At the recent BIMA Breakfast Bites, Kerry Glazer, Chief Executive at AAR (the UK’s leading agency search, selection and relationship consultancy), offered a unique insight into client/agency relationships - looking at why they fail and how to reduce the risk of this happening.

To examine this in more detail, AAR commissioned a piece of research to include 26 clients and 20 agencies. The objective of this exercise was to source an overall impression of the quality of each participant’s client agency relationship, discover what factors are important to establish success, and gain insight into why these relationships fail.

Results showed that the majority of those surveyed believed that client agency relationships are managed fairly well, but that the main reason for failure was ‘avoidable’ reasons. The predominant feedback from both sides seemed to be a distinct failure to listen and lack of clarity.

Why does it go wrong? Looking at it from a client’s point of view, the four most common things that cause a relationship to disintegrate are:

• Failure to listen

• Agency inflexibility

• Stale thinking

• Lack of hunger

And from the agency perspective, the same is true, with the top four reasons being:

• Failure to listen

• Lack of hunger

• Client inflexibility

• Loss of focus and attention

Sound familiar? The results are most definitely interesting - as they show that both clients and agencies are thinking along the same lines, with a distinct awareness of why a relationship is doomed. But the question is – does anyone look out for the early warning signs? Or do we all wait until the final straw, and begrudgingly say goodbye without a word because we didn’t do anything about it?

Relationships can fail for various reasons, and if these problems are not recognised and dealt with, you get caught up in a downward spiral with a very slim chance of redeeming yourself. For a client, it seems the ultimate call for a failing relationship is when there is:

• Poor agency response

• Change of client personnel

• Agency personnel issues

There are a lot of ways to prevent potential issues. Looking at the research findings, it becomes clear that the key points to positively managing a good client agency relationship are:

• Set clear expectations/ roles

• Establishing and maintaining excellent senior relationships

• Structured relationships are more likely to last

• Clear communication

For clients, things can quickly go wrong when there is a lack of delivery and poor understanding of their business. In order to avoid this, clients need to think of agencies as clients too, and get them involved in their business.

If agencies establish and maintain strong client relationships (& vice versa), understand the brief that they are being given (clarify & ask questions) and deliver what is expected of them by setting clear expectations – they are off to a very good start. A big mistake is when an agency thinks its all going well because they connect with a client on a personal level. The truth is, if you’re not delivering what you are being paid to do, you will soon find the ‘liquid lunches’ coming to an end.

A final point to remember is that clients who work in a productive way with the right agency for their needs can fundamentally affect the success of their brand or service. So what is the ground for a solid client /agency relationship? In short, the answer lies in good partnership, and that works both ways.

In his talk to a captivated agency-centric audience, Chris emphasised that while organic growth always makes great economical sense, in an economic downturn, it is essential. He outlined several key points to developing an organic growth strategy:

1. it is ultimately more profitable, there’s less ramp up time and the team is already familiar with the client, industry, etc. Plus, the risk attached to new business is reduced
2. your best credentials with a current client are obviously the fantastic work you’ve already done together
3. can help move from a project by project based affair to a long-term sustained relationship

Chris highlighted a few factors that regularly get in the way of organisations creating a proper organic growth strategy, such as time, lack of “sexy factor” versus the rock-and-rollah lifestyle of the “new business team”, lacks its own budget and lead.

He suggests the following when crafting your plan. Focus focus focus. Keep a clear focus on what your agency does well. Don’t dabble in everything. Many agencies lose sight of what they are good at and suddenly have a case study on their website for just about anything, including those obscure one off projects from 10 years previous. Be clear about your strengths when discussing your service offering. Identify your top clients and then dig deep. Follow the leader. A team must be created that has ownership of organic development. Also, it must be led from the top to get the proper resources allocated to it (time, budget, people). Emphasise with the client. He quoted that all too often agencies look through their own lenses and sell the client what the agency believes it is good at without finding out or listening to the client’s actual needs. In other words: stop selling and start listening, folks!

Also some gems that while might seem like common sense, all too frequently are forgotten, like make sure the scale of the opportunity is weighted toward your skills; that the opportunity is of strategic significance to what your organisation’s goals are; that it’s a cultural fit and the teams all have good chemistry together!
Here are a few cheat sheet top tips:

1. Do a once over on your client list, get rid of loss clients and focus on the most rewarding accounts
2. Audit your current accounts to see what your most successful service offerings are…what it is you’re actually doing the most of, best of, etc and if it’s not a 7 or higher on a 1 to 10 scale, say goodbye
3. Make friends with procurement
4. Evaluate your external and internal strategy for client on-sell
5. Create milestones, and for god’s sake, don’t send out that agency newsletter, the client doesn’t care unless it’s personalised to them and relevantTeam team team, make sure the team is the best team for the job
6. Get out there and figure out what your client is actually interested in, reading, doing, etc.
7. Apply your already in place new business tools to your organic growth programme

There was a lively debate post the chat from Chris, and one question in particular stands out. Q: Should a company prospect and work with a client in the first year, knowing that it might be a loss lead relationship initially? The answer naturally is that each agency would have to determine what they could invest in such a relationship but that organic or traditional business development of this nature should be considered just that — an investment — and a proper budget should be set up with allocated resource.

Chris, hats off to you for the informative and fun Breakfast Bite. Thank you and we hope you enjoyed the delicious Soho House bacon butties.