If you were to ask me about the workshops I conduct, I would reply I actually do four, inter-connected ones that easily can be delivered as 60- to 90-minute stand-alones, or mixed and matched into a longer half-day, full-day, or even multi-day curriculum:

• Five Ways to Build Trust with Clients and Colleagues;
• Formulating a Brief that Drives Great Creative for agencies that have Planners on staff, or How to Help Planners Formulate a Brief that Drives Great Creative for agencies that don’t.
• How To Run a Meeting, Brief a Colleague, Write a Conference Report, and Formulate and Give a PowerPoint Presentation; and,
• One Agency Meltdown plus Two Client Disasters equals Three Difficult Conversations and How to Navigate Through Them. 

Five Ways to Build Trust with Clients and Colleagues serves as a highly effective distillation of what is a nearly a 300-page book, compressing its lessons into five principles:

• Show up;
• Follow up;
• Speak up;
• Make it up; and,
• Straighten up.

Many of the workshops I conduct are for smaller shops, digitally native ones, or both, where Planners are either in short supply or missing altogether, which means agencies have to rely on an amalgamation of ad hoc staffers – Account people, Project Management staffers, even Media experts – to craft Creative Briefs. Section Five of The Art of Client Service is called “Formulating a Brief That Drives Great Creative,” and I’ve borrowed this as the workshop title.  I love presenting Formulating a Brief that Drives Great Creative for shops without Planners, or its alternative for shops with Planners, How to Help Planners Formulate a Brief that Drives Great Creative,  because both allow me to share and deconstruct a couple of broadcast spots, which always is great fun.

I wrote How To Run a Meeting, Brief a Colleague, Write a Conference Report, and Formulate and Give a PowerPoint Presentation in response to an agency request, given the shop really needed a tutorial on “How To,” and I was the person to deliver this, given Section Four of the book includes eight chapters on this very subject.

I figured people might learn best if they heard me confess to some of the worst screw-ups I perpetrated as an account person, so I’ve extracted three such stories, all entailing “difficult client conversations,” that recount problem/solution case histories in One Agency Meltdown Plus Two Client Disasters equals Three Difficult Conversations and How to Navigate Through Them. 

I also do a session called Why Client Service is an Art, which I originally presented to the some 1,000 attendees at the International Advertising Association’s Annual Conference, held in Bucharest, Romania.  It covers skills I’ve not discussed previously that are enormously beneficial for client service people in general and Account Management people in particular to master.

There is still another session, Why Client Service Should Be One of Your Advertising Agency’s Key Competitive Advantages, that explains how we should view Account people and the client service they practice not as a liability to be overlooked or dismissed, but instead as a competitive advantage to be nurtured, developed, and sustained.

Usually my workshop clients will find one or more of these topics of interest, but in the rare event they don’t, I easily can create new content based on a challenge they articulate.  The fact is, I’ve been doing this for more years than I care to admit, and to paraphrase a famous insurance commercial, “I know some stuff, because I’ve seen some stuff.”

My fees for conducting workshops are surprisingly reasonable; if this is of interest, feel free to get in touch with me at robert@solomonstrategic.com to learn more.