From good to great: Why client relationships are the most powerful lever of agency growth
What has the biggest impact on your agency’s ability to cultivate client relationships that fuel growth?
Having spent two-thirds of my working life leading client business in agencies and the other third advising agencies on their client relationships, one thing is clear. Relationship strength really does matter.
Let’s look at creative agencies as an example. Of the 90+ behaviours that contribute most to a client’s satisfaction with their agency, creative work sits at number 42.
That’s not because great creative work doesn’t matter. It does. However, clients can love the work, but not the agency. In fact, creative work is the top area praised even by those clients who rate their agency relationship poorly.
Time and time again, we see agencies hired for their ideas and fired for their relationships.
The difference between a ‘good’ and a ‘great’ agency
The areas that separate a good agency from a really great one are largely in the relational space.
From our own first hand data, we see (on average) 57% of feedback from top rating clients is about the relationship. For some top performing agencies it can be as high as 70%. This dynamic holds true for all types of agencies in all parts of the world.
At the Client Relationship Consultancy, we’ve found it helpful to draw the distinction between the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of effective client management.
The ‘what’ is whatever you deliver:
The strategy
The campaign
The budget
The work
The ‘how’ is the relationship. The behaviours that count the most:
Care — being interested, engaged, and invested in your client’s success
Partnership — working together in support of a shared agenda
Client centricity — in-depth understanding of the client’s needs and goals both soft and hard, individual and organisational
Challenge — constructively challenging each other to get to better outcomes
Doing the ‘what’ well matters, but it’s the ‘how’ — the spirit of engagement that gives your agency the edge.
The path to ‘great’ — building high-value client relationships
At a time when many industry dynamics are creating ‘transactional drag’ in the system, prioritising the relationship can be hard. And yet, to really succeed, agencies need to manage their client relationships as projects in their own right, just like other deliverables.
If the same energy, intelligence, and ingenuity that goes into solving client business problems were routinely applied to client relationship strategy, the results could be transformative.
Managing client relationships intentionally and strategically works. If you go with the flow and let them become the result of everything else that happens in the business, you risk becoming a hostage to fortune. Because things will go wrong — they always do. The difference is — those relationships that have a clear purpose, are cared for and invested in daily, tend to absorb those bumps better.
Many agency teams already do this brilliantly, and their results and long-lasting partnerships speak for themselves.
Unfortunately, industry trends aren’t helping the cause. If anything, they’re undermining it.
The decline of the retainer
The rise of procurement
Investment in technical skills over relational skills to keep up with change
The list goes on. The irony is — these skills, which are so often described as ‘soft’ are anything but. Soft skills deliver hard numbers:
Better growth
Better margins
Better work
Better morale
My advice: let’s treat the relationship with the respect and attention it deserves — as a powerful, if underutilised, commercial lever in its own right.
Anna Hopwood
The Client Relationship Consultancy