Marketing agencies

The relationship is with a person who will leave

Agency relationships are personal in a way that most business to business relationships are not. You are hired by a marketing manager who likes working with you, and marketing managers move every two or three years. When they go, two things happen at once, and most agencies only notice one of them.

The first is that the account is now at risk, because the new manager will review agencies and has no relationship with you. The second, and the one that gets missed, is that your champion has just arrived somewhere new with the authority to hire an agency and a good opinion of yours. That is the warmest lead an agency can get and it is routinely wasted.

Holding the person and the company as separate connected records with dates is what makes both visible. The connection to the old employer ends. The connection to the new one begins. Your record of what you did together follows the person, and the client company keeps its own history of who was there.

Retainers and projects are not the same shape

A project is won once. A retainer is won once and then re earned continuously, with a notice period, a renewal date and a slow drift in whether the client feels they are getting value. Those are completely different commercial objects and they need different stages.

Agencies that force both through one pipeline get a forecast that is wrong twice: it overstates, because renewals appear as new wins, and it understates the risk, because a retainer that is about to lapse looks exactly like one that is not. Two pipelines with your own stages fixes it, and the retainer one has an entirely different shape, closer to a set of renewal dates with health attached than to a funnel.

Losing a pitch is the most informative thing that happens

A pitch is expensive. Three weeks of senior time, occasionally more, and no revenue if it goes the other way. Agencies do this repeatedly and almost never record the outcome in a way that can be analysed.

Recorded properly, with the stage history, the value and the reason, the questions become answerable. Which sectors do we actually win in. Which kinds of brief we lose. Whether we lose on price or on the credentials meeting. Whether the pitches we win are the ones where we had a relationship first, which they almost always are.

And when the same client comes back two years later, which happens far more often than agencies expect, it arrives against a record rather than into an inbox.

Not agency management software

Time can be recorded against a project on the delivery module, with a view of what each person put down against their capacity, and that is the whole of it. No resource planning. No creative task management. No asset library. No rates and no job costing against recorded time. Those last ones are the core of agency management tools and this is not one of them.

Do not run client campaigns from it

The marketing module exists for an organisation marketing itself. Using it to send on behalf of clients is a bad idea and we would rather say so than take the money. Electronic marketing in the United Kingdom is governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 as well as by data protection law, and both are read against whoever sent the message.

The consent records would belong to your organisation rather than to your client's, which is the wrong controller relationship. Sender authentication is configured per organisation rather than per client. And the audiences would mix your client's data into a system your other clients' data is also in, which is precisely the thing an agency should never have to explain to one of them.

Client sending belongs in a platform your client controls, or in one configured specifically for that client. This is for your own new business and your own relationships.

What we would build if agencies asked

Reading from agency management software so the retainer value and the current job list appear against the relationship without being typed twice. The connector framework exists and this trade is not on it yet, which the roadmap says plainly instead of describing as coming soon.

Put the retainer renewal dates in before anything else

Every retainer has a date and a notice period, and in most agencies both live in a contract file rather than in anything anyone looks at weekly. A retainer that lapses because no one diarised the conversation is the single most expensive administrative failure in this trade.

Model the client contact as a person who will move

Agency relationships are personal and marketing people change employer more often than almost anyone. When yours moves, two things happen and most agencies act on one: the account is at risk, and a warm buyer has arrived somewhere new.

Connections carry dates, so a saved view of former client contacts now elsewhere is a better prospect list than anything else available to an agency.

Run new business as its own pipeline, separate from renewals

A pitch and a renewal have completely different probabilities. One pipeline containing both produces a forecast that is wrong for every individual deal while looking approximately right in total, which is why no one catches it.

Record where pitches came from

Referral, existing client, inbound, an intermediary, an approach. Agencies spend real money on new business and usually cannot say which channel produced the work rather than the meetings.

Build one saved view of clients who have gone quiet

A client who has not commissioned anything in five months and has not been contacted is not lost, only unattended. A saved view of clients with no activity this quarter finds them, and in most agencies it finds more money than new business does.

Then leave reporting alone for a quarter

A pitch cycle in this trade is long enough that any conclusion from six weeks is a conclusion about how you imported.

Where it currently lives

In almost every agency under about forty people, new business and client relationship information is spread across the same short list. A shared inbox, usually called something like hello or newbusiness, which no one owns and everybody reads. A spreadsheet maintained by whoever holds the new business brief, frequently a part time consultant, containing a tab of targets and a tab of live pitches. A board tool with a column for each pitch stage, set up enthusiastically and last updated some months ago. A shared drive of proposal decks organised by client name. And a set of connections on a professional network that one director treats as the actual contact database.

Some agencies also have an agency management or job costing tool, which holds jobs, time and invoices properly and holds the relationship badly, because it starts at the point work was won. And a good number have the abandoned free tier of a large marketing platform, opened during a growth push, filled with two hundred contacts and then left alone. The reasoning behind free tiers, ours included, is set out in what a free plan costs.

What comes across without difficulty

Names, company names, email addresses, deal values and dates come across from any of those, because they are columns. The spreadsheet is the easiest source and the board tool is usually second. The shared drive gives you a list of who was pitched and roughly when, which is more than most agencies think they have.

The job costing tool is worth exporting for the client list and the historic values. It will not give you anything about prospects, because it never held any.

What has to be rebuilt by hand, and is worth it

Four things, all of which matter more than the columns. First, who is currently where. A contact list of any age in this trade is substantially wrong, because marketing people move, and the correction is a genuine afternoon of work. It is also the single most valuable afternoon in the migration, because a former client contact at a new employer is a warm prospect and a stale row in a spreadsheet is nothing.

Second, why pitches were lost. The spreadsheet has a column called status with the word lost in it. The reason is in someone's memory, and it is retrievable for about two years and not much longer. Sitting down with whoever ran each pitch and recording the reason against the opportunity is unglamorous and it is the only way that column ever becomes worth reading.

Third, consent. Nothing that comes out of a shared inbox or a professional network carries a lawful basis with it, and importing a scraped list into a system that keeps consent records does not create consent. The obligations are on every plan, which is the point, but the record has to be true.

Fourth, the freelancers. They are almost never in any of the sources listed above. They are in a phone, in a payments export and in a folder of invoices. Rebuilding them as relationships connected to the projects they worked on takes an hour and answers a question that gets asked several times a year.

What to leave behind

Do not import the shared inbox. It is tempting because it is the largest source and it is a mistake, because most of it is suppliers, applicants, students asking for work experience and people selling search engine optimisation. An address book full of those is worse than a small one, because no one trusts it and so nobody maintains it.

Do not import a contact list you cannot say the origin of. Do not bring across the board tool's stages if they were invented on a Tuesday and never used. And do not import proposal documents in bulk; attach them as you touch each relationship, which spreads the work across the year and leaves you with files against records people actually open.

The order that works

Current clients first, with the retainer dates and notice periods, because that is the part with money attached. Then last two years of pitches with outcomes and reasons. Then the people, correcting employers as you go. Then freelancers. Then, if ever, the older prospect list. Most agencies stop after the fourth step and lose nothing.

Two of those are worth more than the rest. The word client, used for both the company and the person, is the root of the modelling problem this whole page keeps returning to: a trade that uses one word for two objects will build one record for two objects, and then lose one of them. And campaign, meaning one thing on the studio floor and another in the marketing module, is the confusion most likely to send a new colleague looking in the wrong place on their second day.

The rest is genuinely just vocabulary. Nothing in the product depends on which word you use, no field is named after any of them, and an agency that says account everywhere will be perfectly happy.

Three neighbouring pages describe the same modelling from a different floor. An agency that sells days rather than campaigns will recognise more of consultancy. An agency whose new business is really placement should read recruitment agencies instead. And where a retainer behaves like an annual professional engagement, the professional services page covers the referral side in more detail than this one does.

One agreement, then a schedule for each thing

The normal structure is a master agreement signed once, covering liability, ownership, confidentiality and payment terms, with a schedule or statement of work underneath it for each retainer and each project. The master agreement is signed by people who have usually left by the time it matters. The schedules are signed by whoever is running the account this year.

That structure is the reason files belong against the relationship rather than against an individual opportunity. A dispute about a project reaches for the schedule and then immediately reaches for the master agreement above it, and an agency that has to ask a former employee where the second one is has already lost the first hour of the argument.

Notice, and the difference between renewal and review

Two shapes exist and agencies frequently do not know which one they have. A retainer that rolls automatically until notice is served puts the burden on the client to end it. A retainer with a fixed term and an annual review puts the burden on you to renew it. The first is much better for an agency and the second is much more common in anything procurement has touched.

Both need the notice period and the renewal date recorded, and they need different behaviour. The rolling one needs watching for the client's notice window opening. The fixed one needs a proposal built before the review, which is work, and work needs a date and an owner rather than an intention.

Pitch terms and the work that was not bought

A pitch produces real intellectual property that nobody has paid for. Whether the ideas presented remain yours when you lose depends on what was agreed at the start, and in a large number of pitches nothing was agreed at the start because the brief arrived by email and everyone was flattered.

The practical habit is simple and rarely followed: whatever was said about ownership, expenses and the timetable goes against the opportunity as a file or a note before the first meeting, not after the result. If it was never said, that is worth recording too. An agency that can see it entered four pitches in a year with no terms agreed has learned something about itself.

Where you are handling someone else's data

Agencies routinely receive personal data belonging to clients: an event list, a customer research sample, a database for a mailing. In that arrangement your client decides what happens to it and you act on their instructions, which is a different legal position from the one you are in with your own prospect list, and it carries different paperwork. Deciding what happens to personal data and acting on someone else's instructions are the two roles the Information Commissioner's Office calls controller and processor, and an agency is routinely both in the same week.

The straightforward consequence is that client data should not be in here. This is your organisation's system, holding your organisation's relationships, and the section above about not running client campaigns from it is the same point arriving from the commercial direction. A client's mailing list living in the agency's CRM is a conversation nobody wants to have with the client whose competitor is also on your roster.

What the product actually does with any of this

Less than the length of this section suggests, and the honest list is short. It holds the documents as files against the relationship. It holds the dates as tasks with owners. It holds custom fields for the notice period and the renewal date. It keeps an audit trail of who changed what, on every plan including the free one.

It does not read your contracts, does not extract dates from them, does not warn you about a clause and does not know what your notice period says. It does send a contract for a client to accept or decline by typed name, and where the contracts module is bought it lists what is up for renewal in the next ninety days. It is a place to put a file, a date and a person responsible. That is genuinely most of the value, because the failure in this trade is almost never that the contract was misunderstood. It is that no one could find it and no one had the date.