There is a particular kind of client conversation that stays with you. You have made a promise — ranking in three months, a 30% lift in leads by Q2, a guaranteed result of some kind — and now you are sitting across from that client explaining why it did not happen. The commitment felt right at the time. It was confident. It probably helped close the deal. But confidence and honesty are not always the same thing, and in agency work, the gap between them eventually shows. At Choco Media, we have stopped making a handful of promises that used to be standard in our pitches. This post is about what we stopped saying, why it was eroding trust rather than building it, and what we say instead — without underselling the work we do.
This is not a list of things we are bad at. It is a list of things no agency can reliably promise, regardless of skill or effort, because the variables that determine those outcomes are not fully in anyone’s control. Understanding that distinction has made our client relationships more durable, our proposals more honest, and our results easier to communicate — even when they fall short of the optimistic version.
If you are evaluating agencies or thinking about how your own shop handles expectations, what follows will either confirm some things you already suspect or give you language for conversations you have been avoiding.
We Stopped Promising Specific Ranking Positions for Target Keywords
The most common promise in SEO is also the most difficult to keep: “We will get you to page one for [keyword] within six months.” It sounds concrete and measurable, which is exactly why it sells. The problem is that keyword rankings are determined by Google’s algorithm, your domain’s history, your competitors’ behaviour, the quality of the content, the site’s technical state, and factors that shift without notice. No agency controls those variables. We influence them.
What we stopped saying: “We will rank you for [keyword] by [date].”
What we say instead: “We will build the content, technical foundation, and authority signals that give this keyword the best realistic chance of ranking. Based on the current competitive gap, we expect to see meaningful movement within four to six months — but we will show you exactly what is changing and why, each month, so you can evaluate progress against real evidence.”
This framing does three things: it is honest about the limits of our control, it commits us to transparency, and it keeps the conversation focused on inputs we can actually deliver rather than outputs that depend on a third party’s algorithm. Our SEO service is structured around that same principle — measurable activity, honest reporting, and targets framed as ranges rather than guarantees.
What clients actually need from this conversation
- A clear picture of the competitive difficulty of their target terms — not just search volume
- A baseline of where they are now, so movement in any direction is visible
- Monthly reporting that shows what changed and why, not just a table of rankings
- Honest timelines: most meaningful SEO results take longer than clients are told upfront
We Stopped Promising a Specific Return on Ad Spend
Paid media agencies love ROAS targets. They are compelling in a proposal because they translate budget into revenue, which is the language every client speaks. The issue is that ROAS is a function of creative performance, audience saturation, competitor bidding, seasonality, landing page quality, offer strength, and platform algorithm changes — none of which the agency controls entirely, and several of which shift week to week.
In client work, we have found that ROAS promises set the wrong frame from the start. They make the agency responsible for a number that depends on factors outside the campaign — the client’s pricing, their product’s actual market fit, their website’s conversion rate. A campaign can be executed perfectly and still miss a ROAS target because the landing page converts at 0.8% instead of 2%.
We can control what we put in front of people and how much we pay to do it. We cannot control whether those people buy. The honest framing acknowledges both sides of that equation.
What we stopped saying: “We will deliver a 4x ROAS within 90 days.”
What we say instead: “We will build and test creative, manage bidding, and optimise audiences to improve the efficiency of your spend over time. Here is what we have seen in comparable accounts, and here is the conversion rate your site needs to achieve for this to work — that is something we need to look at together.”
This approach also opens a more useful conversation: if the site cannot convert paid traffic, the campaign will underperform regardless of how well it is managed. Our conversion rate optimisation work often starts here — paid media reveals the page problems that organic traffic was masking.
The numbers we do commit to in paid media
- Weekly creative testing cadence: minimum number of variants in market at any time
- Cost-per-click and cost-per-lead benchmarks based on the account’s current history
- Spend pacing: within what percentage of agreed budget, reported monthly
- Creative refresh frequency: when we rotate based on frequency or fatigue signals
We Stopped Saying “We’ll Handle Everything” in Retainers
Retainer pitches often include a version of this: “You will not need to think about marketing anymore — we have got it covered.” It is reassuring to say and genuinely appealing to hear. It is also not accurate, and it creates the conditions for scope creep on both sides: the agency resents the volume of requests, and the client feels they are not getting enough if they have to think about anything at all.
What we stopped saying: “We will take marketing completely off your plate.”
What we say instead: “We will own the strategy, the production, and the reporting within the agreed scope. You will still need to review content before it publishes, share information about your business as it develops, and make decisions on budget and direction when we bring them to you. The goal is that your involvement is focused and efficient — not zero.”
That shift matters for a specific reason: the best marketing output we produce always has client knowledge in it. Access to the founder’s perspective, accurate product information, and real customer feedback are inputs we cannot manufacture. When clients expect to disappear entirely, we get work that is technically competent but strategically shallow. The honest framing sets up the relationship to actually work.
What a healthy retainer collaboration actually requires from clients
- A monthly 30–45 minute review call, prepared with questions and decisions needed
- Same-week feedback on content drafts — delays compound across a calendar
- Timely sharing of internal news, launches, and product changes that affect messaging
- Clear sign-off authority: one person who can approve, not a committee
We Stopped Promising Viral Content
Early in our work with some clients, we made optimistic statements about content “going viral” or achieving outsized organic reach. It was aspirational, and occasionally it happened — but we had no reliable way to make it happen on demand. Virality is a function of timing, existing audience size, platform algorithm behaviour in a given week, and an element of genuine luck that no brief can engineer.
What we stopped saying: “This has real viral potential” as a deliverable promise.
What we say instead: “We will build content that is structurally set up to perform — hook, format, distribution strategy — and we will measure distribution quality rather than raw view counts. Occasionally something breaks out. That is a bonus, not the plan.”
This is actually a more useful conversation for clients, because it shifts focus from unpredictable spikes to consistent compounding. A content programme that generates steady engagement over 12 months is worth more than one viral post and nine months of nothing. Our social strategy work is built on that principle — distribution consistency over lottery-style bets.
What we can reliably build toward in content
- Increasing share rate on posts by testing format and hook structure systematically
- Growing average engagement rate over a 90-day baseline period
- Profile follower growth tracked as a monthly percentage rather than absolute numbers
- Content that earns organic backlinks over time through structural quality, not distribution luck
We Stopped Saying the First Month Will Show Results
Agency client promises often include an implicit compression of timelines. When someone is spending money, they want to see movement quickly. The pressure to show early results is real, and it tempts agencies to report on vanity metrics — impressions, reach, follower gains — in the early months when the meaningful numbers are not yet moving.
We have seen this pattern in client work: the first two months are full of activity reports, and then by month four the client wonders why they are still not seeing leads. The timeline mismatch was baked in from the pitch.
What we stopped saying: “You should see results within 30 days.”
What we say instead: “The first 30 days are for setup, baseline measurement, and getting the first content and campaigns live. The first meaningful signal comes at 60–90 days. We will show you what we are watching and why in the first report, so you know what we are building toward.”
This is a harder conversation to have in a pitch. Prospects want to feel that progress is immediate. But clients who understand the timeline are far easier to work with in month three — when they remember that this was always the expectation — than clients who were told to expect early results and have been quietly disappointed since week six.
The 90-day expectation framework we now use
- Days 1–30: infrastructure, baseline, first content in market. No performance claims.
- Days 31–60: early data, first optimisation round, initial trend direction.
- Days 61–90: first meaningful read on what is working and what needs to change.
- Month 4 onward: compounding effects visible, strategy refinement grounded in real data.
We Stopped Saying “We Work With All Types of Businesses”
Generalist positioning is tempting for a small agency — it feels like it maximises the opportunity pool. The problem is that it also removes any grounds for saying no to a bad fit, and working with clients we cannot genuinely help is one of the fastest ways to damage a reputation.
What we stopped saying: “We work with any business that wants to grow.”
What we say instead: “We do our best work with brands that have already found product-market fit and want to scale distribution — typically B2B services, SaaS, or e-commerce brands with a considered purchase cycle. If that does not describe you, we will say so early and point you toward a better fit.”
This is a promise to ourselves as much as to clients: we do not take work we are not equipped to do well. The filter is not about size or budget — it is about whether the conditions exist for us to add genuine value. An honest “this is not a fit” conversation is a better outcome for everyone than six months of disappointing results and a client who would not refer us.
What Honest Framing Actually Does for Client Relationships
The objection to all of this is that it makes pitches harder to win. That is partially true. Prospects who are shopping for bold guarantees will go elsewhere, and that is fine — those are the relationships most likely to end badly. In our experience, the clients who respond well to honest framing are the ones who become long-term partners, because they are evaluating the same things we are: is this a realistic plan, and can we trust these people to tell us the truth when things are not working?
Trust, in a retainer relationship, is not built in the pitch. It is built over twelve months of consistent, honest communication. The pitch is only the beginning — and making promises you cannot keep is a liability you carry into every conversation that follows.
- Clients who understand the realistic timeline are more patient when it takes the realistic amount of time
- Honest scoping prevents the resentment that builds when “we handle everything” meets “but why didn’t you do X”
- Framing outputs as ranges rather than targets keeps conversations focused on strategy rather than blame
- Saying no to the wrong clients protects the quality of work we can do for the right ones
If you are thinking about what a working relationship with us actually looks like — the communication rhythm, the scope boundaries, the honest expectations on both sides — the best starting point is a conversation. Get in touch and we will tell you plainly whether we think it would work, and what it would take.