Client retention strategies for small agencies

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Hello and welcome to today’s webinar on how to improve your client retention as a small agency owner or leader. I am Chip Griffin. I’m the founder of the Small Agency Growth Alliance or SAGA. I’m very happy to have you here with us today. We’ll be talking about something that I know is on the minds of a lot of you.

And it’s something that is probably one of the easiest paths to agency growth and increased profitability, keeping your existing clients longer, getting them to be stickier and helping to generate more revenue from those relationships. So, we’ll go ahead and get into the webinar. We’ll start with a few housekeeping

items. Let’s see if I can actually speak clearly today. Housekeeping items. There we go. And so today form from a housekeeping perspective, the recording in the deck will be made available to all of you who are attendees. There’s a full webinar replay library on the SAGA website. So if you have not yet joined, please do so.

And you will get access to that. If you have questions during today’s session, I will see the Q and A come up on my other monitor right over here. So, Please take advantage of that. I look forward to whatever questions you may have. I will try to address as many as I can at the end of the primary presentation today.

If you have questions that you think of after this, or that I’m not able to get to during the live session, feel free to email me chip at agency leadership. Sorry, sorry, we rebranded in December. So it’s chip@smallagencygrowth. com. I’ve said chip at agency leadership. com. So many times it’s just embedded.

So chip@smallagencygrowth. com, although really either one will get there. Hashtag agency leadership is still the hashtag that we use if you’re on Twitter and want to talk about this webinar there. And of course, smallagencygrowth.com has a wealth of additional resources and client retention and plenty of other things that may be useful to you.

So let’s talk just briefly about what it is that we’re going to focus on. First, , sorry, first, we’re going to talk about upcoming webinar next week. We have how to onboard new agency clients, and you’ll see, as we talk today about client retention, that onboarding is a critical piece of that conversation.

Also, if you haven’t had a chance to watch last week’s business development webinar, I would encourage you to do so because there’s going to be a tie in and what we talk about today to that presentation as well. So I’m trying to make all of these webinars tie together so that they give you the resources and information that you need to be as effective as you can be as an agency leader.

All right. So now, as I was saying, we are going to talk today about a couple of different things when it comes to client retention. The first thing we’re going to look at is why you lose clients in the first place. And you may think that it’s entirely obvious, but I think I may have a couple of surprises in that portion of the conversation.

We’ll look at how you can avoid the most common problems that lead to lower client retention than what you desire. We’ll, we’ll talk about how you can position yourself to be more persistent, more sticky with your clients so that you survive all sorts of challenges that may come along. And finally, we’ll talk at the end about the absolute key to better agency client relationships.

So you won’t want to miss that. So the first thing that I really want to draw your attention to here is the concept that anytime you have a, an agency client relationship, it’s, it’s like any other human relationship, there’s all of the intangibles that go into it. But it’s also important to understand that it’s not exactly like other person relationships in one key way.

And that is most agency client relationships do not last forever. They do not last until death do us part. And that’s okay. There’s actually a lot of experience that I’ve had in working with clients where you’ll take a look and you’ll see that there is at the start of a relationship there’s a a small level of profit because you’re you’re over servicing the client to get up to speed to learn what’s going on to to get smart with them to become more efficient then once you do become efficient you start to get some real profit generated out of that client relationship but over time you you gradually start to over service and you start to do things impair your ability to make that same kind of profit margin.

So it’s not necessarily bad once you’ve reached that point for you and the client to part ways. But the reality is you can’t let yourself get too wound up when you lose a client as long as you understand the reason and you decide that you’ve done everything that you could have done reasonably in order to keep them.

And so those are the things that we’re going to talk about today. What are the things that you can reasonably do to keep a client on board? And the other thing I want to say is, I know a lot of times when I work with agency owners, there’s a tendency when they hit a rough patch with a client that they start to worry, Oh my God, I’m going to lose them.

The reality is that most clients are far more tolerant of mistakes than we give them credit for. Not all of them. We’ve all got the horror story clients that we can talk about, but most clients are more understanding when we have a missed deadline, or we’ve we’ve you know, made a mistake in a press release or I mean, all sorts of different things.

So, so the first thing, anytime you hit a rough patch with a client is take a deep breath, relax, because ultimately how you solve the problem for them may be more important than the fact that there was a problem in the first place. I can tell you that some of the strongest client relationships I’ve built over the years were actually strengthened when I screwed up or when my team screwed up, it’s how you resolve it.

It’s the extra mile you go to resolve it. It’s how you interact with them. It gives you an opportunity to, to build, to forge a useful bond with that client and help them see that you’re willing to do what it takes to get the job done. And so that can be a real benefit to the relationship if it’s handled correctly.

So focus on being a problem solver and don’t worry so much about the rough patch when it first comes up.

Let’s start by talking about the main reasons that clients leave, because this is something that is really important to understand, and you can see here that I, I messed up and I have the wrong title on this slide. It is not today’s agenda. It is instead the reasons why clients leave. clients leave. So anyway, I didn’t catch that in the proofreading process, but hopefully you’ll be just as understanding.

See, did I, perfect segue from that last section. In any case, the reason why clients leave typically falls into one of five buckets. There are obviously exceptions and other reasons that, that might be the case. But the first one is that they’re not getting enough results. They’re not getting the value for their money that they thought they were going to get.

A lot of this comes down to, to missed set expectations. We talked last week in the business development webinar about the importance of setting expectations correctly from the start, understanding what the client is really trying to get out of the relationship and then delivering back. And so that’s the probably the number one reason that I see for agencies to lose a client.

There is a mismatch between what the agency is delivering and what the client expects. Sometimes it’s a strategic shift. So if you’re doing work for one product line within a business, then they’ve decided to de emphasize that and focus on something else. That can be a reason that you lose that business.

It may be that they decide that I mean, well, we saw this, at the start of the pandemic, right? Where, , clients stopped focusing on in person traffic and focused on digital, right? So some agencies lost business. Some agencies gained business as a result of that strategic shift. Now that was obviously a strategic shift that was forced upon them, but nevertheless, it was a strategic shift.

The third is budget issues. And I kind of hate budget issues as a reason because And the reason why I put an asterisk on that one is because it’s usually a smokescreen for something else. When a client tells you that it was a budget issue, it probably is just their friendly way of saying, I don’t really want to talk about the real reason.

And so typically it’s one of the first two things. And in one case where it’s a strategic shift, it may be that they’re uncomfortable because, you know, maybe it’s impacting on their job. And if it’s not enough results, they don’t want to just deliver the hard news that you’re not delivering enough value.

The reality is, if I told you that if you gave me one dollar, I would give you a million dollars back, and I could guarantee that I would give you that million dollars. Even if you didn’t have a penny to your name, you would find a way to get that dollar. So budget is a really bad explanation because it almost always covers something else up.

Now, there are times where corporations or organizations will go through across the board budget cuts, and so sometimes there’s an impact there. But again, if the client is absolutely convinced that they’re getting real return on that investment, absolute, undeniable, guaranteed return, then they’re going to be reluctant to cut it.

Even if they’re doing an across the board cut, because typically the reason why an organization, a client cuts their budget is because they’re having financial issues, cashflow issues, those kinds of things. And so they need to get as much cash and keep as much cash as possible. If the work that you’re doing is helping them to do that, why would they turn off that spigot?

So that’s why I put an asterisk on that one. And it’s, it’s why I don’t really love. Budget as a reason for, not hiring an agency for letting an agency go for making a change. Any of those kinds of things. The next is personnel change, and this one is incredibly common, particularly for, you know, those of you who are in the marketing and communication space, which almost all of you are.

If you’re having an ongoing relationship with a client, Typically if they bring in a new CMO or a new CCO or something like that, a lot of times that signals that there’s going to be an agency change because most, individuals at that level have their favorites. They have firms that they’ve worked with for a long time and they like to make their own stamp.

Sometimes at a more junior level, they may not have their own stable of agencies that they work with, but they may be in a place where they just feel like they need to make a change because otherwise, why were they brought on? And, and this is something I suffered from in my early days as a mid level manager in other organizations, I felt that I couldn’t just let things go the way they had been, because then I’m not really delivering my unique value to the operation. As you get older and wiser hopefully you, you walk away from that and you decide you’re going to do the right thing regardless, and you don’t feel that sense of insecurity that I felt and some in your clients organizations may feel when they take on a new role. But,, it is something that really does have a significant impact on a lot of agency client relationships.

And finally, the one that we all dread, the one that we sit there and say, Oh my God, you know, They’re talking to another agency and what if they like that other agency better and, you know, did you see them talking to that agency, you know, the other day at recess or I mean, come on, it is absolutely something that happens, but the reality is, again, I should have put an asterisk on this one, just like the budget one, because typically if they’re switching agencies, it’s because one of the other four boxes have been checked above or one of the other three.

If you take out the budget asterisk. So typically when a client switches agencies instead of just, you know, turning off the spigot entirely, it’s usually because frankly, it’s usually because they feel like they’re not getting the results that they expected. Sometimes it’s strategic shift, so they might switch to an agency that has a different specialty than the one that you have, you know, again, going back to that strategic shift of, of in person to digital, okay, that caused some agency switches to take place. And so that could be something that would crop up. So, you know, how do you address this? If the, if we know roughly what the, the circumstances are that may cost you a client, how do we focus on improving our client retention?

And I would start by saying that it starts early. How early? It starts At the very beginning, and no, I don’t mean the birth of your client contact. That would be a little bit ridiculous. But if you were able to get in front of them and set the expectations for what your agency can do all the way back to then, that would be certainly fantastic.

But the reality is you just need to, to be setting expectations from before you even have your first conversation with a prospect. We talked during the business development webinar last week about the importance of understanding and setting expectations correctly and about the importance of those early conversations.

But client retention actually starts before that first conversation. It starts with how you’ve positioned your agency, what expectations you’ve created for that initial conversation and what it is that they think you as an agency can do for them. And so you need to be thinking very consciously about what your website messaging is, you know, what the messaging is that you use when you have word of mouth conversations, what those conversations are in those early prospect meetings.

What the, what your line employees are saying versus what you’re selling in the sales process or the business development process, you need to be thinking about all those things and unifying your messaging so that you’re setting the right expectations right out of the gate, because that’s where a lot of client retention issues come about.

They, the client thinks that you’re doing something that you’re not able to do or not willing to do. So set those expectations as early as possible. And I’m not a huge fan of the under promise over deliver. But you definitely don’t want to under deliver. Okay. So that’s why if you get the expectations correct, you should be delivering at least at their expectations, preferably above them.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you go in and you low ball them. It doesn’t mean that you go in and say, Well, we might get you a sale or two and then you give them a thousand. Okay. If you think that one or two is unreasonably low, don’t share those as the metrics that you might use. You really do want to set the expectations so that you believe that they are attainable for the client so that they can accurately judge the value of the services that you’re promising to provide.

So be very thoughtful about that and make sure that you’re being, you’re thinking about that from those early stages. So now, we’ve talked about sort of what you do, how you set those expectations from before they’re a client, but now as they start to become a client, and this, this actually starts just before the sale, you need to start thinking about the boundaries that you’re setting.

There need to be guardrails on the agency client relationship. There needs to be standards that you’re setting for the quality of work, the way you’re going to work. You need to be framing those right out of the gate. And so, you know, because this is the kind of thing that can cause real tension in a relationship.

So this is where you need to decide, are you going to be responsive to text messages. If so, how quickly? Are you going to allow a lot of after hours communication between the client and your team or yourself? You need to set those boundaries, those guardrails from the start, because that’s part of the expectation setting game.

And sometimes when I’m working with an agency and they’ve got some client retention issues, It’s because in the early stages, and we all have this in the early stages of really any relationship, but particularly one with a client, we just want to do anything to make them happy. We just, we want everybody to have a smile on their face.

And so it causes us not just to over over service over deliver, but it also causes us to go outside of our comfort zone in terms of the number of hours that the play, you know, the, the timing of those hours, those kinds of things. And so we need to set those boundaries early on because otherwise, when our team comes to us and says, we need to fix this, or you say, I just can’t be doing this at 7 PM on a Saturday night, every weekend, it’s a lot harder to change that after the fact, because you’re now changing the behavior, the client has come to expect. And so that can be a real point of tension that can lead to client retention problems. So it’s important to set those boundaries, create those guardrails in the earliest stages. If you don’t, you have that hangover effect.

You have that, that morning after the big party that you know, some of us probably haven’t felt in more years than we’d care to count, but it’s the, it’s the kind of thing where if you’re, if you suddenly are taking away their happy drink or whatever, and for whatever reason, they’re not going to be real pleased about it.

And so that’s going to cause problems with retention. So set those boundaries early. Set those expectations so that you don’t have to have those difficult conversations later on, so that you don’t have the tension in the relationship that will develop from it. So, beyond setting boundaries, we now need to think about how are we going to produce for the client?

And I talked early on about the fact that clients generally will let you go because they’re not getting the results that they expect. Well, part of the reason for that may be that you’re not doing a good job of reporting it. And so you need to make sure that your client knows when you get a win. And a lot of us don’t like tooting our own horns or even our own agency’s horn with our clients and so we need to be thoughtful about how we’re reporting this. And we have to be thoughtful about how we’re reporting it not just to our immediate client contact who may know instantaneously. They may just get it.

You need to work on providing your primary client contact with things that help the client understand your wins, the results that you’re producing, give it to them in a format that they can easily share. Or better yet have them have you share it directly. So for those of you who are doing earned media, for example, for clients, whenever I would send an earned media report to the client, I would always say to my client contact.

Who else should I be copying on these? Let me make your life easier. Instead of you having to forward it and type in all the, my team will just send these reports out, whether that’s a daily update or just as it happens or weekly, whatever it is, let us do the work for you. And part of that was indeed trying to help the client contact do less work.

Part of it, though, was more selfish, more self serving. Part of it was so that our agency was getting in front of more people. And that’s really important because you need to make sure that as many folks at your client as possible know the good work that you’re doing, know the results that you’re producing.

They see your victories and they see them as their victories too. And so this is where a concept of spider webbing with the client comes in. And this is, you want to spread out. You don’t want to be in one place and dependent upon one person. And so the next couple of things we’re going to talk about are how to address that.

And I, this is a question I get a lot from agency owners. How do we survive our primary contact moving on to another role within the organization or moving outside of the organization. And we know from what we talked about earlier, that that’s a critical juncture. That’s a time when you can expect to lose business.

So you need to be thinking about how to spiderweb. You need to think about how you can get your tentacles into more pieces of the organization. Part of this is from the reporting I talked about and making sure that the results that you’re producing, the work that you’re being, that you’re doing is being seen by more people.

Part of it is simply networking. It’s getting out there and having conversations with more people than just your actual client contact. Whenever we get to travel more freely again, it’s having the opportunity to sit down in person with these folks. If you’re able to go to your client’s headquarters and meet with your client contact, and maybe they walk you around.

So you get to say hello to other people. Maybe you get to say, Hey, I’ll take, I’ll take your team out to lunch. Find ways to get those tentacles out, meet with more people in that organization, get to know them. Get to know the person who’s above your client contact, even if you don’t deal with them on a regular basis.

Try to get a quarterly conversation as high up the food chain as you can that makes sense. You know, this isn’t a, you know, if you’re seven layers removed from the CEO, don’t try to go get the CEO on the phone. You’re likelihood of success is pretty low, but if you can move at least one layer above your primary contact and you can get out there and and maybe that’s an in person meeting when you go to headquarters, maybe it’s a conversation on the phone each quarter just to touch base.

But it can also be simple things. It can be, doing the same kinds of things that you would do as part of a business development process. It’s liking their posts on, Twitter or, , retweeting them or connecting with them on LinkedIn. You really need to be treating your whole client service process as an extension of business development.

And so just as when you’re trying to sell an organization on your agency’s services for the first time, you try to talk to a lot of people and connect with them and stay on their radar, you need to do the same thing from a client retention standpoint. So use those same tactics that you’ve honed as part of business development and use them to help with client service. So spreading wide is one thing, but you also want to burrow. You want to get deep. You want to get into the organization and really understand what makes that organization tick. You want to get in there and understand as much as you can about that organization. You want to figure out who’s the decision maker.

You want to figure out what are their pain points, not just the ones that you’re focused on that you’re doing day to day, but the kinds of things that are, that are keeping your client contact and their bosses up at night. What are the kinds of things that are stressing them about their organization? As you understand more about that organization and how it operates, you’ll be able to understand better how you can plug in as an agency.

How you can plug in, not just on the services that you provide, but also in understanding the way that they operate and the things that will resonate. Understand the language that they use. I mean, those of us who have been on the PR side of the agency fence, we know that most of our clients have certain phrases and words that they either love to use or that you just they have to be on a never use list.

You need to understand those, even if you are in a space where you’re not doing content creation, because those are the kinds of things where you want to make sure that you’re not repeating them on a phone call or in a meeting when you have an opportunity to have a larger audience. So really borrow into that organization, understand what their focused on what their what their hot buttons are, and that’s how you start to become more sticky. Hopefully not with this blue goo that I found in this picture, but but you want to be sticky because you want it to be that that organization. thinks about you regularly, and they think about you in a positive light, and you want that to be well beyond just your day to day contact.

And all of this comes back to one of the absolutely most critical things that you can be doing as an agency, and that is to listen. And if I had any advice, this is a slide that I use in a disproportionate number of my webinars, and frankly, other presentations as well. Listening is so vitally important, whether you’re talking about sales or client service or talent management, all of these things come down to listening.

And so you need to take the time to listen to what your client is saying. Listen to the feedback they’re giving you on your work, on your team’s work, listen to what they’re saying about the things that they’re focused on. Listen so you understand what their personal KPIs are. You want to understand how you fit within that.

How do you, is the work that you’re doing driving their personal bonus? For example, I’ve been in that situation. I’ve been in a situation where my agency was responsible for producing reports that were used to determine the actual financial compensation of one of the folks with our client. And so we didn’t know that at first.

And so it led to some tension in that relationship. When we found that out, we were able to, to more understand what was driving them. And while we didn’t necessarily agree with what the driving force was in that compensation decision, we at least understood it. And we knew the impact that we were having.

So we could make more intelligent decisions about how we were working, how we were reporting and doing those kinds of things. So we need to understand as much as we can about the client. And the reason why we don’t get it quite often is because we’re not taking the time to listen. We’re not asking the questions that we need to ask.

And if we’re constantly asking questions, not to the point of annoyance, but if we’re constantly asking questions and trying to learn, we’re trying to listen, we will be in a much stronger position to build the relationships with those clients. But we also need to look at becoming more expert. And I don’t mean expert just on what makes our clients tick.

We’ve talked about that. We need to develop some expertise in the broader area in which our clients operate. If we’re a regional firm, we might want to know more about what’s going on in the general local economy. What are the dynamics at play? What are the, the political, the social impact things going on that might, drive our client’s decision making or at least their thought process.

We want to understand what their competitors are doing. So even if we’re not doing competitive work, we still want to understand enough about the industry and their competitors so that. We can see what’s going on. We can see if we’re working for one auto company, what’s happening with the other auto companies and, and how might that impact our client, even if it’s not already doing so today, what innovations do they have going on?

What are their competitors doing in the space in which our agency operates that we might be able to take advantage of and implement on behalf of our own client? What are some of the, the, The bigger things that are going on, are there mergers and acquisitions taking place that perhaps might impact our client or that might be adjacent to our client?

Is our client looking to do some acquisitions? If so, what can we learn about that? And it’s a balancing act, right? Cause we’re never going to be as expert as our clients are at their own business. And we shouldn’t try, but we should try to be more expert than we probably are. We need to really understand the overall environment in which the client operates in order to deliver the best advice that we can within our own specialty. But it also goes to giving us the ammunition and the information that we need in order to have more effective conversations that build the bonds with our client contacts, with their bosses, with other team members there.

It helps us frame our helps us frame our proposals for future project work, right? Because part of client retention is actually thinking about not just staying static, not just keeping, , the revenue that you’ve already got, but trying to look for opportunities where you can, you can move forward and generate new revenue in new areas, right?

I think one of the problems that, that some agencies run into is that they become complacent and they, they focus. In a purely defensive mode, protecting whatever retainer or ongoing revenue that they may have from a client. And instead, you should be on offense. You should be looking for those opportunities based on this expertise that you’re developing so that you can have those chances to grow the revenue.

And even if you don’t get a revenue increase. Even if you don’t get that, you’re demonstrating to the client that you’re thinking strategically and tactically about the things that might help them, that might help them get the results that they need. And so they might say, look, I can’t pay you more for this right now, but what if we did that instead of this?

You’ve now created an opportunity for the client to indicate to you an area where they think maybe you’re not performing as well as they would like, but now they’re latching onto something else. So instead of them potentially stewing about your lack of results in one area, they get to be excited about some new work that you’re going to be doing for them.

I mean, look at these as opportunities to continuously rejuvenate the relationship. But you can only do it if you’ve got some degree of expertise beyond just those blinders and doing what is on that checklist, what is on that statement of work that you’ve given the client, the things that you’ve promised to do for them.

So, hopefully this has given you some, some good ideas. We’ll, we’ll tie this up, with a bow. We’ve talked about some of the reasons, most of the reasons, at least from a 30, 000 foot perspective that clients leave your agency. We’ve talked about some of the tactics that you can use starting from even before the business development.

Process conversations start and then passing all the way through the life of that relationship. We’ve addressed how you can deal with both challenges as well as opportunities. We’ve talked about the importance of listening and becoming an expert. Hopefully if you start applying some of these things to your agency’s relationships with your clients.

You’re probably already doing some of them. There are probably some ideas here where you can do a little bit more in some areas, but hopefully I’ve had a chance to open your eyes to some strategies and tactics that you may not have considered yet. So, at this point, I’ll take a sip of water just to catch my breath, and then we will move on to any questions that you may have and, and we’ll dive into those.

So there’s the Q& A function at the bottom of your screen, so I’d encourage you to use that, send in a question, happy to, to answer, a few of those here, and, let me just grab that sip of water there, cause I’m feeling a little parched, and I think it’s the dry air here in New England. And then I will start in on the questions and answers.

Okay. So the first question that I have is, and I’m going to paraphrase here because this one is a longish question. So this person is saying that their, their average, client tenure is only about three and a half months and, but they feel like they’re producing real results for their client. So, you know, what should they do?

So, obviously we’ve, we’ve, we’ve talked, you know, big picture about some of those things, , yeah. Three and a half months is an awfully short tenure for an agency client relationship that is not project based, time limited from the start. So if it’s, if it’s a situation where you’re looking to have an ongoing relationship, there’s something wrong.

There’s something misplaced that you need to address there. My. My strongest guess would be with, three and a half months as the average tenure for your clients, that your, your biggest problem is probably in the expectations arena. It’s probably that there is a mismatch between what they think they’re buying and what you’re actually delivering.

So I would start by taking a real close look at, at those promises that are being made. , Is it something that you’re saying or your team is saying as part of the business development process? Is it that you’re leaving things unsaid? I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges that agencies have is that they allow prospects to inflate what they think is possible.

And then the agency doesn’t do anything to correct them. And I think to one degree or another, we’ve, we’ve all been there. I think you have to be really careful with that though. If, if a client says, Oh, well, if we do this and that would mean this, even if it’s potentially going to cost us the business, we’d be wise to correct them at that point, because you don’t want them to realize months into the relationship.

That what they thought was possible is not. You know, it’s, it’s sort of like, you know, get rich quick schemes or lose weight fast schemes or those kinds of things. Sometimes folks will have the idea, Oh, if I just go Keto, I’ll lose a hundred pounds in a month. And if you’re selling some Keto products, you’re probably going to kind of keep your mouth shut and just hope that they buy, that’s not a real good approach.

You really need to set those expectations. If it’s someone who has seen great work that you’ve done for someone else, It’s important to set them straight. If for some reason, you know that the other client has something that they don’t right. So we all have worked with clients who, , you know, could sneeze and get media coverage.

And then we’ve got others who, you know, work tirelessly, but, you know, can’t convince anyone to cover what they’re doing. And so if we know that. They’re looking at work we’ve done for another client, but that client is easier to get coverage for or easier to generate SEO results or whatever. We need to be clear about that.

So, my, my gut is, and I’d be happy to have a conversation, offline about this, but my gut reaction is that, that with that short of tenure, it’s, it’s almost certainly an expectations issue. That helps to answer that question. Let’s see. Okay, so we’ve got another one here. And so this one, this one says, so how do I create a conversation with my With my client’s boss, even though it is not someone that I talk to regularly.

So I get it, you know, it’s, you know, most of us are, you know, not in the business of wanting to do what are effectively cold calls and we need to be careful. We don’t, we don’t want to undermine our primary client contact. The problem that I see quite often though, is that we don’t even find a way to make an attempt to get to know the client contact because we just, we fall into that comfort zone.

It’s someone that we’re talking to every day. They’re giving us what we need. You know, maybe, maybe the boss is kind of a scary person. Maybe we’re just, you know, we don’t, we don’t want to, to, to rock the boat. And, and probably that notion of rocking the boat is one of the biggest challenges that I see agencies have, you know, with, with clients is they, you know, they, they do, they, they keep quiet.

We keep quiet about the challenges that we’re seeing because we don’t want to upset anyone. And so that just allows things to fester either on our side or the client side. So this really does come down to communication and finding the opportunity. To talk about it. And the way that you do that is by actually having conversations.

So some of the tactics that I talked about here today, as far as being able to expand the reporting, that’s an ideal one. If you’re, if you’re not able to directly send to your client contacts boss, because maybe they’ve asked you not to at least make sure that the reporting that you’re providing is done in a, in a way where it’s easy for them to forward so that the boss gets to know who you are and what you’re doing, right?

Because we all, I mean, most of us in our day to day work lives, we’ll follow the path of least resistance. We’re not going to sit there and, and, you know, recreate someone else’s report just so that, you know, we make it look the way that we want it to. At least most of us won’t. So if we’ve got a good looking report, that’s got all of the right information and we get it from a contractor or an agency, whatever, we’re just going to pass it along.

And we’ll include, you know, whatever. branding is in there. You don’t have to be over the top about it, but just, you know, something that sources it to your agency is very helpful because that makes sure that, again, you’re just staying relevant. You’re staying in front of your client contact, your bosses, or your client contact boss.

Let’s see if I can say that correctly. So, You know, focus on those kinds of things. Absolutely. You know, talk to your client contact. And I like, you know, whenever I’m working with, , a client contact that has bosses who would be relevant to the conversation from the earliest stages, I try to find ways to bring them in both in the business development process, because obviously it’s helpful as far as getting into a decision faster.

But even afterwards, I like to frame it in terms of, you know, our usual process is that we have quarterly semi annual strategic sessions with our clients and just say, we usually involve a larger group from your organization so that we can really be smart about how we’re deploying the available resources.

And, and that’s really a helpful trick is the wrong word, but it’s a helpful technique that you can use anytime you want to create things, processes, et cetera, with your clients. Just say what we usually do is, or our standard process is, and I don’t care whether it’s the first time you’re running it or the hundredth, just say it’s your process.

Say it’s how you do things because generally speaking, we as humans, if we hear someone say, this is how it’s done, we say, okay, cool, we’ll just, you know, we just kind of, we go with the flow. Clients are, are no different from agencies in that respect. They don’t want to necessarily go rock the boat either.

They’ve got all sorts of things they have to worry about beyond what your agency is doing for them in all likelihood. So you need to make things easy, make things so that they don’t have to make a lot of decisions. So if I say our usual process is to do a quarterly strategic planning session with a broader group, they’re more likely to go along with it than you, if you say, Hey, what do you think about having a quarterly strategic session?

Right? Do you, they’re, they’re both driving to the same point, but one assumes that the answer is yes, because it’s your process and the other requires thought and it requires input and feedback. Right. So it’s a, it’s a question mark. So try to use a period, not a question mark in order to drive it in the direction that you want it to go.

Because as an agency, your focus is on making sure that you’re delivering the results that are needed. Now, I’m not suggesting you go create meetings that are unnecessary, right? Don’t, don’t go creating a strategic planning session just so you can meet the boss. You have to make sure that you’re actually using the content of those conversations for good.

You have to make sure that you’re actually gathering information that you will use. I would argue that you probably can, and you probably should be doing those kinds of things. Whether it’s quarterly, semiannual, annual, doesn’t matter. You figure out what the right cadence is for the kind of work that you’re doing for the client.

But absolutely try to cast that wider net where you can bring people in. And so that’s the excuse that you can use going back to the original question here. That’s the hook that you can use to get to know the boss without just having to pick up the phone and say, Hey, Hey boss, I’d like to have a conversation about the work we’re doing.

Because then the boss may say, who are you? But why are you giving me a call or worse may, may go to the, your main client contact and say, why are they calling me? Believe me, I’ve had that conversation with team members before, where out of the blue, I have, you know, some vendor or, or some contractor call me and I have no idea why they’re calling or what the state of that particular relationship is, because it’s just, it’s not on my radar on a day to day basis.

So you want to make sure that you’re not undermining your client contact in that kind of a way, but absolutely find those ways that you can cast that wider net, and you will see results from that. All right, let’s see here. Are there any other questions? I don’t see any other questions here in the Q and A function.

Let me check over in. Let’s see if I can bring up the chat function here. Wonders of technology. Some reason I can never bring up chat on zoom when I’m trying to do this. Let’s see. No, nothing in the, no questions in the chat and no open ones in the Q and A. So, if you are one of the folks who is sitting there watching quietly right now, you have other questions, feel free to email me anytime chip@smallagencygrowth.com. Let’s bring that up for you one more time, and I’d be happy to take your questions there. I’d be happy to take your feedback or suggestions for future webinars. We’re always looking to make these as useful and informative as possible. Hope to see you, here for our webinar very soon. Remember to check out the webinars page, smallagencygrowth.com /webinars for the events that we have coming up. We also have a virtual happy hour, coming up, I believe tomorrow night. So February 10th. 10th. And I believe 6 p. m. Eastern time is our monthly virtual happy hour. So we’d love to see you there. , thank you for joining me and have a great day.