Calling the Ones Who Left

A current client has reasons not to tell you everything. They are mid-contract, they like the account manager, they would rather not have the awkward conversation. A former client has none of those reasons. They already decided, and most of them will tell you why if you ask.

Almost nobody asks.

In October 2023 DMA did. Our president worked through the list of businesses that had paid the agency in the past and stopped: a call, an email, and where he could a text or a LinkedIn message, with one line in a report after every attempt. On 25 October he sent me the list, about halfway through. My reply that morning:

Thanks for the update; what a great effort on your part and what a great exercise to learn about the value add or lack of from our operations

“Or lack of” was the reason to do it.

A lot of churn is not about you

The first thing the list showed was how many former clients no longer existed. Closed stores, dead websites, domains redirecting elsewhere, numbers that rang out. Some had been absorbed into larger companies with their own marketing teams. One had stopped all marketing because the business itself had not worked.

That is useful on its own. A churn rate counts all of those as lost clients. Calling them separates the business that failed from the relationship that did.

The rest were specific

The former clients who picked up were specific. The reasons came in a few shapes, and the most common was the plainest. One owner, as the note recorded it, “didn’t understand what we were doing but all he knows was that his phones weren’t ringing.” What he could see, he was paying for. What we were doing, he could not see.

Others said they had felt they were “dealing with way too many people,” or that the content did not sound like them. Several had moved to a cheaper local agency, or brought the work in-house, and were content with it. One had put his budget into radio, and it was working.

None of that needed a defence. Each one is a description of the gap between the work and what the client could see of it, from the only person who was in a position to say so.

Not every call was a closed door

Some of the calls opened something. One former client had become active again by the time the report was written. Another was getting a new proposal. One was open to paying on results. One said to check back after the new year; their funding had fallen through. One, who in the note “wasn’t happy nor mad,” agreed to an occasional follow-up and got some free advice on the call.

Why the call is worth making

Read as a whole, the list was a description of the agency from the outside: what we charged against what an owner could see, how many hands touched one account, and how quickly a small business decides a closer, cheaper option is good enough.

You can get some of that from a current client, eventually. A former one will tell you in a single phone call. The only cost is being willing to hear it.

Related: Large Accounts Are a Different Sale and Activity Is Not the Number.