The next question is, of course, how to get your employees to faithfully record and submit their hours? I recently heard someone say, “You shouldn’t point out a problem unless you’ve prepared a solution.” — an adage I’m going to try to live by — so I have a solution. It starts with education. Your employees should know the importance of recording billable time. We’re all in this together and everyone wants to keep the lights on in the agency. Set the right expectations and put a clear process in place. Prepare for contingencies and eliminate room for excuses.

At Developware, we’ve addressed this issue by implementing a feature in CurrentTrack^® which helps agency principals enforce a time sheet policy. Users of CurrentTrack can be flagged as time sheet required. You can also set how long an employee has to enter their time. At the specified time, if a user has an overdue time sheet, CurrentTrack displays a pop-up notification letting them know they’re missing a time sheet. They’re then brought to the screen where they can easily complete it. The user isn’t permitted to continue using the system until their time sheet has been successfully completed and filed. This might be some tough love for the offenders, but your business depends on it!

Please share your time sheet policy and enforcement methods in the comments!

Much like our venerated local spirit, ad agencies have to distill their communications. The challenge is for Account Executives (AE), when meeting with clients, to capture all the details of a new project or campaign then review and focus it for internal communication. It’s imperative to accurately filter extraneous information, summarize the details of the project or campaign and pass clear details on to the creative team.

Most agencies I speak with are using a Creative Brief or a Client Contact Report to record this data. The exact form that these documents take is malleable and should be customized to suit your agency’s particular business. An AE should concentrate on summarizing, with precision, details about the project’s main message, target audience, talking points, budget, time constraints (let’s be exact here, not “ASAP”), and media type. The more detail the better. Opaque communication will lead to costly revisions, delayed deliverables and a strained client relationship. With so many challenges facing the modern agency, they simply don’t have the margins to cover inefficiency.

I implore you to examine the communications processes in your agency. How effective is it now? Do you have a process in place for capturing the details of client interactions? In CurrentTrack, we have a default Client Contact Report form which can be completed on-the-fly during a client meeting, on a laptop or iPad. Once completed, the form will be back at the office before the AE has even returned.
Whatever your methods, be sure to provide your team with the best information and be confident they’ll yield great results.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s have a bourbon, you’ve earned it.

The goal of any Traffic Department, whether within an advertising agency, design firm or public relations organization, is to increase efficiency and profitability. This can only be accomplished through the reduction and ultimate elimination of false starts, inappropriate job initiation, incomplete information sharing, over- and under-cost estimation, and the need for deadline extensions.

The core competency of advertising agencies (and other creative outlets) is not simply the production of creative work. It’s the efficient management of that production. Without traffic management — the ability to carefully control and document workflow processes — even the most creatively successful agency might find itself in a state of chaos. You have to meet deadlines. You have to stay within budgets. You have to know who’s doing what and when they’re doing it. And, most importantly, you have to have the tools to help you do so.

There are many project management options available on the market today. An entirely web-based system such as CurrentTrack® allows your Traffic Manager to break work down into measurable increments and manageable tasks, making that information accessible to everyone within your agency whether working in- or outside of the office. A central traffic system such as this fosters a way of doing business that is much more organized than a paper system. It also makes everyone involved in the process more accountable.

As the facilitator of a workflow system, the Traffic Manager ensures the consistent delivery of accurate work on time and within budget parameters. This is accomplished through not only the initiation of project work electronically, via a document such as a client contact report, but through the constant policing of deadlines and financials using such tools as task lists, time sheets and estimates. The Traffic Manager also ensures that work is accurate through the provision of detailed job requirement information to the appropriate parties via change orders, progress reports and media details. The careful daily monitoring of all jobs through the various integrated agency disciplines from their inception to their completion is the ultimate responsibility of the Traffic Manager.

A central traffic system, overseen by an employee whose sole responsibility is its ongoing maintenance, can save your agency valuable time. By making client information that was once segregated available to all employees, from the convenience of their desktops, it makes possible increased billable time through increased productivity. Task, time and expense management, client access to materials posted to the Internet, and the archiving and instant retrieval of job-specific information, are among the many indispensable features of a good web-based traffic system.

Every employee within an agency plays an integral role in its workflow processes. Through the combination of an efficient web-based traffic system, managerial commitment and team member dedication, your organization can experience unparalleled efficiency and profitability.

Dear Creatives, please don’t view our beloved Traffic Managers as merciless taskmasters, they’re just trying to make sure the agency’s work gets done within a reasonable time frame, stays on budget and is routed to the appropriate team member. It’s tough work, help us out!

I’m an organized person. [For those who know me well, that’s an understatement if ever there were one.] For some time, I searched for the perfect “to do list” app for my iPhone. I wanted a clean, easy-to-use app that could be updated via my desktop and sync’d to both my iPhone and iPad. I’d nearly given up when a friend introduced me to Wunderlist.

While the project management system we use, CurrentTrack, makes it easy to include Tasks on a Personal To List, there are school- and other family-related items that I prefer to manage separately.

Wunderlist enables to me to quickly create lists (e.g. School, Store, Home Improvement, Bible Study, etc.) that I can update within seconds. No more paper grocery lists or Post-it notes on the steering wheel. I enter everything in Wunderlist and simply reference my phone while on the go.

If you’re looking for a great “to do list” app, give Wunderlist a “Wunce-over.” Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

A turtle person…

A… well, you get the point. I love creatures of all shapes and sizes.

This afternoon, I have the pleasure of dog-sitting my best friend’s cocker spaniel/dachshund mix, Peyton, for a few hours.
She’s been sniffing around the office, checking everything out. She’s even stretched out on my guest chair a few times and given the beanbag a try. (And you thought it was funny watching me get out of a beanbag!)

Some employers feel that having pets in the workplace decreases employee productivity. I disagree. While I’ll admit I’ve spent a few minutes hugging Peyton today, just having her around has lifted my mood. I’ve actually been more productive.

I think our office just might need a mascot. I wonder if an otter would like our kitchen sink?

It’s not a surprise to anyone that a sexy homepage creates curb appeal for your company. One CurrentTrack® client recently landed a national account because “[they] liked [our] website.” If we all know how critical it is to your business, then my question is: why do some (a lot) of ad agencies, who are trying to help clients promote their goods and services, have confusing (even irritating) websites? I have a couple guesses as to why agency sites go out of control, but that’s not what this article is about.

Here are my top 5 web-peeves (sorry):

1.) Intro – If you give us a flash intro and include [Skip Intro] at the bottom of the page, everyone’s going to skip your introduction. If it’s not important, and can be skipped, should it even be on your site let alone the first thing visitors see?

2.) Flash – It simply doesn’t run well on computers and isn’t built for the mobile web. Apple® sold 15 million iPads over the 2011 Holiday season and I assure you not a single one of those users will be able to visit your site if it’s built in Flash. Avoid this technology.

3.) Music – Midi versions of elevator music are decidedly unhip. I provide my own music when browsing the web, you should suspect that many people do the same and avoid jarring them.

4.) Spelling and Grammar – Maybe working with a grammarian proofreader has turned me into a stickler but really, proofread your site’s content; then proofread it again.

5.) Updates – Old blog posts are sad, irrelevant and leave visitors searching for a pulse. If you’re not going to regularly update content, don’t post a blog or space for updates to go stale.

Incidentally, the Second Wind Network has put together a handy new website guide.

Agree? Disagree? Email me or comment below!

Is it fame? In my 10+ years of traffic management, I’ve never once had someone stop me on the street and say, “Dawn Travelstead? I know you! You’re the Traffic Manager everyone is talking about!”

Is it respect? While I appreciate knowing my peers value me as a member of the team, I’ve never been one to covet respect from others. After all, aren’t we in this thing called, “advertising” together?

Is it fortune? How many Traffic Managers do you know who drive a Rolls-Royce? I’ll stick with my “soccer mom” mini-van, thank you very much.

Being part of something great.

That’s what motivates me. It’s not about the accolades or material things. It’s about being part of something bigger. It’s about knowing that my actions, day-in and day-out, affect not only the people around me, but this organization as a whole; whether positively or negatively is entirely up to me.

What’s YOUR motivation?

I could set up an event in iCal to remind myself to call him. No thanks, that takes too much time and can you imagine how cluttered my calendar would look if I added every follow up call? Yikes. I’ll pass on that.

Maybe I should add a dated task to my favorite to-do list app (Wunderlist). Ok, that could possibly work, but what about the notes I have recapping my conversation? And where will the notes go when I complete that task? Pass.

How about I just jot down notes in my trusty notebook or notebook app? But that won’t remind me to call on a certain day will it? No, no, that won’t work either.

If your business development workflow includes a hodgepodge of office suites, to-do list apps, calendars and Moleskine® notebooks, perhaps it’s time to consider acquiring a CRM system for your agency.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems come in a variety of flavors, but all are designed to keep sales teams organized. Regardless of the system you choose, the guiding principals are the same — to provide a centralized place to capture all relevant information about a prospect and keep a record of associated communications. Most CRMs are structured in an Account -> Contact -> Activity hierarchy. It’s simple for me to store general information like company names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts in the Account record. I can also add my own fields if I’d like to capture other relevant information like industry, company size or even the lead source. The more information you capture about your prospects the better; for example, you can use this metadata to build targeted lists to share a press release detailing the results of a recent campaign.

In addition, I can track the contacts I’ve made at each prospect and record activities and events which include phone calls, emails, demonstrations, and meetings. In the case of the prospective client who wants a follow-up after the new year, I can quickly make a couple notes recapping our conversation and schedule a follow-up task for mid-January. Each morning, I log in to my CRM and get a sense of what I’m responsible for that day. It’s not dissimilar to a traffic management system like CurrentTrack®, but it’s contact- rather than project-focused. Here at Developware, we make a distinction between business acquisition efforts and traffic management — not cobbling the two together. After all, account services’ sales efforts are decidedly different from project management.

Since I prefer to access my day’s work from any location, I use a web-based CRM system, Salesforce®, but many options exist to suit any workflow. Successful business development starts with a carefully considered strategy and a CRM system to enforce it.