CEE Agency Titans Program – First Session Feedback

As a part of CEE market development program, Google recently launched CEE Agency Titans, a business coaching and networking program for agencies in developing markets.

IM Action is proud to take part in this program, and in the following series of posts I will share some feedback on program sessions, overall experience and value that the program brings to our agency.

The first session was held on June 25 by Magnus Hasselteg, Viva Media CEO. The session was devoted to strategy and leadership, vision, goals and setting KPIs. Magnus was very open in sharing his thoughts and experience on corporate culture, company values, and, what’s more important, in answering lots of questions from peer agencies.

Here are the key takeaways from the first session presentation:

1. True leaders need a sense of control; when you lose control, someone else takes it.

2. Leadership means being a step ahead: always, in everything you do.

3. Building a strong, healthy culture is vital for agency success – keep in mind the “monkey culture” risks.

4. The most common reason for losing clients is lack of interest to clients’ business from agencies and complaints handing – i.e. “soft values”.

And here are some notes on the most important takeaways from Q&A session part. As I mentioned earlier, Magnus was extremely open (or, as he said, “brutally honest”) when answering the questions.

1. Viva Media tends to act as an “outsourced marketing team” for its clients, covering all possible digital needs that a client may have. This leads to bigger clients, more services, and longer contracts.

2. KPIs – one of the key project management KPIs is renewal rate – and this KPI is shared across the team. The team members’ performance is measured, apart from other metrics, by the amount of actionable suggestions on project improvement.

3. Group bonuses is another important factor to motivate a team. Along with individual bonuses, there are department bonuses that encourage all the team to share projects success.

4. Key leads sources are email marketing and cold calling, and sales managers need to generate and process a certain amount of contacts per week.

5. The company is working on removing time sheets from the processes and focuses more on performance-related factors.

Anyway, we have much in common between our agency and things Magnus mentioned in terms of team/HR values. A healthy culture, ability to go personal with employees, open issues handling – all this fits right into how I see IM Action path.

As a part of the program, I got homework. I will share it both in the program group and here, stay tuned for updates!

IM Action CEO made a brief overview of CEE Agency Titans Program and presented it in an open-air video. CEE Agency Program was a great time to reconsider our business progress and have a fresh eye on our daily routine activities. The event is newsworthy, yet refreshing, as we could catch a break from issues at hand and focus on business as such. See our video report here.