On losing and loser clients

Ocean's Gate, Like Heaven's Gate

Many times in my decades of consulting, I've been directed to do a dumb thing by a client that's paying me to, well, steer them away from doing dumb things. (And yes, this post was inspired by a small group of obscenely wealthy people dying in the ocean, causing untold expense to find out what happened to them, all of which is money that could have been spent on so many, many better ideas.)

It's the single worst part of consulting, and the hardest judgment call you'll ever make. If your client hears your counsel and chooses to keep in their bad course, you are honor-bound to execute it to the best of your ability. All while knowing that, like a failed military coup in politics, this refusal to bow to expertise, math, etc., is just setting the stage for a deterioration of the relationship later. 

Most agencies lose 1 out of 4 clients every year, and most marketers don't stay at one gig for life, especially in aggressive categories. You acquire a past as being either too ineffective or too inflexible, the client acquires a past as being obstinate or resentful that you are telling them that they are wrong, and the seeds for a future separation are shown.

I'm not really sure how to solve for this, honestly. I've tried at most of my gigs to make it about the math, under the theory that math can solve a disagreement without emotion, and gives everyone a great way to walk it back from a bad decision. Test don't guess, and the only real way to fail is to not test, or at least, not test effectively.

But the trouble with this approach, and the reason why M&AD hasn't been able to elude the gravity that every other agency is subject to, is this: "the math" isn't binary. Which is an odd thing to say about math, but hear me out. It's never about a single key performance indicator. If it were, you could do your job forever and the only real issue is ducking AI or boredom, because your job is simple AF. 

But for most clients, if I drive leads to your business cheaply, you can say I've done my job -- or you can point to lifetime value and ROI and say I'm done nothing useful. I can say it's your site or your offer or your competition, and now we're back to the world of emotions, not math.

For clients like this, you win so long as you do the thing that makes them happy. You try to make yourself bulletproof by getting them to change the way they look at the world... but reality is that most people do not change the way they look at the world. And if they do change, it's not always for the better.

And that's when the job starts to lose its fun, its vitality, its candor and its color... and you start to think about the client that's going to replace this one. Which is also why agencies are never not looking for new business. Ping us accordingly.