And Why You Must Build CYA Into Everything You Do
Selling search software directly to brands is one thing. Selling it through agencies is something entirely different. I wrote this from a series of emails I sent to industry fronds that were trying to get large agency groups and holding companies to offer their software to their clients.
Agencies introduce layers of politics, ambiguity, unrealistic expectations, and communication filters that you must understand to avoid scope blow-ups, misalignment, or being blamed for problems you didn’t create.
These challenges aren’t hypothetical. They’re the reason we ultimately had to build CYA (Cover Your Assets) protocols directly into Hreflang Builder — a story I’ve detailed separately because the lessons were painful, expensive, and utterly avoidable with the proper foresight.
This article is the strategic version of those lessons — the patterns, incentives, and structural realities that make selling software to agencies uniquely hard.
1. You Serve the Agency Relationship, Not the End Client
This is often the most significant misunderstanding and mistake of software companies. Unless pre-negotiated, you don’t get direct client access. Everything flows through the agency:
- Requirements
- Feedback
- Data
- Scope
- Decisions
This means your onboarding, documentation, and product UX must be airtight. If anything is unclear, you won’t be in the room to correct it. If you need access to analytics or code to be added to their website, this needs to be communicated and ensure that the agency can get that access.
This is exactly the dynamic that forced us to build detailed data validation and dependency logging into Hreflang Builder — because agencies would hand us broken sitemaps or missing URLs, then assume the software had failed.
2. Agencies Avoid Telling Clients Bad News
Agencies hesitate to admit:
- They missed issues in audits
- They overlooked errors
- They never implemented fixes
- Their data is incomplete
- Their workflows are broken
So when your system surfaces problems, it creates friction.
Sometimes they appreciate it; often, they wish you hadn’t found it; and most typically, they force you to work around or accommodate the challenge.
This is a core theme in the CYA Builder article: vendors get blamed for upstream failures the agency doesn’t want to own.
3. Pricing Is Political, Not Rational
Agencies operate on:
- fixed-margin project budgets
- aggressive procurement policies
- expectations of discounts
- mark-up opportunities
- quarterly P&L constraints
Your pricing must give them room to package your product into their offering — without creating misaligned expectations about what you are responsible for.
If you don’t define roles clearly, the agency will assume ownership only of the upsell, not of the implementation.
4. Agencies Think in Projects, Not Platforms
SaaS wins with ongoing usage and long-term adoption; however, agencies operate on:
- billable hours
- deadlines
- sprint calendars
- “complete this by Q3”
If your product requires continuous inputs, recurring data imports, or long-term governance, you must map to their workflow — not the other way around.
This is another area where CYA protocols matter: recurring dependencies must be made explicit, validated, and logged so the failure source is traceable.
Many agencies will insert your solution as a quarterly project. This often happened with Hreflang Builder, where it is an ongoing management application, but they would try to finish it as a project sprint in the first few weeks or months, and then it was done. Despite knowing how it works, their sales teams would not integrate any maintenance or often failed to account for any source file or alternate mapping challenges.
5. No Minimum Commitment = No Incentive to Sell You
Unless they’ve committed to volume or minimum spend, agencies rarely push your product.
Why?
- It doesn’t help them hit revenue targets
- There’s no forced bundling
- They don’t earn a recurring margin
- It’s easier to bill hours than sell tools
Preferred vendor status + volume tiers change everything. If you can get a commitment for multiple client installs or a specific billing threshold, you should negotiate it. Then, and only then, is there an incentive to sell. Nearly every agency I worked with would say they would offer to every client, and to be fair, many did, but getting it sold in was a different story. For every dollar of your solution, they sell, that is one less dollar they can count as revenue.
6. You Must Speak in Their Voice (and Stay in Your Lane)
When working through an agency, you now need to coordinate with:
- their support team
- their account services team
- their vertical specialists
- possibly an offshore delivery team
Your reporting must align with their format.
Your messaging must not imply you’re the expert instead of them.
Your team must not upsell or “educate” the client too aggressively.
If you bypass the agency — even accidentally — you lose the relationship.
7. Internal Agency Teams Fear Cannibalization
Nearly every team from SEO teams, content teams, analytics pods, vertical solution leads — many see your product as a threat:
- Automation replaces their billables
- Diagnostics expose missed work
- Workflows show inefficiencies
- Your recommendations override their roadmap
- Your revenue is a loss in billable revenue for them
To survive in this model, your positioning must be:
We amplify your work, not replace it.
We make you look better, not smaller.
This was a central lesson baked into Hreflang Builder: the software had to make agencies more accurate and more efficient, not obsolete. Even with a strong value proposition, many will view you as a threat to billable hours. You may feel that doing 100 hours of manual effort in 2 is a great deal, the team manager will view that as a loss of 100 billable hours. Yes, those hours could be spent more efficiently on higher-margin work, but is this not how they are trained to think?
8. Agencies Sell the Dream… and You Inherit the Promise
To win pitches, agencies often:
- Oversell what your product can do
- Package features you don’t have
- Guarantee outcomes you can’t control
- Commit to tasks they won’t actually execute
This creates a dangerous gap between:
Expectation → Reality → Accountability
CYA protocols exist to protect you from this gap:
- system-level validation
- input verification
- logging upstream failures
- dashboards that show exactly where the breakdown occurred
These aren’t software features — they’re survival features.
9. Agencies Want Tools, But Don’t Want to Integrate Them
They love to buy and license tools.
They don’t love:
- integration
- workflow change
- governance
- long-term adoption
- documentation
Most tools die because they require more than “login and go.”
Your product must deliver value with minimal change-management friction.
This was one of the root reasons Hreflang Builder needed full error-proofing: agencies rarely maintain long-term governance unless forced.
10. Staff Rotation Constantly Resets the Relationship
Agency account managers and direct implementation team members cycle frequently:
- turnover
- promotions
- team reshuffling
- loss of institutional memory
Every rotation means:
- retraining
- re-explaining
- re-aligning scope
- recovering lost context
If your product relies on consistent data inputs, you need built-in guardrails to prevent silent drift — another core CYA lesson. We created video training modules as well as checklists for agency teams to get them up to speed.
11. Access to Client Systems Is Never Guaranteed
You may never get access to:
- Search Console
- Analytics
- CMS
- CDN
- Tag Managers
Or you get partial access.
Or temporary access.
Or the wrong access.
Or access granted only through a subcontractor.
Your product must be able to:
- operate on limited data
- offer verification alternatives
- create audit trails
- handle cross-domain complexities
In a decentralized enterprise, this alone can be the difference between success and churn. This resulted in several new features for Hreflang Builder, making it a much stronger solution. Because of limited access, we had to accommodate cross-domain hosting and multiple URL sources, which significantly expanded the feature set. So what seemed like a significant challenge resulted in more robust features.
12. Agencies Want Features That Solve Their Problems, Not Necessarily the Client’s
Their biggest internal pain points are:
- reporting
- justification
- value demonstration
- pitch support
- quarterly business reviews
So you’ll receive roadmap pressure to build features that help them prove effort, not necessarily improve outcomes.
Balancing these two constituencies is an art in itself.
Final Thoughts
Selling software to agencies is a massive opportunity only if you understand how agencies think, how they sell, and what they fear.
If you don’t adapt to those dynamics — with product design, onboarding structure, pricing strategy, and CYA protocols — you will:
- be blamed for things you didn’t do,
- inherit promises you never made,
- become the bottleneck for problems you didn’t create, and
- lose renewals despite strong product performance.
If you do adapt, you become a force multiplier inside their ecosystem — the tool that makes them faster, smarter, more accurate, and more profitable.
That is how you win agencies.
And that is how you keep them.
