Why do agencies lose clients?

A recent post on Reddit questioned why clients leave their agencies, so Chip and Gini decided to tackle the topic on this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

Usually, agency-client relationships don’t end for one simple reason, but rather an accumulation of factors. Some of those can be traced back to the process of winning the business, while others may develop along the way.

Chip and Gini argue that agency leaders should focus their efforts on addressing the things that they can to improve retention, but accept the fact that sometimes an account will leave for reason’s out of the agency’s control.

Key takeaways

Chip Griffin: “Your job in order to improve the retention of your clients is to do everything you can on your side of the equation so that you can minimize the risks. Produce the best results that you can for the client, and then be aware of those things on their side that may trigger potential issues for you.”

Gini Dietrich: “A massive issue for ad and PR agencies is they bring in the leaders or the salespeople or the really polished people and sell the business and then they bait and switch it so that the junior level people come in and do the work. And it never works.”

Chip Griffin: “Clients are people too. And they’re just like you are as an agency leader, you don’t want to have a difficult conversation with an employee. You don’t want to have a difficult conversation with a client. Clients don’t want to have difficult conversations with you either.”

Gini Dietrich: “I have found that when the team is part of the whole process, sometimes they’re more invested than I am. And they’re excited about working with the client because they’ve been through the whole process and they got to present ideas and they got to talk to the client. And so they’re invested in the success from the beginning.”

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 Gini, I’m afraid that you are going to lose me as a client of this podcast. Does that work? Do we have clients?

Gini Dietrich: That actually works for me. Okay.

Chip Griffin: All right. Okay. Well right after this.

It’s possible. That’s one of the more tortured openings that I’ve had.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, I very much enjoy your segues most of the time, but yeah.

Chip Griffin: I couldn’t really think of a good way to lead into the topic. We are, of course, talking about losing clients and why agencies lose clients, but that didn’t really come across in the open nor was it really all that funny or amusing like that.

So we’re off to a grand old start today. But as we’ll talk about later, that’s one of the reasons you lose clients because you got out of the gate wrong. See, now I brought it right back, I’ve recovered. Gini, I’ve recovered.

Gini Dietrich: You did recover. Yes, you did. You did. Yeah. So on that note, the topic is why does a client decide not to work with your agency?