How to Be the Client Every Agency Wants to Work For

Ask Yourself This Before Every Difficult Conversation

The single most useful shift I made was learning to pause before any feedback conversation with an agency and ask one question. It sounds simple, but it changes everything about how those conversations land.

What I mentor my teams on is that agencies are just like any other relationship built on trust. When you become hypercritical, when every missed expectation is met with discouragement, the people on the other side of that relationship have a very hard time recovering. They get defensive, they get careful, and they stop taking the creative risks that produce the work you hired them for in the first place.

That does not mean lowering the bar, but it does mean being precise about the purpose of every conversation you have with them.

Build the Right Structure Around the Relationship

One of the structural patterns I see most often is the top marketing executive on the client side stepping back once a relationship is active, leaving a direct report to manage it while checking in at quarterly reviews. The executive thinks the relationship is covered. It is not, and the absence is felt on the agency side more than most executives realize.

Every agency relationship worth protecting needs an executive sponsor at both the client and the agency, and that sponsorship needs to be active throughout, not just when something goes wrong.

Your weekly check-in with your direct report is crucial. There will be moments when that person is frustrated, demoralized, or ready to send your agency partner a message they will regret. Your job is to hear them, help them stay focused on the long game, and make sure the relationship does not drift in a direction that is hard to come back from. The day-to-day owner is close enough to feel everything and sometimes not senior enough to contextualize it. Your role is to help them keep the bigger picture in mind.

Be Thoughtful About Who You Put in Charge

Who you assign to manage the agency relationship matters immensely, and not just because of their ability to stay organized or keep meetings on track. If your agency is running your paid media program, the person managing that relationship needs to understand paid media well enough to ask the right questions, recognize when something is off, and push the agency in a way that reflects a genuine understanding of the work.

A strong generalist will keep the relationship running, but they cannot have the kind of substantive conversation that moves an agency from competent to exceptional. The agency will inevitably sense that gap and calibrate to it. This doesn’t happen out of malice or bad faith; it is simply human nature. Agencies will naturally match the level of rigor and depth that is expected of them.

If you don’t have someone on your team with the right background, the answer is to mentor them carefully, not to throw someone in and hope for the best. Mentoring someone in how to manage an agency is not the same as telling them how to manage the agency. If you are in every meeting and taking over the conversation, you are teaching the agency that your direct report does not have real authority, and you are teaching your direct report that they do not either, and both of those lessons will take a long time to undo.

The more effective approach is to work behind the scenes. Game-plan before meetings and debrief after them. Help your direct report form the right questions on their own rather than handing them the questions. Be present selectively, in moments where your presence signals importance rather than substitutes for their ownership. Set the tone with the agency directly and explicitly: this person is in charge. When an agency has that clarity from you, they will respect it, and when they do not, they will always be looking past your direct report for the real decision maker.

Invest in Relationships at Multiple Levels

The agencies that have produced the best work for me and my teams are the ones where real relationships exist at multiple levels between our teams, not just a client contact and an account manager. Depth at multiple levels is not accidental. It requires intention, and it pays off in ways that are hard to measure until the moment you need them.

When things get hard, and they will at some point in every agency relationship, the depth of those connections can play a major part in how fast things recover. The cross-level relationships deserve particular attention. When your day-to-day owner has a direct relationship with the agency principal, it sends a clear signal to every level on their side that this person authority and that you have empowered them The agency stops routing around them and they engage them as the decision maker they actually are.

That connection is also one of the most pivotal investments you can make in your team member’s growth. Exposure to a senior leader at the agency, in a real working relationship, accelerates development in ways that internal coaching alone cannot. Creating that connection is the executive sponsor’s job and it does not happen on its own.

When Performance Slips, Resist the First Instinct

No agency will always deliver at the level that earned your confidence when you decided to hire them. Things stall, teams turn over, and new business wins at the agency can dilute the attention your account gets. None of this means you chose the wrong partner. It means you are in a real relationship, which requires active management.

How you respond in those moments defines the trajectory of the entire engagement. A client who escalates frustration the moment performance slips teaches the agency to be defensive. A client who goes clinical and transactional the moment trust breaks trains the agency to give them exactly what the contract says, and nothing more.

When I see something concerning, my first move is not to go directly to the agency’s leadership. It is to sit down with my direct report, the person who owns the relationship day to day, and game-plan together. What is the issue, what has already been tried, and what is the right way to bring it to the account lead? That channel should always get the first opportunity to fix things. Going over your direct report’s head quickly undermines their authority with the agency and trains both sides to wait for you before anything moves.

If the account lead is not able to bring about improvement, then it is time to escalate at the principal level, but only after game-planning with your direct report again so the conversation is deliberate and they are fully prepared for what comes next. When that conversation happens, it should feel like a conversation, not a warning shot. The framing should always be “I am telling you this because I want to fix it together and because this relationship matters to us”. That is a very different exchange than one that starts with a list of grievances.

The agencies my teams have held onto through difficult stretches are the ones who listen when you have that conversation, who do not deflect or make excuses, and who take the feedback and get to work. They are far more likely to do that when they trust that your intent is to improve the relationship, not to build a case against them.

When You Need to Pull Back Scope

There are situations where, after months of direct conversation and genuine effort on both sides, you realize the agency is in over their heads on a specific part of the business. Maybe they took on more than they could execute, or a capability they sold you on is not fully developed yet. The instinct in those moments is to terminate the engagement and start looking for someone new.

Resist that instinct almost every time.

Terminating a relationship because one part of it is not working means losing everything that is working and putting your team through a search and onboarding process that costs real time and money. You will, in all likelihood, encounter similar challenges with the next agency, because some of those challenges belong to the work itself rather than to the partner.

The better move in most cases is to reduce scope, not end the engagement. If the agency is executing paid media at a high level but consistently underdelivering on creative or SEO, pull those channels back. Let them own what they do well and stop asking them to carry what they have proven they cannot. A focused agency performs better than a stretched one. Approached correctly, a scope reduction is a signal that you want to protect the relationship, not end it.

Give Feedback That Leaves Room for Their Expertise

One mistake I made earlier in my career, and one I see often in how executives manage creative relationships, is crossing from feedback into prescription. When you tell an agency what is wrong and then tell them exactly what you want instead, you are treating them as an order taker. Most clients do not realize how much this costs them, because the moment an agency feels like they are executing your vision rather than contributing their own, they feel boxed in. They stop bringing their own originality and creativity, and start trying to guess what you want to hear or see. Once this happens, it is hard to undo it.

Agencies love working for clients who believe in them, who hold them to a high standard and still let them show up as the professionals they are. When an agency trusts that you respect their judgment, they take more ownership of the outcome and stop waiting to be told what to do, thinking instead about what you actually need.

Recognize Which Cycle You Are Fueling

The feedback you give, the escalations you make, the relationships you build at each level, all of it compounds. Over time, every partnership is either gaining altitude or losing it. The direction is set by what you and your team (the client) repeatedly chooses to fuel.

Most clients who are unhappy with their agency are operating inside the first cycle and have not yet recognized the role they are playing in keeping it there. The clients who consistently get exceptional work are not doing one big thing right; instead they are doing several small things repeatedly that move the relationship into the second cycle and keep it there.

A Honest Look at Both Sides

None of what I have described above is easy to do consistently. It requires a level of self-awareness in the relationship that most executives are not taught to bring to a vendor partnership. The grid below is not meant as judgment, but as a mirror. Most of us will recognize something in both columns.

The agencies I would go to bat for without hesitation know exactly what my team and I expect, and they know they can trust us to be straight with them when they miss. They also trust that the know at all times how we view how the partnership is going, and that there will be no surprises. That trust takes time to build, and it requires consistency from both sides equally. It produces work that is better than any one side could do on their own, which is exactly what a partnership should be.