Turning agency reporting into a profit center

Agency Leadership Podcast

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of effective reporting for agencies.

Many agency leaders view reports as a necessary evil, but when done right they can actually become an important contributor to profits.

Chip and Gini recommend auditing existing reports to eliminate unnecessary ones and creating meaningful reports that directly influence business decisions. They also highlight the potential of leveraging AI to analyze and generate reports, ultimately transforming reporting from a mundane task into a profit center.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “I don’t think I’ve ever met an agency that’s not producing at least some useless reports. These are reports that either don’t really inform you in any way, shape, or form and/or are never even consumed by anybody, oftentimes not even within the agency itself, beyond the person who creates it.”
• Gini Dietrich: “You have all of this data available to you. Use it. Don’t be scared of it.”
• Chip Griffin: “Anytime you’re talking about a report, I always encourage you to think about what’s the business decision this is influencing? And the flip side, what is the business decision you’re trying to make? Now, what reports would help me to make that decision more effectively?”
• Gini Dietrich: “AI is getting pretty smart on this stuff where it can analyze the reports for you. There are tools that you can use to make it really easy and profitable for yourself.”

Related

• How PR agencies can turn measurement and evaluation into a profit center

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we need to produce a report.

Gini Dietrich: Okay,

Chip Griffin: we need to figure out what’s working and what’s not with this podcast. And then we’re gonna make some money off of that.

Even better.

Which would be the first money we’ve ever made off of this podcast.

That’s actually not true. I

Gini Dietrich: I guess we get I mean, anncilliarily we make money.

Chip Griffin: Sure. I have prospects tell me all the time that they listen to this show and that’s one of the reasons why they reached out. So, I mean, it, it has a positive impact, but we do not directly generate revenue

Gini Dietrich: We do not.

Chip Griffin: From this podcast and, and we never will because we get the occasional inquiry, but it’s way too much effort to try to sell sponsorships and that kind of stuff, not going to do it.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. All right.

Chip Griffin: Not going to do it. Plus, I mean, as we know, everybody who’s, you know, sponsors these podcasts and videos, not everybody, but a lot of the people who, they’re not really things you want to be associated with. They just are people who have big checkbooks.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I agree with that.

Chip Griffin: I mean, I watch a lot of YouTube videos,

Gini Dietrich: Sometimes you think, why would…yeah

Chip Griffin: awful stuff.

Gini Dietrich: I do agree with that.

Chip Griffin: Anyway, though, we are going to talk about how your agency can use reporting to your advantage, to improve your profitability, to generate more revenue and basically just make it an all around good thing, as opposed to just that painful checkbox that you currently have probably sitting in front of you.

Oh, we need to do a weekly report, a monthly report, a quarterly report, an annual report. Oh, it takes so much work. And, and it can actually be beneficial to you if you’re thinking strategically about all of the different kinds of reporting that you do to clients.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think that goes in, that delves nicely into measurement too, because I think to the same challenge, perhaps we think, Oh, gotta pull the report.

And then I have to look at the data and then I have to do a comparison and then I have to figure out, did this work or did it not? And you’re like, and so I think just as agency owners overall, it’s not our strong suit, so we tend to, to procrastinate and put it off. And, and I think, you know, you wrote an article about this.

On your blog, but I think the idea that you have the opportunity to turn those, both of those things into a profit center and make some money off of it is one that you is compelling, compelling one. And one that you should go, okay, maybe I should learn to love this because I can make some money doing it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and frankly, part of it comes from stopping doing some of it. So you become more profitable if you stop the useless reports that you’re creating, because I guarantee you, I don’t think I’ve ever met an agency that’s not producing at least some useless reports. These are reports that either don’t really inform you in any way, shape or form and/or are never even consumed by anybody, oftentimes not even within the agency itself, beyond the person who actually creates it.

And so the first thing you probably ought to do is do an inventory of all of the reporting that you’re doing, whether it’s. human generated reports, automated reports that just get emailed on a regular basis. Inventory it, figure out what you’re actually producing for reports for both internal and external use so that you can then start going through it and start weeding out the stuff that no longer has value.

Right? So that’s, there are probably some new things you should create, but start by just pruning the tree and get rid of all those dead branches that I guarantee you are there.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And while you’re doing that, talk to your clients and figure out what’s working for them and what’s not because same thing. Like we have one client who at the beginning of the relationship said, we have to have media hits for the industry sent to us every day and so we got into TruScope and we packaged everything up and it’s automated now and like if their competitors are talked about or anything that’s pertinent from the industry that’s talked about it all gets packaged into a nice email and it goes to them. And so at the very beginning of the relationship, they’re like, we have to have this and you know, a year and a half into the relationship now they’re like, we hate those emails.

Can you stop them? So, you know, talk to your clients and figure out, is this something you want? Is it something that you need? Is it something you pay attention to? And if not, let’s figure out a way. Is it okay if we stop it or, or rejigger it or tweak it or do whatever it is that we have to do to it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Because why waste your time creating a report that nobody is actually using? And, the problem is that we all accumulate new reports. We keep adding things, but we almost never go back and say, are you still using this? Do we, do we still need to keep sending this? And, and a lot of times when I would work with agencies or even internal teams over the years, I would be getting things months after it was still useful, years in some cases after it was still useful.

And, and that doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if they’re automated reports, you still need to prune them because part of the problem with automated reports is you forget to maintain them. So while, while it doesn’t take any staff time to create them. You know, let’s say it’s an automated report out of a media monitoring service.

You can have these things spitting out, but if you’re not updating it with new products and services, brand changes or messaging changes or things that have gone through, then people on the other end, they might be looking at it, but they might be getting the wrong impression.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: Because you forgot that this automated thing was going out.

And so you really need to have a strong inventory of these things to make sure that, that you’re maximizing the effort that you are putting in.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. So we prune everything and we say, we don’t need this anymore. We need to tweak this and we should continue this. Then what should we do?

Chip Griffin: I mean, anytime you’re talking about a report, I always encourage you to think about what’s the business decision this is influencing? Because it can be, you know, sort of easy to say, well, let’s just, let’s generate a report on all of the media hits that we’ve gotten or all of the calls we’ve made or whatever. But, but if you look at it and say, okay, well, what decision am I going to make based on this information?

And, and if there is no decision that is going to be influenced by whatever you’re getting in that report, that’s a good candidate for not doing. Flip side. You start with. What is the business decision we’re trying to make? Do we want to spend more on advertising? Do we want to change our messaging? Okay, cool.

Now, what reports would help me to make that decision more effectively? Because you need to lead with the business side, not with what’s easy to generate from the tool, or what have you done for other people in the past, or any of these things. It’s really got to be driven by the business decision that’s going to be helped with that report.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I would look at things like, okay, if we’re, if, if you’re responsible, if you’re on the B2B side and you’re responsible for helping to qualify sales leads then what’s the report that’s going to help you generate that. And if you’re on the consumer side and your sole job is to. build brand awareness.

What are the reports that are going to help you with that? And you know, there’s conversation. There was actually just a conversation about this in Counselor’s Academy about what are the right KPIs for those kinds of things. And so you have to figure out what the KPIs are and then figure out what reports are going to support those things.

And I will tell you the AI is getting pretty smart on this stuff where it can start to analyze the reports for you. So if you have the correct reports, you can throw those into your generative AI tool of choice and say, compare this to this or do this and that, and it will do it and it will pump out graphics and everything for you.

So it’s not as cumbersome or overwhelming, especially for right brain professionals that it used to be. So there are things that you can do to make it really easy and profitable for yourself.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think that’s the, it’s the most obvious use of reporting is to, to take a look at the KPIs that you have for the work that you’re doing, report on that.

It helps to prove the, the ROI to the client, right, which helps to improve retention, which helps to improve profitability. So that is probably the most glaringly obvious use of reporting. to help your profitability. But again, you need to understand what is your client actually trying to achieve so that you can have those KPIs that you can then fuel reporting around.

If you can do that, then it really has a benefit in helping the client to see the value of the work that you’re doing, and therefore typically want to continue to work with you.

Gini Dietrich: At the same time, I will say that this is the bane of our existence, especially for the work that I do as a communications professional, because much of the work that we do can’t be directly correlated to sales.

It’s great for building trust. It’s great for building authority. You’re building great brand awareness, but can you correlate that directly to sales? Usually not. What it does correlate to is the sales team saying, Oh my gosh, every time I make a cold call, the person on the other end knows who we are.

Great. But how does that correlate to sales? And so what you have to do is figure out how to meet your clients in the middle so that you can show the ROI in the middle part where if your sales team is making a cold call and it’s, it’s reducing the calls by three times because the person on the other end already knows what is that in a dollar value to you.

And so there’s, I think there’s a lot of like working through that. And, and to your point earlier about, you know, you may have automated a report and it was working six months ago, but isn’t anymore. Same thing. You have to have those consistent conversations with your clients to say, okay, we are able to, we were able to do X with brand awareness and it correlated or it helped sales do Y. Where’s that, where are we meeting that in the middle? And you have to continue to have those conversations.

Chip Griffin: And to your point, you may need to do reporting on intermediate steps, but you need to have the conversation so that people understand this is why it matters, right?

So it may not be directly reporting on what they’re trying to achieve, but you’ve educated them on why it helps them to achieve that. And so then you can report on those intermediate things. And, you know, I love being able to have sales reps provide feedback on how media is working, right? I mean, to what we were talking about earlier in this episode, this podcast is very helpful to me from a business development standpoint.

I don’t think there is, I don’t think I’ve ever had a client sign up who has not listened to at least an episode of this podcast, usually more than one and consumed videos and articles and all that kind of stuff. So I know that there is clear ROI on this beyond the enjoyment I have in doing it. And so, you know, obviously it’s easier for me because I am both the content creator and the sales rep.

So, but you can find similar ways. And if you need to find ways to survey clients or things like that, that, you know, there are opportunities to create reports that you actually get paid for, right? So that’s another way to turn it into a profit center is to say, look, you know, if you were to do a survey or some other kind of analysis, we can help you to figure out what’s working, even if it’s not even directly something we’re controlling.

So think about how you can pitch additional reports that might be of interest to your clients. Because there are a lot of agencies out there that do explicitly charge for certain kinds of reports. I mean, if you’re doing an in depth media analysis on a quarterly basis, most agencies explicitly charge for that.

You don’t have to give it away for free. For sure. It means you got to position it and explain the value, but you can do that. And that’s another way by actually selling the reports that you can turn it into a profit center.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, we have one client who came to us at the beginning of this year and said, Hey, we want to start tracking our NPS score.

Can you help us with that? And so that’s one thing that we charge extra for. We were like, yeah, but you know, it’s going to cost this, but they were like, great, do it. And so we do every, we, what we did is we, built it, we created everything and then we send it out to current clients and then we built it into the system so that after six, after a customer of theirs is with them for six months, they automatically get the survey and so it keeps it ongoing and rolling.

So every month we get a little extra boost to our invoice for, for that, because we’ve, we’ve built it into the process and it’s an ongoing thing. So I think there are opportunities for you to do that, those kinds of things for sure to, to build some more. oomph into your budget.

Chip Griffin: And you can use the reporting to come up with other new opportunities.

Right? So the report itself doesn’t have to be up, but you can use it internally with your team, whether that’s coming up with ideas for content or members of the media to target. I mean, your databases are great, but what’s even better is figuring out what they’re writing about and they’ve written about something similar.

And so therefore maybe they’re interested. There’s a lot of things that we can do with reporting that will help our internal teams either come up with ideas for other initiatives that we can try to get a client to sign up for, or just to make ourselves more efficient in what we’re doing on a day to day basis.

And so we ought to be thinking about how can we leverage reports internally to grow the accounts.

Gini Dietrich: Love that. Yes, I love that. I love that. I love that. Really looking at you know, one of the things we do pretty consistently as we look at our google analytics Which is kind of a pain in the butt right now because if you want to go back past 2024 you have to download all the stupid stuff that is no longer available in google analytics But that’s neither here nor there, but we do

Chip Griffin: and what’s currently available in GA4 is rubbish.

Absolute rubbish.

Terrible! It’s so bad.

And that’s, that is not the subject of this episode, but God, I mean, GA4 is just the worst thing that’s happened to web analytics in the 30 plus years that I’ve been involved with the internet.

Gini Dietrich: But we do, we will go back and look like a year ago. What kind of content was resonating and what kind of long tail effect does it have?

And then that helps us start to look at new types of content. Or should we repurpose stuff that is, that already exists? So it gives us the opportunity to look at, Oh, wow, this topic really resonated. Let’s continue down that path and maybe build a guide or do some, a video series or something like that.

So you have all of this data available to you. Use it. Don’t be scared of it.

Chip Griffin: No, I mean, it’s, there’s a sea of information out there. You just need to figure out what it is that’s going to help you to do your job more efficiently, more effectively, or to prove your ROI better. Absolutely. And if you sit down and you’re actually thoughtful about reporting and you don’t view it as a mundane task that you’re assigning to an intern, right?

I mean, how many times do we see it? You know, you assign the reporting to the lowest person on the totem pole, you give them very little guidance and just say, replicate this thing we’ve already been doing. That’s silly. Reporting should be a much more important function within your agency business, because it has so much value when it’s done right.

And it can actually harm you when it’s done wrong. Correct. And worst case, it just, I mean, or sort of best worst case, it just sucks a lot of resources to, to create and nobody ever looks at them. Yeah. But why not leverage it for more? Why not do better things with it?

Gini Dietrich: It’s so funny you say that because I used to have somebody.

Do all the reporting for us. And I didn’t feel like I was getting the insights as well as when I did it myself. And so I stopped that practice and I said, let’s try this for six months and I’m going to do this. And yeah, is it a pain in the butt for sure? Is it something that I totally enjoy? No, but once I all have all the data in front of me, it’s easier for me to analyze it because A, I know.

How it was pulled and what kinds of information I prompted it to get what I needed and B, I have it all in front of me in one fell swoop. So I can say, okay, Based on this, I can see this, this, and this. And it was a lot harder for me to do that when somebody else was prompting it and pulling it. So I agree with you.

I think it’s a senior level job and it’s not something that you should have an administrative assistant or VA or an intern do.

Chip Griffin: Well, to be clear, I’m not saying that Gini Dietrich should be producing the reports herself, but Gini Dietrich should absolutely be involved with the process in an active way. I think, you know, the legwork can certainly be done by somebody else.

But if you’re not, if you’re not providing as a senior executive in the agency, if you’re not providing active guidance, and you’re actively using those reports. If you’re not doing those things, then you’re making a mistake. If it is all happening at that junior level, whether that’s a junior employee, intern, VA, whatever, if it all happens there, you’re blind to it.

It comes into your inbox. You don’t even read it. That’s right. Just goes off. That’s where the problem is. And, typically you want to be, even if a junior is producing it, someone like Gini Dietrich should be putting a cover message on it that says, here’s what it means, because so much reporting is done, just a, it’s a data dump.

Put it in context. I mean, anytime I had someone who was producing reports for me and they just sent me the data dump, I told him, you got to I mean, to go back to our episode from a few weeks ago. So what, tell me what it means. What do I need to pay attention to? What is different here? I don’t want to have to pull up every report you’ve done for me every month for the last six months to figure out.

You tell me. You’re looking, you’re in the weeds on this. You need to tell me what’s important and what I need to be paying attention to and why.

Gini Dietrich: And like I said earlier, AI can help you with that. And especially if you start to train it and you create your own custom GPT for a client, you say, okay, every month I’m going to dump the data into this GPT and I’m going to, I’m going to start training on, on the kinds of things that I’m looking for. Six months from now, you can say

do a comparison or do an analysis from this month to this month and show me what the differences are. Tell me what the strengths are. Tell me what the weaknesses are. Tell me what we’re missing. Tell me if there’s anything that could be a threat. And it does it all in seconds for you. Is it completely flawless?

No. But does it give you a really good starting point? For sure. And it makes things a lot, a lot easier for you to go, okay. Oh, you know what? I didn’t even think about that. Let me dig into that. And it starts to like, there’ve been a couple of times where I’ve missed a couple of things that the AI has said, this might be a threat and I’ve started to dig into it and it was, it was right.

And it gave us the opportunity to dig into something further. And. actually helped to mitigate an issue that could have come up for a client. So do not be afraid to use artificial intelligence for this either.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. Leverage the AI, make sure that you’re still putting human eyes on it.

Don’t use it as a crutch to automatically generate anything. Cause now you’re right back where we started. You still need to be able to look at it. You still need to be able to understand what you’re saying to a client or what you’re saying internally, if you’re a junior speaking to a senior, but if you can figure those things out, you will be able to get so much more value out of the reports.

You’ll get rid of the ones that are useless or not doing something that you actually need. And you will turn reporting from a mundane, horrible task that we don’t want to do into something that’s actually a profit center for your agency.

Gini Dietrich: Love it. I love to make more money. It’s a great idea.

Chip Griffin: So with that, you can all now stop listening to this episode and go make money by improving your reporting.

Gini Dietrich: Go make money.

Chip Griffin: Go make money or just go make money some other way. I don’t care how you make money. I just want you to make money. What’d you make? Well, and legally. So with that, before we go completely off the rails, we’re going to draw this episode to a close. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.