When you ask seasoned agency executives why they lose clients, you hear a multitude of reasons. The agency's client changed and the new client came in and cleaned house; the agency paid poor attention to budgets and timelines, or their strategic ideas, creative, and execution fell below client standards; the client feels they have "outgrown" the agency and they need a new agency with fresh ideas. Alternately, the client left because of the agency's arrogance and intransigence. And so on...
Though all these are potential reasons, the overarching foundational reason agencies lose clients is that they do not adequately satisfy the clients' basic human needs. Their basic human needs for food, safety and love -- yes, you read it right -- and their basic needs for esteem and self-fulfillment.
Understanding that all clients' needs at their core are basic human needs and passionately fulfilling those needs is the key to keeping most clients an agency would have lost. You must repurpose your agency's strategy, people, operation and processes to meet those basic needs to enjoy increased client retention.
In our client-agency relationship and process improvement work with interactive, direct marketing, branding, promotions, advertising and PR companies we have identified what clients need from agencies [see list in figure below]. If you compare those needs to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you find that "excellent ideas and delivery," "value for money," and "meet my goals," map to the clients physiological need for food. The "responsiveness" and "develop fast solutions" requirements map to the client's safety needs. Continuing, the "good to work with" and "understand my business" requirements map to the client's desire to fulfill their need to belong.
You may not agree with the specifics in this example, and may want to build a Clients Need Map that best reflects your clients' specific requirements. The key insight is that your clients, at a deep psychological level, want to satisfy their basic human needs.
We have found in our client-agency relationship and process improvement work that agencies with a laser-beam focus on delivering those needs well tend to keep their clients a lot longer than those that do not. The secret reason your agency is losing clients unnecessarily is that there is not enough leadership focus and emphasis on this concept and its execution, and that your agency's strategy, personal, operation, and processes are not yet geared towards achieving this goal. Let's take a look at how to remedy the problem.
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