TL;DR

• Promethean’s Consulting Capacity: We’re booked for agency consulting clients through the second quarter. If you’d like help in 3Q, please book an intro call early.
• Effective account retention is a cheat code for agency growth.
• Four components to effective account retention include:
  1. Doing good (enough) work.
  2. Communicating the value you deliver.
  3. Being enjoyable to work with.
  4. Make your clients look good.
• Key activities that make those components easier include:
  1. Track account health.
  2. Consistent communication cadences.
  3. Regular value communication.
• ​Agency Mythbusters Episode Two: Does Billing Hourly Limit Profitability?​

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Effective Growth Through Limiting Churn

The most effective way to grow a digital agency is through client referrals and growing current accounts. Underpinning this growth is account retention. Effective account retention is a cheat code for agency growth.

I think we all knew this, but it was nice to see it reflected in the data in our How Digital Agencies Grow Report.

This is too big of a topic for a single newsletter, so today we’ll cover retention, and we’ll hit growth, referrals, and a secret bonus growth vector in a future newsletter.

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Retaining Accounts

Think of retaining accounts as the foundation for your agency’s growth.

This involves four key pieces:

1. Do good (enough) work.

The work that you do must meet the expectations you set out during the sales process.

A lot of friction arises when there’s a mismatch between client expectations and what’s delivered.

Think of it like trying a new restaurant. If you’re walking into a beautifully appointed, $125/plate farm-to-table spot, your expectations are going to be a lot higher than stopping at a McDonald's on a roadtrip. If the farm-to-table place misses a beat and messes up your order, it’s easier to get annoyed. If McDonald's messes up your order, well, it’s kind of expected.

Agency relationships are similar. If your sales team is promising transformative experiential marketing and your production team delivers some lame ass tradeshow booth, the client is going to be pissed.

Conversely, if your SEO audit sales process is 90% self-serve and you deliver a 1.3x ROI instead of a 1.5x like your case studies show, the client is less likely to pitch a fit.

Expectations make or break relationships. This is why it’s so critical to communicate accurately and regularly.

2. Communicate the value you deliver.

The next critical step, after doing good(enough) work, is letting them know.

Communication can’t end after a fantastic kickoff meeting that hypes everyone up. This is why the Account Manager role is such a key piece to successfully growing a digital shop. It’s their responsibility to communicate clearly and often with the client team and beyond.

Let your client know what you’re working on. Let them know your production team found an optimization or avoided a landmine that saved them X time implementing. Let them know you discovered a new opportunity during the project that’d make their life easier.

Successful agencies communicate beyond their direct client teams. Demonstrating your value and becoming well-liked within an organization can be massively beneficial. Which leads us to…

3. Be enjoyable to work with.

No one wants to work with a jerk.

Think about this in the context of your own employees, coworkers, vendors, and partners. People are infinitely more patient with people they like and infinitely less patient with those they don’t.

This can mean the difference between getting a heads up about tighter budgets 6 months in advance vs. a curt email saying they’re “going a different direction.”

With that said, this doesn’t mean your AM team should be a doormat for your client to walk all over. Boundaries are still massively important to the relationship, but there are ways to act and communicate that strengthen relationships instead of breaking them down. Regular communication is a huge part of this.

4. Make them look good.

Want to build a relationship where your internal advocate will go to war for you? Make them look like a rockstar.

Make it seem like hiring you was the best damn decision that company ever made and make it clear that your contact was the one who had the foresight to make it. Progress and opportunity meetings with your contact’s broader team are a great way to do this. Show what you’ve done, bring a senior staff member from your team, and show them you’re looking out for them as a strategic advisor.

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Retention Activities

Some general motions make accomplishing those four key pieces easier.

Track Account Health

The first is to find a way to measure and track account health. This is important because it gives you triggers on when to act. Without those triggers, it’s up to the AM to make a subjective judgement call and these are too easy to get wrong.

This can be as simple as a RAG (Red-Amber-Green) health score for each account based on communication responsiveness, project outcomes, relationship depth, call sentiment scores via AI, ROI delivered, etc.

Use those RAG scores to conduct regular account reviews and track early warning signs (slow invoice payments, decreased scopes, lower stakeholder engagement). This allows your team to both offset dips in the relationship and act during points of peak client happiness.

Consistent Communication Cadences

Maintain ongoing proactive communication that builds strong relationships and gives your team the information necessary to be effective.

The proper cadence will depend heavily on the length and style of your typical engagement. Short engagements may only need 1-2 meetings. Longer ones may need monthly check-ins. The point is to regularly be in contact with your client team so you can surface opportunities and threats quickly.

Regular Value Communication

Communicate your value regularly but do it in a way that’s not irritating.

To do this, you have to actually create something of real value for your client. That’s a broader conversation, but it boils down to “do work that matters.”

Second, tie your work into your client’s broader business objectives. If you don’t know these, get to know them. I covered some of this in a prior newsletter detailing how agencies are blocking their own growth.

Combining those two aspects is where magic happens. It’s where you can tell them something about their business or industry that they don’t know that’s critical to their success.

For most industries, you can provide this kind of value update quarterly. For the more boring ones, semi-annually is fine, but if something comes up (cough - tariffs, trade war, funding freezes - cough) don’t be afraid to put your take on it and deliver it sooner. You AM team can handle this most of the time, but for significant changes, a note from a leader can be incredibly impactful.

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Keep What You Worked For

Those four components: doing good (enough) work, communicating the value you deliver, being enjoyable to work with, and making your client contacts look good seem simple on the surface but building them into your agency’s DNA can radically reshape your growth story.

As a bonus, this work tends to result in higher margins too.

Before you go design a new go-to-market strategy or hire a leadgen service, consider spending some effort focusing on retention. The results might surprise you.

Next time we’ll have our 2025 State of Digital Services Report ready so keep an eye out for that. There are some super interesting findings this year that you don’t want to miss. Spoiler: growth sucked last year, but margins were fine and agencies aren't implementing AI as quickly as expected.

Finally, an update on Promethean’s capacity: We’re booked for consulting clients through the second quarter. This includes both Revgen Reviews and Custom Strategy Engagements. If you’d like help in 3Q, please book an intro call early.

Until next time,

- Nick​

Agency Mythbusters Episode Two: Does Billing Hourly Limit Profitability?

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Episode two is out!

A myth as old as time itself. When you bill hourly, do you limit profitability?

Nick thinks so, but Carl loses his freakin mind that it's just not true!

Tune in and find out who wins in this epic battle for profit supremacy!