Sharing your agency’s internal work product with clients

Agency clients often ask for things like media lists, Photoshop files, raw research, and access to internal software tools.

How much of this material should you be willing to share? How should you decide where to draw the line?

In this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, Chip and Gini pick up a question from the Spin Sucks Community to dive into this topic.

They started out with some degree of disagreement, but as usual ended up more in agreement than they first thought.

Key takeaways

Chip Griffin: “You need to be in a position where the client understands that you’re creating value well beyond that mere media list that you have.”

Gini Dietrich: “There have been multiple times where we have said goodbye to a client, and I thought I’m never going to hear from them again. And that’s just not the case.”

Chip Griffin: “I frequently see where an agency senses that the client is headed out the door and they start throwing up roadblocks to make the transition more difficult. Don’t do that. If a client wants to leave, you should not be throwing up roadblocks. You should be trying to figure out how to end the relationship gracefully.”

Gini Dietrich: “In 99.9% of the cases you’ll share the work product and they’ll go, oh…We don’t have the internal resources. Or we didn’t know it would take this much time or we didn’t have as much knowledge about this. We need you to handle it.”

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: And today we’re going to try to disagree with each other all the way from start to finish. In this episode, we’re going to give it our best shot right after this.

So this is our second try recording this episode because the gremlins literally got into the microphones somehow. So we’re going to see how well we do here, but just one of those behind the scenes things I like to share with listeners. So they feel like they’re right here with us, even though we could have pretended that nothing had happened at all.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Apparently there are gremlins in my microphone, so hopefully we’re ok.

Chip Griffin: Or in Streamyard, which we use to record, or, you know, maybe it was just in my own head. You just will never know. But what we’re going to talk about today is a conversation that took place in the Spin Sucks community. And Gini and I had some disagreement about it and it’s a topic that’s I think, near and dear to the hearts of particularly PR agencies.

But it’s something that all agencies confront, which is how much of your work product you should be sharing with clients. And it started with a conversation about sharing media lists with PR agency clients and what you do when your client asks for it. But I think it can be a broader conversation because agencies of all kinds get asked to share things like research or access to Google ad words accounts, or Photoshop files, instead of just finished graphic images.

All these kinds of things are issues that agencies need to deal with and they need to figure out where to draw the line.