In the business world, we are all slowly (some of us are a little faster than others) coming to terms with how much things have changed because of the onset of technology. Gone are the days of looking for clients’ information in the phone book or (gasp) mailing a brochure to a potential client. There are obvious benefits to using technology in the business world—the speed, the ease of access, the quantity of information available. But as we have all experienced, technology is stripping us of that personal interaction that business has thrived on for so many years. Anyone in sales can tell you that having a meeting in person will almost always be more successful than a phone call or email. The same is definitely true in the world of the talent agent. For years, we at The Talent Group have based our business on building relationships—relationships with our talent—knowing their skills, knowing their availability, knowing who is the best at what they do; and relationships with our clients—knowing how they prefer to receive submissions, how often they like to hear from us, what kind of talent they prefer. We are now experiencing a definite shift in our interactions with clients—many clients prefer to only be contacted via email and only want to receive online submissions. Our opportunities to even speak to our clients have become increasingly more limited. Those relationships are thus being formed based on an impersonal and often misunderstood form of communication—the email.
Further, with the increased use of social networking sites and email listings, clients are seeking new outlets for finding their talent. Many businesses will now post a request for models on Facebook or tweet their search for a new spokesperson for their website rather than calling a talent agency. It seems that the idea is to find talent this way because it is faster, more direct, and primarily cheaper. However, these clients are taking for granted one of the basic responsibilities of being an agent: we find good talent. It is our job to find talent that we feel will best fit our clients’ needs—talent that will book jobs–who are beautiful, talented, and reliable—whether it is for a fashion model, a “real” model, on-camera actor, or spokesperson. It goes back to that principle of building relationships. We take the time to get to know our talent, working with them in several different areas to ensure that they can produce the kind of work our clients expect to receive from us. It is our job to make our client’s job easier. So in trying to “cut costs”, these businesses end up spending more time and money trying to get inexperienced talent to produce the same caliber of work of our professional talent.
We can all agree that technology is a wonderful thing and it has a positive impact on many aspects of how we conduct business. However, we cannot lose sight of those basic business principles we learned as undergrads—of the importance of building personal relationships and of letting those relationships naturally help our businesses to be successful. You may not always be able to rely on your Blackberry to work all the time but if you have built a trusted business relationship, you can always rely on that person.