Great client partnerships build agencies. They bring energy, vibrance and growth to your agency. The right clients are your lifeblood; however, the wrong clients burn hours, kill morale and create team churn.
Let’s explore how to win more of the right business across 1) Scope Alignment 2) Written RFP Response 3) Pitch Meeting 4) Post Pitch Follow-up 5) Financial Viability & SOW Transparency 6) Onboarding and 7) Ongoing Relationship Health.
Scope Alignment: First and foremost, make sure the scope of the RFP is right for your agency. This might seem like “table stakes”, but the truth is that many agencies chose to participate in Agency Reviews when the scope is not a perfect fit. Some do this in an aspirational spirit to gain a notable client, punch above their weight class for a budget or grow a service; while others unfortunately say yes at any cost.
Before participating in an Agency Review, ask yourself these questions:
- Do we truly offer (and excel at) the services required?
- Can we support the global operations needed?
- Do we have the right category expertise?
- Is the budget appropriate for our organization?
- Does the challenge sound like the type of work our team loves to do?
Only move forward in going after the business if you can answer “Yes!” to all of the above. We recommend walking away from business that is not the right fit, as it will hurt your agency, the relationship with your client (or potential client) and ruin a later opportunity. We always suggest long-term successes over short-term wins.
After you have determined if the client is the right fit for your agency, standing out against your competitors can be challenging. Most agencies have access to the same platforms, tools, technologies, etc. Your true core differentiators are your people and your thinking.
Written RFP Response: This is a moment for you to introduce yourself, set the tone and help the client team understand how you can help them. Written responses should be tailored to the specific client, scope and RFP. The language you use and the design of your presentation matters (more than you think).
Here’s how to write an impactful RFP response:
- Welcome Letter: Start your response with a “Thank You” letter or some sort of “Welcome” letter. Use this to set the tone of your response, build rapport and share excitement. Resist the temptation to use this moment to chest-beat about how great your agency is. This isn’t about selling; it is about creating the foundational elements for building a relationship.
- Understand the Client Mindset: Your potential client has an already full job and life, with many responsibilities spanning across the hours of the day and night. Make reading your response easy and enjoyable for them. Avoid the temptation to add extra elements to your response that simply just create more work for the reader.
- Answer Questions Directly: Answer the questions asked directly. Use their audiences, any information supplied, their language and any additional insights when answering the questions. Don’t make them go searching for an answer, provide it clearly.
- Be Custom: Write every word as if it is for them. Write the response like you’re having a conversation with them. Avoid the temptation to send over generic slides or use generic language.
- Polished Presentation Design: The format of your response should be appropriate for the specific scope and scoring team. Regardless of specific format, the template should be clean, clear and crisp. Use this as an opportunity to showcase to the client team how you will communicate with them in writing. Keep in mind that they are almost always thinking about how what you give them will translate into a deck they can provide to their stakeholders and leadership.
- Response Ending: As opposed to abruptly ending your response with the last word of your last answer or a slide that has “Thank You” in large letters, we recommend ending your submission with a "Thank You" letter. Similarly to the “Welcome" letter, use this opportunity to thank the client team, share your excitement about the potential of working together and any other relevant closing remarks.
Pitch Meeting: Whether virtual or in-person, the pitch meeting should be about building trust, demonstrating expertise and helping the client team understand how you can help them. Every moment of your time together should be used effectively from introductions to goodbyes.
Here’s how to create the right pitch environment:
- Build Chemistry: Building chemistry is a collection of micro-moments throughout your time with the client team. Take every moment possible to engage with them. Before the pitch officially starts, talk to them, ask them questions and welcome them to the meeting. During the “pitch” engage with them, ask them the right questions, be friendly, thoughtful and direct.
- Assign a “Pitch MC”: This person on your team is responsible for tracking time, fielding questions and has the ability to interject with your team should anyone spend a bit too much time on a slide (it happens). This reduces the occurrence of double-answering questions, time feeling rushed and team members self-selecting answering questions. In other words, this increases the client team’s confidence in your agency as this helps them to feel more taken care of by you during the pitch meeting.
- Make Your Time with Them about THEM: Use your time effectively. Answer their questions, provide detail on the things that matter to them and make sure they walk away with a deep understanding of how you can help them. Talk about them more and your agency less. Your only agenda should be their agenda. Let them use the time with you however they want.
- Be Custom: (Yes, this again.) Use their language, their name, their technology, their audiences, etc. Even if slides are repurposed from previous pitches, customize the slide for that specific client. Have a conversation with them about them, rather than philosophies and theories. This way, the client team can truly see themselves working with you.
- Ask the Right Questions: Your pitch meeting should be collaborative - you have a live audience. Furthermore, your live audience are experts in the subject matter you are there to discuss with them. Use the meeting as an opportunity to ask them questions as you present. Things like: “Has your research shown this before?”, “What was your thinking behind this approach?”, “Have you considered this before?” (you get the point). And, when they answer, use their answers as a way to build on ideas together and incorporate their feedback into your meeting as you proceed.
While not everyone who will work on the business is a polished presenter, we recommend having team members on the pitch who will work on the account. No one appreciates the “bait and switch” – in fact, it causes significant damage to the relationship should you win the business. The client team likely already knows that you can do this work, they will be assessing who they want to do the work with. Empower your team to confidently and comfortably shine during the pitch meeting. This is your moment to build the foundation for your ongoing successful partnership.
Post Pitch Follow-up: Picking a new agency partner is a big decision. Not only is it a HUGE financial investment, but this relationship will also be responsible for helping the marketing team achieve their goals. Their own personal careers could depend on your shared success. The team will not take making this decision lightly. It is your job in this moment to help assure them and give them additional supporting evidence that you are the right partner.
Every client team needs something somewhat different for this step in the process, but it is ultimately all the same: They all want to feel supported, confident and comfortable. Many teams then need to justify their decision to their executive sponsor or leadership team, which they may need your help doing. These last moments are critical.
How to become the final agency partner:
- Timely: The last steps in a review process often move quickly. Go as fast with the team as you can, within reason. Provide them with answers to questions, schedule additional Q&A Team sessions, get them the last details they need to build the internal case to select your agency as their final partner.
- Team Access: They will want to talk to their actual team. While leadership can be present on any needed follow-up meetings, allow the client team to connect with their day-to-day agency team.
- Executive Meetings: You may be asked to meet with the most senior Marketing Leader (CMO, EVP of Marketing, etc.). Ask your potential client team to help you calibrate the correct elevation and specification for that meeting. This way, the Marketing Leader is getting the information they need to support their team’s choice.
- Transparent: Be open, honest and transparent through every conversation and interaction.
The client team will want to be sure that they are selecting the right partners and that the relationship is financially sound. We’ll talk about money next, but financial obligations are often highly discussed during this phase of the process.
Financial Viability & SOW Transparency: The agency-client relationship needs to be financially viable for both sides. What this means is that there needs to be extreme clarity about the scope of the partnership and full transparency around fees. The SOW should be written in plain language that everyone touching the business can easily understand, without the opportunity for ambiguity or interpretation. Create an SOW that a 12-year-old could understand.
How to create a financially viable relationship and SOW transparency:
- Scope Clarity: There needs to be extreme clarity about budget, what services are included, where people are needed, reporting cadence, deliverables, etc. Get exact insight into what is needed from you to support the client relationship. Of course, this could change over time, but that is what change orders are for.
- Create SOW Transparency: Define everything. (What “monthly reporting” means to different people is different, promise.) Clearly define each element of the partnership, providing insight into what is and what is not included. Be clear about the level of support you will be held to for that specific budget. Regardless of the pricing model, fees, team service level, deliverables and outputs should be clearly stated. Remove any ambiguous language.
While this is a moment when everyone wants to move fast, this is not a time to cut corners. The SOW will be the effective operating manual for the relationship. It is in your best interest (as well as the clients) that you take the time to be thorough, thoughtful and clear when scoping the relationship.
How the partnership is scoped will ultimately help to reduce the likelihood of your client asking (in our opinion) the worst question they can ask about you, “What am I paying my agency for?”. And it will keep you from having to ask your client for more money for things they thought they were already paying for. In other words, setting up the relationship SOW correctly will help to set your overall relationship up for ongoing success.
Anyone (on both sides) who works on the business should be required to review the completed SOW, so that everyone clearly understands what is (and isn’t) included in the partnership.
Onboarding: Now, everyone has decided they want to work together and there is an extreme urgency to hit the ground running. The client team is ready and wants to move fast. Depending on the complexity of the relationship, onboarding can be quite complicated and span across teams, time zones and services. There are many priorities and moving parts.
In almost all onboardings, there are two parallel workstreams:
- Financial Onboarding: MSA, SOW, Vendor Onboarding, etc.
- Business Onboarding: Getting the teams to work effectively together.
The above are usually happening in unison. Most agencies are happy to start with business onboarding, while financial onboarding is being completed. There is clearly a lot happening across all elements of onboarding, it is on you to help your client team feel taken care of throughout this process. Help them usher this change.
Here’s how:
- Onboarding Checklist & Timeline: Create a collaborative checklist of all key activities with corresponding dates and responsibilities. Make this accessible to everyone, share it often with updates.
- Onboarding Meetings: Schedule the required meetings to support your initial onboarding (kick-off, product demos, stakeholder interviews, etc.). Prioritize by urgency. If possible, meet in-person for initial onboarding meetings.
- Onboarding Updates: Have a regular check-in meeting with your key contacts to remain in lockstep. Pivot as needed.
- All-Hands Communications: Provide regular onboarding updates in the agreed upon cadence, format and forum.
Like we said (and you already know), onboarding can be extremely complex and complicated. Be clear about timelines, expectations and what is needed from both sides. Approach onboarding as a collaborative team project where you are the team captain. And, remember, if you want to fast, go alone… if you want to go far, go together.
Ongoing Relationship Health: The number one reason brands go to RFP (look for a new agency) is because of struggles, dissatisfaction and frustrations with their agency team. Once the client team loses confidence in their agency team, there becomes a heightened focus on how much they are paying you, errors made and what is not going right. Challenges lead to more challenges, as what we focus on grows.
So, now that your agency has gone through so much time, energy and money to win the new client, how do you keep them, ensure that they are happy, grow the relationship and turn them into a positive reference for your agency?
- Always be Building Rapport: Every moment your team interacts with your client is a moment for them to build rapport. Meet deadlines, get to know them as people, provide deliverables they can share with their stakeholders, educate them, help them, let them know they can trust you and count on you. This way, there is established trust and a relationship to lean on when something goes wrong (notice that we said “when”, not “if”… something will go wrong at some point).
- Share Goals: Your only goal should be to help them achieve their goals. Their job could be dependent on your agency’s ability to showcase the impact of what you’re doing together – in other words, your job could be dependent on helping your client show their bosses the impact of your work. Help them get what they need.
- Strong Client Services Lead: Account leads should have a deep understanding of the services your agency is supporting, as well as, the client, their space and their goals. Educate, empower and enable your account leads to truly lead the account. Invest in them, train them (with internal resources or external hired resources), have them join lunch and learns and give them the space to actually think and learn.
- Take Accountability: When (again, when, not if) something goes wrong take accountability. You miss a deadline, an error gets made, there’s a miscommunication and so on… acknowledge it and apologize. Taking accountability actually builds trust. Remember, trust is gained in drops, but lost in buckets.
- Have Live Brainstorms: Your clients are paying you to think. They want you to be their strategic partner; to make them better, stronger, smarter. Have real-time brainstorms and strategic conversations with them. Ask them questions, add on to ideas, give them another way of thinking about something, provide insight and a POV on topics, etc..
- Have Regular Relationship Health Check-ins: At an agreed upon cadence, openly assess the health of the partnership. Be open about expectations being met, hours being utilized and areas of improvement. If appropriate for the relationship, share hours reports regularly (monthly, quarterly or half yearly) and adjust as needed.
- Ask Our Favorite Question: Many years ago, we had a client who would regularly ask us this question: “What can I do to be a better partner to you?”. The spirit of this question sets the stage for honesty, vulnerability and partnership. Don’t be afraid to ask, as not asking can have greater repercussions.
Your current customer is your next best customer and your official (or unofficial) reference for your next potential client. Keep the focus on doing great work, adding value and showcasing impact. Client can always tell when you’re trying to sell to them, rather than add value.
Final Thoughts: Winning more of the right business is the best way to support the long-term growth of your agency. Focus on the fit of your relationship. Be authentic, honest and transparent. Help your client achieve their goals. Be the strategic partner they hired. This way, you are no longer creating challenged “square-peg-round-hole” relationships; instead, you are creating and growing the right partnerships.