Most prospects who land on a call with me this year arrived with some version of the same opening line. The previous agency did not deliver. The previous agency did not communicate. The previous agency was not strategic. I have heard it enough times that I have stopped reacting to it.
The thing is, when I actually pull the previous agency's account and look at what they were doing, the work is almost always fine. Sometimes lazy in spots. Rarely bad enough to have killed the account.
What was bad was the visibility.
That is what I check first now. Not the work. The visibility. Because if I do not check it, I am signing up to be the next agency the client tells someone else did not deliver, eighteen months from now.
Here is what I think is going on.
Most agencies are doing acceptable work. They are running the campaigns. They are publishing the content. They are sending the monthly report. The report has impressions and reach and a campaign performance graph that goes up and to the right. The client opens it for forty seconds, says "looks good," and goes back to wondering what is actually happening to revenue.
That gap is where the relationship dies, slowly. The client does not know what to ask in the next call, so the calls get shorter and more polite. Renewal comes around and the client does not have a story to tell their CFO about what the agency did, so the agency becomes a line item that gets cut. Then the founder calls a new agency and says the previous one did not deliver.
Visibility is not more dashboards. Most agencies, when they hear the word, immediately add a Looker Studio link with eight more charts on it. The client opens the link once, glazes over, and the dashboard becomes another tab they do not check. Visibility is the agency telling the client, in language they could repeat in a leadership meeting, what changed this month, what it means for the business, and what the agency is doing next. It is sometimes a five-line email. It is rarely a graph.
The clients who switch are not always switching from bad work. A lot of the time they are switching from work they could not see, could not explain to their boss, and could not defend at budget time. The new agency wins because they showed up with a clear answer to "what are you doing for me." Not because their campaigns are inherently better. The previous agency's mistake was assuming the work would speak for itself. It almost never does.
So when a new prospect tells me their previous agency did not deliver, the first thing I ask is what did the previous agency send you every month and how often did you actually open it. The second thing I ask is what did you check yourself before deciding to switch agencies. The third thing I ask is what would you have wanted to see that you were not seeing. Honestly, those three answers tell me more about what to do for the client than looking at the previous agency's GA4 setup ever does.
Sometimes the answer reveals that the previous agency really was running a bad operation. Sometimes it reveals that the work was solid and nobody was pointing to it. The two situations need very different first ninety days. The difference between getting that right and getting it wrong is whether I am sitting in the same chair eighteen months from now hearing the next agency owner tell my client a different version of the same thing.
Aapka Hi,
Saurabh