The Best Predictor of a Marketing Consultants’ Future Performance is their Past

To shift performance to the next level, we have been reading up on leadership best practices and other performance-based content that delivers insights into how best to transform a marketing department in the new era that is in front of us.

Like any accomplished marketing firm, especially one that has been around for as long as we have, we are digging deeper into our past performance including how we did business during COVID. Where did we excel and what challenges did, we need to overcome? Did our company show strengths and weaknesses that can help shape the way we do business as we forge into another year?

Taking in another layer, we are sitting down with marketing consultants in our marketing agency and really trying to understand what challenges they have faced and what could we have done as a company to make it better. This is an interesting and important journey, one that brings a lot of reality into the forefront.

The facts of working from home for some marketing consultants are relevant:

• Getting out of bed and jumping on a laptop blurs the lines
• Not getting dressed for work when there are no video conference calls is comfortable but it makes it harder to put the work hat on
• Flexibility in how time is used is highly beneficial to work, life balance
• Lack of in-person collaboration is hard especially on quality of work
• Asking for help in-person is easier than taking steps to conference call a colleague, therefore many times marketing consultants hold back
• Quality of work is improved by an in-office experience

Not every marketing consultant experiences the same level of connectivity with an office environment and it also depends largely on the age of the team and how long they have worked together.

If a marketing consultant has worked predominantly from home in the past, then they have already ‘got their groove’. If they haven’t, it takes some adjustment.

As we embark on 2021, working from home needs to be included in the mix. While for Marketing Eye, our team has voted to work from the office, there will be occasions when they will benefit from the flexibility of working from home. We need to ensure that they are supported on that journey and are able to draw on the experiences of the past 8 months to improve the way they work from home.

We have included new technologies to our suite, but mostly we have encouraged people to pick up the phone and chat. Sometimes just to catch up.

In the past few weeks when people have been back in the office, they have been happier, more connected and creative. They bounce ideas off each other, share insights into what they have learned through reading and campaign experience, and in general show that culture really does improve their performance.

Ask your marketing consultants a few pertinent questions:

• Over the last 8 months, what was your biggest accomplishment? What contributed to that accomplishment?
• What lessons can you take from the past year into the new year?
• What performance measures do you believe would benefit you most in the future? 
• What did you learn motivates you most from the past year, and how can we help you stay motivated in the year ahead?