Creating Agency Scorecards and Standardizing Meetings
Agency Framework Mini-Series:
- Creating an Inbound Marketing Agency Framework
- Crafting Agency Core Values and an Agency Organizational Chart
- Creating a Client Journey
- Agency Scorecards and Standardized Meetings (this episode!)
Establishing shard expectations is perhaps the most important element in the agency-client relationship. Throughout your marketing and sales process, you want to use the terminology and metrics your prospects understand. Getting everyone aligned about what success looks like is the first step toward realizing success.
But how do you track your progress toward success?
Sometimes it is a long and weary road. In this episode, Gray shares two tools that can help you pace toward the goals you have for your agency and the goals you have with your clients.
Level-10 Meeting Agenda
The Level-10 Meeting Agenda is a part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. Author Gene Wickman breaks down the whole system in his book Traction. This is a model that several agencies have applied to their businesses with great results.
Placing a recurring meeting on your calendar and following a set agenda is necessary to reaching your goals. It is just that simple.
It isn’t enough to set smart goals, you need to track progress and adjust plans as you go.
A big part of a Level-10 Meeting is the scorecard review each week. You want to identify the key numbers, both lead and lag indicators, that will show the health of the business. Fluctuations in these numbers will show you where attention needs to be paid or where efforts are paying off.
After the scorecard review portion of the meeting, the next big area of focus is your problem solving time. It is important to keep the meeting flowing and push the points of discussion to this segment of the meeting. Before kicking off, everyone agrees on a priority for the meeting review.
The question you want to ask yourself relating to this time is: Are we working together as a team to solve our biggest problems?
So many times the core team at an agency is pulled in so many different directions. This is your time each week to stop working in the business and together, work on the business. This is called the IDS section: Identify, discuss, and solve the problems at hand.
As we all know, a meeting that is all talk and no action is just a waste of time. To make this time profitable, assign follow up tasks from to each person in the meeting. Make sure they’re documented so they can be followed up with at the meeting the following week.
Organizational Checkup
Running a standardized Level-10 meeting each week with your leadership team is a great way to stay on top of the problems facing the agency and the rocks that you’re working on as a team. Another tool to help check the pulse of the team on the strategic direction of the agency is an Organizational Checkup.
This standardized set of questions is a quiz that each member of the core team should take every six months. It is a great way to track the momentum that the core team is feeling as you’re pushing toward your one-year goal and three-year goals. When you’re 18-24 months into the process, it is cool to look back at the past results and see how things have changed for each team member.
