It’s true that most clients want an objective outside point of view from their agency. But not until their agency has bothered to take the time to first understand the client’s expectations.

Agency professionals everywhere are frustrated by the master-servant dynamic that increasingly characterizes client-agency relationships.

Agencies are indispensable partners in helping marketers differentiate their brand. Differentiation is, after all, the essence of branding. But when it comes to their own brands, most agencies haven’t thought through their own brand touch points to look for opportunities to stand out.

As agencies become more and more convinced that they should be selling their services based on value instead of costs, they need to learn a new set of skills to help sell the concept of value and get a better price for what they do.

Imagine three agencies presenting to a prospective client. The client has provided all three agencies with a list of guidelines for the presentation, which includes explicit instructions to outline the agency’s proposed compensation approach, including hourly rates, expected hours, and staffing plans.

Consider the deceptively simply question, “Where do profits come from?” When you pose this question to a group of agency professionals, the answers will typically include such things as clients, hours worked, and even efficiency. But the real answer to this question is that profits come from risk.

If you’re like a lot of business executives, you may be concerned that you haven’t adequately defined your “mission” or “vision.” These often feel like buzzwords, and that offsite planning sessions that seek to define them often end in a bland statements that reflect more compromise than courage.

Agencies want to capture more of the value they create for their clients; in other words, earn more for what they do. The important first step is to understand the nature of value, including how, when, and where value is created.

At a time when prospective clients are scarce, it’s easy to be lured into the belief that some new business is better than no new business. The self-talk among agency executives is that the account “will help keep the lights on.”

Somewhere in the notes from last summer’s offsite agency planning meeting, do you have a statement similar to any of these?

A lot of advertising industry pundits preach the value of agency positioning and differentiation, but not many of them can really define it. Positioning isn’t just about being different. Featuring a laughing hyena on your home page is different, but it hardly qualifies as a positioning …

Faster. Cheaper. Vendor. Three words that characterize one of the leading issues agencies have with their clients right now. Many agencies feel they have been pushed down the client value chain into the same category as printers, having lost their status as professional advisors.

Would a prospective client travel 1,000 miles to do business with your firm? That’s one of the litmus tests of a strong agency positioning strategy. Unless you’re satisfied attracting local business from the local market (and some agencies are), you should devote some thought to how you can become what I call a “destination agency” …

Do you know the territory, or are you just a tourist? As artist Julian Schnabel wrote, tourists many have significant technical skills, but they don’t really know the territory. They know how to get some things done, but they don’t have deep expertise in a particular area …

Advertising agency income “per unit of work” has fallen 40% during a steady 20-year decline. So reports agency consultant and advisor Michael Farmer, whose research demonstrates that agency staffs are being squeezed to deliver increasing workloads at a time when fees are declining faster than costs.

It’s no coincidence that the 50 fastest growing brands in America have one important thing in common: they have committed themselves to an ideal that transcends making money.

What is the primary reason agencies don’t deliver more innovative solutions for their clients? Lack of talent? Lack of time? In my experience, the latter is much more of a factor than the former. Most successful agencies have some pretty smart people.

One view of the future of our business is that increasingly agencies will make the majority of their revenues from the intellectual property they create instead of the hours they work. The “work for hire” model that has persisted for the last half-century is becoming a less and less profitable way to make a living.

You would like your employees – or team members – to work harder. To care more about the agency and its clients. To put in more time, show more effort, or do a better job. Agency managers reason that what’s needed is to motivate employees with the promise of more money – a chance to earn more if they’ll work more.

When it comes to your agency’s business strategy (positioning), the best place to start is to make sure you’ve struck the right balance between authenticity and aspiration.