What Do Clients REALLY Think of Agencies?

“Your best new business opportunities? They live with your existing clients,” says Simon Rhindtutt, co-founder of Relationship Audits. 

As new biz gets harder and harder, agencies are taking a closer look at making sure the clients they’ve already got are sticking with them. But are you approaching this in the right way?

Having been in the industry 25 years, Simon understands the landscape of client-agency relationships better than most. His business, Relationship Audits, helps agencies build stronger and more sustainable client partnerships.

He says the difference between how you think your clients view you and how they actually view you is huge – and growing.

“You think you’re doing a good job. Then all of a sudden, the client goes out to pitch and another agency wins the work. The reason for that is, your agency is being treated like a vendor – not a partner.”

Simon says that while the status of partner is something that has to be earned, there are things agencies can do to be seen as more than just their service offering. 

“We’ve got over 30 million data points of what clients think of agencies, and vice versa,” says Simon. “The problem is, many agencies are defaulting to a passive role – like a waiter or waitress. If you’re going to act like that, then there’s always going to be somebody who can do it cheaper or with a bit more personality.”

👉 At Happy Clients, Simon will dive deep into Relationship Audits’® extensive insights on client-agency relationships. He’ll provide actionable advice on how agencies can use this to strengthen their client relationships and drive business growth.

How We’re Keeping Clients Close and Committed

Agencies know they’re meant to track their clients’ health and happiness, but a lot of them just… don’t.

“Up until three years ago, there was no one purely focusing on client services,” admits Fiona Skilton, client services director at Collective Content. “Some projects had statements of work, others didn’t, and there were no timing plans or concrete plans behind relationship building – none of that stuff.”

Fiona knew that the best way to stay aligned with clients’ needs was in the form of client health checks. 

“It’s literally forty-five minutes once a year to get us all really focusing on a specific client,” says Fiona. “Now, we have a really good client retention rate, and I think it’s a combination of our niche, our brilliant creative team, and how easy we are to work with.”

👉 At Happy Clients, Fiona will be joining us to discuss how their annual client health checks have hugely impacted their client services, as well as the positive effect it’s had on the team.

How To Make ‘Client Services’ The Whole Team’s Responsibility

Trenton Moss could feel a big change looming. 

The big management consultancies had begun to invade the UX space – which Trenton’s agency, Webcredible, specialised in. 

Trenton knew they’d struggle to compete head-on with the Accentures, IBMs and Deloittes of the world. So instead of fighting tooth and nail for new biz (and losing), he turned his focus on making sure his agency was indispensable to clients. 

To do that, he needed to make every staff member in his agency a ‘client superstar’. Step one: increase commercial awareness across the team. 

“How do you get people aware of the commercial side of the business and motivated to help out with developing accounts? You need to define what client servicing excellence looks like in your agency. Then you need to relentlessly remind everyone of this and make sure they have the confidence and tools to deliver against it. That’s where ongoing training comes in. It can’t just be a one-day course every three months.”

For Trenton, instilling a commercial mindset wasn’t about giving everyone individual sales targets. Instead, he divided his team into small groups – or pods – so they could begin to take ownership of client relationships, without the mounting pressure that they had to do this all alone.

Each pod had targets around client satisfaction, team happiness and revenue. Soon, every team member knew how many billable days they’d have to reach in order to achieve their revenue target.

“Then they began to understand the importance of not doing unbillable time. Whereas previously, they’d just do whatever the client asked with little thought for the commercial implications.”

The final piece of the puzzle was incentivisation. 

He tried a profit share scheme: absolute disaster. Traditional incentives clearly weren’t the answer, so Trenton decided to come up with his own: WMIF. 

“WMIF stands for the ‘We Made It Fund’,” says Trenton. “At the end of every client engagement, or the end of every month if it was a retained client, the team got 0.33% of the client fees which they could spend on whatever they wanted.”

The trick here, though, was that nobody actually received a penny.  Instead, they would work as a team to decide on how they wanted to spend it – on things like theatre tickets or group experiences. It was so successful, teams began working together to pool their WMIF money together to pay for even bigger experiences. 

“Doing that as the reward meant that they had an experience that they could remember which then tied back to the business. So that’s obviously motivating, but it was also something that they could influence.”

The project was a huge undertaking – but the payoff was equally massive. In fact, it even stopped the business from going bankrupt. 

“After we set all of this up, we saw a 35% uplift in revenue from our accounts,” he says. “At the same time, new business revenue fell off the cliff – it dropped by 60%. We’d have gone bankrupt if we hadn’t started this. So this client revenue uplift kept us going through a really difficult time.”

At Happy Clients, Trenton will delve into how he turned his entire team into client superstars, and how this helped to boost revenue, transform team morale and saved the business.

How We’re Upselling Existing Spenders

“We’re not just chasing new business anymore – we’ve realised there’s a goldmine of opportunities for upselling within our existing client relationships,” says Lillie Price, head of account management at Mr. President. 

Lillie has spearheaded a shift in how Mr. President approaches client relationships and business growth. Instead of placing all their focus on new leads, the agency is actively ‘farming’ their existing clients.

One standout example is their work with White & Mackay, a Scottish spirits company. What began as a small radio and digital campaign evolved into a major strategic partnership.

“We spent so much time at their offices, really digging into the nuts and bolts of their business,” recalls Lillie. “We wanted to understand everything – from their sales team’s needs to their supermarket shelf space strategy.”

“They’ve smashed all of their targets – the work is winning awards, and the business is growing. It’s a full-circle success story. And for us, it meant a substantial increase in revenue from an existing client.”

They’ve also developed what Lillie calls a “new business spiderweb” – a network of relationships that includes current clients, past collaborators, and even individual contacts who’ve moved to new brands.

“Often, when a past client moves to a new role, they’ll call us before they’ve even started, saying ‘I need your help.’” says Lillie. “With the competitive nature of new business pitches being so intense, we’ve found that dormant or smaller clients are a huge part of our growth strategy.”

Rob Twells, co-founder of Digital Maze, has also implemented a unique approach to growing existing clients, resulting in about 30% of their new revenue coming from upselling efforts. 

“I think a lot of it has to do with treating upsells the same way we treat new business,” explains Rob.“We are slowly bringing our client services team and sales team closer – they all follow the same processes to improve the amount of revenue we drive from our existing base.”

“A good chunk of our new revenue comes from [upselling]. We have OKRs around that too; we’ll take 10 or 15 clients and set actual revenue targets against them, which are then assigned to our account managers.”

👉 At Happy Clients, Lillie and Rob will delve into the details of their active farming and upselling approach. They’ll share practical tips on how agencies can identify and capitalise on upselling opportunities within their existing client base, foster deeper relationships, and position themselves as indispensable strategic partners.

How We’re Tackling Over-Servicing with a Data-Led Approach

How do you set boundaries with clients?

It’s a problem every agency grapples with – and something Claire James has put a lot of effort into solving.

“I was in a client meeting recently –  and we’ve over-delivered by 200% on their account,” says Claire, deputy MD at Skout PR.

Claire began to prepare herself for a very tricky conversation.

“You think they’re going to say, ‘It’s YOUR job to do whatever I say!’. But then you’re in a master slave relationship – not a partnership.”

What she actually said was: “If you want us to continue to deliver at that level, you need to find additional budget. But we don’t have the capacity within the team to deliver at that level, without the budget to support it.”

The client’s response?

“Yep, completely get it.”

Claire says it was a much easier conversation than expected.

“It all comes back down to what kind of relationship you want with your client. If you want an honest and open relationship with your client, you will set that out from the outset: this is a partnership, we will work to deliver what we both agree are the right things to deliver. But if the goalposts for the work change, we reserve the right to change the KPIs that we’re delivering.”

But where did that 200% come from?

“You cannot track overservicing if you’re not recording time against client budgets,” Claire says. “So it’s about having the data in the first instance – and then understanding what that data is telling you.”

“Then it’s having a trigger that allows you to do something about it. Say you’re within a threshold of, say, 10% over serviced. Are we expecting that? Yes we are, because this is the first quarter we’ve worked with that client and we’re doing tons of exploratory calls. But if we’re not expecting that, it’s time to have a conversation.”

Ultimately, it’s up to YOU to decide at which point to trigger that conversation. Is it 20%? Is it 200%?

“Sometimes dipping into the realms of over-servicing is worth it,” says Claire. “When next year’s budget comes around and it automatically comes your way because they see you as a solution to their challenge rather than just another drain on their resources – that’s a big pay off.”

👉 At Happy Clients, Claire will be joining us to share more about how her agency is tackling over servicing and setting boundaries with clients by combining data insights with strong personal relationships.

What Does GOOD Account Leadership Look Like?

“The state of play that we’re in at the moment, people are overwhelmed, and the whole world just wants to resign at the moment. As a society, we’ve got to turn this round, and we’ve got to make people feel reinvigorated and to value their career.”

Are you investing in YOUR juniors’ development?

In a role like account management, a lot of the big lessons come from experience; either from being in the role a while, or having a great mentor.

Things like:

• Asking the right questions to understand the client’s needs and challenges
• Developing an ability to read the room (and the client)
• Becoming a trusted advisor rather than just a task taker
• Identifying new opportunities and growth areas for the client’s business
• Having difficult conversations around scope, timelines, and budget in a constructive way

But as agency pipelines get squeezed and account directors are pulled into new business farming, fewer and fewer agencies are carving out time for employee development. 

What’s more – with remote working there are less opportunities to learn this stuff organically, and pick up on skills by overhearing phone calls or sitting in on meetings.

“People are not getting trained on this stuff,” says Rachel Raphael, co-founder of outskirt collective. “The skill set and behaviours for the account management function are fundamentally different to project management, for example,  and it needs its own training and mentoring path.”

“Agencies need to value the role more and be more considered in not only their career development programmes, but also the hiring process.”

The challenge is, though, some clients value account management, and some don’t – and that can be reflected within the agency too.

Not to mention, the step up from account manager to account leadership is huge: “You go from managing a project’s delivery to building a relationship with a client – then all of a sudden you’re in charge of leading accounts and expected to understand the wider commercial agenda of your clients.”

That’s not something you can easily pick up on the job.

SO how can you equip your team with the resources to develop these skills on their own – so you can focus on tackling the hard stuff?

“Half of the work is training the more senior people to delegate and brief in an outcome-based way, rather than transactionally, so that the juniors feel that they’ve been given autonomy, as opposed to being feeling that sense of micromanagement,” says Joanna Anthony, client services coach.

But it has to be a shared effort: “Everything is about 50/50. The infrastructure has to be there, but it’s the people that make it happen: the leaders have to make space for the people, and the people have to be curious.”

The benefits of employee development are pretty obvious. But what happens when you don’t prioritise this stuff?

Rachel says: “So then who is building those relationships? Who’s looking for organic growth opportunities? Who’s looking at the commercials and how to make it more profitable? It’s either the agency founder being dragged into it, or the senior leadership team. And if you’re dragged into that, who’s driving the agency?”

Joanna says: “You better be prepared to run a monthly employee survey, or a quarterly employee survey, so that you know which people you’re about to lose. And it’s always the good people that go first.”

At Happy Clients, Rachel and Joanna will be pulling together their collective 50 years of client services experience to discuss what excellent account leadership looks like in an agency – and how you can train your junior team members to follow in your footsteps.

Client Services Group Therapy Surgery

If you work in client services or account management, chances are you have your fair share of horror stories…

• Impossible briefs with impossible budgets
• Difficult clients with unmanageable expectations
• Awkward mistakes (and the tricky conversations thereafter)

But when experiences like this begin to pile up, it can take a heavy toll. 

When faced with that situation, it helps to break out of your agency’s bubble and hear about the challenges others in your role are facing – so you know it’s not just you trudging through the cowpats. 

👉 So at Happy Clients, we’ll be hosting a ‘talkshow style’ surgery session for you to share stories and get advice from your peers. 

It’s a chance for you to vent your challenges, whinge about difficult clients and discuss the unexpected changes you’re facing in your role. We’ll have two client services ‘veterans’ on hand to kick off the surgery and lend some solutions to your challenges.

If you’re just about ready to snap, you can submit your client challenges here (anonymously or not) to be discussed in the surgery.