Real Talk about Agency Culture
Agency culture is a core differentiator when you’re talking to potential new hires and clients. It’s something just about every agency I know talks about prominently on their website and sales materials.
It’s also difficult to quantify the impact of a mindfully built and maintained culture (although we try to draw a relatively straight line from our culture to our NPS score). For businesses that rely largely on KPIs and hard data, culture talk can get pretty squishy, pretty fast.
It’s been on my mind a lot lately, especially as we’ve brought on a couple of new team members. At Blackbird, we strive to build a culture of achievement through pride in performance. That’s baked into our hiring and training process. . There are pros and cons to our approach, but ultimately I’ll explain how I think it helps us back up our cultural goals.
“Growth and comfort cannot ride the same horse”
Many agencies go the route of hiring experienced people to fill mid-level and senior-level positions. This comes with some clear benefits: those people can plug in and contribute right away, and they bring a different perspective on techniques and initiatives to add value to our clients and team. Those are material benefits, though we take a different approach.
Over the years, we’ve occasionally brought in experienced folks, but we’ve seen some drawbacks. For one thing, hiring experienced people usually means recruiting fees, which means you’re paying a premium that affects how much you can invest in other team members and training initiatives. For another, we are particular in our methodology, and smart experienced advertisers will need to learn or relearn approaches.
We’ve found that for our company, the best approach is to hire smart, driven entry-level people with little to no marketing experience and to train the hell out of them. The best people I have ever worked with came in with virtually no training but had a ton of ambition.
There are obvious detriments to this approach, including:
There’s a ramp-up period before those folks can start contributing to client success.
Entry-level folks aren’t bringing anything to the table from previous experience with marketing – or industries relevant to our clients.
You’re asking people who have no idea if they really want to pursue marketing careers – let alone agency careers – to get voluntarily put through the wringer. Not everyone is up for that, and not everyone should be – and it benefits all parties to know that as soon as possible.
On that note, one of my favorite interview questions to ask (and I think this is relatively controversial) is, if you had to make a choice between work-life balance and career progression, with ascending titles and salary, which would you pick? People who choose the latter are identifying themselves as aggressive and willing to work hard, which are essential qualities for embracing our culture. The other big benefit of hiring entry-level folks is that we don’t have to ask them to learn anything different than they’re used to; we train them to our standards from the jump.
Speaking of training…
How we train at Blackbird
A digital marketer’s job is always changing, which means success is much less dependent on what you know coming into it. It's really about the ability to adjust and to learn and to progress. New marketers will start by pulling reports, learning about budgets and bids, and writing ads, but they’ll get higher-leverage projects as they develop. Channels will change, best practices will change, and marketers will progress into owning and designing client strategies.
To help our team members get traction toward that progress, we’ve built a hands-on, intense training experience that intentionally produces discomfort. We view discomfort as a good thing because it creates an urgency to adjust and learn, which is always a necessity in marketing. (But, again, an approach that fosters discomfort isn’t for everyone.)
We obviously include modules and certifications in our training, but most of our approach is dynamic. It includes active learning, town halls that serve as open forums about methodology, account audits, and public quizzes.
The audit system – where newer Blackbird team members are asked to audit accounts they don’t work on – is essential to our training. These folks are just learning digital advertising, but they're tasked to really look at it, understand it, and give recommendations early on. In doing so, they’re able to apply what they’re learning to real accounts, with real data. It forces them to understand how rules and best practices actually translate into strategy and actions. Audits are incredibly hard at first, and that’s on purpose; over time, good marketers learn to quickly translate data into actions and strategy.
The quizzes themselves aren’t actually about knowledge assessment. Our main intent with quizzing newer employees is to expose them to ideas and concepts and channels and problems that they don't know they don’t know. This kind of exposure starts training them to think about new levels of methodology.
At many agencies, training involves prescriptive tasks and SOPs; do all of the instructions correctly, and you’ll succeed at the task. Lots of agencies actually make that a goal; design a training program where anyone can study the manual and follow the process. This DOES help establish a basic performance consistency, but philosophically, we believe that’s the wrong way to develop marketers.
Instead of saying, “Please create a report with these tabs and columns and date ranges,” we say, “Please tell us your recommendations for target CPA adjustments given last week’s performance.” You’ll still need to create the report, but that’s just the beginning of the project. From there, our team needs to consider comps, scenarios, potential outcomes, and steps and resources involved. That is where actual mastery starts.
If all of this sounds hard, it is. Combine that with exposure to multiple accounts, and the learning curve is incredibly steep. But Blackbirdies who stick it out are excited to put in the effort to get results for our clients and to become better marketers, day after day.
What is the business of an agency?
Our agency’s primary goal isn't actually to produce great marketing performance. Our objective, our core, our actual business, is to produce great marketers that then create great performance. That objective is fueled by our culture and the tension between autonomy and processes.
There are questions our leaders need to frequently ask ourselves to make sure we’re living up to the goal of developing great marketers. Are our team members valued? Are they rewarded for learning? Are they given all the tools and resources they need to evolve?
Ultimately, our culture is like our approach to talent development: it’s a constant work in progress. But none of it gets traction unless we bring on the right people in the hiring process.