How to Get the Most Out of Your Agency

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. In terms of today’s episode, I wanted to give a little bit of background as to the why of the episode.

I was meeting with a client last week around some questions of how to best structure their marketing resourcing between agency and in-house. The question turned to how to get the most out of their agency partners. Rocket is one of those partners and, like a lot of our clients, they have a village of three different agencies doing different things.

We were talking around how this is, in some ways, an evergreen theme for marketers. Most of you listening have one, two or three different agency partners that you are using. I feel that, as we get towards the middle of 2026, there are three things that have come together to create this environment where I do believe there is more pressure than ever before on marketers to get the best out of their agency.

I think one of them is fairly obvious, which is simply the macroeconomic environment that we are operating within. Ever since COVID, it has been a strange time for most businesses and most marketers. If we look more recently through last year, the threat of global tariffs, and now this year with the war in the Middle East and all of the uncertainty, we are dealing with inflation and cost of living pressures and the fuel crisis. There is clearly more pressure on marketing budgets than there would have been 10 years ago. I think that is fair to say.

In addition to that, we have had the spectre of AI and what that leads to in terms of uncertainty for two, three, four years now. I think that itself has been a journey where pressure has been put on marketers to just do AI. There have been efforts to do it. Sometimes it has not worked particularly well. But now we are starting to see a whole range of use cases where AI is being used to do things really quickly and at a really good level. There is still a lot of thinking around it being a tool for experts, but we are starting to see AI technology and tools being used to drive efficiency and better outcomes, whether that is in-house or in agency environments.

Then I think the third thing that has come together is just the complexity around marketing and digital marketing. This push to measurement, attribution, this proliferation of different channels, people now using AI to search for things, people wanting smarter search, turning to Google, with Google still continuing to grow, the digital media landscape changing, advertising changing, creative agencies being used for different things. I think it is this melting pot of factors that has come together, putting a lot of pressure on marketers to justify performance and to justify budget.

We are seeing, through big procurement processes, finance being more involved in marketing budgets. We are seeing non-marketing leaders get involved in pitches more than ever before. So I think it is more true than ever before that there is pressure on marketers to get the most out of their agencies.

I was going to record an episode on the topic of how to get the most out of your agency, and I was listening to an older episode we did on this topic with Jordan Slover, who runs Neon Ambition out of New York in the United States. He has been running that agency for many years now, and it is a really successful growth story.

Rather than re-recording on the topic, I felt it was best to simply rerun this episode. I went through the transcript of the original episode and listened to it, and everything that Jordan and I spoke about then I believe is more true now than when we recorded it a few years ago.

So I hope you enjoy the episode on how to get the most out of your agency. Whether it is getting the most out of a digital agency like Rocket, or a creative agency, or a dev agency, or above-the-line media, I believe that the themes we talk about are all themes that can help marketers get the best out of their agency partners, but do it in a way that works for both parties.

Enjoy the pod.

Jordan started his career in digital at Google, working for a number of years across both New York and London. He had varying roles with Google, including being Strategic Partner Development Manager in the UK. He was the Online Sales Marketing Manager at Web Showroom for three years, which is where we worked together in Sydney.

Jordan founded Neon Ambition eight years ago, which is one of Texas’s most experienced paid search, SEO, CRO and content marketing agencies, now with offices in New York. Neon Ambition made it into the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in America, which Jordan, I am so proud of you for.

We thought it would be very useful for the listeners for us to have a discussion about how to maximise the agency-client relationship. When I pitched this to Jordan, I wanted it to be, “How do you bleed your agency dry?” and Jordan said, “I am not going onto a podcast that has that topic.”

But I think that is the first point. We do not want that to be taken as how you make your agency an order taker or how you get your agency to work 60-hour weeks for you. I guess let’s talk about that to start with, Jordan.

Jordan Slover: Yeah. I just did not want it to be, “How to push the scope,” and, “How to push the boundaries of the agreed-upon client relationship.” I want it to be more of how to have the best relationship with your agency and what that looks like.

James Lawrence: Yeah, and I think I feel pretty firmly that, from a Rocket viewpoint, the best relationships we have are the ones where there are two equals coming together to drive a particular outcome. I think that the relationships that generally break down are the ones where, historically, there is a perception that I am paying you the money, therefore you will do whatever I want, as opposed to two professionals coming together saying, “This is what we want, and we will agree on some stuff, and we will disagree, and we will challenge each other.” Is that a fair comment as well from your perspective?

Jordan Slover: Yeah, I think so. There are no guarantees in marketing, generally speaking. You are a smart in-house marketer and you are doing your due diligence to hire a smart agency. You both are human beings working towards, hopefully, a common agreed-upon goal.

I think it is good to always keep that in mind, whether you are on the agency side or in-house, that we are all humans trying our best out here. I think there are some things that we will talk about in this podcast about how to make sure that relationship is as good as possible, but always keeping that in the back of your mind. You just never know what people are going through as well.

Not to be too much of a hippie or something, but try to be kind to people in your everyday life, and that should apply to your agency relationship as well.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I think that is right. I often run it through the lens of you should treat the agency how you would be treating your staff internally, because the cliché is that the best agency-client relationship is an extension of your team. So you probably want to have similar rules for how you treat your agency partners as to how you treat your staff, right?

Jordan Slover: Yeah, absolutely. Unless you have got a terrible working culture, in which case, follow some of the steps in the pod today.

So let’s get started. I think we both come into this with some ideas and preparation. There is some overlap. There are probably some differences.

James Lawrence: Why don’t you go first. What is your first point on how to build a thriving relationship, how to get the performance you want while also being reasonable?

Jordan Slover: Yeah. I do not know if this is an order of importance or not, but the first thing that came to my mind when we were coming up with ideas for this is be ready to provide constructive feedback, and how important that is.

At our agency, where this applies the most tends to be on copywriting, but also on creative assets. Obviously, I think very highly of my team, both designers and copywriters. It is what they do for a living. They are all very experienced and good at what they do. But design is very subjective. What I think is beautiful and what you think is beautiful can be two totally different things. And the same with copy.

There are a lot of nuances to writing good copy. It should be educational and informative, but what is the tone that your company likes to use in its copy? How do you talk about your company, or how do you talk about your customers? There are just a lot of nuances that we could probably have a whole other podcast on in terms of how to get copywriting right.

I have had clients that get disappointed with the very first blog that we send them, thinking it is supposed to be perfect. These are clients who do pretty complicated things sometimes, whether it is SaaS. Hopefully my US clients are not going to listen to this podcast.

We have one client that does homomorphic encryption. It is pretty complicated stuff. So the importance of feedback and understanding that this copywriter is obviously trying to wrap their head around a pretty complex topic, while also getting to know your tone of voice and how you like to speak to people, means it is not going to be perfect the first time.

You just have to be ready to approach giving feedback with a kind voice. Coming back and saying, “This is crap,” does not help us.

James Lawrence: Yeah. I had feedback as my number two. For me, it is even broader than just the deliverable level. I feel that if you are managing a staff member in your business, one of the number one things is feedback, right? As a manager, is there something you need to get good at? And I see that going both ways.

I feel sometimes clients think withholding positive feedback, like if you give too much positive feedback, the agency will take their foot off the accelerator. And it is just not what happens. If you feel something is good or you think a particular member on the agency side is doing a great job, send that feedback across, because I guarantee you it will only make the team want to work harder for you.

Jordan Slover: Yeah.

James Lawrence: Totally. We get unsolicited feedback from a client and it gets sent around the whole agency, and everyone feels lifted and motivated.

And I think constructive feedback is the same. Sometimes I find it is almost the other way, which is a lot of marketers, because we are generally dealing with pretty nice people, they are sensitive, they are kind most of the time, often do not give the feedback. I almost feel that they shy away from it, thinking, “If I do not give the feedback about the complex blog content, or about performance not being where I need it to be, or about this monthly report always coming on the seventh day of the month when I need it by the fifth,” then resentment builds.

Then suddenly, you do not hear about it and there is a cancellation in six months’ time. For me, you have got to give constructive feedback. “Hey, this is not working. What are some things we can do about it?” As well as, “You guys are actually doing a great job in all these areas.” For me, it is very similar to managing a team member. And in doing that, you will shape the way the agency behaves towards you and towards your account, because not all clients are the same, right?

Some clients do not care about monthly reporting but care a lot about performance. Others care about both. Others care only about performance and monthly reporting can come within the first three weeks of the end of the month. It is pretty fundamental. Would you agree on that as well?

Jordan Slover: Yeah. There is a lot there. I think, take your average agency account manager, maybe they have six, seven, eight or 10 accounts they work on. They are going to prioritise clients probably by client spend, if their agency owners ask them to do that, which is quite common. But if you have got two clients that are spending about the same amount and one is super nice and gives really helpful feedback, and the other is always a jerk, you know who they are going to spend a little bit more time on or who they are going to answer first.

James Lawrence: It is just the reality, because I think reputable agencies will always fulfil their contractual obligations, right? If you are meant to get these outputs, you will get them. But then there is a lot of variance in terms of the depth of that, or the speed with which it gets turned around, or that little extra round of changes that technically probably should not be there, but you are happy to knock it over to make the client super happy. They are the types of things we are talking about, right?

Jordan Slover: Yeah. We go above and beyond for clients we love, at the expense of profitability, all the time.

James Lawrence: You sure you want to put that on the pod?

Jordan Slover: Maybe not all the time. But it happens, right? “Hey, this is over scope, what do you think?” “Let’s just do it. They are the best.” If the client is a jerk, it is going to be a change order every time.

James Lawrence: One hundred percent. So that is feedback. I had that on there as well.

The first point that I had was to agree on success and only worry about that, which to me is KPIs, that North Star metric. I feel that sometimes the relationships that break down, or the ones that do not feel harmonious or are not getting our best work, are the ones where we are not on the same page.

And that does not always mean a strict performance number. Often it does, because we are both in digital marketing, but I think we need to know what the outcome is that we are looking for here. If we know that it is ROAS in Google Ads, or traffic or conversions in organic search, or maybe something softer in terms of content, but knowing where we are going, we just stick to it.

I think often, if it is vague, like we are doing these four channels and we are looking at 20 different metrics every month, that is when we start getting caught up in, “I do not like the look of that landing page,” or, “That copy is not quite right,” when if we all agree on certain metrics, I think it can often take a lot of the friction away from the relationship and make it a bit more objective. That would be my number one, which is if we know exactly what we are looking for, often it helps both sides get there.

Jordan Slover: Yeah. At Neon Ambition, before we start with a new client, I have an internal kickoff meeting with my team where I bring them up to speed on everything I have learned in the sales process. Here is everything I know about them. Here is everything I know that they want to accomplish. Here is what we are doing. I bring everyone up to speed as much as possible, so when we have the actual client kickoff call, they are not walking in cold, so to speak.

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Jordan Slover: I wonder how many of our clients have an internal kickoff meeting before they start with us to align on, “Why did we hire this agency?” Because maybe it was one person leading the agency selection process, but then all of a sudden there are three people on the call from the client side at the kickoff.

Actually, I might start asking people that, because the reason why I am saying that is it feels like they are not meeting and getting aligned internally in terms of why they hired us and what the goals are. You can also have three people from the client side on the kickoff call and they might all have totally different goals.

James Lawrence: I think it is really common.

Jordan Slover: Yeah. So really coming to the table with clear ideas of what success looks like, and communicating those, and documenting those.

James Lawrence: And it helps so much. It is so different to guarantees and, “This has to happen.” They are KPIs. They are goals. They are targets. Let’s at least have something to shoot for, and then we will work as hard as we can. If we get there, then let’s reset them.

And I have no problem with clients coming in and saying, “Something has changed in our business. We have to change what the focus is.” Happy days. These things happen. But to not know exactly what success looks like, it is hard to get there.

Jordan Slover: Yeah.

James Lawrence: Cool. Those are our first two. I am going to get you to go next. How do you maximise the client-agency relationship?

Jordan Slover: Pay your bills on time. I am just kidding. That helps though.

James Lawrence: I will tell you.

Jordan Slover: I do not disagree.

Let’s see. I might regret saying this, but I think being the squeaky wheel. Obviously, you have got to be a nice squeaky wheel. But I know for a fact that some of our clients that are squeakier wheels than others end up getting more attention from the account managers.

Again, I think being a nice squeaky wheel is the key there. But I guess maybe it is almost the opposite of your question. How to not get the most out of your agency is to not be the squeaky wheel, or to not communicate that well with your agency.

Of course, I have one or two clients in mind who just really do not meet with us very often. On the one hand, from a profitability standpoint, it is like, wow, I am not spending too much time on meetings here. They are an easy client. But also, if they were talking to us more often, we would be getting better feedback from them on how things are going and probably be getting better results.

So regular communication is super important. That is one thing. And then talking about communication preferences is an easy, maybe obvious thing, I do not know. But I hate email, personally. I wish everything was conducted over phone calls or Zooms and we never had to email each other ever again. But that is me.

So if you are a client that wants to be communicated with over email or Slack, or you would rather get phone calls, or you would prefer texts, just letting your agency know that, and hopefully your agency is willing to meet you there, is another way to improve things, I think.

James Lawrence: Yeah. That is good. I did not have that, the squeaky wheel point, and it is such a balance, isn’t it? We both would have a small number of clients we just do not hear from, and we try and there is no interest. And I go, what are you paying us for? Obviously we have got production teams doing work, but there are no catchups, there is no feedback, there is nothing.

Which is so different to every single day on the phone, sending emails, “This is not good enough. Why hasn’t this been changed? I want to know why this bid in New Zealand was bumped up by 10 percent.” You get to a point where it is so absurd that your expectation needs to come back and go, “Do not worry about what we did with Google Ads in New Zealand. Worry about where we are trying to go as a campaign and via that KPI that we have agreed.”

But it is a fine balance. And I think the best marketers that we work with do push us, right? But push us in a nice way and accept that mistakes happen and accept that people have sick days and whatever else. But they are giving feedback and they are getting their pound of flesh, and they are asking why this has not been done, and they are asking if they can get a little bit more.

Jordan Slover: Or why was this done?

James Lawrence: Yeah. That is right.

Jordan Slover: Yeah. Really smart marketers that we work with do push us. But it is good. It keeps us on our toes.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that is it. We recently had a new contact take over at one of our biggest clients, and she came in pushing really hard, asking lots of questions, and we were like, “Oh, here we go. Is this going to cascade over?” But it did not. It was just someone coming in who knew the space and pushed really hard.

Then I think she, it was almost like a bit of a boxing contest, spoke to the team members that had been doing all the work, and then she took a breath and said, “Okay, I get it. I understand why you have been doing this now.” Then the respect is built and the relationship is at a higher level than it would otherwise be.

It is almost an art, isn’t it? How hard to push before you become the squeaky wheel that no one wants to attend to.

Jordan Slover: Yeah.

James Lawrence: That is an interesting one. I think the micromanaging point parlays into a point that I had, which was it is over if you start dictating strategy and decision-making. It is all built on trust, so they are veering into the same area.

I find that some clients do this from the very beginning. Others do it when the relationship has broken down, or it will happen when a new contact comes in. But for me, once you start dictating to the agency everything that needs to be done, you may as well stop paying your bills, because it never works.

We were talking about it before we started recording. Maybe recount that story, but I think you have got to have trust and you have got to know what you are paying the agency for. What is the expertise or work that you are paying an agency for? It does not mean you have to blindly trust them, but you need to cede certain decision-making and certain things to the agency, or there is no point paying them, right?

Jordan Slover: Yeah. It was an account that spends a lot on paid media and had a very knowledgeable client, which we love, but I think they came in a bit untrusting of agencies. They had done things in-house and, admittedly, were not excited about hiring an agency, but had someone leave and were in a pinch and needed an agency.

We came in and they were dictating how they wanted things done. It was like, okay, we can do that, but you are really not getting the most out of us. We have got ideas. They just really wanted us to be monkeys, pulling the levers they told us to pull. So we did, for a time.

Then one day I got a call from the CEO who said, “Jordan, what are we paying you for? You are not bringing any new ideas to the table.” I was literally shocked to hear it and had to remind him that we were doing exactly what they asked us to do.

Of course, we have ideas and we do bring them to the table, but your team does not really want to hear them all the time. So we started bringing new ideas to the table and things got even better. Now it is a great relationship.

You should trust the agency that you are working with until they prove that their ideas are not good, obviously. But one of the things that agencies have an advantage over in-house marketers a lot of the time is that we get to try things on a lot of different accounts and across a lot of different industries. So we often have tested something 10 times, whereas maybe someone in-house has tested it once.

Hopefully the ideas people are bringing to you are vetted through experience and you should be willing to give it a try, even if it is a test budget. We are real big on that. That is a beautiful thing about online marketing. It is not about whether I am right or you are right. It is about what the data says.

So if I come with an idea that I am pretty excited about and I think will work for you, do not say no. Say, “Okay, what is the minimum amount of budget you need to test that?” And let it get tested, at least. If you are not willing to test, then what are you paying an agency for?

James Lawrence: Yeah, that is it. Trust is massive.

The next one I had is transparency. I often find one of the benefits of in-house over agency is the knowledge. The knowledge of how the business is tracking, how sales are tracking, what the product is doing, the product roadmap, whatever else. And I often find that the relationships that break down are the ones where the client is not being transparent with us as much as they should.

That can relate to a whole bunch of different things. For me, it is just give us updates about what is happening in your business. Is revenue up? Is revenue down? Give us updates about product launches. Give us updates about what you are actually thinking in terms of marketing.

You might be thinking, “We are doing paid search with you guys, but next year we are thinking of down-weighting it,” or, “We are thinking of bringing it in-house.” Often I think the clients that feel they should keep things close to their chest do it for no reason, and it actually runs to their detriment.

So for me, transparency around a whole bunch of different things is vital. Even just sharing information with your agency that you might not necessarily think is that relevant. It could be an updated sales deck. It could be your annual report. But the more you share with your agency, typically I find it is to the betterment of the relationship and to the betterment of the results you get. I am keen to hear whether you agree with that or disagree.

Jordan Slover: Yeah, I do agree with it on a couple of different levels. Sometimes, it does not happen often, but sometimes you do have clients where you feel like they do not want to tell you how good things are going because they are afraid you are going to take your foot off the gas or stop working or something.

At least I can speak for our agency. That does not happen. Again, what we do, it is why we do this for a living. We like seeing client wins. It gets us excited, whether it is the SEO team getting motivated by keywords ranking number one, or the PPC team getting more leads with a lower cost per lead, or whatever.

That is the kind of thing they get geeked out about and get excited about. Usually, sharing that things are going well is going to have the opposite effect of what people maybe think. They are going to feel good about the work and it is going to push them to keep it going.

We have had clients where we have hit their goals four months into the year and we do not take our foot off the gas for the rest of the year, because then at the end of the year they would be like, “Those guys stopped trying after four months.” Of course not.

So yeah, definitely share. It is, again, that feedback, right? Feedback on quality of leads. We might see that we are getting you 100 leads a month, but we need you to tell us how good they are and how many are closing, or how bad they are. So that is really important.

James Lawrence: What was your next point?

Jordan Slover: Tell the boss when they are doing a good job. It is just communication. It really is coming back to communication. Unfortunately, sometimes I do not hear from clients until something is going wrong. You get an email from a client, “Hey Jordan, can we talk?” and it is like, oh boy, what is this about?

James Lawrence: It is never a thank you for all your hard work.

Jordan Slover: Usually not, James. It usually does not happen like that. So I do not know, that is pretty self-serving to agency CEOs out there. But if your agency is doing a good job, again, it touches on your transparency point, do not hesitate to tell them they are doing a good job. It is only going to motivate them more.

James Lawrence: And conversely, give feedback if it is not. But do it in the right way. “Hey, I have just got some reservations about my account manager,” or, “About performance in paid search,” or, “There have been lots of balls dropped recently. Not just one or two. Is everything okay over there?” Not fire and brimstone. Just come in maturely and ask questions, give feedback.

Jordan Slover: I have also had clients cancel who never gave me any negative feedback. Then I get an email saying, “Hey, we are going to end our contract at the end of the month,” or whatever. It is like, whoa, where did this come from? They never once gave us feedback that they were not happy. So that was not a good way to make things better.

James Lawrence: It just means by definition that the past months they have been paying you, they have not been getting out of you as much as they should, because you are sitting there thinking blindly that you are doing a reasonable job.

The next one I had was to get involved. If you think an agency is going to do all of the work, you are wrong. For me, that is a few things. Anyone who comes to us and says, “I am going to pay you X for SEO,” or, “X for content marketing,” or, “X for paid social,” and then, “I am just going to wake up in three months’ time and have all these amazing results,” it is just fantasy land.

To get the results, it is a partnership. That means responding to approvals on time. It means making yourself available for monthly reporting and weekly WIPs. It means giving feedback if you actually think something is not going to resonate with your market. It means probably digging in through your business and going into your sales team, getting feedback, or getting information from your product teams that are going to help the marketing agency put collateral together.

So I think if you come into a relationship or an engagement with an agency thinking, “I am paying X per month and therefore that is just going to solve my problem,” it is very rarely as simple as that.

Jordan Slover: Expectations need to be aligned early on. I would not want to say it is impossible to just have your agency do everything. That certainly could happen, but you really would want to make your expectations clear if that is what you are expecting.

James Lawrence: Jordan is in sales mode here. He has got a prospect who is time poor, who does not have any in-house marketers.

Jordan Slover: I know that some of our clients maybe have one marketing person. A decent number of our clients have one marketing person. They are hiring us as their outsourced team and we will pick up a lot of the things that they cannot do.

So yeah, I am not disagreeing with you. Almost always, there needs to be involvement. I guess I am saying if you do have that expectation that your agency is going to do everything, you certainly would want to make that clear. It is probably going to make it very challenging for you, or you are going to have to be okay with someone saying something slightly different than the way you would have said it.

James Lawrence: That is right, because I understand why, if you are a business owner and you have got no marketers or one, it is easy to say, “I am just going to pay this shiny agency with all the awards and all the case studies this bucket of money and they are just going to fix the problem.”

But I find that unless you are willing to come to the table to some level, obviously whatever the agency is doing, they have got to go off and do it, but just this kind of head in the sand, “I will just check back in in a month’s time and it is all going to be fine,” because the blog article is not going to be perfect in terms of the subject matter that you speak of and access to the website will not quite have been as easy as you thought it might be. I think it generally has to be a two-way street.

Jordan Slover: Yeah. Sometimes a good agency will probably challenge you in terms of how you operate your business, even to a certain degree. In terms of messaging work and trying to differentiate a client from its competition, we are always trying to think about what makes you exceptional. Not just better than your competition, but why does someone have to choose you?

Sometimes you hear really generic answers like, “We have the best customer service.” It is like, how? Prove it. Do you respond to all inquiries that you get on your website within 24 hours? Great. So does everyone.

Can you change that to say you will get back to everyone who enquires on your website within five minutes? That would be exceptional customer service that maybe not a lot of people could say. But in order to put that out there on your website or in your marketing, you might have to change some internal processes to make sure that someone is available all the time to respond within five minutes.

So I think that is another way you have to be willing to come to the table open-minded, because your agency might have ideas that require you to actually change the way you are doing things.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Good comment.

I just had some little miscellaneous points. They are not long ones. I do not think they are even worth discussing in depth, but I think just as bonus points.

The first one, mistakes happen. I think you tolerate and expect staff members to make mistakes and learn and whatever else, so do not naively think that agencies do not make mistakes. They do.

I have reset if you are about to leave. I feel that unless your agency is really terrible, it is probably going to be much more beneficial. You do not have to go out to market. You do not have to share all this information again. Just ask for a reset. “Hey, these things are not working. I am thinking of leaving. Can we fix this?” I think that is often a much more pragmatic approach. And I do not say that as someone trying to keep clients. I say that if I was on the other side.

And the next two interrelate. Socialise and then be human. I think that is what you said at the beginning, which is treat your agency partners as humans. We would treat our clients as humans, right? You have good days, you have bad days, you have stuff going on in your personal life. And then socialise. I think often, you touched on it earlier when you said that you guys are going the extra step because you literally love the client and they are good people.

Not everyone wants to go out for the long lunch, and you might have clients on the other side of the country, but I think just being social and trying to act as human beings coming together will often be quite positive in driving results.

That is what I had. Do you have anything else to chip in there?

Jordan Slover: Yeah. Before you hire an agency, you should ask to meet the team. You are going to be spending a lot of time with these people and your own livelihood can be at stake sometimes. You are a marketing manager, you have goals, you are trying to get promoted, you are trying to get a bonus. The success of the relationship with the agency is going to maybe play a big part in whether you achieve those big goals that have an impact on your family.

So certainly I advise people to meet the people that are going to be assigned to their account before they sign off, to make sure you are going to like these people, first of all.

Then one thing that you said about resetting is that we have got a whole team of account managers. It has certainly happened in the past where personalities just were not a good fit and it became apparent pretty quickly that these two people just are not communicating well together. We switched account managers and it really improved things. It was not because the other person was a bad account manager. Sometimes personalities just do not click right.

James Lawrence: One hundred percent. That is the transparency and feedback thing. Do not sit there going, “Oh, I do not like this person, do not like this person, I am going to leave.” Just give the feedback to the person who introduced you to the business or to the agency owner. Just say, “Hey, I am struggling with this. I think it might be a personality thing. Have you got any solutions? Because if not, I will probably leave.”

Nine times out of 10, it will get resolved and you will probably actually feel better about the entire engagement, because you go, “I had a problem, I got it resolved, these guys actually care about me.”

One other thing is, as agency owners, we know that it is harder to win a new client than it is to keep an existing one, right?

Jordan Slover: Yeah. So if you are an in-house marketer, you should absolutely know that as well. If things are not working, we want to fix it just as badly as you do. It might not be our business, but it is our business. You are our client. You are paying for our livelihood, so we should be caring about your success as much as you do. And I do believe that we do almost always.

If you come to an agency owner and say things are not working, what are we going to do about it, a good agency owner is going to try their damnedest to figure it out.

James Lawrence: And if they do not, it just validates your decision to leave. There is no downside except for maybe what you think is a difficult conversation, which probably is not difficult anyway.

Cool, man. I have been making some notes here. To summarise, I think agreeing on goals, giving lots of feedback, positive and constructive, being the squeaky wheel, but not too squeaky, transparency, getting involved, trust, pay on time, and then a whole bunch of little bonus ones. But I think there is definitely some good stuff in there.

I think if you followed these themes, I cannot think that you are going to get a worse relationship and worse performance from the agency-client relationship.

Jordan Slover: Yeah. I hope it is helpful. We all want to have the best relationship with our clients as we possibly can.

Bonus topic, try and learn about the people at the agency. I encourage my team members to take note of birthdays and kids’ names and what sports they play. Again, try and, like you said earlier, socialise and be human. So I guess I would encourage clients to do that as well, because we are all just here trying to do the best we can.

James Lawrence: Good man. Jordan, thanks for coming back onto the Smarter Marketer Podcast.

Jordan Slover: No problem. Thanks for having me.