I’ve spent my career on the agency side, working with marketing leaders across organizations of every shape and size. The strongest client-agency relationships I’ve seen aren’t the ones where nothing goes wrong. Things go wrong. Work misses the mark, priorities change, and, sometimes, one side simply gets it wrong. What makes a relationship strong is what happens next.
Trust doesn’t have to disappear when something breaks. Some of the strongest relationships I’ve been part of have been tested by difficult moments. What matters is whether both sides can be candid about what happened, assume the right intent and stay committed to moving forward together.
Curiosity is an Underrated Measure of Partnership
Giving an agency instructions, reviewing the to-do list and checking that the work got done tells you whether a relationship is functioning. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s valuable.
One of the most underrated characteristics of the strongest partnerships I’ve worked in is curiosity. We look for clients who ask questions, including the ones they think they should already know the answer to. They want another perspective. They’re interested in where we disagree and what we would do differently. The same should be true of the agency: asking better questions, challenging assumptions and understanding what’s really driving the brief, not just what’s written in it.
An agency is a significant investment, and part of its value is precisely that it is external. You’re paying for specialist skills and experience, but also for pattern recognition and a point of view that hasn’t been shaped by your internal conversations. If that perspective isn’t being sought, challenged and debated, you’re effectively paying for external expertise and using it as execution capacity.
Curiosity is therefore more than a cultural trait. It’s part of the commercial equation. Agencies have a responsibility to create conversations that change the thinking, and clients have a role in making space for them. Without both, there is value in the relationship that neither side is accessing.
Strong Relationships Don’t Wait for the QBR
The pace of change makes an ongoing conversation about the relationship more important than ever. Ask your agency: What are you building that we’re not using? What are you learning from other clients? What does your best client engagement look like, and what could we be doing differently here?
There is a huge amount of intelligence sitting inside an agency that rarely makes it into the formal scope: what we’re seeing change, what other organizations are testing, what’s working, what’s failing, and what we’re building next. Waiting three months for a QBR to access that intelligence is too slow.
That openness should extend to the commercial relationship. If the scope is no longer right, say so. That doesn’t automatically mean making it bigger. It might mean shifting investment, adding a capability, stopping something that no longer adds value or bringing in a specialist who’s better equipped. Partnership shouldn’t mean protecting scope. It should mean protecting the outcome.
Share the Mental Load
What I enjoy most about working in an independent agency is that nothing stands still. How we work, what we build, and what we can do for our clients is always open to being challenged and improved.
I’d love to see more clients take advantage of that. Ask for more. Tell us what’s keeping you awake at night, especially if it isn’t in our scope today. Share some of the mental load and give us the opportunity to help solve it. The chances are, we’re already solving a version of that problem somewhere else.
That’s the real opportunity in a strong agency relationship. Not simply getting everything on the to-do list done but having another team around the table invested in your problems, curious about the answers and continually looking for ways to create more value together.
The author, Amy Crowther, is CEO at Incubeta.