Two Human Shifts Every Agency Needs
It’s tough out there right now. And I don’t just mean the news, or the state of the economy.
Many agencies, despite long partnerships, amazing client lists and shining credentials, are struggling. Badly. Many employees are right there with them, or being laid off. And brands aren’t faring much better, with customers feeling the pinch and prices rising all around.
It means we’re navigating a newly fragmented B2B landscape. A harder, more complex one, where clients bring capabilities in-house, giants merge, and even the agencies who are succeeding feel the strain of keeping their edge.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. I want to talk about two areas where I see real opportunity. Neither involves AI, for the record. Both are built on very human principles about relationships, conversations, and people-first ways of doing business.
The Empathy Gap and Bigger Context
Getting your head down and delivering on what’s asked of you is one thing. But being smart enough to recognise the nuance in the complexity, the human need or unsaid requirements, to question or interrogate the ask and see the bigger picture – that’s where the magic can happen.
The trouble is, tech and AI can get in the way of that human connection. It’s shockingly easy to overlook the person on the other end of the screen. Or assume you know their business inside out because your favourite AI tool spat out a summary of what’s happening in their industry.
It’s no longer enough to turn up with a great idea and no understanding of how your client’s business actually works. If you don’t know how a 2% shift in raw material costs ripples through a supply chain, or how a “minor” packaging tweak can derail a warehouse’s automated sorting system, you’re not a partner – you’re a vendor. And vendors are much more easily cut when the CFO starts looking for savings.
Even worse – when you lack that granular understanding of the red tape, the margins, and the internal politics, you are not providing a solution. You’re creating another problem for the client’s desk.
Truly understanding your client’s world means you can actually help, rather than just “deliver”. And that insight is often found in the unglamorous spaces, the chance encounters, subtle observations or off-the-record comments snatched in-between work talk and day-to-day business.
Famously, the Cadbury Flake was “accidentally” invented on the factory floor when an employee noticed excess chocolate falling off the line in delicate, folded ripples. Their curiosity and presence — being physically there, paying attention to what looked like waste — led to a billion-pound product. That didn’t come from a creative brief. It came from a chance observation.
It’s in these moments of presence, curiosity and listening that the real opportunities show up. It’s easy to hear what a client tells you, or respond to a line in the brief. Getting into their world and digging a bit deeper is what lets you see what they’ve missed.
Siloed Teams and Disjointed Journeys
Agencies have long been defined by the brilliance of their people — the collective spark of specialists coming together to solve messy problems. But right now, agency leaders are under constant pressure to innovate, scale, adapt, and add new capabilities to keep up and stay relevant.
The problem is, in the rush to expand and stand out, they can end up doing the opposite. Move too fast without bringing your people with you, and you risk breaking the very thing clients value so highly – their experience of working with you.
There are two traps agencies fall into.
- Head-down tunnel vision: When client-facing teams are buried in delivery deadlines, they lose the room to zoom out. Without the time, tools or permission to look at the bigger picture, work turns transactional. Teams retreat into their immediate disciplines, creating accidental silos and making the client’s experience feel disjointed.
- The “go sell it” mindset: Agencies launch new services and expect teams to champion them automatically. Without real context, tools or training, people feel out of their depth. So they default to what’s safe, and miss the obvious opportunities to help.
The real opportunity is to unite and align your team. Give them the tools and the space to zoom out, and something shifts. They stop working in isolation. They start understanding the full breadth of what the agency can actually do. And they gain the confidence to bring that to their clients. They stop pitching at clients and start solving with them.
At True & North, that’s our whole mission: aligning client-facing teams, giving them the confidence and skills to see the bigger picture, and building a genuinely shared, client-first mentality.
Because if you want to move from disposable vendor to irreplaceable partner, the strategy is remarkably simple: get closer to your client’s real world, and get your own team on the same page.
Where to start
We run free, virtual Power Hours on exactly this kind of thing every few months — get in touch if you’d like to know when the next one lands.