On occasion I conduct agency searches for clients. I did the Jenny Craig and Villeroy & Boch reviews among others and am currently engaged in another search.
What I have found during my reviews is that many agencies make it very difficult to connect with them by e-mail. Often I am doing my research after telephone hours and am checking out potential prospects sites. At the beginning of the review my task is to find candidates quickly usually because the clients are having a problem and that is why they have hired me. I want to connect with agencies quickly and easily.
When I go to the majority of advertising agency, public relations agencies, and digital agencies sites alike, the contact info on their sites are e-mails like info@ or contact@.
I have sent e-mails to those e-mail addresses and rarely hear back from the agency.
I think that agencies often do this because they do not want to get resumes from people in transition and that is short sighted and a mistake. More on that later.
The worst contact method is asking somebody to fill out a contact form with the nature of the request. What is the size of my budget? Are you really serious? Rarely are these responded to when I complete them.
As a review consultant I am incentivized to find agencies so I persevere.
The majority of clients do reviews on their own. I wonder if they have as much tenacity as I do.
Smart agencies make it easy to connect with.
They provide the name and phone number of the New Business person with a hyperlinked e-mail.
They make it easy to connect with and follow up quickly. My record is 7 minutes.
If you want to manage communications flow with the outside world you can add e-mails like jobs@agency, inquiries@agency. This will insure that the right e-mail goes to the right people.
I also find that in the majority of cases I have to follow up with a call to the person mentioned on the site instead of hearing from them first. Sorry to say but that is the truth.
Connect with Hank on LinkedIn, Twitter, & Facebook:
Trackbacks/Pingbacks