6 Signs Your Agency Is About To Fire You As A Client

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. By 2027, 70 % of software interactions won't have a UI at all. The button is dead. So this is the whole concept here, Neil, is around designing for agents.

0:38Eric Siu:Okay. So there's this great post from this guy, Teddy Riker. And so if you think about this, there's more and more agents that are popping up. You think about Supabase, the number of deployments that are popping up, right? That's going parabolic right now. So Salesforce did an announcement. They're like, what are they saying? oh, we're basically going to get, they're going to get rid of the UI. Like it's, they're not going to get rid of it more so, but they're, they're talking about headless 360. It's a sweeping initiative that exposes every capability in its platform as an API MCP tool or CLI command.

1:06Eric Siu:So AI agents can operate the entire system without ever operating the browser, right? Even what, what I'm doing right now with the, the AI API for SEO thing. I think even what you're doing with your software too. So I think humans are still going to need to operate a UI. Like you and I are going to need to look at the UI. We still want to point and click, but I think it's going to be 80-20. So 80 % is going to be more focused on the agent. 20 % is still humans looking at UIs that are still, maybe these UIs are managing the agents and it's reporting on how things are going over time. So what the interaction pattern was before Neil, over the last 20 years was you have a user, you have an interface, then you have a database.

1:43Eric Siu:Now it's, you have a user and they have a user's agent, so it could be using Cloud or Hermes or OpenClaw, then you have a database, right? That's where it's all going. And the key thing is, I'm not going to go through this entire article, but you have to think about whatever it is that you're building, you have to design for agents. So when we're building new websites, what are the.md files across the entire thing? Cloudflare now has a thing where it's, is your site agent ready or is it agentready.com? It'll grade your site. Their site is not even agent ready if you put their site in there. Okay.

2:12Neil Patel:But with this, I think there's a few things that you guys should keep in mind. One, the status for software interactions. It's not necessarily for your website. Two, it doesn't mean that you can get rid of these buttons altogether because there are still some human use cases. It's more so the interactions will mainly be happening by agents, so the agents won't have to click on the buttons at all, but you still need the buttons there for when a human interacts. Now that may change by 2030 or sometime by then, because most things may be done by agents, but this is talking about by 2027. And remember, a lot of companies and humans don't adapt as fast as technology is.

2:51Eric Siu:Yep. So I think, by the way, so Ramp, they launched their MCP. And we're just talking about one of the things you can do here in terms of designing for agents. Neil's opening his water, so that's the sound. So you wanna make sure that you build feedback loops. So when Ramp launched their MCP, they had a problem. observability so they can see all the tool call volume but they couldn't see the surrounding chat context right so when you're building these uh when you're designing for agents you want to make sure that there's some type of context or rationale on all these tool calls because then you can figure out what the problems are right your agents are going to run into a lot of these problems humans are going to call in a lot of these things you're going to need some type of feedback tool um and that way it's going to help your agents figure out what the problems are and so you can build on top of that right and then you can have this kind of self-improving uh loop and so i would highly recommend reading this it's called designing for agents it's on x honestly a lot of the best ai content right now is on x people are sharing the most cutting edge things so i'd highly recommend that you go there um that's what i would say it is and i don't think by 2027 all this stuff is the ui is going to be dead um i think it's going to again i think it's gonna be an 80 20 thing it's

3:56Neil Patel:gonna flip so and for everyone who's listening i know a lot of you guys work with agencies so we thought it'd be fun to do an episode called there are six signs your agency is about to fire you as a client. Most agencies hide them. Here they are. Okay.

4:10Eric Siu:So number one, when they start to ask about getting all their data, right? Hey, can we get all our data? Can we have all the reports? No, this is about your agency firing you. Oh, your agency. Okay. Okay. All right. You start first.

4:25Neil Patel:I need to think about this one. Number one, if you start yelling and being mean to people in an organization and they're not as responsive to a hostile quote-unquote tone of voice we've seen that and eventually we fire we then go look at the contracts and stuff and we terminate people

4:45Eric Siu:who are rude number two i would say is if you are non-communicative meaning that you expect the world but then you're not communicating because it's a two-way street it's a relationship and if you want the agency to help you grow, you have to help the agency help you.

5:01Neil Patel:Yes. Number three, you're missing deadlines. So an agency needs you to succeed, not just on the communication end, but sometimes you are assigned tasks and you have to complete those tasks. If you're not helping the agency help you, you will struggle. An agency, no matter how good they are, will require some information and stuff from your staff and your team. It could be minimal, but if you never provide them and nothing ever happens it's a lose-lose scenario and here's why a you're not going to get the results and you're going to be pissed off b it's not going to be fun for them to work on your project because internally they're going to be like well the client's not going to ever give us what we need so we're not going to be able to execute on anything there's going to be no results what's the point of even doing this people want to enjoy what they're working on and more importantly they want to see progress when they see progress individuals feel more fulfilled both on the company level and on an agency level.

5:57Neil Patel:So you need to make sure that you're completing your task.

5:59Eric Siu:Number four, you're unreasonable with your expectations. So I know someone, the company he works at right now, they are working, let's just say it's a SaaS company. Their CEO all the time is talking about how fast Anthropic is growing. Okay. Cream of the crop, totally different businesses, but unreasonable expectations, right? That happens for agencies too.

6:19Neil Patel:So he wants similar type of growth to Anthropic?

6:22Eric Siu:Yeah, it's like, how is Anthropic growing so quickly? Why are we not growing as fast as Anthropic, right?

6:26Neil Patel:Is this a startup or a scaled business? It's a scaled business, couple hundred million a year. Yeah, yeah.

6:32Eric Siu:So unreasonable expectations will, to Neil's point, they'll cause the agency to burn out and they don't want their people to burn out because their people are their business. Honestly, people are becoming even more important now.

6:43Neil Patel:Yeah, dude, people are becoming really, really important. And if you just have unreasonable expectations, it's just not going to end up working. Number five, and this is one of the most comical ones that I've dealt with, and I deal with this multiple times a year, is when you're asking an agency to do something that is against your data. So if your data says, this is what's working and they're showing you, and a lot of times customers argue with agencies saying, no, I want you to do it this way and you believe it's a better way. then why are you really paying an agency to help you out if you already know what's better?

7:24Neil Patel:And I'm not saying you're wrong, but you hire the agency because of their expertise or hopefully you did. And typically they should be specializing in whatever area that you're asking for help. So if you're telling them how to do the job they specialize in because you feel you know it better, they're probably going to end up terminating you. It's just a question of one.

7:44Eric Siu:Number six, you ask for more work all the time, but you don't want to pay more. So you're constantly asking for more. It's known as scope creep. And so what happens is you expect more communication. You want the world. But at the same time, when the agency is like, hey, this is going to cost us more in terms of times and materials, but then you don't feel like paying it, that's going to cause an issue as well. because the agency does have other options for the most part. And if they do have other clients that are willing to pay it for longer terms as well, and it's a better deal for them, they're going to take that.

8:18Eric Siu:Totally agree. All right. So next one. So basically, Anthropic is paying 400 grand a year for an events manager, not an engineer, an events manager. So this is my good buddy, Mark Andreessen, retweeted this. So think about it this way, okay? so you have an events lead brand i'm pulling this up right now okay so anthropics missions create self safe reliable ai annual compensation for this role is listed below um so basically they're looking for someone to own the execution of brand experiences that translate anthropics values into physical moments so mark andreason says when one thing becomes abundant and cheap another thing becomes scarce and valuable so what is becoming more abundant and cheap now code okay i would say intelligence is becoming more abundant engineering engineer yeah like

9:05Neil Patel:And actual engineers that you're hiring with an organization. Even though we need more engineers now.

9:10Eric Siu:No, no, we need more good engineers.

9:12Neil Patel:More good engineers, yeah.

9:12Eric Siu:Everything is we need more, but we need good. Yes. We need more good. That's what we need. That's good. So, but another thing becomes scarce and valuable. So what's more scarce and valuable now? Events, in-person stuff. That's all the stuff that like, because all the online stuff is just, by the way, I do tell my team now, the only thing I'm concerned about with the people who are really good now is actually the burnout piece. So to your point, they do definitely feel momentum, but even for me, like sometimes I just, I gotta slow it down a little bit, right? So anyway, all that to say is I think this makes sense.

9:42Eric Siu:If they find a really good events team and they're able to put on amazing events, that's good for them because those are all marketable moments as well. And those are also good to be posted to social too. Dude, I totally agree with you. Quick break for agency owners. You know the content bottleneck. Clients want more content, but writers are more expensive. Freelancers are inconsistent and you can't scale. ClickFlow fixes that. It creates production-grade content your clients will actually approve. Not generic AI slot. It's content that actually matches their voice. One agency using it reported saving 90 hours a month per person.

10:14Eric Siu:That's margin back in your pocket. Plus, it handles internal linking and content audits, which most agencies charge extra for. There's a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com.

10:24Neil Patel:Your ops team will thank you. Back to the show. Speaking of events, you want to do an old marketing school classic? Yeah. let's do six ways Eric and I are leveraging in-person events in 2026. All right. So number one, when I go to conferences, I'm setting up in-person events now at conferences. So a lot of times where I'm going to speak, let's say it's in Brazil or Hong Kong or UK or whatever it may be, I'll work with the organizer to actually have a private meeting room within their event venue. And they invite the attendees, specific ones that we select, and we'll do a free lunch. And during that lunch, we'll do presentation and networking.

11:18Neil Patel:And that's actually been working out really well for us.

11:21Eric Siu:That's good. What I've always done with events is I like to throw dinners around them. I think Niels is, I'll say, Niels actually talked about this on this podcast. So use the YouTube API, use it for marketing school. He's given out his entire flow for this. But he throws events that are tied to people who actually are people that are part of his ICP. They have some power in the organization as well. And it's pretty like, if it's a larger company, they're likely to move around. They'll probably think about him in the future. So even having that one touch point, it goes very far. I would just say that what's always worked well for me for the events that I typically am speaking at or the ones I'm doing.

11:59Eric Siu:I always try to throw a dinner around them. Now, the thing is, you want to make sure that the dinner you're throwing, ideally, is people that are in your ICP. Don't just throw it with a bunch of speakers, which is what I used to do in the past. That's fun, but it's not going to drive the best ROI for you. Dude, totally.

12:14Neil Patel:When you mentioned how I look at people who have power, Eric's speaking about decision authority, and he really nailed it when he talked about how we focus on executives because they're likely to also get other high-paying jobs at other companies so for example there was this lady who worked at oracle and one of their latin america regions she wanted to work with us they had an agency of record they gave the work to the agency of records so we didn't get it she moved to another company eventually this is over a many period year period like probably like five six years she went to another company eventually, wasn't able to get us in due to budgets.

12:55Neil Patel:And the third company she went to was Thomson Reuters. She was able to get us in. That's good. Right? All because she heard us ages ago and she was working at a company that she wanted to work with us, but wasn't able to. Was that your number three? No, no, no. That was still number, that was just reinforcing number one. Like people really forget the long game of building that brand with your ideal customer, because as they move around, if you do good work, they'll keep bringing you with them. Or if they like what you have to say, eventually they'll be able to test you out, just maybe not at the current company they're with.

13:27Eric Siu:Actually, that's very true. Steve Young's private equity firm reached out and then apparently the guy had been following both of us for many years. And he had actually invited both of us to speak at a private equity conference. I'm like, I didn't hear about this. Apparently you didn't either. But the whole idea is like they want to do something now and then he's so the whole idea is like you want to make sure that you're nurturing nurturing nurture and the good thing about creating content is it gets people to remember you over time it's getting these impressions right so you're actually on number

13:58Neil Patel:three now so go ahead uh number three so another thing that we're doing when we're doing these in-person events is setting up side events with platforms. So if I'm going to go speak in Brazil, there's a Google Brazil, right? There's a LinkedIn Brazil. We'll then say, hey, I'm in town. We would love to do it in a session event at your own corporation, call it LinkedIn or Google. Do you want to invite some of your big advertisers? We'll be there. We're going to show them how they They can even do get more benefit from their LinkedIn advertising or their Google advertising. So it benefits the platform.

14:39Neil Patel:They bring in some of their top advertisers within the region. We network and it gives us access to more potential customers.

14:46Eric Siu:So for us, typically also what we, when Neil and I, every year we speak at the HubSpot conference. And so what happens is we'll do a session with them and there's Q &A as well. What I would say is one year, I remember we did a separate session too. So it's almost like we're throwing side events for these things, right? And then HubSpot actually helped us with that. That side event that we did, I think we had 200 people show up to the room. That rated way higher than you and I doing the marketing school. And so that session rated a 4.97 and HubSpot's crowd is typically higher.

15:16Neil Patel:Wait, wait, wait, which session?

15:18Eric Siu:So we remember this was in Boston, the last summer in Boston. So last year we're in San Francisco, right? Remember the year before we're in Boston. And so we did our marketing school session, but then after that, we did a session just for marketing school fans to come in and 200 people came in and it was very interactive. and it's like, hey guys, get into groups itself. I was basically directing people, hey, get into groups, talk about the latest thing and we picked a champion at the end and they won like an iPad or something, right? Remember there's a Taiwanese person that walked up to you? Did they even win anything?

15:44Eric Siu:No, they didn't. We just said you get bragging rights, you're the champion. Yeah, we're like, yeah, right? But that scored 4.97 and we didn't have to, like that, when you foster a community like that, it connects people together. That's something we should continue to do but our talk that year, you know what it rated?