Your clients look tasty! Can I have a bite? How to Protect your agency’s clients from New Biz Hunters Like Me

During difficult economic times the general consensus is that it is of primary importance for advertising agencies to keep the clients they already have. Many agencies are fighting to stay alive and are bending over backwards to keep current business humming along. Other agencies are in the same boat but are also stepping up efforts to prospect for new accounts because they are receiving less incoming inquiries and RFPs and they want to make sure there will be on-going revenue and growth.

Agency chiefs with an eye toward the future are sending out their best New Business Hunters to bring home as much meat as they can for their hungry tribe. One of the first places hunters look for dinner is in your back yard where they wait to steal game when you aren’t watching. Since I have been hunting and developing new accounts for Ad/ MarkCom firms for more than 15 years, I would like to share some of the reasons clients give me for why they switched agencies. Hopefully account managers will find this to be useful in their quest to keep and grow business from within.

WHY YOUR CLIENTS MOVED THEIR ACCOUNT FROM YOUR AGENCY TO MINE:

1. “My account was smaller than others at the agency so they took their time getting back to me when I called. It was obvious that managing my account was not a priority for them. I also had junior-level people servicing my business. I had to do a lot of educating.”
2. “They kept pushing me to use capabilities and services that were most profitable for them instead of developing a solution that would meet my marketing goals and needs”
3. "They were not proactive, had no ideas and were behind the curve when it came to innovation.”
4. “The person(s) who pitched me disappeared after we signed and ended up working with people who did not seem to care as much about my account.”
5. “They did not have the ability to do X.” NOTE: Sometimes the former agency actually did have the ability to do X but had not done a good job of communicating all of their agency’s capabilities with their client, or had not made an effort to update the client on new capabilities.
6. “They did not get the results we wanted.” NOTE: This is not necessarily the agency’s fault. However, reviewing results often with the client and making sure the client is aware of all the reasons why something may not be working, and/or offering to try a new approach could help alleviate this threat.
7. “I took the place of the person who used to manage the agency relationship and I did not want to work with the same agency my predecessor used.” NOTE: In this case, the new VP of Marketing or Advertising wants to put their stamp on marketing/advertising strategy going forward, and that includes choosing a new agency. As someone hunting for new accounts, I have found that when roles change at a company, this is one of the best times for me to pursue that company aggressively by making contact immediately with the new decision-maker. The only thing the incumbent agency can do to try to keep the account in this case is to make sure that the new decision-maker knows about any good results you achieved, giving them a good reason and/or empirical evidence for why they should stay with your agency.
8. “They did not know what was going on at my company. We had lots of announcements about X in the media, but when I asked my ad agency’s account team if they had any ideas on how we should adjust our marketing communication strategy to reflect this recent development, they did not have a clue. We were spending a lot of money with this agency and I thought they should at least have some cursory knowledge of what was happening within our company before I told them about it. It was all over the news so I don’t understand how they could have missed it.”

In a future post I will offer some suggestions for avoiding these no-win situations.
By Laureen Peck