Handling clients who disagree with your agency’s advice

Sometimes clients just won’t take their agency’s expert advice. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that — after all, we can only offer advice.

But how should you handle it when they ignore your recommended course of action? When should you push back — and how should you do it?

Chip and Gini explore this topic and talk about the importance of understanding the root cause of the client’s objection or desire to proceed differently. With that information in hand, it becomes much easier to figure out your own next steps.

Key takeaways

* Gini Dietrich: “When you hire a professional – and we all hire professionals in some form in our lives – do you hire them so that you can tell them what to do? Or do you hire them because they have an expertise that you don’t have? And you want them to provide real concrete professionalism that will help you do whatever it is – from building shelves, to cleaning your house, to going to the dentist. I don’t go to the dentist and say, You’re cleaning my teeth incorrectly.”* Chip Griffin: “Sometimes clients still make bad decisions. We all do. It’s like raising kids. We can tell the kids, you shouldn’t touch that hot stove. Guess what? Sometimes they touch the hot stove.”* Gini Dietrich: “Don’t be afraid to give advice. Because even if they’re ignoring you, that’s what they’ve hired us for. They’ve hired us because this is what we do every single day and we’re professionals and we’re experts.”* Chip Griffin: “We are not the decision maker. We are the agency. It’s like a lawyer. You hire a lawyer for their advice. You have the right to ignore that advice.”

Resources

7 reasons clients ignore advice from your agency (SAGA article)

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: Gini, I think I want to take this show in a whole different direction right after this.

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: So have you ever been in a meeting with a client where they say, I want to go and do this, and you’re thinking that’s not a good idea, I think we should do something totally different. 180 degrees opposite.

Gini Dietrich: I have in fact, just a couple of days ago. I have been there.

Chip Griffin: Well, how timely? I didn’t even know that when we, when we settled on this topic for today’s conversation, but it is something that agencies run into all the time where our advice is to do one thing.

The client wants to do another. And so the question is, what do you do? How do you handle it? And I think too often, the default for many agencies is they just go with what the client says. Yeah, for sure. Because in their minds, that’s how I keep the business. And that’s how I make sure that I’m not rocking the boat, right.

Because we’re all, we all want to keep all that revenue we’ve got. And we think that if we start disagreeing with clients too much, they’re going to tell us to go take a hike.

Gini Dietrich: Here’s the thing about this. When you hire a professional and we all hire professionals in ...