Managing an agency without doing their job for them

If you're rewriting their work, you're paying for it twice and getting the worse version of both. Your job is to be a good client, which is narrower than it sounds: set the direction, hold them to what was agreed, make decisions quickly, and otherwise leave them alone. Most in-house teams fail at this in one of two ways. Either they disappear and then complain, or they get involved in everything and wonder why the agency has stopped bringing ideas.

Our interest, stated first. We're an agency, and we're also often the person in the room on the client's side. This piece makes life harder for a lazy supplier and easier for a good one, and that's the test it should be judged on.

The rhythm

There are four things to put in the calendar, and nothing else.

A monthly call, with an agenda you set. Ask three questions: what happened, what did you learn, and what are you doing next? It isn't a walk through a slide deck, and if the call is them reading numbers aloud, cancel it and ask for the numbers in writing.

A written monthly update, before the call. That way the call is about decisions rather than information. Keep it to two sides of paper at most.

A quarterly review against the plan. Look at what was promised, what was done, what it changed and what's planned for next quarter. This is the meeting that stops a retainer drifting into maintenance.

One named person on each side. Yours makes decisions, and theirs is accountable for the work. Everything else can be a group chat.

What to ask for every month

• What moved, and what you think caused it. You need both halves, because a number without a cause is a weather report.
• What you tried that didn't work. A supplier that never reports a failure is either not experimenting or not telling you.
• What's blocked, and by whom. It's usually you, sitting on an approval, some access or a decision nobody made, and it's better to see that in writing than to hear about it in a quarterly review.
• What you'd do with more budget, and with less. The answers tell you how well they understand your business.

Judging the answers is a skill of its own, and it's most of what working out whether your agency is doing a good job comes down to.

The things to keep on your side of the line

Some decisions can't be handed over, however good the agency is.

• What the marketing is for this quarter. That's theirs to advise on and yours to decide.
• What you're prepared to say in public. That covers claims, prices, promises and anything with a legal edge. The advertising rules put the responsibility on the advertiser, and that stays true when an agency or a tool wrote the words.
• Ownership of the accounts and the data. Everything should be in your business's name, and who owns your marketing accounts is the checklist for that. Do it at the start of the relationship, not at the end.
• The relationship with your own customers. Never let a supplier become the only one who knows what customers say.

Decide quickly, or say when you will

The commonest complaint agencies have about clients isn't the budget, it's waiting. Work sits for a fortnight, the context goes cold, and by the time the comments arrive, the person who made it has moved on to another job.

You don't have to decide immediately, but you do have to say when you'll decide, and then do it. A client who answers within two working days gets better work than one who pays twenty per cent more and answers in three weeks.

Three signs it has stopped working

1. The updates have become activity lists. Posts published, keywords tracked and hours spent are output with no argument attached, and that means nobody is thinking about your business any more.
2. Nobody has disagreed with you in six months. A supplier that only agrees has decided the relationship matters more than the result, which is the beginning of the end of the value.
3. You can't say what the last quarter changed. I don't mean what was delivered. I mean what changed.

If two of those are true, have the conversation before the renewal rather than after it, and start it with the quarterly review, not with the contract.

Before you switch

Switching costs more than people expect: the handover, the relearning, and the two or three months of nothing much happening. Make sure the problem is the supplier and not the brief, because an unclear brief produces the same disappointing work from anybody, and briefing an agency so you get what you asked for is the cheaper fix to try first.

If you'd rather have somebody on your side of the table for the monthly and quarterly conversations, that's what our fractional and part-time marketing leadership is for, priced by the day.