How to hold onto mainstay clients for much longer than PR industry average
I have been lucky enough to have not one but two cornerstone, anchor, mainstay or ‘whale’ clients (depending on your word preference), since I founded Agility PR way back in June 2003 just as the gloom of the dotcom bust began lifting.
Inspiring loyalty in clients means adopting a partnership mindset – My top 6 tips for lengthening client relationship is here
Indeed, one of these mainstay clients stayed with me from the very month of our foundation as an agency until last month – January 2025. In fact, strictly I’ve been looking after them from an external comms, media relations and content perspective from mid-2000 when I was with a former employer, and they elected to come with me to become a founding client.
So, when I found out for sure that I would no longer be able to work with that client (due to the fact that its latest acquirer mandated that they drop Agility PR in favour of the acquirer’s own agency), I was of course bereft.
However, other PR agency bosses I spoke to, simply pointed out that holding a PR client for nearly a quarter of a century ought to be worthy of an entry in the Guinness Books of Records! So, I paused to reflect on that achievement and consider what I might have done right to retain that fast growing fintech client (and others) for so long.
This became the basis of this ‘6 Top Tips For Retaining your Mainstay Clients’, the ones that make the difference between sustainably growing your agency, rather than living a ‘feast or famine’ see-saw, or even hand to mouth, existence. The ideal for us all is to build a business which grows reliably and sustainably but how many B2B PR agency bosses can truly say that today? Is your growth story married with a positive cashflow outlook, strong margins and profitability, year in year out? If not, then it may be worth reading on as client retention and growth is the key to longer term sustainable growth.
To set the scene, we know all too well that the tenures of CMOs of B2B and B2C tech firms have been steadily falling. Amongst the Top 100 B2C tech brand advertisers in the US we’ve seen average tenures of CMOs falling by nearly a year just over the last three years – now sitting at 3.3 years today.
We also know that PR agency client retention is also falling. Figures I saw from an Agility PR Solutions study found that larger agencies were experiencing a loss of close to a third of all their clients in a typical year – admittedly this was from a study conducted just as the pandemic was rolling in.
So, how best to arrest declines in the length of time you hold (and therefore potentially increase the value of) your clients?:
1. Make sure you get C-suite level sponsorship for your work, ideally right at the start of your engagement with them.
This is easier when the hiring of your services is directly linked to the medium and long-term goals of the board and ideally the co-founders themselves. So, back in the dotcom boom 100 per cent of the clients I worked with were looking to build their brands fast with a view to a listing (normally on AIM in those days), or to a high value acquisition by a larger player in their market.
There was an intrinsic value to what we were doing which potentially was valued in the millions of pounds for co-founders and key board members. They not only wanted to be seen to lead those companies but also wanted to be perceived as visionary thought leaders. It was our job to create opportunities for them to be seen to lead the market not only in their tech, but also their thinking on the direction of their tech field and the vertical sector(s) they served.
It was about building a network of influencers, highlighting exemplar customers and of course creating thought leadership content – perhaps running market research, writing white papers, sector studies and business guides, and many, many by-lined articles for key trade media. Some had higher ambitions. They wanted to be in the business pages of the nationals – so we tracked column opportunities and pitched our luminaries with great gusto.
Needless to say, both the really long term Agility PR clients I’ve had – one for 10 years, the other for nearly 25 years – have reported to very senior, very ambitious people. In one case we worked for the UK Managing Director of a global physical security market leader. That MD became the EMEA Marketing Director on our watch as the business expanded at a rate of 25-30% year on year, and his career blossomed.
For the fintech client I held for 25 years, I worked closely with the CEO and co-founder for many years before the business grew to the point where he handed over day to day marketing leadership to a new Head of Marketing (and even after that he kept involved and greenlit the big strategic marketing decisions and signed off the big budget items).
It is not always possible to operate in close proximity to a founder, CEO or MD of the business, but it must remain a target for any PR or marketing services agency, as it is in this way that you hear about the targets and longer term ambitions that the business has and what constraints are holding back growth.
If PR plans can then be built to address these ambitions and/or alleviate any constraints head on – then the chances of delivering results which are meaningful from both a sales and marketing perspective (and therefore fully visible to the whole board of directors) are much higher.
With this dynamic in place, you are not left justifying continued marketing spend, alongside an increasingly frazzled head of marketing who may be struggling to justify budgets and unable to prove a straight line from marketing spend to sales improvements. (The link and the beginnings of integration of sales and marketing under a CSO or CRO, is another trend to explore in my next monthly blog).
2. Adopt a High Touch Service Approach
By this I mean, that the closer you can get to understanding the objectives of the company, the more visible you are to them, and the more top of mind you remain when new challenges pop up which may demand additional work – some of which you are sure to win once you have this level of visibility.
The best way of winning the board’s trust is to be present with them (or at the end of a Zoom/Teams) when they are discussing these challenges.
Sometimes, especially since the advent of WFH and now Hybrid working post-pandemic, it is difficult to ensure you are getting face time with the c-suite. If they are a long way from your place of work you may need to swallow transport and subsistence costs you are incurring to get to them. If that is a barrier – remove it by not charging them. It’s critical, especially at the start of a working relationship with a client.
Sometimes, you will have to navigate around marketing budget guardians. There will be politics to navigate especially if lots of people feel they have a stake in the work you are doing. However, far better that you have too many people on the executive board to impress than too few.
Whatever you do, make sure you are visible and delivering beyond the classic marketing function into business development and sales lead (or demand) generation. Your work must be seen to add to clients’ bottom line – meeting strategic as well as marketing or comms objectives.
Always keep in mind the question: what am I doing this for, what benefit is it bringing to the wider company. Then communicate those benefits as you see them, and make sure the c-suite are on the same page. Be prepared to be challenged on those benefits. It’s important to have that conversation too.
Most of this can only be done if you are face to face regularly. An email only, transactional relationship which relies on static and unengaging reports is one symptom of a client relationship which is not built to last.
3. Don’t get ‘pigeonholed’ as a tactical delivery resource alone (e.g. just another copywriter)
Aim to kick off any engagement by offering to assist with strategy. You can also use annual review points to try to elevate your role. Can you help identify the key target markets they need to be expanding into? Can you help find the early bridge heads into that market. Can you help them to build their partner base quicker? Can you help them to appeal to the right type of customers that will really move the sales needle?
It is tempting when your market gets tougher, and more competitive to assure clients of writing a certain number of pieces of content or delivering a certain amount of media coverage. The danger of this approach is that if this content is not fully integrated into the rest of marketing activity, let alone visibly contributing to sales goals (either directly through customer or partner engagement) you are in trouble.
Your budget is likely to be controlled by that hard pressed CMO who may be under pressure to support sales (or at least channel development) better. This pressure is likely to feed through to outsourced content provision fairly quickly. Before you know where you are, you are being seen as a project only or occasional copy writing resource to be turned off and on at will. That’s a very dangerous place to be when marketing is struggling to support sales and/or markets are becoming tougher/more competitive.
The more tactical your client engagement, the easier it is to be displaced by another agency that offers what you do (most are capable of writing good copy or hiring an ex-journalist that does), and then a whole load of other things you cannot do (or the c-suite don’t know you can do!).
4. Think Customer Lifetime Value – even if the signs indicate that your window is short!
Thinking about potential Customer Lifetime Value is valuable. This forces you to think beyond the next review point and gets you plugged into the long-term goals of the business. This thinking will sometimes make you realise that actually your future with a new client is likely to be short.
Perhaps, they are polishing up their brand or building their customer base in double quick time with a view to being acquired within the next year or two. You may only have 6-8 months with that client to make a big splash and then exit when the business is sold. Make this intense period count. Use the clarity of thought that this short window and ‘big prize thinking’ brings, to deliver exactly what they want.
If you can do your best work in these sorts of intense engagements you will not only get an ex-client who has several soon to be ex-employees happy to advocate for your agency’s work (many exit following an acquisition) but you will optimise the income from the work you do for them on that period.
Agility PR had three of these sorts of engagements during the pandemic and not only did they generate vital income at the time, but they became great case studies for our work because they were very results focused. Shorter, self-contained projects built with specific deliverables and results in mind, working to a tight timeframe, are much the easiest case studies to write up. And if they have sold out six months later there is not likely to be anyone there who will object when you put your project write ups out there.
5. Be prepared to share client pains to benefit from their gains
Lord knows the tech world has experienced some ups and downs over the last 25 years or so. There was the dotcom boom and bust (four good years followed by two bad ones), the banking crisis and subsequent Great Recession (from 2008 to 2013) and then the pandemic initial shock, bounce and subsequent slow growth/no growth phase which we are frankly still in.
If the business is struggling, and the CEO or founder or another c-suiter who is on your side is prepared to share the nature and depth of the pain, you might even offer to cut or even stop your fee payments for a limited time, if you can afford to do so. With my 25 year old client I took two payment holidays in the time I worked with them, one of those breaks was for nearly six months. On another occasion, I stopped charging travel and subsistence expenses for over a year (during the pandemic). You need to be seen to share their pains, in order to share in the victories on those sunny uplands when the business is doing well. It’s about taking a partnership approach.
6. Gather feedback on your service
We spend our lives being asked by service providers, from cafés and restaurants to utility providers, to leave online reviews. But how do you ensure you get valuable feedback yourself? Many agencies wait until it’s too late to gather feedback: perhaps a month before the annual review or a couple of weeks before the existing contract is set to expire. That is far too late of course. If your client contacts are not particularly forthcoming or effusive in their feedback, why not ask for formal or informal feedback regularly? This can be asked informally in the monthly planning meeting or more formally.
For example, one approach I take is to mark anniversaries of client engagements with a valued customer by interviewing the most senior person at the client who is willing to talk about what you are delivering and knows what a difference your work is making.
For my 25 year old client, I interviewed the CEO and co-founder of that fintech. I’d heard a few things anecdotally about the value our market research-led thought leadership campaigns for them but had nothing official or on paper. By spending an hour with the CEO, over an expensive lunch which I paid for!, I was able to get some priceless testimony from him, and I quote an extract here when we were talking about the value of his consultative selling approach married with our thought leadership-focused campaigning:
“For years, as a tech provider to these companies (major name pension providers), we were pretty much on our own in terms of sharing our views and expertise in applying system changes to remain compliant with new regulation which came thick and fast.
“I’m absolutely positive that focusing on maintaining our profile over the years got us on more RFPs (Requests for Proposals) than would have been the case if we had not done this thought leadership work consistently and to a high quality.”
This long standing client, a leading pensiontech company, succeeded in winning mainstay whale clients which stayed with them for years and created ‘bedrock’ income which ran into the millions each year for several years, and enabled the business to grow reliably and sustainably. Its whale clients included Aegon, Canada Life, and now Nucleus and 7IM. It goes a long way to explaining why it was worth £27.3m when it was sold to Curtis Banks in the summer of 2020.
So, ‘on that bombshell’ as Jeremy Clarkson used to close, I’ll summarise my Top 6 tips for retaining your clients for longer (heaven knows why I’m telling my competitors how to do this but generosity in giving my peers the benefit of my 30+ years of experience is my way of paying forward):
1. Go high: Make sure you have C-suite buy-in, preferably all the way up to the CEO and/or founder.
2. Get face to face: or at least be proactively available and use every opportunity to get F2F
3. Offer strategic advice as well as tactical delivery
4. Think Customer Lifetime Value
5. Share pains to share gains
6. Gather feedback regularly.
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