Launching a Product - How to Pick the Right Agency?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, and today I want to talk about picking the right agency. How can you pick the right agency for you and your project, and what are some criteria to look for in finding an agency that's right? For you. This is something that I've been asked by people, you know, people looking at even my firm and contact me and say, okay, well, how do we, you know, what are the things that you look at and what are the things that you do and how do I compare you against, you know, these other people that I'm talking to? And so I've put together, you know, a little bit of list here on just some areas to be aware of and think about as you're going through the process and finding the right agency. And yes, of course I would, I would potentially love your business, but we're not the right agency for everyone. And so you need to go through this process of determining who's going to be your right business partner for launching your product. So I'm going to talk about ability to solve problems, type of connection, having a good connection with them, making sure your values align, experience that the agency has, and Whether they can scale with you. So first, I wanna talk about ability to solve problems. Now, this might be a pretty obvious one, but you do wanna have an idea of the level of complexity that they're comfortable with in actually working on. And yes, people can say, oh, we'll do anything, we can manage anything to whatever level you want, and that may not be true, you know, you can just say that. But look at the type of products that they've worked on. Ask for, you know, not necessarily references in terms of gonna call them up and talk to them, because honestly, a lot of people don't like that. And something that we don't do is ever give out our clients' information. So we're not gonna be one of those people that gives you the information of one of our clients in order to go ask them about a project they had with us. We're typically under some pretty heavy NDAs. And you'll find that with product development in general, Not going to be just handed client information in order to review that. So you want to look at, you know, what does their portfolio look like? What are the companies that they've worked with? Have they worked with companies that have products in the complexity level that you have? And just what are those references that they can show you, you know, without breaking an NDA and show what their capability is? And in your process of interviewing with them, getting an idea of their problem solving and asking them just some questions about general design or how they go about working through a project can give you an idea of what their problem solving capabilities are, because at the end of the day, you're going to need an agency that can solve every problem that comes up in developing your product. The second thing I want to talk about is having a good connection. And obviously first impression is important, and so are your subsequent meetings. You know, if it's— you want to make sure that you're with someone that when you partner with them, you're going to have a really solid connection with them. You want someone at that company to be your point of contact. So it's also really important that you actually talk to whoever's going to be managing your project. And being your point of contact. So if they're just going to hand you off just to a project manager, make sure that you talk to that product manager before you engage them. You want to know your point of contact so that you know that you have a good rapport, a good conversation, you can understand each other, and everything is going to make sense really well. Because if you get handed off, you know, the first person is really great salesperson, And you never talk to the person who's actually going to be managing the project and being your point of contact, and then your personalities don't mesh well, it can cause additional friction that just shouldn't be there and should be avoided. So making sure you have a good connection with your point of contact is really important. Third thing I want to talk about is making sure your values align. So making sure if you're really sustainably minded, company, if that's what your brand is all about, you want to make sure that you're talking to an agency that cares about that as well. Is there going to be able to get into your shoes and understand what you're trying to accomplish better than someone that is, you know, not as sustainably minded, for example? Those values are across the board. It's, you know, making sure that those values align are really important because If you're working with an agency, the right agency is a partner company to yours, and they're going to be a partner hopefully for the product that you're first working with them on and, you know, every other product after that. Hopefully that, that's the kind of relationship you're aiming for, and that's the kind you should— an agency relationship should be something that is long-term and isn't, isn't just a one-off, hopefully. Project. Fourth thing I want to talk about is experience. Now, with an agency, there's obviously new agencies where, you know, just started an agency. That was definitely mine when I began. I— my agency started with, as an agency, no experience. But you can look at who's a part of the company. If they— if the agency hasn't been around and they haven't had a ton of experience, then You know, asking questions of like how much experience individually do team members have that would be involved is something that comes up, and I definitely fielded those questions early on. And then now where I'm at, experience is really based on what is the agency's portfolio, and I can throw my personal experience as a little bit of extra weight if needed to show that, you know, I have been doing it for a long time. Awesome. And doing it way before my agency became an agency, but it's something you wanna look at kind of overall. And both of those add up, right? If the agency's been doing it for a long time, then you should be counting that experience. If they're newer, if they're less than a year old and they don't have very— if their portfolio is very thin, then yeah, maybe asking for the experience of at least the lead designer. You know, this is typically when hiring an agency, you don't— it's not a government contract, so the experience and resume of every person on staff isn't really going to be handed off to you in order to get you to work with an agency. They're going to expect you to look at the lead designer, the owner, the founder, whoever that is that has the experience, and then the agency as a whole. The 5th thing is, can they grow with you? So when looking at an agency, especially if you're launching your first product or you're, you know, rebranding and relaunching a product, you want to make sure that they can grow with you as you continue to add more products, as you continue to require more services. And so this is something that not every agency can do. Some agencies are very specific in what they do and they're really good at it. We're hoping, at least the ones that you're talking to hopefully are. They're really good at a really specific section of it. And so they aren't able to scale with you or they're small, they're a boutique, they're just a couple people. And if you were to say, need to launch 5 products in a year, they wouldn't be able to do it. And so you wanna look at what is your overall strategy? What is your growth gonna look at? Because you want that long-term relationship. By the time you build a relationship and an agency knows and understands your brand, your mission, what you're trying to achieve with your products, your customer base, and what you do for them and with them, you don't want to— like, that's a lot of time. It can take months, build it over years, and the more time you spend with that agency, As long as they're doing a good job, you are going to find it harder to split over to a different agency. Of course, if there's a colossal mess up, then yeah, you might be able to easily jump ship and find the time it takes to rebuild a relationship like that worth it. But this should be something that if you're a startup, you find an agency that is a little bit bigger than what you actually need right now because you should have growth. Now, you can of course, you know, go cheaper routes, hire independent contractors and things like that early on. But if you're really being strategic about planning for your product launch and your future product launches, you want to have an agency that's going to be able to support you now and in 3 years and in 5 years or even longer. You know, there's in the marketing world and even product development world, In ad world, signing 3, 5-year contracts are not unheard of and quite common in certain sectors because you know that it needs to take a lot of time to build that kind of relationship, be able to produce the results you're looking for. Hopefully this answers some questions about how to find the right agency. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description, and of course we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.