Nobody Has Ever Thanked Us for a Dashboard

Two emails landed in my inbox this week, a day apart, from two different agency partners.

Both came after a planning session with our team. One partner said it was the only three-hour meeting their team had ever sat through without wanting it to end. The other said they were ready to get started on next year’s plans and had already offered times for the follow-up.

My team ran both sessions. I read the emails afterward, and they had something in common.

Neither one mentioned a dashboard, a model, a report or a tool. Both were about people who showed up, took the client’s business seriously and made the room smarter.

Where I stand

Building automation and AI systems is part of my job, and I’m a believer. I’ve written about a model that can’t write a sentence and earns its keep anyway, and about teams building their own AI skills. We automate more every quarter.

The popular story right now says planning takes thirty seconds and agencies will need far fewer people. Part of that is true. The production side of agency work is getting cheaper fast.

But when one thing gets cheap, something else becomes the scarce part. In our business, that’s the part clients write thank-you emails about.

What gets cheaper, and what doesn’t

Here’s the production side, roughly: pulling the numbers, building a first draft of a plan, setting up campaigns, running checks, writing the recap. Technology does more of this every month, and it should. Most of it is rules, and the rest is getting easier to hand to a tool with a person checking the result.

Here’s what isn’t getting cheaper:

• Understanding what the client is actually trying to do. The brief says “drive awareness.” The real goal is often a board meeting in March, a new location that has to work or a competitor that just showed up in their market.
• Earning trust. A client agrees to a bigger test, or a harder conversation, because they believe the people across the table. Software doesn’t build that.
• Saying the uncomfortable thing. Telling a client their best-performing channel probably isn’t driving the results it gets credit for takes judgment about timing and tone, and a relationship that can handle it.
• Owning what happens next. Someone has to be accountable when the plan meets reality.

Those four things are what the two emails were thanking us for.

Clients can tell whether you care

Every agency says it cares about its clients. Clients don’t go by what you say. They go by what they see:

• You remember their business without being reminded. You know their busy season, their biggest client and which numbers their boss actually looks at.
• You answer quickly, and the answer comes from someone who can do something about it.
• The same people show up month after month, and they know the account’s history.
• You bring them ideas they didn’t ask for, because you’ve been thinking about their business when nobody was paying you to.
• They hear bad news from you first, before it shows up in a report.
• You show up, in person when it matters.

None of that is complicated. It’s just rarer than it should be.

When an agency comes to us after leaving another partner, we hear the same complaints over and over. Emails go days without an answer. Support has been handed to an outsourced team that doesn’t know the account. Every call starts with explaining the business again. The complaint is rarely that the media was bought badly. It’s that nobody seemed to care.

I won’t pretend every client we’ve worked with loved everything we did. But I don’t think any of them would say we didn’t care about them or their people. Technology can’t make you care. When you do, it gives you more time to show it.

What happened in the room

Each session was a collaborative deep dive into the client’s strategy and plans. It wasn’t a presentation, and it wasn’t a recap of last year.

The work behind those hours is what made them useful, and it’s where most planning sessions go wrong.

Our team did the homework before anyone sat down: research on the client’s market, a point of view on strategy, a competitive analysis, and a map of how the work moves from the client’s brief to a live campaign. The meeting was where that work met the client’s own knowledge. Nobody spent the first hour catching up.

And it wasn’t one account lead with a deck. Several people went, each bringing a different view of the business. One partner said everyone on our team added something to the conversation. That’s what happens when you send the people who’ll do the work, not just the people who sell it.

One team traveled to be there in person. The partner noticed. They also mentioned they were still enjoying the leftovers from lunch the next day, which tells you the afternoon was remembered as more than a meeting.

Why the hours were there to spend

This is the part the popular story leaves out.

Days of research, a day of travel and a full afternoon with a client are expensive. Most agencies can’t afford to spend senior hours that way on every client, because those hours are tied up in production: checking setups, chasing pacing, rebuilding the same report.

We’ve spent the last few years moving that work onto systems. Monitors watch delivery and open a ticket when something is off. Setup checks that used to be a checklist are becoming software. I’ve written about how we decide what to automate first, so I won’t repeat it here.

The point is what we did with the time. Automation didn’t replace the people in that room. It gave them back the hours to be there, prepared.

If you automate and only take the savings as lower costs, you’ll end up competing with everyone else on price. If you put some of the time back into clients, you’re offering something a thirty-second plan can’t.

What I’d do as an agency owner

Find out where your senior people’s hours go. Ask them to estimate one month: how much went to production, how much to thinking about a client’s business, and how much to time with the client? Most owners are surprised by the split.

Decide where freed-up hours go before you free them up. When a workflow gets automated, the saved time tends to disappear into whatever is urgent. Choose a destination ahead of time, such as planning sessions, quarterly business reviews or visits.

Do the homework before the meeting. Research, competitive context and a point of view should be done before you walk in. The meeting is for the conversation you can’t have without the client.

Send the people who do the work. Clients can tell the difference between a pitch team and the people who will actually run their business.

Leave with the next step on the calendar. One of the two partners offered follow-up times within a day. Momentum like that is easy to lose when nobody owns the next step.

The short version

Technology is making the production side of this business cheap, and I’m all for it. What it can’t produce is the feeling a client has walking out of a room with people who understood their business.

When did a client last thank you for something a tool did? When did one last thank you for something a person did?