Among the seven key behaviours, Trust stayed at the forefront of building better client-agency relationships in 2022.
Why behaviours?
The Aprais database comprised of more than 25,000 evaluations of client-agency evaluations not only holds scores on the strength of client-agency relationships, but details the behaviours that strong relationships exhibit.
Unlike functional disciplines, these behaviours are common to all companies and job roles. They can therefore be compared regardless of team or industry.
Aprais has assigned behavioural traits to each core question in the Aprais database, then analysed the database to determine the behavioural traits that impact the effectiveness of the client-agency relationship. From this exercise Aprais was able to define seven core behaviours namely, Trust, Functional skills, Resilience, Communication, Goals, Challenge and Accountabilty.
in 2022, Trust remained the highest-ranked behaviour for both clients and agencies.
In the context of client-agency relationships, Trust is defined as:
“The team is trusted to deliver and behaves with integrity”
How behaviours have changed over the past year
The chart above is based on scores given by the marketer of the agency partner. For agency scores of marketers, Trust also retains its top position. Click here to see the comparable chart showing agency score of clients.
Without trust, business relationships cannot hope to flourish. Successful business relationships are the result of a multitude of factors, but trust remains the universal ingredient.
Challenge too is a vital attribute of successful relationships but unlike Trust, it remained relatively static in 2022 with little to no improvement in scores for both clients and agencies.
Our data consistently shows that the best business relationships are characterised by a willingness to challenge the status quo and the poorest-performing, by a lack of challenge. This makes Challenge a key area for clients and agencies alike to focus on in 2023.