You Don't F*cking Work For Them

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We are an extension of your team…

I talk to a lot of agencies every week, and I've talked to quite literally thousands of agencies in my coaching career. The number of times that I've heard this phrase is astounding. And you might think that you are positioning yourself as completely integral to your clients' success.

But in no small way what you have just done is said, "We work for you."

There is so much subtlety here, but when you say to a CMO or VP of marketing, "We are an extension of your team," what they're really hearing is, "I can treat you like my team. Except worse! Because I can fire you without calling in human resources!"

It isn't that your average buyer hears that phrase and immediately thinks about how they can push you around or extort extra value from you. But here's the rub. When you say, "We are an extension of your team," that means you are not in a leadership position. You are a worker bee. And listen sports fans, you are too good to be a worker bee. You would not have started an agency if you were satisfied with being a worker bee.

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You aren't part of the team. You are a peer.

Again, we're dealing in subtleties here. Even though your client pays to fund your team, you don't work for them. They have hired you for your expertise, for your insight, for your capabilities, for your perspective, for your marketing skill set…

The client didn't hire your agency because you filled out all four corners of an open job requisition they had. They hired you. They chose you because you have skills, technique, judgment, discernment, and instinct that they don't have.

Now that we are clear that you aren't an outsourced employee, you have to start talking to your clients like they are peers.

In all the years that I've been doing this, I have really found that there are two sorts of agencies:

1. The overly accommodating, “OMFG, that is a great idea!” kind of agency. Typically, these are the agencies that live in fear of being fired. They live in fear of confrontation. They live in fear of difficult conversations. They live in fear of being held accountable. They live in fear of asserting their expertise, insight, and taste. This kind of agency is generally seen as an “order taker.” They don't push back. They are there to accommodate the whims of the client. They typically don't have a really strong sense of mission - other than keeping client churn low. This type of agency will almost always agree with the client's decisions, and rarely will they share their true opinions.

2. The highly opinionated, “This is what we think. Fight us” kind of agency. These tend to be agencies that have been around for a while and are confident in what they do, in what they know, how they do it, why they do it, and the impact that they have. They don't want to lose clients either but they aren't going to forego their expertise, their opinion, their discernment, their taste just to make you happy.

97% of you have just decided that you are the highly opinionated kind of agency. I'm going to guess that the highly opinionated, agency-type is closer to 10%. I run across very few agencies that own their expertise and own their conviction in the face of client pushback.

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Why are there are so few agencies that are sure in their convictions?

This is really hard, and it really does start from the very top. If you are living in constant fear that your client is going to fire you or if your team is feeling that way because you “lose it” when somebody churns, you can't really effectively serve them.

Revenue is hard to come by, especially these days. Customer churn is just a part of life. But if you are living in that state of fear, then you aren't really doing your job.

You are better at a particular skill set and have a team that is better at multiple skill sets than your client is. That's why they've hired you. They haven't hired you because you are accommodating or that they find you terribly agreeable. They have hired you because you and your team are experts.

You are experts that work with clients.

How do you establish a position where it is clear that you are working with your clients and not for them? How do you stake out a position where you are in full control of your expertise and are willing to push back when the client needs it?

It all starts with how you sell. It all starts with how willing you are to dig through the details of what your prospect wants, needs, and is willing to hear. When you are able to start your relationship with a deep understanding of what your client actually needs, then you have earned the right to push back. You have earned the position of having authority.

But this often falls apart after the sales handoff because your delivery team doesn't have that context or that authority. They're often just starting over. They're asking new clients the same questions that they went through during the sales process. They are explaining the same things over and over. Less sophisticated clients may not actually understand all of the work that goes into what you do. Therefore they might be expecting for you to know exactly what to do without any input from them. So you 100% have to stake out that position of authority in order to have an effective partnership.

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Wait, what? We have to continually assert our authority?, WTF?

Yeah, you have to continually assert your authority not in a "we are better than you" or "we know more than you" way, but more in the "this is why you hired us" sort of way. That means that as you go through your engagement life cycle, you're constantly in a position of doing discovery and sales. Now, that sounds crazy because you already closed the client, right?

It isn't crazy because once your initial foray of work has been accomplished, the circumstances are different than they were the day before they hired you. So their needs have changed. Their market opportunity might have shifted because of something happening externally. They might have an overage of inventory in a particular way or need leads from a new geography because of something different.

It's your job as the expert to continually be probing for those kinds of changes and be suggesting opportunities and adjustments and things that somebody who cares very deeply about the other party would do.

In the early 90's I went through a crushing breakup…

I was head over heels in love with this woman. She was my everything. We dated and ended up living together. Six months into later, she was a little more distant. Then she moved out while I was visiting family for Thanksgiving.

A few months after we broke up, we had coffee. I asked her why things didn't work…

She shared that I was so accommodating of her, and I was just so happy to be in her orbit that she couldn't understand who I was, or what I wanted to accomplish because I wanted to please her so much.

That was a giant kick in the teeth. But it taught me something incredibly valuable:

→ One sided relationships don’t serve anyone.

Are you in a one-sided relationship with your clients?

If you are not constantly probing and helping your clients understand more about their business, their opportunities, threats, and constraints, then you weren't really serving them. You are orbiting them.

After a while, they (like my ex-girlfriend) will forget what brought you together. They will forget your insight, your expertise, your willingness to discover. All they will feel is an amorphous presence who never shares a real opinion or does the hard work to challenge them to be better.

So remember, you don't f*cking work for them

You might be in love with their monthly fees, or you might be in love with the way they run their business, or you might be in love with their product. You might work really well with their team but you aren't part of it. You aren't an extension of their team. Your client is not your boss. Your client is a peer. Your client is an equal. Your client deserves to be challenged because just like my ex-girlfriend, they want to be better.

A quick teaser of what's coming up in the near future…

1. In the next week or so, you are going to start seeing some content that is all about how to get the best out of your CRM. I'm lucky enough to be doing this with a great partner Copper. We'll be working through a lot of their new features and I'm really excited about it. I think you will be too. Even if you never become a Copper user, these insights will help you think more carefully about your sales process, your account management process, and your project management process.

2. I've got some more agents coming out. This next one will be a cold email writing agent that researches your prospects' market, your prospects' company, your target contact at the prospect, and creates an email that's worth reading. That will be out in a couple of weeks. It will be a ton better than AI SDR kind of emails because, I hate getting bombraded with crap, so I do not want to facilitate anyone sending out crap.

3. This is issue number 99 of The Agency Inner Circle. I am going to do something big for issue 100. I don't know what it is yet, but stay tuned.

4. In December or January, I will be launching a new podcast series called "WTF Next," where we talk about agency leadership & growth, we talk with amazing client-side marketers, we talk with amazing technologists, and we're going to talk to some amazing cultural influencers - not influencers like people who are good at YouTube - but people who help us shape the narratives that make people engage. I'm really excited about it.