How Listening—and KPI Chaining—Become Your Competitive Advantage
One of the more revealing advisory calls I’ve had came from a client asking a simple but powerful question: “Why aren’t our clients renewing with us?” I did the craziest thing you could imagine, I asked them. The top responses from former clients? “They’re not meeting our needs,” and “We are not generating the business we expected.”
The firm was confused. “We delivered everything we promised in the contract,” they told me. And that was the problem.
This disconnect is at the heart of how most agencies and consultants define success. It also points to the absence of something essential: KPI chaining.
KPI chaining is the deliberate act of connecting your work—your KPIs—with the client’s broader business goals and KPIs. When every action maps to a meaningful outcome for the client, your value becomes obvious. When it doesn’t, you risk becoming a vendor delivering activity instead of impact. They focus on transactional value: “We did the audit, the keyword research, the tickets are in.” The problem is, while you may have executed everything in the contract, the client wasn’t buying activities. They were buying results. Their goals weren’t aligned with your delivery. And when contribution value—the measurable impact on their actual goals—is missing, they walk.
This tension, where agencies operate on different goals than clients, is an under-the-radar force in most relationships. I first explored its origins in “Understanding the Hidden Tension Between Clients and Marketing Agencies”, which lays the groundwork for why KPI chaining is critical in practice.
I explored this tension more broadly in Epiphany 6: Delivering Economic Value, where I shared an early lesson about understanding perceived value. But the reality is, even when both sides agree to the scope and cost, the gap often lies in how they define success.
I learned this lesson early in life. My father had a side business going to local farms using his welder to add thin strips of steel to plow blades or any other metal that was broken. One day, I asked him why farmers would pay him so much for what seemed like such a simple job. He said: “Because they know I’m saving them thousands by extending the life of their plows.” That’s contribution value. It’s not about the simplicity of the weld. It’s about what the weld makes possible.
In marketing, we often forget this. And nowhere is that clearer than in pitch rooms.
The Fortune 50 Pitch That Proved the Point
I was part of a major pitch shortly after our agency was acquired. A Fortune 50 brand was looking for a new Agency of Record. Their lead marketing executive made it crystal clear, way in advance of the meeting, that she needed a significant increase in advertising and marketing performance, and she outlined four KPIs— increased revenue, increased CRM leads, ROAS, and a reduction in expense-to-revenue ratios. She told us those were assigned by the C-Suite and non-negotiable, and wanted to know how we would help them achieve them.
The agency creative team put the KPIs in giant font on the board at the front of the room. Yet for the following six hours, speaker after speaker went up and delivered glossy capabilities decks, industry awards, ad reels, and generic platitudes. Not one tied the presentation back to the four metrics.
When my time came, I had 10 minutes left from a planned 30. I threw out the overview slides and focused on five things: the client’s stated goals, how search could contribute to each of them, proof that it was possible, what we would do, and what we needed from them.
When I finished, the SVP leaned forward and said, “At least someone here understands why we’re all in this room.”
We didn’t win the AOR, but we did win a direct Search engagement with that team, and they stayed with us for a decade.
This Is the Tension We Must Solve
This is where KPI chaining becomes not just helpful, but essential. KPI chaining is the practice of ensuring that every action, deliverable, and external partner directly supports a client’s measurable business objective—ideally one that rolls up to shareholder value. When done well, it creates clarity, accountability, and a clear line of sight between execution and impact.
Client-side marketing leaders are increasingly being held to KPIs that are tightly chained to shareholder value: revenue growth, lead conversion, marketing efficiency, and cost savings. These are the numbers that determine bonuses, headcount, and even career trajectories.
But agency teams—often unintentionally—optimize for an entirely different set of goals: client retention, profitable delivery, automation, junior staffing leverage, and internal margin. They sell what they can deliver efficiently, not necessarily what will move the client’s strategic needle.
That’s where friction comes in. If vendors are truly extensions of your team, then you must force KPI chaining. That means:
- Making sure every outsourced deliverable maps directly to an internal KPI
- Rejecting work that doesn’t tie to a business outcome
- Holding partners accountable not just for activity, but for contribution
This isn’t just about governance. It’s about alignment.
Why SEO Projects Fail Quietly
Nowhere is this misalignment more visible than in SEO. Most projects begin with a flurry of tactical work—audits, keyword research, content gap analyses. This activity consumes the first quarter’s budget, generates hundreds of technical tickets, and delivers exactly zero wins in the short term.
Meanwhile, the client still has KPIs to hit. Leads need to grow. Traffic needs to rise. Conversions need to be measurable. But IT teams are overwhelmed, seasonal code freezes are in place, and marketing leadership sees no movement.
The project gets labeled “underperforming” before it even gets a chance.
Delivering Early Wins as Contribution Proof
One of the best ways to buy trust—and time—is to deliver early proof of contribution value. That means identifying quick wins:
- High ranking queries with low clicks (worked better before zero-click), but you get the idea
- Optimize SERP snippets to improve clickthrough rates
- Swap weak landing pages with high-converting alternatives
In one case, we replaced a PDF that ranked for a major query with the appropriate product page. The result? $30K in immediate revenue and $10K in saved paid search costs in just one month. That single action bought us runway for the more methodical audit work.
This idea connects with Epiphany 8: Showing the Love, where I explained the power of early wins in building credibility and momentum.
Align with Their Workflows
You must also sync your recommendations with the client’s operational reality:
- Tie into existing sprints
- Match their prioritization logic
- Offer recommendations in bite-sized, clearly referenced formats
Your job isn’t to flood them with 300 SEO tickets. It’s to help them take meaningful action that helps them hit their numbers.
Final Thought: Contribution Is a Culture
Listening unlocks the opportunity to understand what matters to your client, but KPI chaining is how you ensure your actions align with those priorities over time. It’s the connective tissue between vision and execution.
Contribution value isn’t a feature of good agency work—it’s the foundation. You can’t tack it on after the fact. If every vendor, deliverable, and internal team isn’t part of a unified KPI chain, you’ll get activity without impact.
Force the chain. Because in the end, it’s not the deliverables that get renewed. It’s the results.
Explore More Epiphanies
This article is part of my ongoing series, My Digital Marketing Epiphanies – realizations, hard-earned lessons, and mental models shaped by decades in the field.
For more insights, visit the full archive here: My Digital Marketing Epiphanies.
