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Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I am delighted to have with me one of my favorite guests, Lima Nightmare, AKA Lee McKnight from RSW/US.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: I’m back and it’s good to be back. Chip. Thanks for having me again.

I love it. I, so I have to, I did bring a little toy, eraser sushi that I will be nibbling on throughout the show. It is important that, yeah, don’t. They literally are erasers.

Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea to be erasers.

But I did bring something.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. I mean, I can always count on you to have a prop of some kind whenever you’re on any of my shows.

So hopefully people are watching this on video. And if you’re listening to it, go back and watch the video because I mean, it’s, it’s part of the entertainment that we have. But in addition to entertainment, we’re going to get into some substantive things here. And because Lee, you and RSW are really expert in business development topics and, and you don’t just opine, you actually go out and do research. You’ve done some research recently. And so we’re going to talk about some of the findings from your latest surveys.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Absolutely. No, and thank you. And we released this little bit of background, oh, about a month, but I think what’s interesting is interesting is how evergreen a lot of these topics are staying.

And we, we’ll, we’ll get into it, but we added a couple of new questions we found to be, you know, really interesting and, thing, you know, one of the things we talked about before we started was, well, I should finish, shouldn’t I? What we do is we survey agencies and marketers. This is one of the three survey reports we release over the year.

Where marketers are included, and it’s probably the most popular, probably not a surprise to hear, in terms of hearing both sides and where they play out, you know, in the answers to some of these questions. So, there’s, there’s the, setting the table there. I think that survey went out end of November release.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think that’s, that’s really what does stand out about this, is that you are looking at both sides. The client side and the agency side, which is, which is relatively unique. I mean, folks like myself, we, you know, I do a lot of research, but I tend to focus just on the agency side. And so being able to bring both pieces of it into the equation, really, I think.

Has surfaced some, some interesting nuggets, that are worth looking at.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Yeah, for sure. And I think we, we decided to start with some of the disconnects, which are always, it’s a fun place to start. I think, and I know one of the ones that you’d mentioned specifically wanted to talk about out of the gate is productization piece, which I’ll try to say that over and over again, it won’t happen, but.

Just to set the table there are so, 52.4 percent of agencies say they sometimes, productize their services yet, 65 percent of marketers still prefer customized services over productized solutions. So there, there’s a, there’s a gap in expectations. And I thought that that 50 percent number maybe seemed a little high.

I wanted to see what you thought, but definitely a gap.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, it, it, the number does seem perhaps a little bit high. I think, you know, part of the challenge that you run into here is definitions, right? Because you know, there are, I would argue that the vast majority of agencies have productized their services over the years.

When, when I go in and I look at the engagements that agencies have, it looks pretty similar from one client to the next, and the pricing is pretty similar from one client to the next. So effectively that is productizing. It’s not doing it in a branded way, you know, where it’s in your face. And so I think that, that some of this may come down to, is it overt productization or is it subtle productization?

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Oh, that’s great. I just wrote a post on this. I’m going to go update it. Because I hadn’t really thought about that because you’re exactly right. I mean, if you look at marketers, SEO firms, I mean, these types of firms that have bundled for lack of a better order productized services for quite a while, you know, I think it’s interesting because I had an agency principal email me, not one of our clients, but just that happens to know a great firm, but, and it’s small to midsize firm, but it said, can you get like 10 minutes?

Cause what do you, what exactly do you mean by like productized services and how would we, a creative agency, we’re not even thinking about that