Are you suffering from Transactional Drag? 3 warning signs that say you are

Transactional Drag is a term we’ve coined at CRC; a narrowing of vision and diversion of attention away from relationships that reduces your client-agency partnership to little more than a transaction. 

It’s something I go into in more detail in my first article but, essentially, it means a deeper focus and energy on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’. Or the work over and above the relationship.

Spotting it is crucial because it can be a major inhibitor of agency growth, so you need to know what you’re looking for. Here are three of the key watch-outs that can help you identify if Transactional Drag is impacting you. 

Watch-out 1: What’s your client narrative like?

Think about what your clients say about you, and how they might spontaneously describe you as an agency. 

Is the first thing they mention likely to be the ‘what’ of the work, like the deliverables, timelines, projects or ways of working? Or are they equally likely to focus on the ‘how’ - how it feels to work with you; your alignment to their goals; the passion and commitment of your people and teams; and how invested you are in achieving success with them?

If it’s biassed towards the former then you should be reflecting on the key barriers to developing a closer bond with your client and seeking to course correct here.

Carrying out regular temperature checks on your clients, which is an important part of the work we do at CRC for our partner agencies, will also help you track the extent that your client narrative is transactionally based and if it’s changing, even subtly.

These insights can be enlightening and help you construct strategic relationship plans that support both the transactional and relational steps required to achieve your growth plans. 

Watch-out 2: How does your client behave around you?

Client behaviour provides a hugely important window into your relationship. And nothing is more insightful than the kind of information they’re prepared to share with you as their agency.

How and when do your clients ask for your perspective? Are you frustrated, as a business, by your client’s lack of openness or transparency when it comes to information you would find useful about them? Are members of your client’s teams emotionally open, inviting you into their inner circle on critical matters, or are they purely transactionally driven?

If your clients rarely, if ever, give you a business context to the projects and services they procure from you, or they’re focused specifically on what you can deliver for them and when, then it’s likely you may be drifting into Transactional Drag territory.

Watch-out 3: What is your own team’s mindset?

As well as looking directly at the relationship, and how your client acts, you need to do a bit of naval-gazing and interrogate your own in-house attitudes and behaviours too.

Does your team suggest that only fixing ‘the work’ is important and that, by doing so, you’ll naturally ensure a great relationship with your client? Wonder if this is a little clearer?  Does your team suggest that it’s the work that defines success? That as long as the work is good, the relationship will be too? We observe that while the work may win the pitch,  it’s often the relationship that loses the business

Look over your team’s action plans. Are they full of tactical work fixes around what you deliver, such as short-term solutions to operations and ways of working? Or are there also actions which specifically aim to build the relationship, to foster a feeling, spirit or experience you know to be important to the client’s business and your desired outcomes? For example, this could be leveraging empathy at an uncertain time of client reorganisation.

Lastly, do your teams acknowledge how operational issues have a relational impact, and one which needs managing? Do they instinctively consider the unintended emotional response to a functional fail? For example, the question of ‘how much does my agency care?’ after periods of sloppy mistakes or ‘how committed are they?’ after high levels of agency turnover?

All these factors can be indicators of how embedded the Transactional Drag risk is for you.

Think this might be an issue? What can you do about it?

If reading the above raises one or two red flags for you, the first thing you should do is get a handle on how big a problem Transactional Drag is within your organisation.

At CRC, we have various tools available that can help you do this and there are plenty of steps – ranging from short- and medium-term fixes to long-term solutions – that can help you begin to mitigate any issues you’re having.

We explore these solutions in my next article in this Transactional Drag series, which sets out six ways we can help you fix it. Follow to stay tuned on when we publish Part Two! 

CRC, the Client Relationship Consultancy, has been working across the entire marketing services spectrum from advertising and PR to digital and media since 2004. Today we work with 1,230 agency offices in 92 countries, from large global networks to boutique independents, to help them maintain, grow and improve their client relationships through our international family of consultants, data and insights experts. We’re committed to putting positive, long-term working relationships back at the heart of your business.

Emma Kelly
The Client Relationship Consultancy