A founder I work with recently told me that they felt that their team had started to give up on a struggling client account that was coming up for renewal. It wasn’t a small client either – low five figures per month which was well above their average level.
The client wasn’t happy and had voiced concerns about the work being produced. Funnily enough, results weren’t actually that bad and the deliverables were technically done, but the work itself could have been much better and more in line with the brand.
Overall, they were fair concerns that needed to be addressed.
So, the founder got involved with the project and helped be the go-between for the team and the client, leading to a refreshed approach that should help the team refine their deliverables.
The thing is, this was about 10 weeks out from the contract being up for renewal and whilst this is enough time to convince the client that things had changed, the team didn’t appear to change anything.
But here’s what bothered the founder most – the team’s response was basically “we’ve already done what we can.” They’d completed their tasks, hit their deliverables, but accepted that the results weren’t great and that was that.
The team hadn’t fought for the client. They’d just… given up.
How “we tried our best” becomes the default
There’s a shift that happens in agencies when teams stop viewing problems as things to solve and start viewing them as things to report on.
It goes from “what else can we try?” to “we’ve done what we said we’d do.”
The scope of work becomes a ceiling rather than a commitment to solve the actual problem. Tasks get completed to tick boxes rather than thinking about whether the work is actually moving the needle for the client.
I saw this exact pattern recently with another agency. The team was completing work just to report on it at the end of the month. They’d mark tasks as done, track their hours, hit their utilisation numbers. Job done, right?
Clearly, it wasn’t. Client work had become a checkbox exercise where they get stuff done, log their time, and think that’s enough.
The bigger picture question here – “is this actually helping the client?” – Wasn’t being asked.
To be fair, this can often happen when teams are overstretched or spread too thin across too many accounts. They lose the mental space to think strategically. They’re firefighting and ticking boxes rather than thinking about what would actually drive results.
I get it, I’ve been there! I’m sure that many of you recognise this feeling as well.
The signals that your team has stopped fighting
The thing is, you can usually spot when your team has stopped fighting for clients before things get critical. Here are some patterns that you can watch out for.
They accept client constraints as final rather than working to overcome them
When a client says they can’t get budget approved or their dev team is slow, the team just waits rather than finding out exactly why and finding a solution. There’s no push to find another way forward.
I saw this with a team member who struggled with a month-long contract renewal process. KPI negotiations were dragging. Budget sign-off was stuck. But they didn’t escalate the difficulty until it became urgent and the founder had to step in to get it over the line.
They stop bringing you problems before they become crises
You only hear about issues when they’ve already blown up. The team doesn’t flag that a client conversation feels off or that progress has stalled. They wait until the client is openly unhappy or threatening to leave.
Ideally, you use weekly (or at the very least, monthly) RAG trackers to keep an eye on client work and happiness. But even these aren’t foolproof and teams genuinely believe that everything is fine – then the client serves notice.
I saw this recently and when the founder dug into what happened, all the warning signs had been there – the team just hadn’t spotted them.
They report on what they did, not on whether it’s working
This is a biggie and again, I know that I’ve done this in the past when I was a consultant working for an agency.
The focus shifts to inputs rather than outcomes. “We published three articles” rather than “traffic is flat and we need to try something different.”
I saw this recently where a team was focused on link building KPIs that the client didn’t actually value, rather than the creative campaigns the client was asking for. They were hitting the numbers but missing the point of what the client actually wanted.
Why this happens (and why it’s not just about bad people)
I should say at this point – this isn’t because your team is bad at their job or because they don’t care. All of the examples I mentioned above are from agencies with very good teams who do very good work.
It is usually because when things get hard or a little out of their comfort zone, they literally don’t know what to do. They haven’t developed the skills (that come from experience) that help them push through problems themselves.
If you’ve historically been the one who steps in when things get difficult, the one who spots issues before they become crises, the one who figures out how to overcome roadblocks- then your team never learns to do it themselves.
They’re used to you catching the problems. They focus on what they can control – the deliverables, the tasks, the tangible stuff they’re good at. Why would they worry about the bigger picture when you’ve always handled that part?
There’s also often a commercial awareness gap. Teams don’t always understand that “acceptable” performance is often the first step toward a lost client. They don’t realise that a client who is “fine” isn’t the same as a client who is happy and will renew.
Of course, things can’t be amazing all of the time, but we also can’t let “fine” become normal.
And when capacity is tight, teams unconsciously prioritise clients who are easier or more vocal. The “fine” clients drift. Nobody’s shouting about them, so they don’t get the attention they need.
What to actually do about it
Okay, so how do you actually solve this problem once you’ve spotted it? Ideally, you’ll get to a point where this problem doesn’t even appear in the first place, but let’s assume that for the time being, that isn’t the case.
Make “what else could we try?” a required question
In every client review, every retrospective, every discussion about a struggling account – this needs to be asked. Not as a tick-box exercise, but as a genuine forcing function.
If someone says “we’ve done what we can,” you (and your senior team) need to push back. What haven’t you tried yet? What would you do if this were your business and your money?
This encourages the team to really think about what they’ve tried so far and what else could be done. Usually, they won’t go to this level of thinking, it’s just not natural or expected of them, so you need to change that.
Set the explicit expectation that exhausting all reasonable options comes before accepting defeat
“If we’re going to lose this client, I want to look back on it and hold my head up high, knowing that we’ve done absolutely everything we can to make it work.”
I’ve said those words to my own teams many times over the years. Sometimes we’ll turn things around and keep a client happy for a long time, other times, we’ve still lost them. But we’ve lost them on what felt like our own terms.
Agencies lose clients, it’s a fact of life. Lose them knowing you’ve done the right thing and done everything that you could.
Create a culture where “we’re stuck” is acceptable but “we tried our best” isn’t
Being stuck gets you help. Saying you tried your best suggests you’ve already given up.
Make it safe for your team to say they don’t know what to do next. That’s the moment to get senior people involved, to bring in external expertise, to workshop solutions together.
But “we did what we could” shouldn’t be an acceptable end point.
Build in prompts that force deeper thinking
No, not those kinds of prompts…!
In your regular check-ins or RAG meetings, ask: What’s the actual business impact we’re driving for this client? If this were our business, what would we do differently? What would the client do if they had our expertise in-house?
These questions push people beyond task completion toward strategic thinking.
At first, you’ll really need to lead the way and border on being annoying with your questions. Your team will struggle at first because they’re not used to these types of questions and therefore, won’t have the answers. But stick with it, change will come.
The difference between being realistic and giving up
Here’s the thing- sometimes the right answer *is* to tell a client they need to invest more or change their approach. Sometimes you genuinely have tried everything that makes sense or that is reasonable within your scope of work.
But that’s a strategic conversation you’re having proactively, not a defence you’re making when they’re already unhappy.
There’s a huge difference between “this approach isn’t working, so we need to try X, Y, and Z” and “this approach isn’t working, so we’ve done what we can.”
The test is simple and goes back to my point earlier – if you lost this client tomorrow, would you feel you’d genuinely exhausted all options? Or would you immediately think of three things you should have tried?
The next time someone on your team says a client is “fine” or that they’ve “tried everything,” ask them: if this were your business and your money, what would you do differently?
Their answer will tell you whether they’re still fighting or whether they’ve already given up.