Gosh, it’s so important to have that trust with your agency—to make sure they’re out there every day representing your brand the right way.
It would be good to ask questions specific to that agency about how they track their people, how they track their results, how they track each and every day that teams are out in the field.
We have a lot of proprietary ways that we do that.
We also are very close to our staff. We talk to them every single day. We know where they are. We know what time they got there. We know the type of events they are doing. We know what they interactions are like. We get lots and lots of documentation, like video and photos.
There’s a lot of information that we track on a daily basis.
We also know based on the quality of the staff that we hire. I’m guessing we take longer and are more in depth in our hiring practices than industry standards. We feel it’s really important to hire the best people that you can out there who are really excited about working on a specific brand, passionate about that brand, and then we train them at least twice as deep as industry standards.
All of our training is face to face. All of it is either here in St. Louis or it’s at our customers locations, depending on what the best fit is. But we spend a lot of time talking about the right way to do a project, setting up our field staff for success.
And we also build an incredible trust really quickly with our field teams. You know, fortunately we have a really great reputation in our industry for really treating our field staff well, supporting them, paying them well, being there for them.
What we hear a lot from our field teams who work with other agencies is that they just don’t get the support that they get from us. We also have people who have said that they’re willing to work for less money for our organization because we spend so much time with them, and we support them so well, and they know that my staff really does care about them. So we build up this trust, and when you have that trust you really don’t have to worry as much about what your team is doing in the field or what potentially they’re not doing in the field.
It’s really important to us to make sure we have that trust and, you know, they know we will be there for them and they are going to be there for us and for our brand.