Turning down the perfect client

Last week, I wrote about how hard attribution can be for a marketing agency, citing a client who took a cold call from us…then told us that they’d seen us on stage and spoken to us before.

This week’s post is about what happened when that same client got back in touch after we’d started our own agency.

What happened in between?

Both Rise at Seven founders had worked at Branded3, which merged with 3 sister agencies to become Edit.

When we launched the agency, we quickly picked up a few clients who we’d worked for in Branded3’s distant past; like Your Golf Travel, with whom we’d parted ways almost 5 years earlier; and contacts who we’d pitched for once upon a time and it had never quite worked out (shout out in particular to David Williams, by this point at Matalan, but previously at Missguided, who put so much effort into bringing us on board in our first two weeks of trading that I had to send his procurement department screenshots of our bank account to prove that we were a real company).

Within a few months we’d won Missguided - David had moved on, but Sam Pennington, previously at Matalan, of all places, put his neck out for us and negotiated the whole deal in DMs on the MancSEO’s Slack - by a) being brilliant, which is a story for another day and b) significantly undercutting the network agency they were talking to.

When the client from last week’s post called us, Rise at Seven had 6 retained clients, ranging from a couple of businesses paying us £2,500 per month, to a spread betting affiliate, paying us £13,500.

We were working with them up until we left Edit. Now they’d served notice to our old agency: we’d done a brilliant job for them over the previous 4 years and performance - and the relationship - had suffered since the old team had moved on.

We had the team they wanted; we understood the brand (and the company behind it); our guy lived in the same building as their guy; we had done a stellar job for them over several years. On paper, it was perfect.

The call

I hadn’t met the client’s new Head of Digital (but the team who were working on the account had). He was keen to get the same from us as he did from our previous agency and he reiterated that the budget would stay the same, making them our largest account.

But he wanted to get more for his money, proposing a deal that he’d negotiated with his previous suppliers at another company:

The day rate he would pay for each of our staff was equivalent to £100 per year of experience they had.

We understood the sentiment: brands often feel like they meet experienced people in a pitch, then they’re assigned junior staff once a deal is inked.

The person leading his account was Will Hobson - who was, in the client’s view, worth changing agencies for - had 5 years of experience at that point, so was “worth” £500 per day.

We could add £15,000 per month of retained revenue to our six month old agency’s books - more than any single client we had…

…but we’d have to discount our rates by almost 50% - without discounting a penny for anyone else.

In the end, this was the line we took:

“We can find another [client] faster than [client] can find another Will Hobson”.

We politely declined…but we were absolutely clear why we were doing so.

About a year later, Will got back in touch with the client. Within a few weeks, they’d signed up to a two year contract at a higher total value…paying our full rates.

What did we learn?

• The Head of Digital was driving the deal…but the other people we’d worked with (including a brilliant CMO - and a Digital Marketing Manager we loved) ended up owning the problem once he’d moved on. We have to do a great job for everyone in the client’s organisation, not just the “decision maker”
• Procurement departments are filled with professional negotiators - marketing departments are not. Charging your marketing department to get the best deal, rather than the best marketing, will not result in the best outcome for the brand. I’d even speculate that a procurement department might have backed down…
• We tagged this one as “outbound”, because the team proactively re-engaged the client (proving again how messy this actually is)
• If you’re staring down the barrel of a brief that you know you can fulfil better than anyone else, hold out for what you’re worth - even if it means walking away from a contract you’re perfect for. One of the first things I do when consulting with an agency is to help them understand who they are made for. One of the things I do as a sales coach is to give the agency the confidence to know that they're the prize to be won by the right client - not the other way around.