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Building Trust: How to Create Strong Client–Agency Partnerships
How do you transform client–agency relationships from transactional to truly transformational?
Join Lee Roth, Co-Founder of The Actionists, and Sarah Paulsen, Head of Global Marketing Services, Innovation and Agency Transformation at Kimberly-Clark, as they unpack what makes the best partnerships thrive. Sarah shares her lessons from both agency and client sides — including how trust, communication, and capability-building can elevate creativity and business results.
What You'll Learn:
Key Takeaways:
Perfect For:
Marketing leaders, CMOs, agency executives, and anyone passionate about building stronger, more human partnerships between clients and agencies.
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction & Sarah’s background
02:38 — How to repair broken trust in client–agency relationships
05:48 — Common pain points in partnerships
10:07 — Essential modern marketer skill sets
15:07 — Designing engaging, real-world training experiences
19:38 — Using marketing to tackle major world issues
Transcript:
Lee (00:04)
Welcome to our latest session of Breaking the Mold. My name is Lee Roth, co-founder of The Actionists. Today, we're talking with someone who I truly love working with, the wonderful, the brilliant, Sarah Paulsen. Sarah, welcome to Breaking the Mold.
Sarah (00:19)
Thanks, Lee. Thanks for having me.
Lee (00:21)
It's an honor, it's a pleasure. So, Sarah.
Besides loving working with you, please tell our audience who you are, what you do, what company you work for, all that good stuff.
Sarah (00:33)
Sure, Happy to. Well, thanks for having me. It's very exciting to be here with you today. So my name is Sarah Paulsen. I currently work for Kimberly-Clark. My role is leading the global agency and content innovation model for the organization, working across creative and media, really making sure that we bring together creative media into one holistic approach to really drive impact for our brands.
I started my career in consulting, then spent quite a few years in advertising, and for the past seven years have been on the client side working at Kimberly-Clark. And I'm really excited to be in this role, which is a new role for me, really bringing together all of our different agency partners and really trying to level up our game.
Lee (01:16)
I love it. I didn't realize that we had all of the same kind of backgrounds. I didn't realize you have consulting too, because consulting, advertising, client, which kind of makes you perfect for the role that you're in. I mean, if there's anyone who knows how to make different parties work together and how to operationalize something, it would be you, because you've sat on every single side of the table. So you're kind of the perfect person for that role.
Lee (01:41)
So today, I want to focus our conversation on how to work well together with your agency partners and the role training has within your marketing organization to do so. So because you've sat on both sides of the table, let me start off with when a relationship is working well, why is it working well?
Sarah (02:00)
Great question, and those are the best times to be part of the model, of course. We want a mutual win-win. I think for me, one of the most important things is to have really a deep respect for each other and a very trusting, open relationship. I think the times when I've seen...
You know, really the teams thrive and the work really excels when people really want to work together, when they're excited to be together and they truly believe that they can make something great together and drive an impact for the business. So for me, really, really trust and respect and just foundational building blocks.
Lee (02:38)
And I want to get back to that because I completely agree, but that's not an easy thing to come by, right? That takes a lot of work and we'll talk a little bit about how to get there. But first on the flip side, I want to talk about, give me an example of when a relationship was completely broken and what you had to do to get it back on track. You don't have to tell us who your terrible agency partner was at the time, but just talk to us about when something was broken and what you had to do to kind of get back to that trust that you were talking about a minute ago.
Sarah (03:09)
Yeah, a great question and always a tough situation. I'm actually going to go back even before my time at Kimberly-Clark to respond to this one. When I was on the agency side, and I'm sure some had said we were their terrible agency, you know, we remember a time when I was brought into a business that was really, you know, believed by many to be already out the door, right? It was kind of a last ditch effort to try to save the business. I came in along with a really strong creative partner that I already had trust with, and we came in to reset it. And really what we started doing was speaking to all the client teams, just really openly and candidly hearing them out, really trying to understand the root of their frustration. We did the same thing on the internal side. And what we found interesting enough was that there were actually a lot of the same themes.
And the relationship itself was just really lacking openness, honesty. The trust was gone. And so what we started doing was we identified two clients, and then myself and my creative partner. And we just started working together really, really in an open way to turn around the business.
And the two clients really believed we could do it. They wanted us to win. They'd worked with our agency for a long time. And really what we did was we rolled up our sleeves. We jumped in to do the hard work. We had collaborative sessions with them. We quickly built trust. And then the cultural shift for the broader teams really flowed from us. There were four of us working closely, bringing our teams along, changing the trajectory of how we spoke to each other, how often we communicated, how often we saw each other in person, really making sure that there was clarity and openness and confidence in where we were going. We then focused on a few big projects and we built success cases for the business and we won over a lot of people who were very skeptical. And we heard many times, is a new agency. It wasn't a new agency, it was the same agency, it was the same client team. We were having a lot of fun. Working together, people noticed, and it showed up in the work, and it really came down to some of those foundational behaviors.
Lee (05:14)
You know, isn't it funny how complicated we make these things, but in reality, well, it's actually quite simple. It's, and you just nailed it out. It's being open and honest with each other and transparent with each other, right? And doing so, you create trust.
And that's everything and partnership, right? But you can't have trust and partnership if you're hiding things from each other, if you're not being open with each other, if you're not communicating. So, you know, we tend to over complicate these things all the time, but really sometimes the answers are quite simple.
Sarah (05:46)
I agree with that, for sure.
Lee (05:48)
So let's go deeper into pain points, right? Like besides that communication piece, what are common pain points that you're seeing between either Kimberly-Clark in your agencies or when you were on the agency side? You know, it's never the clients, always the agency. I kid. But what are the common pain points that you're seeing even today or today and yesterday?
Sarah (06:11)
I think everybody is incredibly busy, overloaded. There's so much change in the industry. There's so much change in the landscape and in the way we market. think that, again, it's not a new thing, but I think it's something that become magnified, which is a pain point is really just becoming too transactional, really focusing too much on the how and kind of losing sight of the what and really forgetting about the people in the work in favor of process or in favor of checking off the list for the week and just getting it done. I think that's something we can all fall into. I know I've fallen there myself. And I think whenever we find ourselves in that situation, just really stepping back and kind of reprioritizing and re-centering the teams on what are we here to do and what do we as people want to get out of it.
I think the other piece I would say here is making assumptions versus really connecting and driving deep clarity on the expectation. think it probably goes hand in hand with kind of being a little more transactional, like focusing on the day-to-day tasks is really just assuming that you know what the other person wants or how they want to work or assuming that you know what's you know, best for a brief or a business without really connecting and driving that, you know, you know, shared expectation on both sides. So for me, I really have worked very hard. We have a lot of change going on right now within my organization. I just over communicate, right? Over communicate, which is kind of a misnomer because I don't know that you can, but just making sure that you're setting the expectation, on the client side, on the agency side. And everybody knows where we're going, while we're also really focused on that work and the people, the great talent that's helping us drive it.
Lee (08:00)
I think that's really interesting. On the transactional side, always, to me, they're kind of two marketers. Well, there's probably a lot more than two, but there's the checkbox marketer, right? And they like, they have their list of things to do and check, check, check, check, check. And that's the transactional side. But then the really good marketers are the ones that want to get their hands dirty, right? They want to roll up their sleeves and sit with their agency partners and work through problems and work through solutions, not as agency and client, but as one team.
Lee (08:27)
And I think those are the marketers that just do great work, inspire everyone around them. That's why we love working with you.
Sarah (08:36)
That's great. We love working with you too.
Lee (08:38)
Well, one of the many reasons I should say. My next question is, what skill sets, so we talked about the communication piece and the trust piece, but what skill sets do you believe marketers need today to have successful relationships with your agency partners?
Sarah (08:51)
Yeah. You know, another great question. There's so many, you know, things happening within the industry. There's so much innovation. I think, you know, for me, it still starts with the foundations, you know, really, you know, strong understanding of how to build and drive, you know, brands at their core, you know, from, you know, the brand equities, driving clear and succinct focus briefs.
And then also being motivational and inspirational to those around you, right? Marketing is art and science and bringing those pieces together. So to me, those strong foundations, having those also...
I think allows you to really flex to some of the new innovation in marketing and a lot of the things that are coming in, everything from AI to new digital processes and platforms. If you have the foundation, then you really can rise to the occasion and bend it where you need to build it in new ways. I think you have to have a mix of both. And I think that with that foundation, but also an openness to learning, a curiosity, and the ability to really balance that foundation with kind of bending and breaking the mold, I think that's really the winning combination of being able to thrive and survive, you know, today's, you know, tougher and tougher landscape.
Lee (10:07)
I agree. And I think one of the sad things that I see from a foundational front is that those foundational, those foundations aren't being taught the way that they used to. Like I remember when I started my career at Ogilvy and they spent a ton of money and time training us and giving those foundations. Whereas today those agency partners for a lot of reasons that I won't get into just don't have that same kind of foundational training that they used to. I think the other issue on foundations is that if I come from Coke and you come from Kimberly-Clark and someone else comes from Amazon, their foundations are different, right? So if everyone's coming from different foundations with different philosophies, it does make it much more difficult.
Sarah (10:47)
So true.
Lee (10:50)
On the flip side, what do you think agencies can improve upon in being better partners to clients? There's so much talk about agency models being broken and we need to fix this and so forth. What do you think agencies could do better to be better partners to their clients?
Sarah (11:05)
Yeah. Well, think, I actually think the industry is a little hard on agencies. think agencies have amazing talent. I think that they are adapting at this light speed between technology and expectations of clients. I think agencies are really under a lot of pressure and they're dealing with change, a lot of change. think, back to your question, I think what can they do to be better partners to their clients?
I think they can recognize that clients are also facing a lot of the same challenges, right? And I know a lot of agencies do recognize that, but really kind of coming to the table, both sides coming to the table and understanding that each party is under immense pressure. But at the end of the day, if we can refocus on that work and the people making the work and really do that in service of the brand impact and results.
I do think that we can be successful together. I also think agencies being flexible alongside the clients that also need to be flexible because there's just so many things changing from new models of production, new compensation models and approaches, dwindling of talent, less resources to go around for everyone, including that training that you're talking about. I think collectively we need each other and we need to really work to drive that success together.
Lee (12:24)
I think there are probably three clips from what you just said that agencies are going to be passing around into the press. No, they're just getting a bad rep. They're doing a good job. I think agencies need to hear that more and more these days. So it's great that you're recognizing that.
Sarah (12:38)
Yes. It is tough out there for everyone.
Lee (12:41)
Well, let's go now specifically to training marketers, right? Because we both have talked a lot about this and the importance of this and we even already started touching upon it. But why do you think training for marketing is so important in today's modern marketing world?
Sarah (12:54)
Well, I think you touched on one of the topics on this that I would also reiterate, which is, you know, number one, think organizations are leaner than ever.
There's less day-to-day mentorship than there was certainly when I was starting out in multiple sectors, right? All three of my different kinds of lives between consulting, advertising, and now client side, there's just, it's a leaner organization. And there's less and less every year, I think, in terms of extra cushion of time and effort to be able to really coach and bring those marketers up. I think leadership continues to have a really strong role there and need there, but it's a challenge. And so I think all organizations really need more help from the outside to help make sure that that talent is being coached and trained and given every opportunity for success and for driving impact for the brands that they steward. I also, of course, the industry is rapidly changing. And even with the mentorship and the coaching from the inside, it's impossible for an internal capability team or even leadership within any organization to know everything that's happening.
And so I think really infusing with outside perspective, outside talent, and outside expertise is a critical path to an organization's success and longevity. So I really think for me it's a little bit of both and it's important to really make sure you continue to look up and out to drive a rounded marketing team.
Lee (14:29)
Yeah, I think both are critical, right? Like one is the foundation and the other once you have that foundation in place, a constant evolving, changing world. And I think a third that I would even throw in there is because so often leadership is up here and your day-to-day team is here. It helps drive those two groups to be in sync, right? The leadership philosophy now trickles into the organization to train and it's a way to bring everyone together on the same page. But I love it. Okay, now when you do training, what's ideal for you? Like how best do people get trained? What are the kind of best scenarios for people to really sink in what you're trying to teach and experience?
Sarah (15:07)
Yeah. Well, I think, again, it's good old fashioned engagement, hands-on activities, real world experiences and case studies, things that are really going to pull the learners in and make them really be able to connect it back to their day-to-day needs. I think in fostering lively discussion, even debate, right? Having, you know, like anything in life, if it's just a one-way push and it doesn't have a lot of grip to it that people remember, I think it's just going to be another meeting that was taking up space in their day. I think it's really on us as leaders and trainers to really come in and really make an impression and make people feel like they're part of it drive that imprint for those few big messages and learnings that we want to take away in that day. I say your team did a training for our North America team a couple weeks ago. I think you guys did a really great job hitting it out of the park, driving conversation, bringing outside examples, real world creative and agency examples people could relate to. And the marketing team was very engaged. They were asking questions, having dialogue.
it really felt like a hit on all those things for us. And people were talking about it after you left, which I think is just the measure of success in a lot of cases.
Lee (16:29)
Thanks, Sarah. to bring it back to how we started, that training was successful because we had a great partner with you. We started out really together in an open dialogue trying to diagnose where the challenges of the organization lie, and then really building the training course together to get it to a place where it would be really impactful for the organization. So thank you for the credit, but it goes back to what you said at first, which is about great partnership.
Lee (16:53)
Any advice you'd give to a CMO who's looking to do training but doesn't really know where to begin? He or she may know that their organization needs training, but sometimes it can be very overwhelming to start with.
Sarah (17:06)
I think it's a... It's always a hard one because there's so many things that you could train on and there's so many different areas of need. You might not all be visible. think, you just mentioned they're doing interviews and really kind of diagnosing, you know, gaps and needs. I think that that's a really great exercise, both at the leadership level as well as, you know, at the more junior levels, because they might be seeing and feeling different things. And it's good to get a pulse on that.
So I'd say, number one, look for the gaps you know, help understand what your people are faced with and what tools and knowledge they could use to really progress and feel like they would be more successful in their roles. Number two, I think another theme that we mentioned is leadership alignment. Again, see a lot of times there's training or things that are happening. But if the leadership isn't also enforcing the training, part of the training and continuing to help embed the training, it can fizzle out pretty quickly, no matter how great it is.
People just don't feel like it's part of their culture. It feels more like a session they went to as opposed to something that's truly embedding and living into their organization. And then number three, would say, is just, again, another theme you touched on, but there's so many different ways to do the same things. And often they're not radically different, but there might be different approaches, different acronyms, different labels for things, different, you know, boxes in the equity pyramid. You know, just, I would say in my experience, working across many, many different brands on the agency side and, now at Kimberly-Clark, there isn't just one way, but what's really important is that you pick a way because otherwise you can spend an enormous amount of time trying to perfect and align the perfect way. And you've wasted all that time to actually get the work done. And so I think, you know, really, you know, picking something, sticking with it, you know, people are going to come from different places. You're going to hear about other exciting things that others are doing, you know, always, always be aware, but, but stick with, stick with what you think is working and, know, and, and try to.
Try to make sure you develop that as part of your culture.
Lee (19:12)
I love it. Those are three really good helpful hints if you're a new CMO. Assess first and foremost what your organization needs. Make sure leadership is aligned to doing this and will advocate for it. And three, define your way of doing marketing and make it the way of doing marketing.
Lee (19:40)
Sarah, my last question for you is something I'm now asking everyone. And this is completely off the topic of training capabilities, which is, if you could take on any issue in the world and use marketing to help solve it, what would be the issue and how would you use marketing to help solve it?
Sarah (19:48)
That's a great question, It's a great question. It's interesting to think about marketing, right? So marketing to solve world issues.
Fundamentally, marketing to me is getting people to change the way they feel or behave about something, right? And if we take that simple lens on it, and I know there's a lot more complexity below that, but with just that simple headline, I think marketing could actually be used to solve pretty much every issue in the world in many ways. Probably not all by itself, but I think it could drive a major impact. I will say a passion of mine, and if I had to just choose one, which would be incredibly difficult because there are many, many issues that come to mind, but one that I have spent some time and experiences on within my time at Kimberly-Clark with our Kotex brand is really, you know, deeply, deeply connecting and understanding the two billion people around the world who menstruate and do so, you know, many, many of them over half without access to hygienic period products. And also in an environment where there's a lot of negativity and misperceptions around women's cycles. You know, as Kimberly-Clark, we've invested millions to help drive change here, but it keeps me up at night. It honestly does. I think about it, you know, all the time because there's so much work to be done. You know, we continue to work with our partners like Plan International to make a difference to help drive change.
But I think there's just so much more that can be done here. It's going to continue to be a focus area of myself and Kimberly-Clark. And just is one that I'm very passionate about and would love to continue to seek and build more marketing agendas around in service of access to those products as well as changing the perceptions and stigmas around periods.
Lee (21:30)
Sarah kudos to you because you're the change agent that's driving that conversation driving that change of behavior and driving it within Kimberly-Clark. I mean kudos to you because you're not just Theoretically talking you're actually doing something about it and before we hang up if you want to say a little bit more about what you guys are doing to address this problem I'm happy to tell our audience because it is something special.
Sarah (21:54)
Yeah, I would say, you know, ultimately, you know, really driving action, you know, everything from donations to, you know, innovation around products for periods. So, you know, there's many, many organizations that are collecting that are, you know, including the Diaper Bank, the National Diaper Bank in the U.S. Plan International is another organization I mentioned that we work with. The UN Women is doing a lot of amazing work in this space, really working to drive education as well as donations and innovation in the space. So welcome any and all participation in that and look for co-tacks along with many of our peer competitors out there trying to also help solve the problem.
Lee (22:35)
Well, in the meantime, kudos to you and Kotex and the Kimberly-Clark Company for really taking this on and driving change. A lot of people talk, you guys are acting, so I give you all the credit in the world. And Sarah, this has been amazing. I mean, I'm not surprised at all because every time we talk, I'm always inspired, but this was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you coming on board and talking with us.
Sarah (22:55)
Of course, thanks to The Actionists and all the things that you're out there doing, fighting the good fight for the brands and the work you've done with us. We really appreciate it.
Lee (23:05)
Thanks, Sarah.