How You Can Tackle 3 Uncomfortable Questions Clients Ask Agency Partners

Is there any agency owner out there who doesn’t feel like every year is going to be our last? How many writers have to use world-ending, groan-inducing rhetoric before we hold hands across America and bury these turns of phrase?

Let me be clear: I by no means believe the existence of agencies in their current form is a sure thing. But I also don’t believe the existence of any company in its current form is a sure thing. Adapt or die. Agencies will do what any business does when the market evolves: we’ll shape-shift to find the right market fit for our services.

My beliefs aside, the narrative about the End of Agencies has firmly taken hold with some in the marketing space, and even with those who may be in the market for our services. Increasingly, the very value proposition of what we do is being called into question, and more clients than ever before are coming to the table with questions asking us to, more or less, to justify our existence and approach.

I welcome the dialogue. These questions are necessary. We’re about to enter a partnership to represent your brand, you’re about to make a significant investment in us, and want to make sure we’re the right fit. I don’t fault anyone for asking these questions, and it’s on us if we can’t answer them in a way that instills confidence.

Three questions, in various forms, crop up again and again in these conversations. I do my best to offer an answer to these that firmly establishes our agency footing, and it’s up to the client to find the answers satisfactory or not.

Why is this so expensive? The other firm is half your price.

The answer I always /want/ to give to this question is always captured by this tweet I published recently:

While the language is a bit harsher than I tend to put it, the answer I do give is captured by the essence of this oven mitt.

Never back down on the price of your services. There’s a difference between negotiating and value minimization. Negotiating is when a client has expressed a good faith interest in collaboration and is trying to find a financial relationship that will benefit all parties. Value minimization is when a client questions your price because they simply can’t believe you provide value equal to what you charge.

When someone questions our pricing in this way, I’ll tackle it in two ways. First, I’ll simply explain that the other firm has priced their work for the market, and we have done the same. Other people pay us this price, and if this client doesn’t want to do so, others will happily take their place on our roster. Our results justify the expenditure.

Alternatively, I’ll offer that our firms are different and may be offering different solutions. All reports, all content strategies, all posts are not created equal. What we put into making an Instagram post may be incredibly different from this other bidder, and we’ll be compensated for the additional work we bring to the table.

Other firms promise results, why don’t you?

This may be unique to Natives Group, but we do our best not to promise results (e.g. audience growth, engagement numbers, sales) when we sign a contract.

Could we make a projection, absolutely. But we don’t want those numbers to be the reason someone works with us. We want someone to work with us because they believe in The Way.

As I outlined in a previous post, we look for clients who want to join us on a journey to climb a mountain. We want clients who believe in our skills, our perspective, and our strategic thinking. These are the clients whose hands we don’t need to hold when Twitter engagement drops from one week to the next, or when they lose 100 Facebook fans in a day (only to gain 150 the next day). They understand this is a long-game, and that we are working with their brand’s best interests in mind.

Alternatively, clients who remain beholden to benchmarks set at a project outset are not with us to climb a mountain, but a shortcut to the top. We end up with our hands tied behind our back when, in the pursuit of an engaging content strategy intended to support growth, a client is breathing down our necks about slower audience growth. If we set those numbers early in a relationship, before we have some data to make estimates from, we’re always working within a constraint or expectation.

Additionally, we also remind these clients that our work is only one of several influencers on a customer’s future actions. For example, in our work in book publishing, we don’t control the point of sale (Amazon, Barnes and Noble). We can only do so much to induce the sale before the responsibility becomes a third-party retailer whose experience we do not control. How can we promise sales if Amazon has a stock shortage, or B&N makes it difficult for users to complete checkouts?

Can you just use these assets my son/niece/assistant/neighbor made instead of charging me for XYZ?

No. Do you want a doctor to perform your brain surgery or someone who watched a dozen episodes of ER? Oh, they are working on a marketing degree? Okay, again, who do you want performing your brain surgery: a board-certified physician or a medical student-in-training?

Go with expertise.

We’ll happily accept your inputs, but do not expect them to take the place of the creative we need to properly do our jobs.

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Collectively, these questions always sting because they get to the core of who we are, but I do my best to share information from a footing that is both understanding of the emotional experience a potential client is having as they debate a major marketing investment, and also protective of our agency and our people.

What clients do with the information is up to them.