The renewal email is the last thing to happen

I ran client services at an agency in Charlotte for eleven years, and in that time I lost a $14,000-a-month retainer by email. Two paragraphs, sent on a Tuesday, thanking us for the work. I remember reading it twice to find the part where they explained why, and there wasn’t one.

What I understand now, and didn’t then, is that the email was not the decision. It was the paperwork. The decision had been made about five weeks earlier, in a meeting I was not in, and for the five weeks in between the client had been telling us in every way except words.

What five weeks of telling us looked like

When I went back through our own records afterward, it was all there. None of it was dramatic, which is exactly why nobody saw it.

• Hours fell. We had sold them 60 hours a month. In the last two months we logged 41 and then 37, because they had stopped sending us things to do.
• Replies slowed. Their marketing director used to answer the same afternoon. By the end it was taking her three days, and twice the answer came from someone junior.
• The standing call moved. Our Thursday check-in was pushed twice in one month and then quietly became “let’s do it by email this time.”
• An invoice was late. A client who had paid within ten days for three years paid one at day twenty-six.

Any one of those is a busy month. All four together, in order, is a client who has already started talking to someone else.

Why the account team does not see it

It is tempting to say a good account lead would have noticed, and I said exactly that to myself for a long time. But look at where each of those facts lived. The hours were in the time tracker, which the account lead opened on the last day of the month to approve timesheets. The reply times were not written down anywhere. The moved calls were in a calendar. The late invoice was in the bookkeeper’s inbox.

Nobody at the agency was looking at all four at once, because nobody’s job was to. Each person saw one small thing that was easy to explain. The account lead was also, reasonably, busy with the clients who were loud.

The clients who leave are rarely the ones who complain. Complaining is a sign someone still expects you to fix it.

Six weeks is enough

The useful thing about all this is the timing. Across the 3,140 retainers Keepwell watches, the median warning before a renewal date is 38 days. That is not a long time, but it is enough for one honest conversation, and one honest conversation is usually what was missing.

Of the retainers that were flagged and then got a check-in, 91.4% renewed. Not because the call was clever. Because the agency asked “is four videos a month still the right number?” while the answer could still change the scope, instead of finding out in a Tuesday email that it had been the wrong number since July.

What to do on Monday

You do not need software to start. Pick the three retainers renewing soonest and, for each one, write down four things: hours logged against hours sold for the last three weeks, how long the client’s last five replies took, whether the last two standing calls happened, and when the last invoice was paid.

If two of the four have moved, book a call this week. Not a status update. A conversation that begins with what you have noticed and ends with a question. We wrote up how to run that call, and it takes thirty minutes.

The renewal email will still arrive. The difference is that you will already know what it says.