they can’t show photography, but they’ll show an artist’s rendering of the scene. Maybe you use an illustration, which I’ve seen done actually pretty effectively and it actually adds a level of interest and uniqueness. So rather than a headshot, it’s an illustration of a person or it’s an illustration of a scene working together or an infographic that demonstrates culture, things like that.

Josh Miles: Maybe that’s a good segue from our maybe silly made up reason why you can’t show your people, but maybe in addition to the bios, where else would you recommend that our people show up on the website?

David Lecours: Yeah, I think, right. Of course, you should probably have some team or staff or people section and that’s the baseline minimum. But I think that people should show up in other places. Like if you’re going to have a section on vertical markets that you serve or you’re going to have a section on services that you serve, it’s a great idea to have ambassadors for each of those particular markets. So that if somebody is in that market, let’s say you work in airports and you have a prospective client that wants to get to know about your expertise in airports, they can reach out to somebody who is that Ambassador. Whether it’s via email or phone and ask particular questions. Even if they didn’t ask questions, it’s almost like just having that person there suggests this reassurance that there’s somebody that stands behind the work and it’s not just nameless, faceless, we’re going to hire a bunch of freelancers to fill in. No, there’s somebody dedicated to this market or this service and you can reach them if you need to.

David Lecours: Yeah, I think those ambassadors are really good. I also think that putting people in relationship to project descriptions if there was somebody significant who added a, I don’t know, level of detail or expertise, linking the person within the project description back to the team or staff section. Then, finally, I think it’s essential to list people where you are housing or archiving, you’re writing and you’re speaking. Any thought leadership should have links to people and who actually wrote the article and who gave the talk so that if you like what they wrote, you can link to them and get to know them on a deeper level. Then potentially follow them via social media or potentially sign up for a list, an email list, like I want to receive everything that that person writes or speaks about.

Josh Miles: I used to get really nerdy about, I say used to like I don’t anymore, but I used to follow a little more closely to Google SEO recommendations and one of the ideas that became very popular with Google for a while was this idea of an Author Box. Meaning like linking your Google+, if you remember that ghost town, to your blog posts. But I’d love the artifact that came out of that which was at the bottom of a blog post, having the photo and the mini bio of the person who wrote it and maybe links to other things. I would definitely recommend that’s another place where you could show off some of your thought leaders as connecting to all of those pieces. Having specifically using that photo again in that place.

David Lecours: Right, if you use the analogy to the print world, we would call that a byline, the Wall Street Journal article has. Well, they have a unique illustration style where they typically will show off maybe their journalist’s picture or headshot but it’s illustrated and then usually not all bio, but at least a minimum their name and their title or any area of expertise. Yeah, I think that’s really good. Let’s say we’ve got this people section, we’re going to feature people. We talked about maybe there’s some untraditional things, of course. Well, let’s talk about photography first. The next thing that often comes up is, “How do we take the picture of the person? Do we go full body shot? Do we do headshot? Do we put them behind their desk? Do we put them in front of a drafting table? Oh, no, we can’t do that, that says we don’t use CAD or Revit or the new tool. How do we actually shoot these people? Any suggestions there for our audience?

Josh Miles: Yeah, just a few years ago, I remember a Canadian firm that I had been introduced to and they had done was pretty novel at the time. They did square portraits that were actually pulled shots from Instagram for all the bios. So instead of taking the time to try to make everybody consistent and getting all the same lighting and bringing a professional photographer, they intentionally went the other direction and found the most creative selfie or photo of the staff person on Instagram and he shared that in the square and all of the colorized and dressed up, however it was. That was a really unique thing back then, I still don’t see lots of that but I think you have such a wide range of options when it comes to photography. Similar to working with a different graphic designer for your digital identity, I think we can really say a lot of different things stylistically with the photography too.

Josh Miles: Whether it’s really dark, serious stark lighting, or whether it’s really bright and airy and blown out, or whether it’s really colorful or whether your people are all photographed with their dog or their favorite thing. There’s just so many different things that you can do. What are some of your favorites that you’ve seen?

David Lecours: Yeah, I saw one recently where so rather than actually shooting everybody like individually against a backdrop, which is the traditional way to do it, this was the company had an internal event where it was a State of the Union for that company. They had speaker or a couple speakers and they had people out in the audience. They hired a photographer who was really good at shooting events and they actually used the photographs of this event. The photographer was tasked to try to make sure he shot everybody individually. All the shots are like environmental portraits where people are talking to other people and they’re out. It was a nice approach, it felt like it was a day at the work. It wasn’t like a post JCPenney portrait session of shot, it was people in their natural habitat. I thought it was a really cool way to do it.

David Lecours: Another thing I’ve seen done is, yeah, maybe you use a more traditional headshot for the gallery and then you click on that and you go to the person’s individual page and then they get the opportunity to submit their own photo that best shows off their personality. Now, we’ve done that before with clients and, yeah, we have to set some parameters and maybe there’s a little editing of like, “Well, maybe that’s not the best photo to show off in this environment. Keep that one for your own social media feed.” That’s a great approach. One of the things that I like to do where if you shoot somebody, let’s say you shoot their full body, you’ve now got three shots in one. You’ve got that full body shot which you can use in certain places.

David Lecours: You can do a waist up kind of shot from that same thing just by cropping in and it gives you a different perspective and aspect ratio. Then the third one of that is you just crop in really tightly to the shoulders and head, and that’s like a three in one approach that works pretty well.

Josh Miles: Any tips for firms who are maybe looking at this as a big expense line item in terms of weighing between, bringing in a professional headshot photographer versus trying to do in the DIY approach?

David Lecours: Yeah, so and this is also a challenge if you’ve got multiple locations. Let’s say you’ve got offices around the country to fly a photographer out to every single office and shoot every single person is probably cost prohibitive. But let’s say you bring in a photographer for your corporate office and you shoot the C-level executives, ask that photographer to set up a style guide and maybe suggest a particular backdrop that you can actually use in all the locations or particular lighting. You’re probably not going to get it as polished and professional as when you hire a professional photographer. But that photographer could give you some suggestions about how to gain some consistency across the entire organization.

Josh Miles: I think maybe along those lines too, especially, as our audience is largely marketers who are listening who might have to go up a few rungs of the organization to get that particular photo style approved or get some buy in from the principles. Something like Pinterest, just looking for headshot styles, or even going to design or advertising or marketing agency websites and look at how they do their people. I think you’ll find some maybe interesting and maybe some examples of what not to do. But I think that’ll give you maybe some inspiration as to what else is possible.

David Lecours: Yeah, ask your web designer for some suggestions because I think you’re spot on there in that marketing and ad agencies tend to be a little more progressive in this. They have creative license to do so. But I think you see folks are creative too, let’s show it off. Yeah, sure, we’re doing engineering and we’re building bridges but those are amazingly creative bridges. It doesn’t need to be super corporate or conservative.

Josh Miles: It’s not just about the photo, that what you do when it comes to the bio or what else should our listeners be thinking about?

David Lecours: Yeah, we need to get to know people, it’s not just what they look like, there needs to be some whether it’s a bio or … there’s a lot of different ways you can do this. I’ve certainly seen short bios and then a LinkedIn link that allows you to go on and see all the person’s qualifications. We’ve done it for clients in the past where we do Q&A. Like we write together with the marketing director 10 questions, and what we do is we distribute that to everybody that’s going to be featured. We say, “Hey, pick the five of those 10 that you feel most comfortable answering that are going to show you off in the best light.” That gives the person on staff some say and control over what gets published and they get to choose what questions they answer. It can be done as a narrative, maybe it’s a story about that particular person, maybe it’s some particular client problem that they solved and that thing is so iconic that that becomes the quick narrative.

David Lecours: If you do something like that, it’s probably good also in a sidebar to list their qualifications about maybe where they went to school and any professional degrees or associations that they have. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity here to be able to show people off. You can have downloadable PDFs, you can have information that let’s say it’s in a print proposal and you give a URL and then they can link back to the bio section and then you’re not using valuable word counts which are often so important these days in proposals. Spending time listing entire bios or narratives of their people. Have you seen anything else that stands out for how to show off your folks and words?

Josh Miles: Yeah, I think, again, be creative with this. I think there are so many different ways you could do it. You could have the, of course, litany of all the social media networks, or if you want the full story, you can always just go straight to LinkedIn because that’s presumably where you’re going to have probably the most complete resume or all the listing of experiences there. I don’t know, write a limerick or a haiku or a fictional story that’s clearly fictional. Just something that shows the personality of the firm and maybe the personality of the person. I think those are all really interesting ways that could potentially stand out from what your competitors are doing.

David Lecours: Josh, we’ve been focused on the individual person, but reality is that we work in these collaborative groups and many times the output is much greater and so shouldn’t we also show group shots and any suggestions around that?

Josh Miles: Yeah, and I love you always get into the issue of, well, what if so and so leaves or we have this certain amount of turnover? But I think the more that we can show more photo journalistic style shots that are not just the team of 12 posed against the wall, it’s more of here’s what it looks like when our design team is working on a problem together. Those photos, I think, have a longer shelf life even maybe many years after someone has left because it still shows the culture of how that team interacts and it’s less about Bob or Sally who’s in the photo and more about the context.

David Lecours: Right, and I always tell clients, “Hey, that person was at your firm at the time that photo was shot. This isn’t like photo realism where everything has to be up-to-date. You can keep a photo of somebody that isn’t in the firm anymore.

Josh Miles: It’s like a webcam.

David Lecours: Yeah, and well they say, “Well, could we just Photoshop them out?” I said, “No, it’s going to look ridiculous and you’ll be able to tell.” But I like your idea like hiring a photo journalist to shoot rather than maybe somebody that specializes in portraiture and some photographers can do both real well, but that’s a great way to show off scenarios that, “Yeah, if you’re going to show culture like show what it looks like and feels like every day and group shots often are a great way to do that. Then you can also have some fun and pose people, but in very untraditional ways. I’m thinking of a site we did recently where the photographer got up on a ladder and shot everybody. They were in a circle on their backs and their heads together and some of them are holding a favorite tool that they use in their job day to day, their engineers, and somebody in the photo is just cracking up.

David Lecours: I love it because like the traditional wisdom will say, “Oh, no, we can’t use that, somebody broke character, and I was saying, “No, no, no, we have to use that one because that’s the one that shows the humanity of what people are really like. We don’t want perfection, that’s not attractive, we want people to show off who they really are.”

Josh Miles: Yeah and I think the best images, photos otherwise, are the things that are really more concept driven and not that they have to be so art directed that they look static or stale, but something that feels intentional and that I love the idea that you’re describing of the people laying on their backs with their heads next to each other. That tells a story about what this team is like and you can certainly connect the dots for yourself about what that story is. But think about how could you pull your people together to do something that really stands out differently?

David Lecours: And then finally, we’ve been talking about still photographs, but wow, if we want to get to know somebody, isn’t video a great way to do that?

Josh Miles: Man, I love that idea and actually I think you might have been one of the first people that I heard talking about this. I think whether it’s more of just an Ambient Video, so it’s like this looping thing of Bob go work at his computer or whether it’s actual. Like actually interview of Bob talking to the camera about how he thinks about engineering or design or whatever it is, I think those could be really differentiating.

David Lecours: Yeah, for sure. You could take a bunch of those and combine them together to make a culture video but you could then break them apart and use them individually on people’s individual pages. I think that these video, I’m calling them video portraits, could be really, really cool.

Josh Miles: Yeah, absolutely.

David Lecours: Nice. Well, I think we’ve summarized all the key points. Anything else you wanted to talk about?

Josh Miles: Well, I think just in case everyone hasn’t gotten our point of view, clearly show your people on your website. It’s all a matter of what fits best with your culture and your firm but I think failing to demonstrate the people in the team and the culture that’s there is just a huge miss. I would just encourage firms to encourage their principles with some of these topics and all the reasons why you should feature your people.

David Lecours: I found that peer pressure can often be a great motivator, so find a firm that maybe you compete with or maybe it’s just a firm that’s admired in the industry and it’s like they’re showing their people and you can say, “Look, they’re not having their people poach, they’re not afraid to show off their people.” We need to be doing that too.

Josh Miles: Or at least they could say David and Josh said so.

David Lecours: Yes, exactly. Blame us, we’ll take the heat. Hey, Josh, I want to tell our listeners, there’s a relatively new feature in that we are transcribing all our episodes now going forward of PSM Show. So if you know somebody that for some reason doesn’t like audio and prefers to read things, every word that Josh and I say is now transcribed in the show notes of each episode. If you go to psm.show and find the episode. You have the opportunity to read the episode. Some people like that because they can go back and we, of course, do highlights of links or references or things like that. I just wanted to point that out.

Josh Miles: Well, now we’re going to be a little more accountable to what we’re saying on this.

David Lecours: I know, I know.

Josh Miles: It’s going to be written down.

David Lecours: Hey, if you guys have any questions or comments about this show or future guests or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Go to psm.show, just scroll down and drop us a line in the contact form there. That’s it of this episode of PSM show from myself, David Lecours and Josh Miles. We’ll see you next time.

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This episode runs 23 min. 34 sec.

Josh interviews the one and only, Seth Godin. One of the most prolific marketing authors of our time unpacks some of the new concepts found in his latest book, This is Marketing. 

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Mentioned in This Episode 131: Seth Godin

• What is Marketing?
• Seth’s new book, This is Marketing
• The Marketing Seminar from Seth
• What we can learn from Seth’s wife’s gluten-free bakery marketing?
• “This isn’t for everyone, but it might be for you”
• How to encourage reluctant marketers (some technical staff)
• If you aren’t sharing your expertise, you are stealing from the world
• If we seek to make change, then we are marketing
• We don’t market at people, we market with them (read Permission Marketing)
• Minimum viable audience—1000 raving fans
• Marketing success is not reaching everyone
• People like us do things like this
• Positioning is helping customers become unconfused
• If you know what you stand for, then you don’t have to compete
• Your people are not a differentiator
• Seth’s Alt MBA program
• Seth’s other passions: Soba restaurant, bean-to-bar chocolate, his summer camp
• The irrational pursuit to become irresistable
• Satisfaction, security, freedom from fear, acknowledgement are what people want (it’s all about Maslow)
• Seths.blog

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

Subscribe to our Podcast

To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

Read the Episode

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This episode runs 30 min. 13 sec.

David and Josh discuss the “dreaded” three letters for marketers: ROI. Why is this concept scary to marketers and what can we do about it?

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Mentioned in This Episode 130: ROI

• ROI: What is it?
• “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” —John Wanamaker
• Marketers aren’t measuring all that they can
• Some marketers are measuring, but aren’t using the data to evolve
• You and your leaders must first agree on what to measure
• First establish a vision, what does success look like?
• Suggestions on items to measure
• Measure marketing for talent (recruiting) and marketing for clients

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

Subscribe to our Podcast

To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

Read the Episode

Josh: Hello, and welcome to PSM Show, the podcast for AEC Marketers. I’m Josh miles, and I’m joined today by my co-host, David Lecours. Today we are talking about ROI, and maybe I wanted to torture all of our listeners today, including the two of us. But I’m actually excited to talk a little bit about the dreaded three letters for marketers R-O-I. David, are you feeling a little dread today?

David: I am. I don’t know why this topic makes me nervous. I guess we’ll unpack that. You can play therapist for me.

Josh: Well, luckily, our listeners can’t see our sweaty palms over the microphones. With that in mind, I’d like to also recognize our title sponsor, who we’re so thankful for, SMPs, who is all about business transformed through marketing leadership, and more on ROI after this insert super. All right David, we are going to do this today, we’re going to unpack, ROI. Maybe a good place to start, maybe you can tell our listeners what that stands for.

David: I think it stands for return on investment. Is that right?

Josh: I think that is correct. I was hopeful that you might make something up that was like-

David: I know, I was thinking about it, but then I was like, oh, it might go sideways. I played it straight.

Josh: Realization of introspection or roping orangutans. I’m already out of steam, I can’t-

David: See what happens, you start getting silly.

Josh: When somebody is saying, okay, marketer and then they raise an eyebrow and say-

David: Yes, they do. Don’t they?

Josh: What’s the ROI on this tactic, or what should we expect that ROI is? What do you think they’re actually asking Us?

David: Well, I think there’s some skepticism. People that don’t work in marketing, because some of marketing deals with emotion and deals with some things that aren’t necessarily implicitly measurable. There’s some cynicism about, oh, you marketers, you’re just all about that touchy feely branding and type of stuff. Sometimes it’s posed as a question of like, you need to justify why we’re going to do this. The way I want you to justify that is to tell me what kind of return on this investment. I think in its spirit, it’s not a bad thing to do. I think we should definitely use it as a filter because, look, I’ll admit, as a marketer, sometimes I get really excited about stuff. If it’s not on task, or on brand or in line with our strategic plan, it probably isn’t going to fulfill that return on investment. That seems like the motivation of why that question is asked.

Josh: Yeah, I think there’s also maybe this idea that not everybody necessarily understands marketing. One of my favorite things to say to people when things actually start working is, the secret to marketing is if you do it, it actually works. When you invest and you make the effort and you test things out and pursue the things that tested well, I think you actually see a return on that. But not everybody’s necessarily experienced in marketing, and not everybody has the same trust factor as they might in some other tactics.

Josh: So, I think what they’re really asking often is, am I wasting money on this? Am I just flushing it? Or can you give me some sort of reassurance or guarantee that we’re doing the right thing here.

David: It seems like also there’s this quest for a formula. There’s like, if we plug in X, Y, Z input, we’re going to get outcome one, two, or three. Because that’s, at least in AEC world, we’re dealing mostly with people that have a science backgrounds. Whether they’re building science or engineering, or even architecture. So, science is pretty predictable. There’s definite outcomes. Sometimes they want to apply science to marketing. I know you have a favorite quote, or an interesting quote that relates to this about, are you getting your ROI? You want to share that with our audience?

Josh: Yeah, there’s this guy named John Wanamaker. I remember hearing this quote, I think, in every job I’ve ever had in an advertising business. And then also at Purdue when I was studying advertising, I remember this being on a textbook? Maybe you’ve heard a version of this, or you’ve heard it attributed to Ben Franklin, or who knows. But the quote is, half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half. I found this particular attribution at b2bmarketing.net. But, they listed him as a pioneer in marketing who opened one of the first and most successful department stores in the United States. Growing it to 16 whole locations, which is now today part of the Macy’s chain of stores.

Josh: But I think this is really the classic thing, is that especially prior to all the technology that we have to track things today and all the big brother tactics, you would know that when I spend money, I get a return, you’re just really not sure which things you were spending on actually helped you create that return. Have you seen that at all with your clients?

David: Yeah, it’s funny. I had always heard that quote attributed to David Ogilvy. It’s one of those quotes that I think a lot of people have said is attributable over different people. But it’s also a really interesting quote in that it’s a Rorschach test that if you share it with somebody and asked for their reaction, you get insight into really what they think about, say, marketing or advertising. On one half, if you are a pessimist, then you would say, “Gosh, darn it, half of advertising is all wasted. It’s all a waste of time.” But if you are an optimist, and probably maybe more on the marketing, you’d say, “No, no, you’re missing the point. The other half is totally worth it. It is worth it and therefore, we’re getting return.” So, it’s just an interesting quote that gives you insight into somebody’s outlook on marketing and advertising depending on which side they take or what they notice within that quote.

Josh: Yeah. I think if we get into the literal math of return on investment, it’s like, if I spend a $1 and we yield $2 in sales, then I doubled my investment. So, depending on how you want to phrase that you either had a 200% return or 50% return depending on which school of thought you’re from there. Whether you’re counting the whole or the net. But the point is, if every time you give me $1, I hand you back $100, you won’t be able to hand me dollars fast enough. We’re going to create the system to where you know that that investment is returning big money and it doesn’t matter to you that 50 cents of that really got wasted, and 50 cents of that yielded 100 bucks. You’re going to be really excited that you got the $100 and you don’t really care just how effective it was.

Josh: Now, when you’re handing me $1 and I give you back a buck 50, or a $1.25, you might start to wonder, is this the best use of my money? I think that’s totally fair as well. I guess the bottom line is in so many things historically, and even today, it is really hard to put your fingers on exactly what’s working and what’s not. Even though that quote was attributed to a paid advertising spend, it really, I think, applies to things like branding, and applies to things like marketing, applies to things like video and website. I think there’s two versions of this problem though.

Josh: There’s the problem of it’s hard to know what’s working. But there’s also the real problem is they’re probably just as many marketers or firms or principles out there who just aren’t trying to measure much of anything. And then there are those who have maybe some tracking mechanisms in place, and they’re just not looking at them. What do you think is more prevalent in our industry with AEC?

David: I think, probably the lack of trying to measure. I get why it’s difficult because in AEC, we’re talking about a long sales cycle and there are so many different things that will affect the eventual sale. It becomes difficult to tie the final sale to a specific marketing initiative. You don’t know that you won the project, and the client probably can’t even tell you if they saw an ad that you posted a year ago, or if it was the conversation they had with your business developer on the golf course, or it was the incredible presentation interview, or it was the follow up slide deck that you gave them.

David: I guess my point to all that is, yes, you can’t tie it to one specific initiative. Maybe you’d be better off by trying to tie it to all of that and looking at maybe more of your total average marketing and promotional push for that particular initiative rather than trying to align it with one particular channel of marketing. Because, yeah, it becomes very difficult to attach return on investment to one specific thing. Maybe lumping or clustering things together is a better way to start to look at this.

Josh: Yeah. I think there may be two things that go into account for that. I’m going to get really geeky for like 30 seconds. But there are two things that create that challenge for measuring the one off. One of them, I believe is called the recency bias, which is the most recent thing that you heard, or the most recent touch that you had, or the email or the referral, you don’t remember the 20 other things that made you think of that brand or made you think of that firm or made you think of that business developer. It’s that very, very last thing is the thing that you attribute in your mind as the reason that you made that purchase or you decided to move forward with that partnership.

Josh: I remember as a young man being in the market for an engagement ring for my would be bride. We were at the Shane Company, which is a big national chain, I’m not sure you’re familiar with that out in San Diego. But they were famous for their very dull and boring sounding founder on the radio. Mostly what they ran was radio spots other they had some locator billboards and they’d do some print ads. But when I was in the store, being an advertising guy, they had a survey for me. They’re like, “Do you mind if we ask you a few questions about how you heard about us?” I’m like, “Oh no, that’s fine.” They went through the list. They said, “Which of the following do you remember impacting your awareness of Shane Company?” One of the last things on the list was their TV commercials. I said, “You know what, I didn’t even realize you guys were on TV.” They said, “Well, that’s the funny thing because most people select that as the thing they remember. We haven’t ever run a TV spot.”

David: Interesting.

Josh: I think since then they have made a foray into television and lots of other digital media as well. But it was kind of a funny thing. It was almost like the marketing department decided to say, “Look, this ROI thing is totally bogus, and people are going to answer with the fake response. It’s not even a thing that we do. And that’s what people think.” But related to that is this thing called last touch attribution, which is the thing I was talking about a second ago, which is things like Google Analytics or other digital tools, it’s easy for you to get a false positive of the thing that you think is really driving the traffic. Which maybe it’s just the loudest or the most recent thing that somebody saw.

Josh: All of these go into effect of like you were saying, David, maybe it’s more important to look at these as an overall campaign or an overall effort where it gets really difficult to track the ROI of running a print ad or having a banner ad or sending a weekly email.

David: Yeah, not to be disrespectful of your CFO, but at the end of the day, if you’re spending let’s say, $200,000 a year on your marketing and you’re winning $4 million worth of projects, do we need to track every last little ad that you ran? I guess it is what we were talking about before, if the results are there, and we’re getting them, I’m not sure that it is essential that it’d be tracked back to every single little item.

Josh: I think revenue solves many lows.

David: Certainly.

Josh: If the cash is flowing, then nobody’s probably too worried about how much you’re spending on a particular tactic. I think you’re probably more likely to see these kind of questions come up if the firm is struggling or if this is just not an area you’ve ever outlaid cash for before, and the marketing team is really pushing for a particular new strategy or a new approach? That might be where you’re going to start to see these questions about ROI?

David: Yeah. You’ve identified in some of the notes we made before the episode, some different ways and different ways of thinking about measuring that might be unexpected. Hope for you to share some of those thoughts in terms of different things that maybe our audience didn’t think of measuring. Because I think your point earlier was that yeah, we’re leaving a lot of stones unturned that we could be measuring that might give us some insight into what’s working effectively.

Josh: Well yeah. I think maybe before we dive into the list of things. Back in Episode 127, I believe, it was you and Ryan were talking on the client experience conversation. Ryan from Client Savvy about co-creating the idea with the client or with the customer about how you’re going to measure something, or what that process looks like. I think it’s the same thing with your client, or your principal or your CFO, is if you sit down together and decide, okay, here are the things we’re going to measure, and let’s decide together that these are important. And here’s what success looks like, we think. When we hit these numbers in these areas, or when we see these results, or when the bottom line is XYZ, that’s how all know we’ve actually moved the needle.

Josh: I think there are so many things that you can track, but tracking all the things doesn’t ensure that you’re going to get the success or that you’re going to have a shared idea of what success is. When you’re like, “Well, we have 100,000 followers on Twitter.” Your CFO may not be impressed with that as much as you adding one new client. Again, I think it’s important to think through what are the specific things you’re going to track that you can both attribute value to those things.

David: That co-creation exercise is really valuable. I think anybody would benefit from asking your boss, how are you being measured? The more you can understand how your boss is being measured, the more effective you can be in making them look good. If you’re making your boss look good, and let’s say it’s the CFO, you’re going to look good. And you’re going to be promoted, and you’re going to have a better case when it’s time for your performance review task for more money because you’ve potentially now quantified or at least you’ve done the things that made your boss look good.

Josh: Yeah, exactly. Back to your question, I think the list of things, and feel free to add to this, David. But some of the ones that I had noted before the show were what are the number of inbound requests? In traditional online marketing, inbound requests often means ones that you didn’t ask for, didn’t know that were coming. In our industry, I think that’s a really, really, really rare thing for an AEC firm to get a project request that there was no relationship, no former knowledge. But if you see an uptake in those blind requests, even though those are tougher to win, I think that it still tells you something, that there’s some effort going on there.

David: Right. There’s something about brand awareness that maybe if you didn’t have a relationship with the client, but now you’re seeing more of these requests, that you’re on more people’s radar, and your name is coming up. So, you’re being added to this list for the RFP. I think that’s a good thing to keep track of.

Josh: Well, it looks like-

David: It doesn’t mean you have to say go, you don’t. In fact, usually in my own internal go, no go process, if I don’t already have a relationship or know the client, I’ll still have a conversation with them. But it’s rare that we’re going to pursue that project in a big way, especially because if I start to get the feeling that they’re just lobbing RFPs out into the universe, trying to get as many people to respond as possible, that’s a surefire, like, all right, they’re just looking for a low price.

Josh: Yeah.

David: But I’m certainly flattered, and I’ll take a note of that we got that request because it tells me, “Hey, our brand name is out there and we’re getting asked, and there’s something nice about getting asked.

Josh: I think there’s, like you were saying back in Episode 129, when we were talking about awards, after you had won a few this past year, you started getting reached out to a little more cold, and had some more inbound requests. Again, there was some sort of activity going on that created that brand awareness and created some new chatter and activity. I think related to that, there’s some other things that you could be tracking. Are things like your ratio of go to know go. Meaning, out of those new requests, which ones are you pursuing? Similar to what we talked about in the awards episode as well, tracking the time and effort and money that it takes to create those proposals. That doesn’t necessarily tell you how effective your marketing is, but it is something that’s worth tracking, I think, to know, hey, we win one out of 10, but we’re spending $10,000 every time we go after one. So, should we be a little bit more selective to get that down to, we’re winning one out of three, and then that starts to make a little more sense.

Josh: I think, knowing where those numbers are, help you determine really what what’s worth going after, or maybe better yet, what’s the shortlist or the hit rate of those goes?

David: Yeah. I think that the ratio of go to no go is interesting. But yeah, it’s that ratio of go to wins that I think is a juicier number. I just think also tracking the total number of goes is valuable to know how many pursuits did we go after this year? Is that reasonable considering our manpower? Because I know wow, so many firms unfortunately from the top are under such pressure. There’s this myth that wow, the more we go after, the more we’re going to win and that’s not always the case.

Josh: Yeah. I’ve even heard from marketers at small to mid-sized firms who say, “Man, we cranked out a proposal a week or proposal twice a week.” Which is just crazy numbers in some firms. In other firms, that might be a really slow year. Again, understanding how big your team is, how big the firm is, and how big is a typical project? Is a typical project a $70 million building or is it a $2 million renovation? That makes a big difference too about what’s worthwhile and what makes sense.

David: For sure.

Josh: A few other things, there’s the traditional … I say, traditional in the past 10 years. The traditional digital marketing metrics such as website traffic; how many visitors, people are always asking how many hits? How many hits on the website? How many unique visitors you had, I think is a more helpful number. Bounce rate, which is we should probably go into super geeky web stuff at some point. But bounce rate is like when you go to the website, and you don’t click on anything else, and you either hit the back button or close the browser. So, you want that number to be lower. What’s your time on site is. If somebody stays there for 10 seconds, or 10 minutes, makes a big difference. Really, ultimately shows you engagement.

Josh: If you view multiple pages of a site and you’re on there for several minutes, you’re probably actually reading or consuming content. I think those are all really great measures-

David: Well, within that website area, I think measuring page engagement, page ranking, what are the top pages that people are going to and are they part of what you perceived to be the funnel or the sales process? If certain pages are getting a lot more traffic than you would expect. And then the ones that you want to get a lot more traffic aren’t, you need to start thinking about, hey, maybe we need to develop a campaign to drive people to the pages that we want people or maybe it’s a navigation issue. People just aren’t finding the content really easily.

David: Then of course, you have not just time on site, but time on specific pages. There are always certain pages that having a high bounce rate isn’t a bad thing. If it’s just a contact page, they get your phone number, they’ve got what they needed, they don’t need to move on. There probably won’t be a real high number in terms of time on that particular page. So, just being real clear about not setting these universal expectations, like more is always better. Knowing what you’re measuring and why.

Josh: I think there’s a couple other related digital numbers that we could look at, which is, if you have an email newsletter, how many subscribers you have, or your related social media stuff. How many average likes or followers or how many times does a particular tweet get retweeted, or how much traffic or follower traffic do you have on things like LinkedIn?

Josh: Those are again, maybe some of those feel a little fluffier if you’re sitting in the CFO seat. And some of those feel really important if you’re a marketing manager. I think again, just other things to consider.

David: Yeah, I know back in Episode 109, that you interviewed Nicole Law from TCOM, you got into some of the approaches that they’re taking, and looking at ROI specifically for marketing in terms of recruitment, recruitment of people. Maybe, if you could share again, some of the things that you guys talked about, and where our listeners should be thinking about those investments.

Josh: Yeah. First of all, if you haven’t listened to that episode, definitely go back and check out 109. But I think if you think about the cost of acquiring talent, almost like the cost of acquiring a project, what’s the cost of having to turn down a project because you don’t have enough people, or you don’t have the right people, or you don’t have enough of the right people in the rainy season? And then comparatively, what might you spend with a headhunter or with advertising online or what are other ways or costs that go into account of what it takes to hire somebody?

Josh: One of the things that Nicole talked about was the process and how to streamline that from making the initial reach out all the way through how long till they’re in the seat, and how long till they get on boarded? So, there are lots of things that you can measure inside of there. I don’t pretend to be the world’s biggest fan of the HR process. But I think looking at HR like a marketer, again, gives you some really interesting things to track. Also, to think about well, while we’re hiring for this particular role, we could also be marketing our services that correlate with that, that our prospective hires are seeing this is a real thing for us. That we’re really … To go back to the bridge design example from a couple of episodes ago, if we’re entering awards for bridges and our marketing, our work on bridges and we’re going to hire bridge designers, they feel like they’re going to be respected when they come to work there because it’s clearly something that the firm values.

David: Absolutely.

Josh: I also really like this idea of, like we said towards the top of the show of sitting down with your principles and team and determining what does success look like in this area, and what can we all agree on that, okay, when we do this, we will hit the mark? I guess I’d like to challenge our listeners to think about, there are so many things you could possibly measure. But maybe have that conversation with your team, or maybe sit down at the table with a couple of recommendations. Here are the three things that we could start measuring and start reviewing that I really think are going to be most impactful for your firm.

Josh: In your firm, it’s going to be really different than in the firm of your peers. That’s my challenge to you today is to start measuring something and don’t be quite so scared of ROI. What do you think about that, David?

David: That’s a great exercise. Sometimes these challenging conversations yield really great results. Just because it may be a little bit uncomfortable, I think having that conversation and getting everybody … Because what worked at a previous job, or maybe even what you think is working now may not be what other people in the organization value. Man, that’s going to be problematic. So, this thing that gets everybody pointing towards the same North Star rather than everybody going off and trying to find their own new constellation. That alignment is essential.

Josh: Excellent. Well, I think that about wraps up our conversation today. Again, we’d like to thank our new title sponsor SMPS You can check out smps.org, or while you’re at it, you can check out the psm.show website to see more about today’s episode and for all of our show notes. Of course, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions for future shows or guests, that’s the right place to go, psm.show and scroll down to contact us to drop us a line.

Josh: So, that’s all for today’s episode of PSM Show. From David Lecours, and myself, Josh Miles, we’ll see you next time.

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This episode runs 25 min. 18 sec.

Does your firm enter awards competitions? This week David explains why he’s had a change of heart about awards competitions, as he and Josh discuss why they might be a fit for your firm, too.

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Mentioned in This Episode 129: Awards Competitions

• Why David changed his thinking on awards competitions
• Are awards a recruiting and retention tool?
• Are awards a marketing tool?
• Which awards competitions should you enter?
• Go/No Go criteria for evaluating awards competitions
• Differences between regional, national, global, and intergalactic awards
• How to develop entries that win
• Give your award pursuit a job #, or at least track your time
• Teaming on awards to build relationships
• Leveraging finalist and winner status
• What do you do with the plaque, trophy, crystal bowl, or oscar?

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

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Read the Episode

Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing Podcast, it’s insight applied.

David Lecours: Hello and welcome to PSM Show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m David Lecours, and I’m joined by my co-host, Josh Miles. So, Josh, I want to give you an award today for being the best cohost on the planet.

Josh Miles: Oh, that’s a thoughtful thank you David.

David Lecours: Actually, the award I’m going to give you is an opportunity to take on a new topic and that topic is awards competition. I also want to mention that we have a new title sponsor they are SMPS. I want to remind our listeners that SMPS is all about business transformed by marketing-

Announcer: This is PSM, it’s insight applied.

David Lecours: All right. So, Josh, our topic today is awards competitions. I guess I have to confess that the reason I want to talk about this as I had a bit of a change of heart recently. I used to personally not be such a fan of awards competitions. I didn’t enter a whole lot of them. I thought that they had value more for, I guess, recruiting and retention, not so much as a marketing and business development tool. Since my firm is real small, we don’t do a lot of recruiting. I just didn’t see a lot of value.

David Lecours: But I have entered a couple recently and maybe it helps that I won a couple of awards and that changed my outlook greatly. I guess I’m a sucker for attention and I like to win things. But I have noticed an uptake in inquiries that specifically are related to winning these awards. I’ve had people contact me saying, “Hey, I saw you won this award, love to talk to you about a project that relates to the award that we won.” So, yeah, I want to just chat with you about that. What’s your background or thinking been about awards competitions?

Josh Miles: Man, I can remember in my very early ad agency days entering just would seem like dozens of award entries into the local Addy Awards and then our firm we would get really excited about a couple of them in particular and others were like, “Well, surely there aren’t too many billboards.” So, billboards got a shot too. This ad’s awesome or this commercial’s great and this logo is really cool and surely we’re going to win a ton of awards. That first year we won exactly zero awards. It’s heartbreaking when you go through all that work and all that effort. Just going through it, the mental catalog of all the things you’ve done that year and stuff you’re the most proud of and then you put it out in front of your peers and to have none of it recognized is really rough.

Josh Miles: Like you, I’ve had years where my former agency would put things into Logo Lounge or into other awards competitions and come back really, just have really huge years and then really down years. So, it’s easy to get down on awards when you’re not winning them. But likewise, when you have the good fortune of … Sometimes, it’s really the intersection of who are the judges and what do they like and what was your work that year. Sometimes you just get lucky but you don’t win because you have lousy work, you win because it’s good work and you get selected because the judges that year liked your good work that year. It’s always an interesting topic and I’m excited to talk through all of this today because like you, I’ve been in and out on awards in the past.

David Lecours: I’m imagining our audience is looking at entering projects that they’ve completed in the local maybe, AIA Awards or local ECEC or BIA or maybe some other trade organization. Or they’re also interested in entering marketing campaigns that they’re interested in something like the SMPS Marketing Communication Awards. Like you mentioned in that first year, you were so gung ho, it just didn’t matter. You were going to enter everything you could. But at a certain point, our audience has to decide which ones are worth it or not. So, maybe some of the contributing factors that might help a marketing director decide, is this award competition worth it? They probably have to do a little budget for the year of deciding which competitions they’re going to enter and work through the math of how much money they’re going to spend.

Josh Miles: Yeah, exactly. I’m at my former agency, we would do this early on. That first example I gave you was from the first place that I worked at, but then in my agency, there for a little while, I would choose. I’ll pick the ones we enter. It’s a marketing expense at some level. So, if we win this, it’s very exciting. And then we get to the point where you get big enough. You’re like, you know what, our budget is X for awards for this year. And we know for this competition, maybe we do or don’t want to put all of our eggs into that one competition basket.

Josh Miles: If we’re going to spend $1,000 or $2,000 or $200 this year for this particular awards competition, how do we decide which items go in there? We would literally just make a spreadsheet and have all the employees vote. We went by popular vote because when it comes down to awards, the more likely it is that somebody’s going to agree with that, that they might have a better chance. I think we tended to do better when we tried to do this a little bit more mathematically as opposed to just by the hearts-

David Lecours: Democratically rather than authoritarian.

Josh Miles: Exactly.

David Lecours: -Josh deciding.

Josh Miles: I made sure there were no hanging chads and it was all very well certified. It was a very clean election.

David Lecours: Yeah. It almost sounds like what you’re talking about is that our audience should consider maybe having like a go, no go criteria for an awards competition, and then deciding in macro, which awards throughout the year they’re going to enter. It seems like, of course, some of the things that they should consider in this go, no go, is reach of the awards. Who’s going to see it? It’s the sort of, if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, did it really fall? I saw you win this award, so what? That’s great. It’s nice to have the ego boost, but I think that should probably be a criteria of like, are your potential clients going to hear about that?

David Lecours: That was always my challenge with a lot of these awards competitions was that it was usually, as a graphic designer, I might enter something in the AIGA competition. And then, yes, I get that peer recognition, and yeah, it feels good. But all those other graphic designers certainly can’t hire me. So, I guess my recommendation for audiences is that yeah, you might want to do some of those because I think they are really good for recruiting and retention. But I think in terms of marketing, you want to enter competitions where your clients gather in some way so that they could see you and potentially hire you to do that thing that you’re winning the award.

Josh Miles: Yeah. I think it depends on what you fancy yourself best at. If you’re best at making pretty things, then you’re probably going to win more awards by entering competitions that tend to celebrate aesthetics. If you’re a company that maybe it’s not about the aesthetics, maybe it’s more about the results. Entering competitions where they’re more stringent on the before and after or the outcome or what the impact was. Again, maybe that goes into your go, no go formulation.

David Lecours: Right. Okay. So, multiple choice question for you. Let’s say you are trying to sell your boss, the CEO at your engineering firm about entering some awards competitions. Do you want to take the approach that it is a marketing tool, a recruiting tool for new hires, or a retention tool?

Josh Miles: That is a great question. I think it’s all of the above-

David Lecours: D, all of the above.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I’ll take that Bob for 500.

David Lecours: Yeah, it seems like depending on the awards competition and your intent, and again, who’s holding it, it could fall into any one of those boxes. It seems like the retention tool if it’s not clear, winning awards is something that you can share with a potential, obviously, new hire. But I think recognizing people, especially if somebody’s on the project, make sure that their name is included in the awards submission so that they get recognized as having a significant … In fact, probably you want to list all the people that were potentially involved with that project in your firm, so they’re on record as being associated with this award winning project. That seems like a great way to help keep people around.

Josh Miles: Yeah, for sure. It’s a really sticky situation too, when you have projects where you have so many people involved, it’s just so important that you have all the folks listed in that submission to make sure that when they read the names that you didn’t leave out, Josh, who was leading XYZ because that means Josh is really sad when you leave him off the submission

David Lecours: Yeah. It’s like you get to get them all right, or don’t list any because otherwise you’re going to potentially do more damage than pretend getting people to stay, if you’re upsetting people. That’s not a good thing. There’s a lot of different kinds of awards competitions out there. I’m thinking of there’s local ones in your city, there are often regional ones, maybe your state or collection of state, there’s national, there’s probably global and I’m imagining someday there’ll be intergalactic awards where you could to put your work up against the best-

Josh Miles: The best AEC marketing on Mars.

David Lecours: On Mars, yeah, exactly. Once Elon Musk gets there, then yeah, we’ll be competing it. But I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about maybe some of the pros and cons or differences either that you had or you would imagine would be associated with those different levels of geographic awards.

Josh Miles: I think it comes back to where your firm’s focus is. If I think back to my previous position, our focus was really national. So, the local and regional awards were interesting in terms of, again, like you said, they serve different purposes. So, the local and regional awards were much better for talent attraction, because we weren’t really hiring folks from the coasts, but we were looking for clients from the coast. So, it was great to have exposure in more national type boards. But doing really pretty work that’s winning aesthetic awards locally is really attractive to other potential creatives who might have wanted to come work for us.

David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely. You tend to recruit more locally. So, that would be an intent there versus the marketing perspective, maybe bigger national, if not global.

Josh Miles: For sure.

David Lecours: When you do make … Let’s say you go through then go, no go process and it’s a go. Now you’re developing your award entry. It’s not a small undertaking. I would recommend that our audience consider opening up a job number internally, tracking your time. Because when it comes around next year, you’re going to have an opportunity to decide, go or no go again. We tend to look at these things optimistically. Yeah, let’s do it again, and hopefully we’ll win this time. But unless you have some real data in terms of how much time it actually took, and what was the cost of the award entry, I think you’re not making a very informed decision. So it is definitely a process and one that you should track and hopefully continually improve upon.

David Lecours: There’s always a lot of things that need to go into an entry. What’s your experience been about boosting your chances for winning as you’re going through the entry?

Josh Miles: That’s a really good question. I think having your firm really focus on again, what type of awards competition is this and what do we think the judges are really looking for? Is it more important that we make sure that we’re following some of the old school competitions that require for you to submit things mounted on board and printed a certain way and cover sheets and I’s dotted and T’s literally crossed or is it … Many, many competitions today have moved to more of a digital or virtual judging environment.

Josh Miles: In that case, you can really spend time focusing on, in my humble opinion, what actually matters, which is the quality of the submission, and not just the craft of paper and whatnot. So, yeah, I think it’s a great thing too to go back to the team that worked on it. Even if this is an award, not necessarily for marketing. If this is an award in bridge design, and your marketing team is tasked with entering this awards competition, it’s really important for you to go back to the guys that worked on that bridge and understand the backstory and before and after and what the impact was, and what the community thinks of it. Because all of that can really be helpful in your submission.

David Lecours: Typically, it seems like there are very specific questions that are going to be asked. Like, what was the impact of this project? The classic case study or format of what was included, what was your prescription, and then, what was the outcome? Even if that’s not a specific question, I think your suggestion of, hey take the lead and answer that question on your own. Because, while that’s going to be so much more impressive to a jury than just a bridge that looks really great. We’d love for just to look great. But yeah, if you can show how it impacted the community and what they got for their investment and some of the benefits that weren’t expected, and getting quotes from users of that bridge, who used to have to take another way before the bridge was built kind of thing, or they were scared to go across the bridge. All that kind of stuff that makes the project so much more real because now it brings it down to a human scale. Then you get to hear those stories. Regular marketing power of story is always effective. Wherever you can use that, I think that’s really important.

Josh Miles: That reminds me, I think it’s the Andrew Carnegie story about the Mississippi River, and the bridge that is steel built. People were like, I don’t know about steel for a bridge. He literally led a parade with elephants across this steel bridge. You can just imagine how long, I’m still telling that story however long in the future, but those kinds of narratives along with your awards entry, man, that’s the kind of stuff that will get judges attention for sure.

David Lecours: Yeah, for sure. Our suggestion, one of many is really take the time to read the submission qualifications. They’re probably going to be getting a lot of submissions and they’re just looking for reasons to eliminate some quickly. If you don’t follow those instructions very carefully, then your chances of winning are not very high. So, do that and then look for ways to differentiate your submission. That’s sort of a marketing contest. In a way, you’ve got to stand out, you’ve got to have great content. And then it’s got to be told in a really compelling manner. Whether that be the physical board or digital format or layout, all that stuff definitely matter.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I think it’s important too, to think about, you alluded to this a little bit, but understanding what kind of time and effort that your team is putting towards these. It’s not just about the cost of the entry fee, but also the effort and the hours that your team is putting towards this. Something maybe we can talk about in a future episode is thinking in terms of ROI or return on investment or return on the time that you put into this kind of thing.

David Lecours: Love it, we should definitely tackle that one. One of the reasons my attitude changed a little bit about awards is I realized it was an opportunity also to build relationships. In that you don’t have to enter an awards competition by yourself. Usually, there’s no stipulation about who the entry comes from. So, we entered a competition recently with our client. I think it’s a great marketing tool for account specific marketing. If you want to really cement that relationship, this assumes that the project was successful or you wouldn’t be submitting it anyway.

David Lecours: But usually from one client come more projects, and if not, at least referrals and there’s all sorts of other opportunities. So, any experiences you’ve had where you’ve teamed up, and it’s turned out to be a great thing?

Josh Miles: Yeah, we had a couple of clients that we historically entered year after year after year, and it was totally that. We weren’t always best friends with all of our clients, but the ones where the relationship was just so important on both sides, I think that was the thing that just added to it. Was like, oh, yeah, what are we going to enter this year? Even going into the new calendar year, I would say, “We’ve got these four projects, and I bet we can do an award winning thing for this third one.” Especially the holiday cards. We get really jazzed talking about why we’re going to put a little extra effort into each of these projects because the awards were so much fun to enter together and to see if we won. Always better if you actually win every now and then.

David Lecours: That process of working on it together is something that I didn’t expect would be kind of fun. It was a great way to review the project, and it was a great way to review the experience. Last episode, listeners, if you haven’t heard it, go back and listen to Episode 127, I interviewed Ryan Sydam from Client Savvy. He talks all about how important it is to measure the client experience. So, by entering this awards competition with them, it was a great opportunity to get a behind the scenes from them about how the project went and the parts that they thought were really successful, and the parts that I may have thought. And to get that feedback that you may not get in your standard debrief as you’re working together to present this project in its best possible light.

David Lecours: The other thing … Let’s say, hypothetically, you don’t do a joint entry. Let’s say you enter this on say, behalf of a client or it’s a project you work on. But in all cases, there is a client typically related to this project. Let’s say you do get nominated, I’d highly recommend that you bring your client to the award ceremony. Certainly, at minimum, let them know that you entered it, that you’re a finalist. Get them excited and engaged. This awards competition recently, I’m literally sitting there in the audience next to my client and we’re just on the edge of our seats, “What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?” It was just a great experience to go through that together, and then to win together was of course, even better and we got some great pictures, so all that.

David Lecours: Definitely, if you don’t enter the project with your client, engage them on some level and make them part of the process, they’ll, I would imagine, really appreciate it.

Josh Miles: I think especially if you do something to make the evening fun with the client win or lose.

David Lecours: Yes, that’s true.

Josh Miles: There’s something exciting for sure. To sell them on stay with the Ryan client experience thing. To sell them on the experience of the night and not just the, it’s going to be awesome if we won it, and it’s going to be horrible if we lose. Just find ways to keep it interesting before and after the awards are handed out.

David Lecours: Yeah, go to dinner beforehand, or make sure you have some plan to get a drink or debrief after. Yeah, I like that. We’re good.

Josh Miles: Yeah, for sure.

David Lecours: And then, of course, let’s say the awards ceremony happens, there’s a lot of things that can be done after the announcement. Of course, it helps if you win. But I think that even if you’re a finalist, or even if you’ve entered, there are opportunities. So, I just want to encourage our audience to leverage those opportunities for, of course the easy low hanging fruit or social media posts but you can go even deeper and share it with local journalism outlets. There might be an opportunity where it gets picked up and stories get written. But yeah, use this opportunity for all it’s worth is basically what I’m saying here.

Josh Miles: Do you feel like you did anything that especially helped you get the word out winning this past year? I know you said you felt like you’ve had more inbound requests after having been awarded these things. So, did you do anything, or was it more just the awards themselves?

David Lecours: I feel a little hypocritical in the advice I just gave, because I haven’t done as much as I should have. Maybe that’s why I wanted to give that advice because hopefully it’ll inspire me.

Josh Miles: To self.

David Lecours: Yeah. I was waiting a little bit to get some photos of it. I’ve had those for a while now and I just have gotten so busy with project work. Luckily in this case, it was just people, they were at the event or they heard about it, and I need to do a better job of leveraging some of these wins, because I feel like I’m missing an opportunity there.

Josh Miles: Nobody is paying as close attention to your brand as you are.

David Lecours: As you are, yeah.

Josh Miles: Sending it out three months later it’s really not so bad because nobody else even know they happen unless they were actually at the show or had entered the show. So, I think whenever you get it out, even if it’s the next year. Like, oh yeah, taking a look back at this award we won over the summer, that’s totally fine, I think.

David Lecours: Well, I love that you say that because that makes me think that these awards don’t have an expiration date. And that you can use the fact that you’ve won this award forever, really, because you did. Nobody can ever take that away from you.

Josh Miles: I’m now an award winning firm.

David Lecours: Yeah, exactly right. You can use that as a moniker. What about the actual thing? Let’s say it’s a trophy or a plaque. There’s been all sorts of fun stuff. I play in a lot of pickle ball tournaments, and occasionally I’m happy. I have to say that the metals that are the best ones are the ones that are also bottle openers. Because they actually have a function, and some other function. I did win one recently that was a … What do you call those things? They’re the spinners that all the kids who are into about … Fidget spinners, yes, but it was bronze. Sounds like a cheap plastic one, this was like a bronze one. There was a gold, a silver and … That was kind of unique. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.

David Lecours: But anyway, that’s my question to you, Josh. What do you do with the actual award? Yeah, I’ll just leave it at that. I’ll leave it open ended.

Josh Miles: There is an agency, actually still is an agency here in Indianapolis who are notorious for winning awards and then just mistreating them. At some point, they were taking these plaques and drilling holes in them and then they would just put them on this rod. They had rods in their entry way that just had stacks and stacks of awards, because they won so many of them. I’ve seen other places that maybe are less fortunate to have won quite so many, and they do little display areas within their entry way or if you’re in a smaller office, maybe you don’t really have space for that. Literally, it’s tough to figure out what to do with it.

Josh Miles: Another friend of mine has always done a great job of cataloging all the things he’s won and where he’s been published. If you go to a page on his website, it’s just general for recognition. But it’s articles that mentioned him, and books that he’s featured in, and awards he’s won. Even if the plaque or the piece of paper or the plastic trophy is not something you want to keep and use something for it, it’s still a great thing to list out all this stuff. What have you seen?

David Lecours: Yeah, I think there’s so many different things that reminded me of … I did a tour of a pretty well-known ad agency years ago. At the end of the tour, and they had this lineup of trash cans. They brought us over and they said, this is what we think about awards. We sure like winning them, but it’s not the most important thing. We really want to move the needle for our clients. It was a throwaway line.

David Lecours: But his whole point was, we don’t value awards that much, but we do want to point out that those trash cans, they’re full. They’re full of awards, they’re overflowing. I thought it was an interesting thing. But yeah, I think you got to leverage everything about this. You’re going to invest, you’re going to go in. You might as well go all in, take pictures of the awards, take pictures of you with the award. If you don’t post the analog 3D actual award, at least have a picture of it that you can utilize on your site or in your social media, or archive that somewhere you might be able to pull it out, and put it in a proposal. Certainly, that would be an interesting approach. So, do something with those awards. Don’t just throw it away or let it go.

Josh Miles: A trophy the whole team drinks from. Awards that serve dual purpose, I suppose.

David Lecours: Multi-purposes.

Josh Miles: Easier to celebrate.

David Lecours: For sure. So, let’s celebrate the end of this episode, Josh. We’re about a half an hour in. Our audience is getting to their destination, if they’re driving. Encourage our audience to go to psm.show and check out our other episodes. If you have any comments or questions or anything that you want to get back to us on, the best way to do that is to go to our website. We just updated it. Love your feedback on that. Its got some fancy new graphics, and it’s got our new title sponsor on their, SMPS. The website addresses is psm.show, and then just scroll down and there’s a contact form there, and just drop us a line.

David Lecours: That’s it for this episode of PSM Show. From myself, David Lecours, and Josh Miles, we’ll see you next time.

Josh Miles: If it’s not too late, David, I’d love to give us an award for being just under 30 minutes this episode. See you guys next time.

David Lecours: Award accepted.

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This episode runs 29 min. 06 sec.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the podcast, David Lecours and Josh Miles make a big announement. PSM Show now has a production underwriter and new focus on AEC Marketing. David also interviews Josh for a behind-the-scenes look at the SMPS rebrand.

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Mentioned in This Episode 128: AEC Marketing Focus & SMPS Rebrand

New AEC Marketing Focus

• Brief history of PSM Show Podcast: How Josh and David adopted this baby
• Why narrow our focus?
• We will now focus on what we know best: AEC Marketing
• Our new Production Underwriter
• What will change and what will remain the same for the show

David Interviews Josh About SMPS Rebrand

• Would you consider the SMPS initiative a rebrand or refresh?
• Tagline/Vision: Business Transformed Through Marketing Leadership
• Who were the decision makers and how did you make decisions?
• What was the scope and process for this rebrand?
• Why go with lowercase in the new wordmark?
• Launching the rebrand at SMPS Build Business
• How you launch affects how the rebrand is adopted
• Big moves with typography and color
• What’s the timeline for rollout across all chapters?

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

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This episode runs 28 min. 55 sec.

What is your typical client experience like? Is it predictable? Is it consistent from client to client? Ryan Suydam joins David to discuss the latest in CX.

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Mentioned in This Episode 127: Ryan Suydam on Client Experience

• What is a CXO? Should your firm have one?
• Is ‘client experience’ just marketing’s flavor-of-the-month?
• Some tools used to measure client experience
• Client Savvy’s CX Deck
• Can you deliver a great client experience without a great employee experience?
• Is client experience a differentiator for your firm?
• How does client experience benefit recruiting and retention?
• The value of event marketing when introducing something new

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Client Savvy
• TBD

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

Subscribe to our Podcast

To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

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