You’ve submitted your proposal (or RFP response, chemistry check, presentation, etc.) and you’re waiting to hear back from the client firm or intermediary on whether you’ll progress.
Do you:
A) Call or email the main contact 2-3 times a week
B) Call or email the main contact once per week
C) Look back at the timeline given by the client (assuming there was one) and contact only when key dates pass seemingly un-noticed
D) Come up with reasons other than status checking to get in touch (there’s a new report out, our VP will be in your city next Thursday, a conference is coming up which you may wish to consider, etc.)
E) Leave it and hope for the best
This is a tricky question and no answer is correct in every case. From our experience, it seems that the level of ‘touch’ between steps and stages depends on the client contact’s personality. But, generally, the same rules hold during the agency selection process as when casually dating. During the agency selection process, the perfect marketing and communications agencies will be:
- Eager, never annoying
- Engaged, without seeming desperate
- Thoughtful, without smothering
- Appropriate, not generic
Appreciating that this isn’t a straightforward answer, we would suggest that the best general approach is to clarify the timeline with clients during the early stages of the agency selection process. Then, agencies may get in touch with key contacts on/just before/just after those critical dates provided to check that things will progress according to the provided timeline. And, if interesting insights are out there which an agency wishes to share, they should group those into no more than one unsolicited contact per week (if permitted at all according to the rules of fairplay amongst competing agencies).
What do you think? Where do you draw the line between pestering and passivity in the agency selection process?
