When we audit corporate-agency partnerships, we frequently ask marketing leaders to rate their satisfaction. Every so often, we get an answer wrapped in a shrug of resignation.
In the corporate world, an 85% sounds like a solid ‘B.’
In high school, it might have landed you on the honor roll.
But in the high-stakes, fast-moving arena of modern marketing and agency performance, 85% isn’t a safe baseline. It’s an invisible tax on your brand. It means your relationship is broken – you just haven’t felt the full impact of the crash yet.
Here is why an 85% relationship is actually a warning sign, and why settling for “good enough” is costing you more than you think.
The 15% Blindspot
When an agency is hitting 85%, they are delivering the bare minimum of the contract. They show up to meetings, they check off the deliverables, and the creative isn’t inherently broken.
But look closely at what lives inside that missing 15%:
- Proactivity: They aren’t bringing you new ideas or keeping an eye on the horizon; they are waiting for your brief.
- Radical Candor: They’ve stopped pushing back on your bad ideas because agreeing with you is path-of-least-resistance accounting.
- Top-Tier Talent: Agencies put their A-team, their innovators, and their problem-solvers on the 100% accounts—the ones that challenge and inspire them. The 85% accounts get the steady, uninspired execution team.
When you settle for 85%, you aren’t buying partnership; you are buying a vendor.
The Cost of Complacency Equilibrium
The most dangerous part of an 85% relationship is its stability. It’s what we call Complacency Equilibrium. Because it isn’t an outright disaster, it doesn’t trigger an immediate Request for Proposal (RFP). It doesn’t force a hard conversation.
Instead, it quietly erodes your market position.
While your agency is giving you a comfortable B-grade performance, your competitor’s agency is working at 100% – re-imagining their media mix, weaponizing new AI agents, and aggressively capturing market share.
In marketing, you are either moving forward or falling behind. Standing still at 85% is just slow-motion regression.
Why Do We Settle?
Marketers usually tolerate the 85% mark for two reasons: fear of the unknown and the exhaustion of the pitch process. The thought of writing an RFP, sitting through endless chemistry meetings, and onboarding a new team feels like a professional masochism. So, we make peace with mediocrity.
But transformation doesn’t always require blowing up the contract and launching a massive, disruptive agency search. Often, the fix starts with intentional listening.
Getting Back to 100%
An 85% relationship is rarely one-sided. It is usually the result of a breakdown in communication, misaligned financial incentives, or shifting client expectations that were never clearly articulated.
If your partnership has drifted into the ‘good enough’ zone, it’s time to intervene before the rot sets in:
- Have the Uncomfortable Conversation: If you’re a client, tell your agency they are sitting at an 85% and explain what a 100% looks like. If you’re an agency, ask your client where the friction lies.
- Undertake a Request for Transformation (RFT): Instead of blowing up the relationship with a costly, disruptive RFP, formalize this entire pivot through an RFT. This structured process challenges your incumbent agency to re-engineer their team, re-evaluate their tech stack (especially AI integration), and pitch a modernized roadmap for your business.
- Realign the incentives: Look at the commercial model and ask if your agency’s compensation structure actually reward innovation and business growth, or does it merely reward volume and hours logged? You cannot expect a transformative partnership if you are paying for mere maintenance.
The Bottom Line
Your brand, your budget, and your growth goals deserve a partner that is fully invested. If you look at your roster and realize you’ve built a collection of “just fine” partnerships, it’s time to name the problems you’ve been avoiding.
Because at 85%, you’re not saving a relationship. You’re just delaying the termination.
Fixing an 85% relationship takes a proven framework. At Listenmore, we specialize in architecting and managing RFT processes that turn stagnant vendor dynamics into high-performing partnerships. Let’s start the conversation.
Stephan Argent
Stephan Argent is Founder and Principal at Listenmore Inc, Canada’s leading confidential advisory consultancy that specializes in Agency Search Management. Read more like this on our blog Marketing Unscrewed / follow me @StephanArgent