Why We Invest in People, Not Just Campaigns

A specialist who cannot communicate a solution is not a specialist. They are a person with a spreadsheet and a headset whom the client will replace with someone else after 3 months.

Marketing talks surprisingly little about this. Everyone discusses tools, platforms, algorithms, and AI. Who is paying attention to the people working with all of them?

I lost one client and spent a long time believing the problem was the project inputs—who was supposed to deliver what, who should have found something independently, and who was waiting for whom. Only later did I understand that it was not a process problem. It was a relationship problem. We did not understand one another. I regret that, but it happens. On the other hand, there have been several times when I retained a client precisely because we met them where they were at a moment when another agency might have sent an invoice and calculated whether the extra effort was still worthwhile.

In 2023, a Setup® Marketing study of more than 300 marketers confirmed what I see repeatedly in practice: clients want effective communication, not better campaign performance. Fifty-five percent said they were likely to change agencies within 6 months. The agencies assumed budget cuts were the issue. They were completely wrong.

Specialists talk directly with clients

At our agency, every team member has direct client contact. I do not sit on every call and then pass tasks to someone else. Team members speak with clients, present results, propose solutions, and answer questions.

Why? The person who actually manages the campaigns can answer a question better and faster than someone who reads a report and paraphrases it. I also do not want to become a bottleneck.

I understand why account managers exist. If you deliver a website, design, PR, four advertising platforms, and email, calls would become inefficient without someone coordinating them. But I have yet to meet an account manager with enough insight into each system to recognize the key point in a conversation, develop it into a hypothesis, and immediately propose a solution rather than logging it in a spreadsheet and forwarding it. More often, the account manager writes a note and sends it to the specialist, who interprets it without the context of the call, the tone of voice, or what the client communicated between the lines.

Consider a specific example. We are Meta Ads specialists. Meta Ads does not show you who else entered the auction. You see only a performance decline and higher CPMs. But talk with the person managing Google Ads and review impression share, and suddenly you can see more. Perhaps Temu, Allegro, or another competitor entered the auction. You can estimate whether the change is temporary or part of a long-term trend. Without that conversation and connection, you only see a falling line on a chart and start guessing.

An account manager cannot do that—not because they do not want to, but because they do not have their hands in the system. They do not know the correlations that become visible only through daily work.

But—and this is the point of the article—direct contact between a specialist and a client works only when the specialist knows how to communicate. Technical knowledge is not enough. They must explain context and say, “I do not know yet, but I will find out,” instead of improvising an answer. They must understand that a client does not hear data. The client hears the story the data tells.

Why we started using Gallup StrengthsFinder

I completed the Gallup assessment after my friend Jirka Schaffer recommended it in our Marketing Heavyweight group—although when it comes to weight, I suspect I may be the group’s only true heavyweight.

Why did it resonate with me? On a previous team, I repeatedly heard, “Please stop taking more courses.” There is some truth in that. At some point, you have to stop collecting knowledge and start applying it. But if you think divergently and Learning is one of your top five strengths—meaning your ideal vacation includes a book or a course—you are not going to follow that advice. Not because you are stubborn, but because doing so would work against your nature.

As I get older, I see more clearly how dramatic the difference is between people working from their natural strengths and people spending an entire career trying to repair their weaknesses. Building someone’s development strategy around what they do poorly is like teaching a fish to climb a tree.

Gallup’s research supports that view. A meta-analysis of nearly 50,000 business units found that when a manager focused on people’s strengths, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees was 60 to 1. When the manager focused on weaknesses, it fell to 2 to 1. When employees were ignored, 40% became actively disengaged. Sixty to one versus two to one is not a nuance. It is a chasm.

Today, StrengthsFinder is one of the first steps for every new team member. If someone is strong in analytical thinking but less confident in communication, I do not send them to their first client call unprepared. If someone has strong natural empathy, we use it because that person can deliver difficult news in a way the client can receive. The most important thing is not the team’s exact mix of strengths. It is that people know their strengths and use them deliberately.

How I develop people in practice

Most agencies train people on platforms. I do too, but that is only one layer. The second layer has nothing to do with Meta Ads: communication, presentation, feedback, and the ability to admit that you do not know something.

I have invested in my own education in communication, improvisation, and presentation since 2018, long before I began focusing on data and AI. I understood one thing early: expertise is table stakes. The difference is the ability to transfer that expertise. Once, on a boating trip, six people were trying to assemble a tent. I was hungry and annoyed, so I thought: it is a Decathlon tent; someone must have put the instructions on YouTube. Someone had. I was not the smartest person there. I simply knew where to look and could explain it to everyone else. That is exactly the kind of skill I mean—not more expertise, but the ability to pass it on.

I hold regular team calls that have nothing to do with day-to-day operations. Sometimes we discuss client situations—not tasks, but context. What is happening in the client’s business? What are the commercial priorities? What changed? At other times, we practice communication through examples. How would you explain a performance decline to a client? How do you present a strategy when you know the client expected a different number? How do you respond when the client proposes a solution that does not make sense? No Meta Blueprint certification prepares you for those situations. Yet they determine whether a client sees you as a vendor or a partner.

To be honest, I cannot calculate the exact ROI of this training. I see the team developing. I see that client calls are different from a year ago, but I do not have a spreadsheet for it. Some things are measured differently: you can see whether there is a dramatic improvement or a modest shift. In the same way, I do not have a precise lifetime count of every campaign I have managed or the total ad spend. But I know the training works, and I know that a year ago the team would not have handled some conversations as well as it does today.

What frustrates me? Standing still. I meet people who say they have been overwhelmed for a long time but do nothing to move forward in any direction. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport describes something I strongly agree with: people want to follow a romanticized passion. Yet what often makes an activity enjoyable is becoming good at it and succeeding. Then you meet a social media specialist who cannot use Business Manager. We work on the same platform. That is not a question of talent. It is a question of approach.

According to Gallup, Europe has the lowest employee engagement in the world at 13%. Managers account for 70% of the variance in their team’s engagement, and only 44% have received any formal management training. I do not know whether that is the cause or the consequence, but the correlation is clear. So is the opportunity for anyone who decides to work differently.

Why this matters more than ever

Your approach to work is not a soft skill to address when time allows. It is a gear that affects everything else. A person with the wrong approach can undermine a brilliant strategy. A person with the right approach can turn an average strategy into a result because they communicate, ask questions, and seek context.

AI only amplifies this. One A/B test from PPC Hero reinforced the point for me: an ad written entirely by AI had twice the cost per lead of a version where a person edited the AI-generated copy. AI without a person who understands the context produces the average. A person with context and AI produces results. The same principle applies to Meta Ads, Google Ads, email, or any other system. The tool does not know what the client needs to hear. The person who knows the client does.

I do not believe it is enough to hire an intelligent person and give them access to an ad account. You have to work with that person on how they think, communicate, and approach problems.

An agency’s value was never in the fact that it managed something. Its value was in seeing things earlier and understanding them better than the client could alone. If you cannot do that, you are only a pair of hands on a keyboard—and soon, even those hands will not need to be human.

Let’s stop pretending that tools create results. Results come from people who know how to use the tools and communicate the work. Everything else is just a spreadsheet no one reads.