Half of What Looks Like a Strategy Problem Is Client Services

Client services is the most underrated function at an agency. It’s relational as much as it is commercial. It’s strategic as much as it is tactical. It’s emotional as much as it is logistical.

And when an account is struggling, my read is that about half of it is the work. The other half is whether anybody is stewarding it, interpreting it, and pushing back internally when it needs to change.

A lot of what looks like a strategy problem is the client’s experience of the strategy

I’ve seen this on almost every account I’ve walked into. The work isn’t terrible. My read might be that the program isn’t running well, but that’s my perspective, and it’s maybe half the story.

The other half is the perception of the strategy and the perception of the value.

On the ground it shows up as signals that feel adjacent to dissatisfaction. Nobody complains. There is less confidence on the call than there was in March, replies get slower, the same question gets asked twice. Some of that is the program. A lot of it is how the program is being delivered and interpreted for them by their account manager.

Nobody gets the program right from the start, and that’s the whole reason the job exists

It is very rare that we jump into a client’s strategy and marketing program and get it a hundred percent right from the get go. We should give ourselves grace there.

So what do you do in the absence of that. You need somebody on the front lines who stays skeptical about our own decisions and keeps evaluating the work against the client’s business results.

It’s almost like being the PR person for the program. Not spinning anything factually wrong, but interpreting what is happening and why, in language the client would repeat to their own C-suite.

And it runs in both directions. The same person advocates internally for the changes the work needs, asks the hard questions, and pushes the team toward the place we all said we were going. That second direction is the one that gets designed out of the role, because it is uncomfortable and it slows things down.

It is not a strategist, and it is not your account manager with a better title

Two things get confused with this and they lead agencies to hire the wrong person.

The first is the strategist. This is the fork I watch owners get stuck on. The work isn’t landing, so they decide the gap is strategy and go looking for someone to think harder.

Sometimes that’s right. Often what’s missing is the experience of the strategy, meaning somebody who takes a sound program and keeps it legible and connected to the business outcome the client cares about, every month, on every call.

Those are two different hires. A strategist who can’t communicate produces work that is right and that nobody believes. A client services lead who can’t think produces a happy client on a program going nowhere. Agencies tend to feel the second failure and go hire for the first.

The second is the account manager you already have. Coordinating an account is real work and it is not this. The difference is the seat. Sitting at the leadership table is what lets somebody say the program needs to change and have it land, or tell a client something they don’t want to hear with the agency behind them. Coordination comes with neither of those.

Which is also why lifting an existing account manager into it is harder than it sounds. You are not asking them for more effort. You are asking them to do a different job, and they deserve to hear that plainly, with the new expectations written down somewhere they can read.

I used to think there was one right shape for this job

I’ve been developing this thesis for about eighteen months, and for most of that time I believed there was a correct version of this role that agencies were failing to build.

This year I gave that up. There is no one right way.

How much of it is a relationship role. How much of it is a sales role. How much is ops, capacity and resource management. How much is strategy. That mix depends on your client base, your service offering, and the team you already have around it. Two agencies the same size can land in different places and both be right.

Which means you can’t copy somebody else’s job description. You have to read your own agency and decide what this person needs to be for it.

You are the filter for the client experience

The question I get asked is how an owner would know they have this problem before a client tells them.

I don’t have a clean operational answer. There are ways to measure signals and surface them up to you, and all of them are slower than the thing you already have. You are a filter for the client experience.

If you are constantly catching things on the way out, rewriting work, or repeating the same coaching without it landing, that is the problem. That’s how you see it before a client says a word.

And if you are so hands off that you don’t know what’s going out or how it’s being presented, that’s an answer too. You’re too far away to evaluate it. You have to be close enough to the work to see it and taste it for yourself, through a client’s eyes.

Both fixes cost something

You have two honest options.

You can muscle through with the person you have. That means real conversations about expectations and growth, documentation showing them what different actually looks like, and a budget for development outside the agency. It takes time from your leadership team, and you have to bring the person in at the ground floor so it becomes their idea. Showing up one morning and telling somebody you need them to be different, with nothing to point at, does not work.

Or you admit the skill set isn’t on the team and you go get it. That is the harder admission and the more expensive one. Ray at Intuitive Websites is doing that now, and the part worth copying is not the hire. It’s that he made room for the seat in payroll and built it with a place at the leadership table, so whoever fills it can define the function instead of inheriting a stack of accounts.

I’ll be straight about the risk there. Hiring is hard. It’s slow, it’s labor intensive, and it’s expensive, and I do not have a hundred percent success track record in this arena. I’ve hired into this exact seat before and had it not work out. I’m confident about what the role needs to be. I’m less confident that any process gets you all the way there.

The work might be fine. If nobody is stewarding it and telling the story of it, nobody believes it. That’s what client services is.