Anyone who’s ever hired a PR firm of any size is familiar with the common practice of “bait and switch.” This is where you meet with the senior agency staff numerous times during the courtship phase of the relationship. You’re impressed by the PR agency’s commitment to your business by having its best and most experienced people invest so much time in getting to know you and all of the communications challenges you face.
Then you hire them and things change.
Pretty soon, those senior members aren’t in as many of the meetings or Zoom calls. You’ve fallen down on their priority list. Instead, you find yourself dealing with the PR firm’s account supervisor or senior account executive. And not long after that, it seems most of your contact with the agency is through a recent college grad with a title like “Account Coordinator.”
You’re not happy. You’re frustrated. But worse, you start to feel like you’ve been tricked.
I’ve seen this issue from all sides, and it was one of the key factors I took into account when I started my own firm, which is decidedly small and nimble for this very reason.
Still, if this is something you’re wrestling with, it is important to understand why agencies do this and how it works.
That Courtship Phase
In order to get your business, PR agencies know they must win your confidence through their best people. That’s why you meet with them early and often before you hire them.
As you would expect, their best people are their most expensive people, not only for the agency, but for you, too. Senior-level people command higher salaries, so agencies can’t afford to have too many of them around. Since they are the most highly compensated staff members, their hourly billing rates are also the highest, quickly eating into your PR budget the more involved they become.
Those senior-level PR agency staffers have to justify their salaries by working across many accounts at the same time. They work to stay in some level of contact with clients. Still, they spend most of their time managing staff, hiring, planning, budgeting, and of course, going after new business.
The people whose primary duties are to serve you day-to-day are lower in the organization.
The PR Firms’ Client Service Model
Public relations firms make the most profit and save their clients the most money by making liberal use of junior level staff. They are more plentiful and more affordable for clients. A junior PR agency staffer can spend the maximum amount of time on your business without chewing up as much of your communications budget.
The fact that most of these staffers are just starting to learn their craft on your dime is a reality of the business and one of the major reasons why clients so quickly tire of some agencies.
If the PR agency has higher levels of turnover among junior staffers, or if it tends to promote junior staff more quickly, causing a revolving door effect on your assigned client service team, chances are you’re not happy.
What You Can Do
If you are committed to the agency relationship, or at least committed to working with agencies of similar size, these economic realities will not go away. With this in mind, here are some things you can do:
- Insist on Regular Meetings – To get the most value for your PR dollar the best approach is to insist on a pre-scheduled and regular meeting or call with the most senior people on your client service team. It could be a weekly call or a monthly meeting, but you should program into the process regular contact with senior agency staffers, if for any other reason than to give and get status and progress reports.
- Account Executive or Higher – At the very least, your main point of contact should be someone at the account executive level or higher. If you are dealing with an assistant account executive or account coordinator as your main point of contact, the agency is not taking your business seriously.
- Monitor Agency Turnover – If client service team turnover is an issue, chances are that’s an agency culture issue and nothing you can control. It may have nothing to do with how effectively (or not) you’re managing this relationship. If this is trying your patience, it may be time to look for a new agency.
- Inquire About Agency Turnover – If you’re in the midst of hiring an agency, make sure to ask explicit questions about agency turnover rates, and when analyzing agency team members assigned to your account, ask how long they’ve been with the firm and in their current position. The longer the better.
Explore Other Options
If all of this is too much, you do have other options. One of the reasons my firm has survived over 20 years is because it’s a hybrid model. In other words, I’m a sole practitioner, so all of my clients deal with the owner. There is no bait-and-switch. But, if the client needs a full-blown team, I can scale quickly because I have several strategic alliances in place, and in every case, my partner is another senior-level practitioner in his or her field, from graphic design and web development, to research and marketing.
If the bait-and-switch issue is on your mind, I’m happy to talk. Just let me know.