Want breakthrough work? Be a Better Client

Agencies need awesome clients to do their best work

I was really excited to get invited to an event at a local digital agency a couple weeks ago. The event was part informational (“Lets all share what’s working!”) and part promotional (“Hey clients, here’s what’s possible if we work together) and food was beautiful and the people were excited to be there on a beautiful Friday afternoon. Everyone seemed pretty fired up!

This event happened to be at a shop known for their bold digital work with famous clients that everyone would know. But there are a lot of shops that have cool reels. In Minneapolis alone, there are probably a dozen shops that are as good as any in the US. The talent is out there, and they want to crush it for you.

For all the positivity in that sunny room, the real message was a surprisingly rare one:  Clients and agency teams actually can forge very successful client/agency partnerships. As in: real, actual partnerships where everybody is getting the work and the results they need and expected.

Partnership with a capital P.

No BS.

The real - sometimes great, sometimes not-great, but always committed -  deal.

So, how do enduring client / agency partnerships come to be? It wasn’t luck and definitely wasn’t random.

I’ve been on both sides of this situation. As a client in Fortune 100 firms I’ve hired agencies and asked them to help us be great.  Looking back, I’m 100% positive I’ve been a bad (or at least average) client more than once. But, after some mixed results with superb agencies, I started to understand how we (the client) and I (the client leader) weren’t doing enough. I got smarter, listened carefully, made some adjustments in my style and approach and then, no real surprise, the work got better.

As an agency leader, I’ve been hired by clients who needed our firm to be catalysts to innovation. More times than not, when the work product was great, it was because the client set the right conditions. We did our job of course, but the client created the right environment. They were the breakthrough, we were their partners.

A little over a year ago, my company was contacted by a marketing leader for a challenger brand in the medical space. They were going to make some strategic shifts in their business, and they were going to bring in some new partners to help accelerate the change. She hired us to guide their agency search, but she also knew her job was to lead some internal changes, too. Her question to us: How can we be our new agency’s favorite client? How can we be different, so we don’t get in the way of great work.

Now, this was a unique situation, dream client. But, any client can be like this. There there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of ways client side leadership can set the stage for a winning partnership. Here are a few patterns and behaviors that can help unlock real breakthroughs.

• Be honest about the business situation - Providing a clear-eyed assessment of the “on the ground” business conditions is an important way to ground any strategic effort. That means sharing margins, sales trends, spending trends, consumption patterns, internal business dynamics, etc.

• Are you solving the right problem? -  Great creative and strategic work - whatever the nature - is about solving problems  and pursuing opportunities. But, everybody has to be clear about which to pursue and why. In the best relationships, clients are open to the perspective of the outside agency and be ready to hear from their partners that there is a more important problem/opportunity to address.

• Be transparent about the budgets - It’s never great when clients are cagey about the money. It’s a sign of a couple potential problems: Maybe the money isn’t really there? Maybe they don’t know how much it might take to deliver the work? So, as the client leader, be upfront about what you have to work with. Good agencies should be able to develop a number of approaches to the solution within different budget parameters. Great agencies will be direct about whether they can deliver the results for the available budgets.

• Ask: What does true partnership look like? Ask the doers of the agency, the people doing the actual work, what would make them feel like they were truly partners. When the talk turns to “a seat at the table”, what does that really mean in practice?

• Ask: What needs to be true for your firm to do their best work - Ask your agency what you should be doing to help them do their best work. You’ll hear things like “Be candid”, “be constructive”, “Let go a bit” . But, you might be surprised at how the little things - honest feedback, transparency about internal decisions, a little gratitude for the “hands-on” agency folks - goes a long way.

• Ask: What does your “great work” looks like for your team?  -  Every agency team wants to make a mark. No one wants to be average. To set the conditions for a great partnership, both sides should be aligned on what they’re striving for, beyond business results. So, ask your agency what their benchmarks are. Have them show you the work they think is “Great” and have them include work they didn’t actually do (but admire or aspire to).   Have them be explicit about their aspirations for strategic decisions, production quality, “taste”/style directions and impact (beyond business outcomes).

• Be clear about who is making the actual decisions - You don’t need a RACI, but you do need to help the agencies understand who are the influencers, who are those with input, and who is actually making the decision. This goes for budgets, timelines, strategic decisions, creative feedback, etc.

• Be advocates for the work - Great clients know how to make sure the agency work is “bought” internally, they’ll do the hard work of building understanding and support for the work in the hallways of the organization. They’ll be able convince internal influencers the work is “on strategy”, and how it’s going to do the job. Average clients are basically go-betweens, messengers.  They’ll let internal politics, power structures, cultural norms or other non-obvious incentives get in the way. They’ll fold when they get pushback internally.

• Keep Procurement in the Right Role - As a client leader, working with the procurement team can be tricky. As an agency leader, when we saw procurement driving the process we almost always declined the opportunity because the decisions would come down to money and hourly rates and commercial terms. You want procurement there as a partner, but make sure you’re leading the process. Real partnership is established around working relationships you’re going to live with: How do we want to work together, how can we achieve excellence together, can we be creative together, and we execute together. If it is all based money, no one wins.

The folks at that event were proud of the work they had done together. The business results were there, of course. The technical work was tight and efficient, and the creative work was unique and different. But I got the sense they were just as proud of how they got there, the ways they worked together to accomplish some difficult stuff.

There are probably a dozen other patterns that client-side leaders can follow to help their agencies. Sometimes clients get lucky. Sometimes agencies pull one out of their hat. But, the first step is almost always with a client who wants to work smarter, better and develop a real partnership.