3 Things Companies Hate About Working With Agencies
Over the last 9+ years building 33 Sticks, one thing has become very clear, most people have had more than one negative experience working with an agency. Typically, these bad experiences are caused by one or more of the following common consulting agency tactics:
⛔️ Nickle & Dime
"It seems like every time we ask for sometime, it's out of scope and requires a change request."
"I'm afraid to send my consultant an email asking a question as I know i'm going to get a bill for at least an hour. It happens every time I send an email."
"I noticed there were three of you on our last strategy call, I assume we are getting billed 3 hours for that call?"
One of the biggest complaints that we have heard over the years is that companies have struggled to build a true, meaningful partnership with their agency due to what feels like a “nickel & dime” approach to doing business. While we understand the need for clear boundaries for an engagement, building in the ability to be flexible is key. If every conversation, if every little slight detour off the path, is a trigger to bill the client more money, you are creating a disconnect between what is best for the agency and what is best for the client. This will ultimately lead the client to disconnect, no longer include the agency in important conversations, and ultimately the relationship will dissolve.
⛔️ Always Be Selling
"We just want to have a conversation without it having to end with being sold more services."
"You know, not every status call needs to end with a pitch."
"It seems like the only time our account manager cares about us is when they need to sell us more services."
We’ve seen this tactic deployed first hand. Agency X has a weekly status meeting with the client, it proceeds as expected covering what got done last week, what they are working on this week, and what their goal is for next week but then at the end, things go sideways. A little pitch here, a little hint there, “and things could be so much better if you simply bought more of our services.” When the client feels like the agency is always trying to sell, especially in the middle of a project, trust is quickly lost. And when trust goes, so goes the relationship.
⛔️ Bait & Switch
"Our last agency had their firm principal on all the sales calls, then when our projected kicked off, it was led by someone who just graduated college. Nice kid, had no idea what they were doing."
"Do you treat customers like they are home loans? You know you outsource the work to another agency or freelancers immediately after you sell the deal?"
This is a big one and a very common tactic, especially for medium sized agencies, that is deployed on unsuspecting clients. The tactic is to put the firm’s principal, their top consultant, in front of prospects. The prospect is rightly impressed, they sign the contract, and then the agency staffs the project with junior level talent or worse subcontracts the work out to a lower cost agency or moonlighter. Once again, the client feels tricked, they more often than not have a very bad experience, they feel like there is a major misalignment, trust is broken, and so in the relationship.
Is it any wonder that companies struggle to see value in partnering with an agency when this has been there experience?
Hopefully you now know a little bit more than you did when you started reading this article. Hopefully you are a bit more prepared to ask your future potential agency partner some tough questions around how they work, how they bill, and how they staff their engagements, so hopefully you can avoid these very common, negative agency experiences.
