Managing Agency Partners: How to Get More From the Relationship

Managing agency partners well is one of the most underrated commercial skills a marketing leader can have. Done right, it compounds over time: better briefs, faster execution, sharper creative, and a team that fights for your account. Done poorly, it produces mediocre work at full price, with everyone quietly frustrated and nobody saying so out loud.

The relationship between client and agency is structurally odd. You are paying for expertise you do not have in-house, from people who are simultaneously managing six other clients, all of whom think they are the priority. Getting the most from that arrangement requires more than good briefing. It requires understanding how agencies actually work, what motivates the people inside them, and where the pressure points tend to be.

Why Most Agency Relationships Underperform

It is rarely about talent. The agencies that end up producing disappointing work are often the same ones producing excellent work for someone else. The difference is almost always the client relationship: how they brief, how they respond, how much they trust the agency to make decisions, and how they behave when something goes wrong.

I spent years on the agency side before moving into consulting, and one pattern was consistent across every shop I worked in or led. The clients who got the best work were not necessarily the biggest spenders. They were the ones who made it easy to do good work. They gave clear objectives, responded quickly, pushed back with reasons rather than just rejections, and treated the agency team like professionals rather than suppliers to be managed down.

That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly rare in practice. Most client-side marketers have been trained to manage agencies at arm’s length, to maintain commercial leverage, to avoid getting too close. That instinct makes sense in procurement terms. It tends to destroy creative output.

If you want a fuller picture of the commercial pressures agencies are operating under, the Agency Growth and Sales hub covers the mechanics of agency economics in more detail. Understanding those pressures makes you a significantly better client.

How to Brief an Agency Properly

A brief is not a wish list. It is a commercial document that tells the agency what problem you are trying to solve, who you are trying to reach, what success looks like, and what constraints they are operating within. Most briefs fail on at least two of those four counts.

The most common failure mode is conflating outputs with objectives. “We need a campaign” is not a brief. “We need to shift consideration among 35-54 year old homeowners in the South East ahead of our spring product launch, with a budget of £180,000 and a six-week lead time” is the beginning of one. The first gives the agency nowhere to go. The second gives them something to solve.

A brief should also be honest about constraints. Budget, timeline, approval layers, internal politics, brand restrictions, legal sign-off requirements. Agencies can work around almost anything if they know about it upfront. What kills projects is discovering a constraint at the point of presentation, after three weeks of work have gone in a direction that was never going to be approved. I have seen this happen more times than I can count, and it is always avoidable.

One thing worth adding to every brief: a clear statement of who has final sign-off. Not who is involved, who decides. Agencies frequently present work to rooms full of people with opinions and no authority, then receive consolidated feedback that contradicts itself. If your agency does not know who the decision-maker is, they will try to please everyone. That is the surest route to work that pleases nobody.

What Agencies Actually Respond To

Agencies are businesses staffed by people who want to do good work. That sounds reductive, but it matters. The people working on your account have professional pride. They want the campaigns they make to be good. They want to win awards, yes, but more immediately they want to solve the brief well and have the client respond positively to it. That motivation is one of the most powerful levers a client has, and most clients do not use it.

Positive reinforcement works. When an agency team produces something genuinely strong, telling them so, specifically and promptly, costs nothing and changes the dynamic of the relationship. It signals that you are paying attention, that you have taste, and that good work gets recognised. That signal travels through the agency faster than any briefing document.

Negative reinforcement works too, but only when it is specific. “This is not what we were looking for” is not feedback. “The tone is right but the headline is too generic, it does not differentiate us from the three other brands running the same message this quarter” is feedback. One of those the agency can act on. The other sends them back to the drawing board with no more information than they started with.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm when the founding partner had to leave for a client meeting. My first internal reaction was close to panic. But what I learned in that moment was that the room responds to clarity of direction, not seniority. If you know what you are trying to solve and you can articulate it precisely, people follow. That principle applies just as much to how clients run agency relationships as it does to how agencies run brainstorms.

How to Structure the Ongoing Relationship

Most client-agency relationships are either over-managed or under-managed. Over-managed means weekly status calls that exist to demonstrate oversight rather than to move work forward, approval layers that slow everything down, and a general atmosphere of surveillance rather than collaboration. Under-managed means the agency is left to get on with it, the client checks in occasionally, and by the time a problem surfaces it has been compounding for months.

The structure that tends to work is simpler than most organisations implement. A clear working rhythm at the operational level, typically weekly or fortnightly, focused on live work and blockers. A monthly or quarterly strategic review that steps back from the day-to-day and asks whether the relationship is delivering against its original objectives. And a senior-level touchpoint at least twice a year that is not about any specific project but about the health of the partnership overall.

That last one is the most commonly skipped. Senior clients often assume that no news is good news, that if the working relationship is ticking along, everything is fine. Agencies rarely volunteer problems upward because they do not want to escalate unnecessarily. The result is that small frictions accumulate, the working-level team gets quietly frustrated, and the first time senior leadership hears about it is when a resignation letter arrives from the account director.

Building in a regular senior conversation, even a 30-minute call every quarter, creates a channel for honest feedback before it becomes a crisis. It also signals that the relationship matters at a strategic level, not just as a line item on a procurement spreadsheet. Agencies notice that, and it affects how they resource the account.

Managing Multiple Agency Partners Without Creating Chaos

Most mid-to-large marketing functions work with more than one agency. A creative agency, a media agency, an SEO or performance partner, possibly a PR firm. Managing them as separate entities, each in their own lane, is the default approach. It is also the approach most likely to produce fragmented output and duplicated effort.

The alternative is not a single agency model, which has its own limitations, but a structured approach to how your agencies interact. That means sharing briefs across partners where relevant, running joint sessions when a campaign requires integrated thinking, and being explicit about who leads on what. Ambiguity about ownership between agencies tends to get resolved by whoever is most assertive, which is not always the right answer for the client.

There is also a cultural dimension to managing a roster. Agencies are competitive. If your creative agency suspects the media agency is encroaching on their territory, or vice versa, the energy that should go into your work goes into internal positioning instead. As the client, you set the tone for how your agencies relate to each other. If you run them as competitors for budget and influence, they will behave accordingly. If you position them as collaborators with defined roles, most of them will rise to that.

For a broader view of the services different agency types offer and where their specialisms genuinely differ, Semrush’s breakdown of digital marketing agency services is a useful reference point when you are mapping out a roster or evaluating gaps in your current setup.

When Things Go Wrong

At some point, something will go wrong. A campaign will miss the mark. A deadline will be broken. A key team member will leave and the account will go through a period of instability. How you respond in those moments defines the relationship more than anything that happens when things are going well.

The worst client response to an agency failure is immediate escalation without context. Calling the CEO because a mid-level account manager made a mistake sends a signal that the relationship is purely transactional and that trust is zero. It also tends to produce a defensive response from the agency, which is the opposite of what you need when you are trying to fix a problem quickly.

A more effective approach is to address the problem at the level it occurred, with clarity about the impact and what you need to happen next. If the issue recurs, or if it represents a systemic failure rather than an isolated mistake, then escalation is appropriate. But escalation should be a considered decision, not a reflex.

I learned this the hard way on the agency side. We had developed a campaign for a major client, one that the team was genuinely proud of, and at the eleventh hour a rights issue emerged that made the whole thing undeliverable. We had to scrap weeks of work, go back to brief, and produce something entirely new in a fraction of the original timeline. The client’s response in that moment, whether they treated it as a shared problem to solve or as a failure to be punished, determined everything about how the next six months played out. The ones who stayed solution-focused got better work. The ones who used it as leverage got compliance, not creativity.

When you are building or restructuring a roster, the way you pitch and position the partnership from the start matters too. Unbounce’s thinking on personalisation in agency relationships is worth reading for the client-side perspective on what makes an agency feel like a genuine partner rather than a vendor.

Commercial Management: Getting the Incentives Right

Most agency contracts are structured around inputs: hours, retainer fees, project costs. That structure creates a misalignment. The agency is incentivised to sell time. The client wants outcomes. Those two things are not the same, and the gap between them is where a lot of value leaks out of agency relationships.

Performance-based elements in agency contracts are not new, but they remain underused, partly because they are hard to structure fairly and partly because agencies resist them when the performance metrics are outside their control. Both concerns are legitimate. But there is a middle ground: bonus structures tied to specific, agency-influenced metrics, agreed upfront, with clear measurement criteria. Not a complete shift to performance pricing, which tends to make agencies risk-averse, but a meaningful stake in the outcome.

Beyond the contract structure, the commercial conversation should be a regular part of the relationship, not something that only happens at renewal. Are you getting value from the retainer? Are there services you are paying for that you are not using? Are there gaps in the agency’s offering that you are filling elsewhere at additional cost? These are questions worth asking annually at minimum, and the agencies worth keeping will engage with them honestly.

For agencies that work with freelancers or specialist contractors as part of their delivery model, understanding how those relationships are structured commercially can also affect what you are paying for. Later’s resource on agency and freelancer dynamics is a useful reference if you are trying to understand what is in-house versus bought-in on your account.

The Signals That Tell You a Relationship Is in Trouble

Agency relationships rarely fail suddenly. They deteriorate over time, usually through a combination of small signals that get ignored until the damage is significant. Knowing what to look for means you can intervene before you are in a full-blown review process.

The first signal is a change in the seniority of the team working on your account. If the people presenting work are progressively more junior than the people who pitched for the business, the agency has made a resourcing decision. That decision reflects how they view the account commercially and strategically. It is worth raising directly rather than hoping it self-corrects.

The second is a pattern of reactive rather than proactive output. An agency that is genuinely invested in your business brings ideas unprompted. They flag opportunities you have not asked about. They connect what they are seeing across their client base to something that might be relevant to you. When that stops happening and the agency is simply responding to briefs, the relationship has become transactional. That is not always a crisis, but it is a signal.

The third is slow response times on anything that is not a live deadline. Agencies prioritise the clients who create energy and momentum. If your emails are taking two days to get a reply and your account manager is always in another meeting, you have drifted down the internal priority list. That is fixable, but only if you address it.

There is more on the commercial and operational mechanics of running agency relationships in the Agency Growth and Sales hub, including how agencies think about client profitability and what that means for how they allocate their best people.

When to Stay and When to Move On

Agency reviews are expensive and significant. The pitch process consumes time on both sides. The onboarding period after a switch typically costs three to six months of below-par output while the new agency learns your business. Most clients underestimate those costs and overestimate the uplift a new agency will deliver.

That does not mean you should stay in a failing relationship out of inertia. It means the bar for switching should be genuine evidence of structural failure, not a single bad campaign or a period of creative fatigue that a good brief might fix. Before initiating a review, it is worth asking honestly whether the problem is the agency or the brief. In my experience, the answer is more often the brief than most clients are comfortable admitting.

When a relationship genuinely has run its course, the transition matters as much as the decision. Agencies hold institutional knowledge about your brand, your audience, your past campaigns, and your internal dynamics. A well-managed transition preserves as much of that as possible. A poorly managed one, where the outgoing agency is cut off abruptly and the incoming one starts from zero, costs you more than the switch was ever going to save.

Managing agency partners is not a soft skill. It is a commercial capability that directly affects the quality and efficiency of your marketing output. The marketers who do it well tend to get better work, spend less time in review cycles, and build relationships that compound in value over time. The ones who treat it as vendor management tend to get exactly that: vendors, not partners.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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