I had an interesting discussion this week with a brilliant team leader at an advisory client about client value or the perception of all of the work being done. This was the actual response from a team leader:
This is now the third client for which we have received questions about what work we are actually doing on an ongoing basis. This makes me think the bigger issue may not necessarily be the amount of work we are doing, but whether we are effectively communicating the value and impact of that work to the client. We do quite a bit as part of our ongoing maintenance and optimization activities, but I’m not sure how much of that activity and its impact is visible to the client. I see a similar communication gap with other clients. Our expectation has been that the Customer Service team can use the information available in our activity tracker to communicate these activities and their value to the client on monthly calls. However, the questions we are receiving suggest that while we are doing the work and documenting it, the client may not have sufficient visibility into it. The team does a lot of work for our clients. Some of it is highly visible. Much of it isn’t. They document that work in activity trackers so the Client Success Manager knows what is happening, but the client may never see most of it.
I totally agree with the team leader and their team members that the client is not appreciating all their efforts. The common thread is “If the client could just see everything we’re doing for them, they would understand how hard we’re working.“
Maybe… But I think that is the wrong problem to solve. The goal isn’t to make the activity tracker more visible or let them know all of the tasks you’re fulfilling:
The goal is to make the value of the activity unmistakable.
There is an important difference.
Don’t Show Me How Busy You Were
An activity tracker might tell me that you completed 14 analyses, reviewed 30 pages, opened eight tickets, attended six meetings, made 12 recommendations, and spent hours working with another team to resolve a problem.
That’s useful operationally. But as the client, what am I supposed to do with that information? You did stuff for me.
Compare that with:
We identified three issues preventing your highest-value product pages from being properly discovered. Two have been resolved, and we’re working with the development team on the third. Those pages represent a significant portion of the organic opportunity we identified for this quarter.
Same work but offers a completely different perception of value.
One tells me what you did. The other tells me what is different because you did it.
That distinction matters more than we sometimes realize.
The CFO Test
I was explaining this to my son recently after the CFO of one of his clients questioned his billing. The question was essentially: What is he doing for us?
First, I told him it is never a good sign when the CFO is questioning your billing. It is less of a problem when whoever the CFO asked can articulate your business value immediately. The CFO is never asking how many things you did, but whether that expense was an efficient use of capital.
The demonstration of economic value (revenue or cost reduction) is not done via an activity tracker but through quantifiable outcomes.
He is responsible for X. That contributed to Y in sales, leads, pipeline, savings, or whatever economic outcome matters to the business.
Of course, that is easier said than done, especially in a large enterprise. The CFO isn’t reading the marketing team’s weekly reports or even looking at this rounding error in expenses. But in a small to mid-size company, where that line item may stand out, they care. The CFO won’t know how brilliant you are or the detailed analysis you completed Tuesday or the technical problem you spent three weeks helping another team resolve that identified a new opportunity or increased traffic by 10%.
The CFO doesn’t necessarily need to know what you do but the value they get for that expense.
Activity From Contribution Value to Perceived Value
This connects to several of my previous Epiphanies. In Epiphany 23, I wrote about why contribution value is more important than contract value. Completing everything specified in a statement of work may satisfy the contract, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the client believes you are making a meaningful contribution to their success.
In Epiphany 36: For Them, Not Just With Them, I explored another part of that relationship. Clients need to believe that we are genuinely working on their behalf rather than simply completing tasks alongside them. That means anticipating problems, challenging assumptions, finding opportunities, and sometimes doing things that aren’t neatly represented by a line item in a scope of work.
Then, in Epiphany 37: Why Contribution Value Is Invisible Until It’s Lost, I wrote about the strange problem that comes with doing those things consistently. The little contributions that make an engagement successful eventually become normal. People stop noticing them until the person or team providing them disappears and suddenly things don’t work quite as well.
This recent conversation made me think about the other side of that problem. Rather than waiting until our contribution disappears for people to recognize its value, how do we ensure they understand its outcome while we are still delivering it?
I don’t think the answer is giving the client a longer activity report. The answer is making the outcome of the activity more visible.
They Need to See It, Feel It, and Believe It
There is a tendency in agencies and consulting organizations to demonstrate value by showing how busy we have been. We completed the audit, delivered the strategy, resolved the technical issues, built the campaign, attended the meetings, and fulfilled all our promises. When someone questions our value, our instinct is often to produce an even longer list of everything we have done.
The client is usually looking at a different scoreboard.
They hired us because they expected something to happen. Depending on the engagement, that might be more revenue, more leads, lower acquisition costs, greater visibility, reduced risk, faster implementation, or simply a better-performing organization. The work we do is the mechanism for producing those outcomes, but the work itself isn’t necessarily the outcome.
That doesn’t mean every activity needs to be tied directly to a revenue number. Some of the most valuable work we do prevents problems that never happen, reduces risk that is difficult to quantify, creates opportunities that will not materialize for months, or helps another team accomplish something faster. Trying to force a dollar value onto every activity would be just as misleading as reporting only the activities.
What matters is that the client can see the connection.
They should understand what we noticed, what we did about it, what changed as a result, and why that change matters to them. Sometimes they will see that in a report, sometimes through a conversation, and sometimes simply because the organization works better as a result of our involvement.
Over time, they should not merely know intellectually that we are doing work. They should see it, feel it, and believe it.
That is perceived value.
It is also why I think there is a difference between reporting value and creating organizational awareness of value. Your immediate client contact may understand exactly what you contribute, but that understanding becomes much more powerful when it travels beyond the people who attend your meetings. Their boss understands it. Sales sees the impact. Another department recognizes the improvement. When finance questions the expense, someone can explain the contribution without needing you in the room to defend it.
I explored the economic side of this in my Search Engine Journal article, From Line Item to Leverage: How Web Performance Impacts Shareholder Value. Ultimately, our work needs to connect to the economic outcomes the organization values. But before we can make that connection, the organization has to understand what changed as a result of our contribution.
That brings me back to my son’s conversation with the CFO.
Perhaps the best test of perceived value isn’t the activity report we send the client or even what they tell us during a quarterly review. It is what happens when someone elsewhere in the organization looks at our expense line and asks why they are paying us.
We aren’t in the room to explain it. We can’t pull up the activity tracker or walk them through everything we did during the last six months.
Someone else has to answer for us.
If their answer is that we helped solve a particular problem, created an opportunity, improved an important business outcome, prevented an expensive mistake, or simply made the organization better at something it needs to do, then our contribution has become part of how the organization understands its own success.
The ultimate test of perceived value isn’t what your client says about you when you’re in the room. It’s how they answer when their CFO asks what they’re paying you for when you’re not.
If answering that question requires pulling out an activity tracker, perhaps we haven’t made the outcome of our work visible enough.
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.
