The Monthly Client Report - a goldmine and/or money-pit.

There aren't many things that cost me as much money, and made me as much money in my agency as the monthly client report.

Confused?

Well, if you run a service business then you'll be used to the fact that you need to send your clients regular updates about all the brilliant, super-valuable work that you're doing for them.

Usually this happens every month, but on occasions it might be weekly or quarterly.

But it's your opportunity as a supplier to big yourself up. To justify the juicy retainer you're charging. To make sure that contract is safe.

In reality, the reports are usually left until the last minute, and are just a dump of data that the client could have just downloaded themselves, without any real value or insights.

Sound familiar? Be honest....

Well, my agency was a perfect example of this. Our client reporting was just a tick box exercise. Page after page of graphs and reports. Quantity over quality.

I knew it was bad, but I had bigger fires to fight. We were growing so quickly that we had all sorts of growing pains to address, as well as signing more clients of course. But it wasn't until we started tracking the time our client teams spent on specific tasks and clients that I realised it was actually the biggest fire we had to tackle.

It turns out that not only were the reports rubbish, but they were taking almost 25% of our total client team hours. They were costing us a fortune, and really delivering nothing for us, or the clients in return.

So out came the whiteboard and it was time for a solution.

Monthly Report --> Monthly Pitch

The first thing we changed was our mindset about what these reports should be. We would spend hours working on a pitch to win a new client, but we had an opportunity to pitch to 100 clients every month by making our existing client reports better.

By thinking of the document as a commercial tool rather than a pointless time drain, we were able to dedicate the time and resource it deserved to turn it around.

Tell a story

Any data or charts that didn't tell a story were dropped.

No data for the sake of data. Just actionable insights. Things that had gone badly and what we were going to do about it. Things that were going well and how we were going to double down on it. Reporting on performance against the long term strategy, rather than the month ahead (or even worse, behind).

Consider WoW, MoM, YoY comparisons

It brought me out in cold sweats the first time I saw a client report that we'd sent that showed weekly sales were down 74% versus the previous week. With no commentary. No explanation. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

How could we send data that made it look like we'd done a terrible job and not offer any detail of why or how. The reality was that it was the last week of December, so it was showing the obvious sales decline vs last minute Christmas shopping the previous week. Of course the sales will be down week on week, but to someone that just sees the report without the context, it could really damage our reputation.

Aggregated data

The best thing we introduced to our monthly reports was aggregated client data. The big advantage that agencies have over brands is the wider view of the market.

By aggregating the client data, we were able to show clients how their own performance compared to the market. It made the report instantly more valuable and made us more sticky as an agency. The clients started to rely on the data for their internal reporting.

But it also allowed us to tell a positive story, whatever the performance of the client.

If our client's sales were down we could often show that the overall market was also down. Or we could show that other brands had increased ad spend which led to stronger sales. 90% of the time there was a positive spin we could put on most results!

Missed opportunities

We turned the reports into a monthly pitch by adding a slide at the start that showed missed opportunities and additional growth opportunities.

So we would report on the activities we were already doing, but also show ways that the client could push for more sales. Maybe it was a new region they had an opportunity in. Or maybe additional sales available if they increased ad budgets.

In general, clients want to be pushed and challenged by their agencies. Not just have someone doing what's asked, but someone constantly presenting opportunities to do better and better.

The missed opportunities page of the report was basically a monthly upsell pitch, and it worked!