Resentful Client, Cringing Agency Part Two

Last week we looked at three of the six reasons we end up breaking up with our agencies and throwing all their clothes and magnet collections on to the front lawn and driving over them a bunch of times.  Here are the other three reasons your agency relationship is on the rocks, and some things you can do about it.

1. You’re Not on Top of Things
   Managing the client-agency relationship is a two-person job. One of those people is the account manager. Stop looking around; the other person is you. If you are skipping agency meetings, not looking at the bills, forgetting to invite your agency to the table, ignoring the reporting and so on, then you are messing this up and it’s your fault they hate your company.
2. You Don’t Know How to Fix It
   Despite your best efforts, it is not unusual for agencies to wander into suckiness territory all on their own. This is especially true if you are not doing  a lot of new work, or if there are more interesting clients to work with. You’ll know when it happens: they turn up at all hours with lipstick on their collars and no good excuses about why they haven’t called in weeks. Also, the work will start to be terrible, people you’ve never heard of will suddenly appear in meetings and your account manager will disappear in the night with no explanation offered.  Assuming you are on top of things and working on the relationship, you can actually fix imminent suckiness quite easily by escalating. Sooner or later you will find the person in the agency whose pay cheque has something to do with your billings. Find that person, suggest there might be a negative impact on the billables and your problem should be solved. If it isn’t, even Dr. Phil can’t save this sucker and it’s time to move on.
3. You Aren’t Having Date Night
   I love to mock my friends about “date night”. If you have young children, “date night” is more properly called “complete sentence night”. It’s the night you go out to dinner, briefly marvel that nobody at the table needs a booster seat and then dive right into the conversation you’ve been trying to have all week about getting the cat fixed. The difference here is that you can have the conversation while you sip a glass of wine instead of while you’re gluing a Fisher-Price guy’s head back on. Agency date night is actually what I like to call a quarterly meeting. There’s not that much wine, and mostly nobody needs their meat cut for them, but it’s a lot like date night because it’s your chance to step out of the day-to-day situation and talk about interesting things like your brand, how your agency’s work is measured, how you can work better together, why you think it’s time to replace the art director on your account and cool stuff your competitors are doing that you should copy.

Related Posts:

Preventing Agency Suckiness

BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
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