If you concern yourself with margins and profitability (you’d be surprised how many small and mid-sized agencies don’t), what typically happens is that you turn over most of these account wins to more junior staff because they are cheaper, and it allows the initial business to be more profitable. But for how long?

There are the obvious drawbacks such as inexperience, the ability and comfort to make the “ask” for additional work, and the biggest miss is whether or not you have taught these young executives the business of the agency, do they even know on a daily basis whether or not the account is primed for growth, or are we fighting attrition. Just how much are they giving away?

We all do it. We all bend over backward from an account management standpoint to make sure our clients are “happy.” But what we inevitably do is “give away” our value … Our thoughts, our ideas, our counsel, our time. Most call it “scope creep,” but what you are really doing is hemorrhaging money. It’s the simple principle of managing your personal household budget … if you have more going out than coming in … well, you know the rest of that story.

Organize Your Giving

But what if you had a strategy to get paid for everything that you “give away” and do it in a way that leads to more work, more revenue, more equity with that client? You can effectively reverse course on your client’s expectations that we are in the business of giving it away, and your fear that if you don’t give it away, they will take the account somewhere else.

Not sure if you are giving it away? Hold a meeting with an account team. Include everyone from the most senior person on the account to the most junior. On a whiteboard list everything you do for that client. Everything you are scoped for and every little “favor” you do for them. List it all, I mean really dig in there. There may be things the junior staff is giving away that you are not aware of, and not because they are bad employees, but because that is how we train account staff to think.

After you make that list, now highlight all the things you get paid for. And more importantly, highlight the things you have not quantified in a scope of work. As an example: We will conduct monthly, proactive media relations. Have you clearly articulated in the scope how many hours, or how many outlets you will pitch? Or do you plan to pitch 24 hours a day, all month?

Now that you have done this, I am willing to bet about 25 percent of the things you do for this client are out of scope, OR you are simply not getting paid for those items. I know it is not as easy as calling up the client and saying, “We’ve been doing this for free for the last two years, and now we need to get paid for it.” We all know how that will go. But what you can do is leverage your landscape insight of the client and the category, identify the things you can control and the things you cannot and create an account plan for yourself and that account identifying the pathways to growth and more importantly how to get paid for the work you are already doing.

We’ve been successful in helping agencies find millions of dollars of opportunity and new work from existing clients. You just have to know where and when to look.