What better way to delve into 'what good looks like' for agency-client relationships than ask a former client of The Engine Room. Ian Probert is a marketing professional with over twenty years experience in B2B, working for SMEs and some of the world's largest corporate enterprises.
Client-side marketing teams are under pressure. Across dozens of my conversations with B2B marketers this year, a consistent picture is emerging: in-house teams are really lean. Budgets are either static or shrinking in real terms. Yet expectations are continuing to rise: growth targets remain, leaders expect more from marketing, and marketers want to deliver more for their businesses.
That’s a clear but challenging mandate – deliver more impact, more consistently, with fewer resources. Improve effectiveness AND efficiency. ‘More, with less’.
In this environment, your agency and vendor partnerships become critical.
Agencies have always been core to delivery: extending internal capability, providing specialist expertise, and generally helping us get s*** done. But in the current climate, it won’t be enough for marketers to consider agencies as just an extension of the team: we’ll need to find ways that our agency spend and activity will help us unlock disproportionate value.
Effectiveness and efficiency don’t just emerge by accident, though. Strong outcomes are always built not just on which agency partners you work with, but also on how the relationship is designed, managed and nurtured. And much of that depends heavily on some key client-side behaviours.
What follows is a practical guide to getting more value from your agency partnerships, drawn from 20 years of experience, £millions in agency spend, and a fair amount of trial-and-error.
There will always be an inherent power dynamic in client-agency relationships, as the client controls the budget. But overplaying that power is one of the fastest ways to limit value.
High-performing relationships behave differently. They operate as genuine partnerships, with an operating model that should show up in a set of consistent behaviours:
- Share context early and often. Agencies can only operate at the level of information they are given. Yet many relationships are still driven by transactional, tactical briefs with limited background. That creates predictable outcomes – safe thinking, limited challenge, shallow outputs.
The counter-move is simple: share more context. Not just your marketing plan and campaign objectives, but the broader picture:
This shifts the agency from order-taker to problem-solver, and allows them to connect individual briefs to broader business outcomes.
- Create clarity on roles and decision-making processes. Nothing kills momentum like ambiguity! Ambiguity is one of the most expensive, yet avoidable, issues in agency relationships. Unclear ownership, approval processes and decision criteria will always lead to duplicated effort, delays, and frustration.
Stronger relationships are explicit about: who owns strategy; who’s involved in approval processes; how feedback is consolidated; when wider business stakeholders need to come in; and who makes the final decision.
Clarity here reduces wasted effort, and also protects the relationship from avoidable friction.
- Treat your agencies as experts. If your agency is only executing tactically, you’re almost certainly not extracting its full value. You appoint agencies for their skill, their perspective, and their experience. Harness this, and create the right conditions to do so.
In practical terms, this mostly means giving them the time to add value. Compressed timelines on briefs will force safe choices. Sufficient time creates better thinking, and the opportunity to suggest different approaches and creative routes.
But it also means giving your agencies permission to question and challenge. At briefing stage, encourage questions and probing, particularly on the thinking that’s gone into a brief. Be open to being stretched or redirected, and create a safe environment for constructive disagreement. There is a maturity required here on both sides, and agencies must challenge with care and judgement. But clients must be open to being challenged at all.
- Ask for options, and make trade-offs explicit. For larger briefs, avoid single-track responses: ask for multiple routes with clear implications and trade-offs on cost, time, and expected impact. Also, encourage the agency to recommend a preferred option, along with their rationale. It doesn’t mean you have to go with their suggested route! But it does elevate the conversation, and force more rigorous thinking on both sides.
Trust is often cited as essential in agency relationships – what’s less often acknowledged is how easily it’s broken. Most issues fall into a small number of avoidable behaviours. So try to:
- Be open and honest about constraints and realities. Agencies are commercial operators, and make better decisions when they have full information. Be as transparent as possible: share budget ranges upfront, be honest about timing constraints, and explain internal pressures and competing priorities.
And be equally open about your wider ecosystem: if multiple agencies are involved, say so. If a brief is competitive, say so. If a project is exploratory or subject to change, say so.
Clarity allows agencies to respond appropriately. And I’ve learnt from experience that it’s much better for all parties to explain the thinking and rationale, rather than try to avoid awkward conversations at all.
- Manage urgency deliberately, not habitually. Urgency has become normalised, but often for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, rush jobs are unavoidable, and virtually all of the agencies I’ve worked with have been able to work miracles under very tight deadlines. And while most agencies will stretch to accommodate when needed, that shouldn’t be overused, or expected routinely.
Habitual urgency is usually a symptom of poor planning. And urgency almost always has an impact on cost, or quality, or both. Over time, it also erodes goodwill.
It’s not about removing pace, it’s about learning to apply it selectively. Strive to make urgency the exception, not the default.
- Pay on time. This one sounds like a ‘no s***!’ statement, but it’s not always well executed. Delayed payments, missing purchase orders, and inconsistent processes create friction that’s entirely avoidable. It also signals a lack of respect.
Operational discipline here matters, and is one of the clearest signals you send as a client. Take ownership of getting your agency paid on time.
High-performing partnerships have a rhythm, and one that is structured, predictable, and purposeful. Without it, work becomes reactive, sometimes bitty. With it, output improves and stress reduces. There are several components to getting this right:
- Brief, properly. Most marketers think they’re good at briefing, most agencies disagree! And poor briefing remains one of the biggest sources of wasted agency spend.
A strong brief is one of the most powerful tools available to a marketer. It forces clarity. It defines objectives, articulates the problem, and sets success criteria upfront. So, start with better briefing discipline. But also, brief the brief. Written briefs alone are usually not sufficient for any work requiring thought or creativity. Talk the agency through the brief, check for alignment and understanding, and invite questions before work begins. This upfront investment reduces rework and improves output quality.
- Establish purposeful meeting cadences. Good meetings accelerate progress, poor ones just consume time. Work with your account manager to establish what’s needed, but I usually lean towards:
And always keep meetings focussed. All meetings should have a defined purpose, a clear agenda, and the right attendees (no more, no less).
- Actively manage WIP. Excessive WIP (work in progress) is a signal – usually of poor prioritisation or premature briefing. Too many open projects dilutes focus, increases cognitive load and leads to slower, lower-quality output.
The discipline here is in sequencing. Try to reduce the number of simultaneous workstreams, align internal stakeholders before briefing and ensure approvals are ready when needed.
- Close the loop with structured feedback. Feedback is where learning happens – or doesn’t. Creative evaluation can be challenging, but structure helps:
And the feedback loop should extend beyond approval of the creative. Sharing performance data and insights after campaigns have gone live helps all parties to either learn and improve, or enjoy the fruits of your labour!
The client–agency relationship has always influenced the quality of work. But in the current environment – leaner headcounts, stagnant or shrinking budgets, heightened expectations – its importance has increased. There’s little room for inefficiency, and certainly no room for ineffectiveness.
The good news is that many of the levers that drive better outcomes sit within a client-side marketer’s control.
None of the behaviours outlined here are complex, or radical. They’re disciplined behaviours which, when applied consistently, add up to create the conditions for better work.
(Shameless plug: If you want to improve how your team briefs, manages, and extracts value from your agencies, this is exactly the work I do – feel free to get in touch.)
About the author
Ian Probert is a Marketing and Go-To-Market consultant who helps B2B organisations improve marketing & sales execution, fix revenue challenges, and drive growth. Learn more at www.probertmarketing.com
