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A marketing agency wanted to give its 25-person team two hours at their annual away day to share what they knew about client relationships. The brief was to surface the coping strategies, tools, and techniques the team had developed individually and turn them into shared agency practice.
We worked with a marketing agency to deliver a two-hour workshop as part of their annual away day. They wanted to help their teams engage in knowledge-sharing discussions and to generate ideas on how to build great client relationships and manage the client / agency dynamic.
The aim was to help team members engage in cathartic and encouraging conversations, revealing coping strategies, tools and techniques to provide a consistently high level of client service and to deal effectively with the intense levels of pressure this often creates.
We arranged the 25 participants into small groups and invited them to share hints and tips with each other on how to build effective client relationships.
We suggested topics for discussion including: how to build rapport, how to consistently offer a high quality service, how to remain innovative over the course of a long-term retainer contract, and how to effectively manage the client-agency dynamic. For each topic we created a series of prompt questions to spark conversation, for example:
After each discussion the groups presented back their conclusions to the wider team, and a Creative Huddle facilitator invited comments and feedback, drawing out useful ideas for concrete actions the agency could take in the future.
The three facilitated discussions each generated at least ten ideas for managing and building client relationships. Participants found the workshop energising and enlightening, and were able to take away simple, tangible ideas to implement in their work.
The work agencies do with clients is consistently more emotionally complex than the case studies suggest. People manage difficult conversations, absorb pressure, hold relationships through stressful project moments, and rarely get structured time to compare notes with their colleagues on how to do that well. A two-hour session designed around that exchange is unusually valuable for its length.
The format that works is small groups, specific prompt questions, and a facilitator who can draw out concrete actions from what would otherwise stay as anecdote. The lesson worth recording: the most useful question for a team that already has the answers buried in individual experience is not 'what should we do' but 'what have you done that worked'.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
