Partnership Is Key

Why IBM puts teamwork at the center of its client-agency relationships

By Joyce Costello    October 30, 2018    

CONTENT PROVIDED BY IBM

 

 

At IBM, the health and productivity of its marketing agency relationships are critical to driving positive business results. The company assesses and evaluates every relationship on an ongoing basis to help strengthen the performance of all marketing initiatives through a best-practice client-agency partnership.

"An effective client-agency partnership is defined by the people themselves and how well they work together," says Ann G. Rubin, VP at IBM Corporate Marketing. "We strive to create an open, honest, and transparent environment where the agency and IBM teams work side-by-side behind common goals. Our process for assessing the health of that partnership follows those same principles."

This highly collaborative process includes an agency relationship evaluation and a continuous improvement plan. Employing agile practices, the process is designed to be flexible and adaptive to ensure continuous improvement. IBM involves its agency partners every step of the way, having learned that the best way to improve a client-agency relationship is by working together as a team.

 

Agency Engagement Starts at the Beginning

IBM begins the agency evaluation process with a survey to better understand the current health of the relationship. Feedback is provided to the agency through the use of a balanced evaluation scorecard. The scorecard looks at several critical areas of the agency relationship, including agency outputs such as strategy, planning, creative execution, and media. It also includes an assessment of how the agency manages the relationship with IBM (i.e., account management, partnership, and processes).

At the same time, the agency team uses the survey to assess its own capabilities and to provide feedback on how IBM stakeholders enable the agency to produce great work. In the spirit of transparency, the joint teams address similar questions. For example, where IBM is asked how well the agency understands its objectives and priorities, the agency is asked for feedback on the briefing and knowledge transfer process. This allows both teams to understand each other's particular viewpoint.

"The partnership we have with IBM is one of the most transparent in the industry," says Fiona Bruder, EVP of client success at George P. Johnson Experience Marketing (GPJ). "The performance process we share together delivers insights that enable GPJ to continuously evolve our services and operating model. As a result, we're empowered to deliver agile, collaborative approaches that consistently exceed IBM's expectations, and which ultimately lead to the delivery of world-class experiences."

 

Understanding Relationship Health Using Net Promoter

To rate the relationship, both IBM and agency assessors are asked to answer a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. For IBM, the question is "On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend this agency to a friend or colleague?" and for the agency the question is, "On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend IBM as a client to a friend or colleague?" This is followed by an open-ended question to allow respondents to add depth to their NPS responses.

In its analysis of the NPS, the IBM team does not rely on averages or benchmarks, choosing instead to use distribution charts to gain deeper insights. These insights help the team understand the differences in scores at a detailed level, so they can determine the most appropriate path forward.

In addition, the candid comments from both the IBM and agency teams to support their NPS ratings provide transparent insight into the health of the overall relationship. The findings are used to not only understand individual relationships but to analyze larger parts of the business for common ideas that can be implemented on a global basis.

"The new approach to relationship health has been a game changer for us," says Chad Cathers, worldwide managing director at Ogilvy. "Despite initial fears about survey fatigue, moving from an annual to a more frequent cadence of surveys has actually increased participation and the number and quality of comments. The addition of NPS has also shifted the conversation and created an environment where the agency feels more empowered to provide constructive feedback."

 

Use of Comments to Gain Insights

All evaluators are encouraged to share comments — IBM gets hundreds of them — to add deeper insights beyond those evident in the numerical Net Promoter Scores. So, while the scores help IBM zero in on areas of improvement or areas to recognize excellence, the comments provide insights into why issues may be occurring and provide both parties with a solid foundation for action planning. This foundation also guides the discussion in collaborative workshop sessions on how to improve and where processes are working well, and could be applied to other areas within the business.

IBM also employs sophisticated techniques like sentiment and theme analysis, along with keyword searches. These techniques help to effectively mine the comments, ensuring that the joint team gets the most information from the valuable feedback.

 

Using Business Intelligence Tools to Analyze Data

IBM and agency teams are given access to a business intelligence tool, which provides a dynamic view into qualitative and quantitative data.

With the amount of information collected, the use of business analytics allows the joint teams to quickly identify areas they want to explore in more depth, and provides meaningful visual outputs to the stakeholders that help reveal the health of the relationship and enable IBM to make strategic decisions based on what teams are saying.

Rapid turnaround of results is vital to the process, with analysis and report distribution occurring the week following the close of the survey. This allows the IBM and agency teams to start discussions around the results, which are catalysts to the action-planning process.

"Now that the data and insights from both the surveys and collaboration session outputs are available in a more real-time cadence, we can also be much more agile at the global leadership level on how to best evolve agency services, talent, and tools to meet our clients' needs," Ogilvy's Cather's says. "Credit to IBM for being a progressive partner in how to evaluate agency performance."

 

Collaborative Workshop Sessions

Once the survey results have been shared, IBM conducts ongoing collaborative workshop sessions with each unit and country team. Agile principles are leveraged to drive a positive outcome, which is to improve the health of the agency relationship and ultimately optimize business results.

The desired outcome guides every action taken. Workshop participants from both IBM and the agency work together to craft a social contract, identify success blockers, and execute action plans to remove them. They listen, iterate, learn, and course-correct rather than waiting for perfection. IBM encourages the teams to exercise self-direction so that they can unleash innovation. Participation in these sessions has contributed to stronger relationships and Net Promoter Scores.

"While changing our survey approach has paid dividends, the secret sauce is surely the methodology and rigor behind the collaboration sessions," Cathers says. "Employing agile and design-thinking practices, the sessions foster transparency, the identification of blockers to great work, and a feeling of co-accountability for not just the relationship health but also the business outcomes."

 

Optimizing the Relationship

While improved scores are great, the true goal is to optimize the health and productivity of IBM's agency partnerships. This requires the full participation by both client and agency teams, at all levels of the relationship. They must be committed to applying the best tools and concepts, and working in an agile and collaborative way, and empowered to address challenges and remove blockers as a team.

Joyce Costello is a brand professional in worldwide agency management at IBM Corporate Marketing. You can email her at joycec@us.ibm.com.

 

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