Your clients don’t want to buy what your agency sells.
- Matthew Ireland
- 6 days ago
- 1 min read
That might sound ridiculous – if they weren’t buying, you’d be out of business. But in every growth training session I run, the epiphany for the account management team is that most clients aren’t remotely interested in anything other than the outcomes they gain and the reduced pain they experience when working with that agency. Your output and delivery process are just the vehicle – the proof you can get them there.
Are you chasing scope, or solving pain?
Borrowing one of ChatGPT’s phrases de jour, the “harsh truth” is that almost no client wakes up wanting a comms campaign, an industry event or a brand refresh. They want what these things achieve – more qualified demand, a shorter sales cycle, better perception with the board, less risk and stress for them personally (personal gain is always present and easily overlooked).
Perhaps this makes the job of growing accounts sound depressing – how can you sell what clients don’t actually want? But this reduction is liberating, as instead of selling our ‘stuff’, we become focused on finding problems (the more painful, the better) that we are best placed to solve, where the outcomes and benefits are so obvious it doesn’t feel like selling. That’s how we stop being the dreaded vendor (let’s face it, no-one ever dreamed of becoming a vendor), and start being strategic partners, devoid of self-interest and biased towards client outcomes.
Organic growth is really nothing more than the repeated discipline of finding painful client problems that we can help to solve, with clearer ‘afters’.
