Dealing with internal client politics

An easy client is one who just wants to make money: as long as you are successful in helping them reach their goal, all is good. But more typically, you’ll be dealing with an organization that has layers of command and that means client politics to be navigated. Here are two of the most typical organizational dynamics and how I’ve learned to deal with them.

Managers vs. Directors. A director is a person with profit & loss responsibility—that easy client I mentioned who just wants to make money. However, you’re unlikely to have direct access to a director level, especially early in the relationship, and even if you do they won’t focus on the details of individual projects. Instead you will report to some form of marketing manager—a person who is tasked with meeting deadlines, staying on budget, and especially presenting no negative surprises to upper management.

Your challenge in dealing with the manager is that your concept and your very existence are inherently risky—you represent the new and unknown, otherwise why would they bring you in to replace whatever else they were using? Your job is to convince the manager that this journey into uncharted waters will be safe and secure as a Caribbean cruise (and without the Legionnaire’s Disease).

You can sell yourself and your concept as a safe solution with a/case histories—other marketers (in recognizable or peer organizations) have done exactly the same thing successfully; b/testimonials—references from clients in those companies they can talk to; c/your personal presentation—this is the time to be buttoned up and professional, not edgy; d/a gentle reminder that one of the possible negatives is being left behind—because others aren’t afraid to innovate and they, the client, are.

Every outside contractor has had the frustration of dealing with managers who seem more focused on budgets and schedules than actual results, but keep in mind that’s what they are getting their job performance reviewed on. Be patient and reasonable, and be prepared to stop seeking work from managers whose near-term focus keeps you from doing the work you want to do or can afford to do.

One last thing: never give a manager a negative surprise. After what I’ve said above you can guess why this is. A blown deadline or budget, or work that doesn’t follow the creative brief, is going to make this person crazy and you may never get work from them (or anyone else in their company) again.

Sound like a lot to deal with? Remember that good managers are where future directors come from. Be patient, prove your reliability, and you may be surprised at how the relationship blossoms once you earn their trust.

Sales vs. Marketing. If the business model is to generate leads, then your company has both a sales and a marketing VP and the sales VP is the one with the big swinging appendage. Because, as sales trainer Roy Chitwood says, “nothing happens until somebody sells something.” The sales department is who brings in the revenues without which nobody would have a job. Right?

Your problem is that your client is the marketing department, which is either subordinate to sales or actually reports to it. And you know, as does the sales VP when he or she is alone at night, that the quality of leads generated by the marketing department is the engine that drives the sales organization.  Actually, I take that back, sales is not at all shy about crediting the importance of leads but in a backhanded manner. If they can’t make the sale, then it’s because the leads aren’t good enough.

You can be part of your marketing client’s survival plan by making sure the leads ARE good. You do this by writing your copy as the first step of the sales process and providing good information and sound reasons to want to find out more. Salespeople may still complain (because not making the sale is never their fault) but the better quality of leads will shine through on the bottom line.

A special sales/marketing problem comes up when you want to use an offer such as a freebie or entry in a drawing to boost response. Sales will complain the leads are no good because you bribed people to respond. The only way to resolve this objection is to set up a test. Have a lower-level support person field the registrations and, if it’s obvious the prospect responded only to get the freebie, don’t pass that lead onto sales. Then see if you have more qualified leads at the end of the day.

I once participated in exactly this test with an enterprise software company. By offering an entry to win a cool tech gadget, we boosted registrations by 24%.  Of these, 10% were quickly dismissed as freebie-seeking lookie-loos. But that left the client with a 14% increase in qualified leads with basically no increase in cost.

I feel like I’ve been unusually snarky in this post. I have generally had cordial, even friendly relationships with my clients and above I’m describing worst case scenarios. But the corporate marketing world is not a relaxing or non-competitive space. You need to be careful out there.

How to get paid as a freelancer

Many freelancers are squirrely about asking for money. You build a personal relationship with a client who genuinely values your creative product, and it seems crass to go back to that person with a bill and say “I hope that you’ll pay this quickly because I have nothing but Pop-Tarts® in my pantry”. Plus appearing too hungry seems non-professional—if you were a pro you’d have the financial details worked out or would simply be above them.

The solution to this one is simple: you shouldn’t be submitting bills to your primary client in the first place. Invoices should go direct to the Accounts Payable Department which is where they’ll end up anyway after your client signs off on them. Your client has other things to do than process paperwork; the AP department doesn’t, because that’s their job. And if they get a bill they don’t recognize they’ll contact you, or their marketing department, rather than simply ignoring it. (Thanks for my friend and fellow freelancer John Wurtmann for reminding me of this strategy.)

Of course a few freelancers—very few—don’t have this problem because they insist on payment in advance. I think that’s an unrealistic expectation and you may lose a project you want because the company simply can’t cut a check in time to meet the schedule. My approach, with a new client, is to ask for 1/3 of my estimate up front, 1/3 on presentation of first round copy, and 1/3 on approval of final copy. That seems to spread risk appropriately between me and them and I’ve never had a client say it was unreasonable.

Kill fees: this is a partial payment a client agrees to give you if the work is unsatisfactory or if their needs change and the product gets stopped in its tracks. A typical arrangement is that the client will agree to pay 25% of the total, regardless of the point at which the project is stopped. A few big publishers insist on kill fees but I try to stay away from them. A stipulated kill fee introduces the scenario of possible failure into the relationship. The 1/3-1/3-1/3 arrangement I mention above protects both of us just fine.

Contracts: if you have a contract you need legal knowledge to make sure it is valid and air-tight and that means, to paraphrase an old saw, the copywriter who writes his or her own contract (or cut-and-pastes one out of a book) has a fool for a lawyer. I prefer to put as little as possible in writing. Definitely an email confirmation of project scope, schedule and price is a good idea. Beyond that I will draft a letter of agreement if the project calls for it either because it is a very large budget or (especially) a retainer arrangement. I deliberately use plain non-legalese language. I sign it when I send it and ask the client to sign a copy and return it; about 50% do.

If you are asked to sign a contract from your client, you can either show it to a lawyer (which means you are going to have to hike your fees significantly, to pay your lawyers) or make your best effort to understand it and question any sections you don’t agree with. The area that typically raises red flags for me is a non-compete clause; I can understand I can’t work for a competitor during the project, but that agreement should have a time limit. Also look at what they specify as payment arrangements and agree they are reasonable.

The big idea here is that a copy assignment is the creation and transfer of a product whose value cannot be objectively determined; if your client is out to trick you, most likely they will be successful or else you will both spend a fortune in legal fees.

Crooks, deadbeats and bankrupts: I’ve had very few bad experiences with payment in a 20-year freelance history. I once sued a client in small claims court and we settled for 50% of the total, at the expense of half a day of my time. Another client proved so difficult to deal with that I resigned the account without asking for pay. Another killed a very complex sweepstakes project many drafts in, initially said the work was off-target so he wouldn’t pay for it, finally agreed to a reasonable kill fee; I think the problem was some internal politics and he had to share the bleeding. I’ve had only one client who was an out-and-out crook who probably had no intention of paying from the get-go; I hired a national collection agency (the one you are thinking about) to go after him and they reported that the claim was “uncollectible”.

All the above problems amounted to a minuscule percentage of my total billing over the years—I would be surprised if it is 1%. If you retain a lawyer it’s probably going to cost you a lot more than that including writing and reviewing contracts and potential litigation. The sane alternative is to pick your clients carefully then work in good faith with the assumption it will be a satisfactory experience for both parties.

Having said that, I’ll close with two cautionary tales. The good: during the dot-com era I worked around the clock for one e-commerce company that wrote a $40,000 check for services rendered and went out of business the next day; miraculously the check was honored but I did not have a backup plan if it wasn’t. The bad and ugly: many freelancers I know worked for a large publisher of romance novels that suddenly went belly-up in the 1990s, not only leaving them stranded but putting an entire agency out of business.

The moral is that, as in poker or stock trading, you should never bet (in terms of uncollected receivables) more than you are prepared to lose.

How I became a copywriter

I would guess that relatively few people spring from the womb and say, “I’m going to be an ad copywriter when I grow up”. More likely you have an aptitude for writing and you discover copywriting as a way to make a living, or else you are asked to write copy as part of another job and discover you’re good at it.

I came from the first group. I went to film school to become a rich and famous screenwriter, but I turned to freelance copywriting as a way to support myself until I got my big break. I actually did apply for the proverbial “job in the mailroom at J. Walter Thompson” but I didn’t get it; my first assignments were writing sale catalogs for department stores. I liked the challenge of finding a way to say something meaningful about a product in a paragraph or two, but it never occurred to me that I was actually selling something.

After a few years of this, I went into one of my department store clients, The Broadway, to see if there were any copywriting assignments coming up. There weren’t but the direct mail advertising manager had just quit and so I was offered that job. For the first time I became accountable for my results—defined not as whether the designs were pleasing and the writing clever, but how much we sold on a per inch basis. It was a revelation, brought home to me when Jan Wetzel, the VP of marketing at our company, took me around to various stores in the chain on the first day of the sale and we watched customers waiting in line to pay for the very same products we had featured in our catalog.

I had a couple of other “suit” jobs, including one where I was the ad director of a company that sold tools by mail. The orders came in by phone so I could see when we had a hit because the switchboard would overflow to the receptionist and she’d be too busy to say hello. I found myself excited about coming into the office on the first day after a new mailing hit, to see if this would happen. Again, a link between copywriting and results. Amazing.

I could only take the suit for so long and eventually I went back to freelancing and buried it in my back yard. (I assume it’s still there, at the intersection of Occidental and Westerly Terrace in Los Angeles’ Silverlake district.) But I had learned the life lesson that successful copywriting is not about gratifying yourself and maybe winning an award or two with a clever concept or turn of a phrase. It’s all about making something happen—and the more significant your impact, the more a knowledgeable client is likely to pay you for your work. It’s copywriting that gets results.