The Standards: It Starts With Hello
Callum on turning small talk into the next big thing.
All good relationships start with hello. This is no different.
Over the years we’ve been lucky enough to have some industry-leading businesses reach out to us to chat. As happy as we are to hear that they like us and our work, we need to remember that they’re coming to us for a reason.
In an industry that loves adding “human-centric” to just about every job description but chastising the client’s inability to follow a 180-page brand-guideline.pdf we made, making lasting work involves asking the right questions and listening deeply. This is The Standard for when It Starts With Hello.
At Love + Money we created The Standards as a manual on creating exceptional work that works, every time. It’s a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
If you’re like us, leads can come from anywhere. From an email, Instagram, friends of friends, old clients or a conversation with someone you’ve just met. While they might all share the desire for us to better articulate and thus elevate their business, what that looks like on a granular level differs wildly every time.
One of the privileges of working in this industry is that we’re constantly exposed to so many beyond our own. To learn deeply about a sector you may have only just found out about. But as an outsider looking in, convincing a potential client that you understand where their problem lies and possess the exact skillset to remedy it is no small feat. In our experience, it’s not about showcasing your work in the slickest hypereel ever seen (chances are they’ve already seen most of your work) or about convincing them that your Ways Of Working™ are second-to-none (no doubt they’ll hear about them down the line). It’s really about getting curious.
Known as an It Starts With Hello (ISWH), this introductory meeting allows us to see what the project requires and if we’d be a good fit. It’s about attempting to understand and then explain their challenge back to them. This process, of listening and re-articulating, is a forcing function to uncover where the complexity lies and the approach you’ll need to implement over the coming months. It’s about understanding the stakes, your ability to help and the limits of that ability. A good fit usually happens when there’s a challenge you’re interested in learning more about, a problem to fall in love with and (obviously) something that you can apply your skills to. Here, an ISWH isn’t about closing a deal, but about fostering a relationship.
Here at Love + Money we aim to bring two of our team to every ISWH (three is a party after all), which we segment into four key stages. This provide us with a clear structure to follow and two different perspectives on every problem, ensuring we’re capturing as much of the nuance as possible.
Starting With Hello:
Just like mum said, first impressions matter. We’ve all been introduced half-heartedly to people we promptly forget, so this introduction needs to play out differently if we want to win the work. Unsurprisingly, doing business with anyone requires knowing who they are and what their role is, so we brush up on exactly that ahead of our ISWH. If we’re still in the dark, we use this introduction to clarify anything we don’t yet know.
As we’re a fairly small agency, we make sure to ask how they learned about us if it isn’t self-evident. This helps us validate the effectiveness of the sales funnels we’ve got in place and lets us know who’s singing our praises behind our back.
What’s Their Problem?:
This is where we start to get into the real meat of the meeting. As we’re not yet capable of telepathy (give our designers a few years, we’re close), this is our chance to deeply understand the prospective client’s problem and indicate how we can best solve it. One of the most crucial parts to get right, we aim to glean as much information as we can on their company and the context that surrounds them. This serves to not only clarify our understanding on what needs to be done, but helps to quickly indicate whether we’re a good fit for each other.
To provide as clear a picture as possible, we move from the granular considerations to the far-reaching. By first understanding the services they offer, the specific problems they face, and the likely outcome should it go unchecked, we can understand the context as it currently stands. By also considering what got them into business to begin with, who cares most about the problem they face and what their ideal outcome for their business is beyond this project, we can best tailor our approach to ensure continued success long after our work is handed over.
Nuts and Bolts:
While there’s a lot that can be covered in a new business meeting, one thing that’s often under-represented are the costs and timings. While every scope is unique and requires tweaking, being transparent about what it will likely need to include and cost goes a long way. We often set a benchmark for a project, and have no qualms revealing how our estimates are built so everyone is valuing the work on the same terms. Getting confirmation on the project’s deadline and the the client’s expected level of investment here are also obvious indications on whether we’re suitable for each other.
By explicitly asking who’s going to make the decision (it might not be the person we’re currently speaking to) and what they’d need to be convinced, we get a much clearer indication on how to structure our pitch and who needs to see it if we get the opportunity.
Debrief + Follow-Up:
With the first meeting having wrapped up with our prospective client, we compare impressions and notes with any of our team who attended the call. This ensures we haven’t missed anything important and can get an accurate sense-check on the opportunity and expected problem areas.
Now with a clearer understanding on the context, we craft a follow-up email no longer than 24 hours after the meeting. This email aims to reflect on what we heard during the course of the meeting and voices what our potential solution would be to their problem. This should also aim to organise a follow-up call where we can pitch this to them and indicate an interest in involving the key decision-maker(s) in the process. And with it concludes the first of (hopefully) many hellos.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles on what some of these Standards are and how they help us maximise room for magic. If you want to see how we can provide you with creative agency to uplift your brand, you can chat with Adnaan about your next project via this link.
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