Playbook, marketing agency
What happens when a client wants to stop working with the agency
The end of an agency engagement is decided by clauses nobody read at the start: how much notice, what happens to work in progress, who owns the assets, who holds the ad accounts and the analytics properties. Those answers are fixed and they are in the contract, so the assistant can give them. What it must not do is process the cancellation, negotiate the notice, or treat a message that sounds like frustration as an instruction to end the relationship.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for cancellations holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- What leaves with the client is the real question, and it is about ownership of assets and accounts rather than about a refund.
- Handing back advertising accounts and analytics properties is an access transfer rather than a delivery, and if it is done badly the client loses history they cannot rebuild.
- Notice on a retainer usually means one or more further billed months, which clients discover at the worst possible moment and read as a penalty.
- A cancellation message on an agency site is very often a symptom of something fixable, so treating it purely as an administrative request loses the account for no reason.
How it arrives
- how much notice do we have to give
- what happens to the work in progress if we stop
- who owns the assets when we stop working together
- do we keep the ad accounts and the analytics
- can we pause the retainer instead of cancelling
- is there anything to pay after the notice period
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Notice terms for each engagement model | How much notice, when it can be served, whether it runs to a month end, and what is billed during it. This is the clause clients dispute, and the version they were told first is the version they will hold you to. |
|---|---|
| What happens to work in progress on termination | Whether partially completed work is delivered, whether it is billed, and in what state it is handed over. Half finished work is where these conversations turn adversarial and it is entirely specifiable in advance. |
| Asset and account handover | Who owns the deliverables, who holds the advertising accounts and analytics properties, how access is transferred and over what period. This is the part with lasting consequences for the client, and the part they know least about. |
| Whether pausing is possible, and on what terms | If you offer a pause, say how long, how often and what it costs. A meaningful share of cancellation enquiries are really about a temporary budget problem, and an answer here saves accounts that would otherwise leave. |
The reply
Notice on a retainer is the period set out in your agreement and it is billed as normal during that time, so it is worth checking the date it runs from. Work in progress is handed over in the state it has reached, and the ownership position for assets, ad accounts and analytics properties is in the same terms document. If it is a budget question rather than a decision, we do have a pause arrangement worth asking about. Nothing is cancelled by this message, so leave your name and email and your account lead will call you.
It gives the three answers a leaving client needs before anything else, because withholding them reads as an attempt to make leaving difficult. Raising the pause is commercially sensible without being a sales pitch, since it is offered as a question rather than as an objection. The final sentence exists because a client who believes they have cancelled in a chat will stop engaging, and that is a worse outcome than either party wanted.
Where it stops
The trigger. The client states an intention to end the engagement, asks about their own notice date, or raises dissatisfaction alongside the question.
Nothing is cancelled by this conversation, and your notice date depends on your own agreement rather than anything I can read. Leave your name and email and your account lead will call you today to go through it properly.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never treat a message in the chat as notice to terminate.
- Never state a client's own notice date or final billing position.
- Never offer to waive notice, discount the final month or extend a pause.
- Never promise that accounts or assets will be transferred by a particular date.
Questions
- Should it answer cancellation questions at all, given the commercial risk?
- Yes, because the alternative is worse. A client who cannot find the notice terms concludes they are hidden, and that turns a routine ending into a dispute. Publishing them plainly and routing the conversation to the account lead is both fairer and more likely to save the account.
- Can it action a cancellation?
- No. It cannot write into any system and it should say so explicitly in the reply, because a client who thinks the chat cancelled the retainer will be surprised by the next invoice.
- What about the accounts and analytics handover?
- Explain the position from your terms and hand over for the mechanics. The transfer itself involves access somebody has to grant, and getting it wrong costs the client history they cannot get back, which is not a risk worth taking for the sake of a faster answer.
Keep reading
- Everything for a marketing agencyService definitions and engagement terms convert. A price quoted for work nobody has scoped is the trap on an agency site.
- Handling cancellations in generalCancellation content is hard to find on purpose. What it costs to answer plainly, how notice periods work, and what happens to data on the way out.
- The handover an agency actually wants to happenHere the handover is the product. A brief arriving in the chat is the signal, and a discovery call is what the assistant is trying to produce.
- A client has the invoice open and is asking about one linePass through spend, the hours allowance and the out of scope line. What a client is really disputing when they query an agency invoice.
- What happens between signing and the first campaign going liveAccess to the client's own accounts, the brand assets, the measurement check, and why month one produces less than month two.
Try it on your own material
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