The One-Pagers That Lost Us a Client

Author: Caroline Petersen | Editor: Steve Korver | Imagery: Anastasiia Hriaznova

Reading time:  6 min

Caroline Petersen founded Gallery Design Studio in 2015. Since then, she and her team have helped B2B technology companies turn their complex offerings into clear visual go-to-market content that buyers can quickly understand. She has been on both sides of the relationship described here – commissioning work from vendors and delivering it. More about Caroline.

A client's small requests kept piling up, and a set of technical sales one-pagers got buried among them. They took three months to ship, and the delay cost us the client. Here's what the queue looked like from our side, and what it says about yours.

A client asked us for something small. We said yes. Then they asked for something else, and we said yes to that too. More requests came in, and we kept saying yes, because that’s what a good partner does.

Somewhere in that pile was a set of technical sales one-pagers. Six months down the line, they'd been in the queue for three months.

The work wasn’t hard. The one-pagers had gone through several rounds of feedback and were nearly done. But a set of sales one-pagers should never take three months, no matter how many reasonable decisions got it there.

So we looked at everything else in the queue. We had over 20 projects open for that one client, coming from five stakeholders, all at different stages. Some had barely started. Others sat idle between feedback rounds, waiting on replies that hadn’t come. Nothing was stuck. Everything was waiting behind something else that was also waiting.

We lost that client. Three months on a set of one-pagers was more than the relationship could take.

I’ve come to think that too much work in progress is the most common reason our work runs late, and the hardest thing to see from the inside.

You’re one of the five stakeholders

If you run a marketing team, you’ve probably been on the other side of this. You’re one of the five stakeholders. Sales wants a one-pager, product wants a launch deck by Friday, the CEO wants something for the board, and each request goes to your team or your agency with a deadline attached.

From where you sit, you asked for one thing and it’s late. From where we sat, it was one of 20, and each of them was someone’s reasonable request.

Saying yes to everything breaks promises you’ve already made

Clients come to a studio like GDS to hand off creative production. That’s the premise of the business, so saying no can feel like working against the reason we exist.

I now think it’s the reverse. Declining the tenth request is what lets us deliver the nine we’ve already promised.

Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to say. In Making Work Visible, Dominica DeGrandis gives four reasons people take on more than they can finish, and none of them is unique to agencies:

• We fear humiliation. Pushing back on a client or a boss feels risky, even when it’s the right call.
• We like new and shiny. A fresh request is more fun than finishing something already underway.
• We underestimate the ask. “A couple of hours” turns into days once the work starts.
• We want to be liked. Yes feels helpful. No feels like the opposite, even when it isn’t.

More work in progress means everything takes longer

DeGrandis lists too much work in progress as the first of her five thieves of time. “We intuitively knew we had too many projects in flight, but it was hard to see until we measured the actual time that it took to get work done, at which point it became obvious the work spent more time in wait states than in work states,” she writes.

The math behind this is old. Little’s Law, published by operations researcher John Little in 1961, shows that the average time a piece of work spends in a system equals the amount of work in progress divided by the rate at which work gets finished. If your team finishes the same amount each week, doubling what’s open doubles how long everything takes.

Then there’s the cost of switching between projects. In Quality Software Management  (1992), Gerald Weinberg estimated that someone juggling two projects loses about 20% of their time to context switching, and someone juggling five loses about 75%. He offered those as rules of thumb, not measurements. Even if they’re high, a small team spread across 20 projects pays a real share of that cost.

The one-pagers took three months because they were competing with 20 other projects.

What we changed after losing the account

We cap what’s open. We limit the number of projects in progress at any one time. When we hit that limit, we either reprioritize the work or redirect the request to another team.

We also group related work into bundles so the heavy contextual thinking can be shared across assets, which speeds up production. For a campaign, we typically start with a flagship asset that requires the most creative horsepower, then build the supporting assets from it. For example, a video might be the flagship, with the landing page and social content developed around it.

Every project lives in one place. A single tracking system, visible to the whole team, replaces the mix of email threads, Slack messages, and someone’s memory.

We say no, or “yes, but.” Sometimes that means moving an active project to the back burner with the client’s knowledge. Sometimes it means reassigning it so it keeps moving. Either way, when a deadline changes, the client hears it from us first.

Whoever does the work owns the follow-up. Getting feedback back on schedule is our job, not the client’s. If a project is waiting on a reply, we chase it, because idle time between feedback rounds still counts against the deadline.

The same moves work on your side of the table. Count everything you have open, with your own team and with every partner, including the requests sitting with you awaiting your feedback. Then count how much ships in a typical month; an average of the last three is more reliable than last month alone. Divide the first number by the second. That’s roughly how many months the average request takes from the day it arrives to the day it ships, and if new requests are coming in faster than work goes out, it’s an underestimate.

The one-pagers shipped. The client didn’t stay. We said yes to every request on that account because that’s what a good partner does. I’d put it differently now: a good partner tells you what your yes is costing.

About Gallery Design Studio

Gallery Design Studio is a go-to-market creative partner for high-growth B2B technology companies. We work with a select number of companies to plan, structure, and produce the strategic visual content that moves complex deals forward. By invitation only. gallerydesignstudio.com