Earlier this week, as part of our Q4 Ready series, we sat down with Isabel Parashos, Lead Insight Consultant at Xero. With five years of experience on the agency side and four years on the client side, Izzy has a deep understanding of the insight industry. 

Here is her honest, unfiltered take on what end clients actually need from their agency partners.

1. The “Grand Reveal” Can Be Dangerous 

One of the biggest mistakes agencies make is disappearing for weeks to perfect a report, only to unveil it at the final presentation. Izzy’s advice? “Little and often.”

End clients hate surprises. If the data is looking tricky, tell them early so they can pivot. If it’s looking great, share the headlines so they can start warming up their stakeholders.

The Tip: Don’t wait for the sixty-page deck. Send a quick Slack message or a three-point email update. As Izzy noted, “I do not want a grand reveal… It helps bring people along the journey”.

2. Be a Challenger, Not a “Yes Person”

There is a temptation in Q4 to say “yes” to every request to secure the work and the budget. However, Izzy shared a powerful story about an agency that actually declined to pitch for a project because the timeline was too short to do quality work.

Initially, she was hurt. But when a bigger, meatier project came along later, she went straight back to them. Why? Because she trusted them to do the right thing, not just the profitable thing.

The Lesson: “If you do everything that I say… that’s actually a worse outcome,” Izzy explained. Clients pay for your expertise, not your obedience. If you challenge the end client constructively, you build a partnership based on trust.

3. Understand Who Your Audience Is

When submitting a proposal, who are you writing for? The insight lead? Or the CFO? The answer, according to Izzy, is both – but they need different things.

• For the Stakeholder: They need the “condensed version.” High-level costs, sample size, and approach. They will never read the full proposal deck.

• For the Researcher (Izzy): She wants the appendix. She wants the detail.

The Tip: Don’t send a long generic deck. Create a crisp executive summary for the decision-makers and keep the methodological deep-dive in the back pocket for the insight team.

4. Comments Are Not Criticisms

Izzy admitted that when she was agency-side, she was “terrified” of client feedback. “If I woke up and I had a comment on a Google doc… I would be so, so nervous”.

Now that she is the client, she revealed the truth: Comments are usually just internal justification. If a client leaves twenty comments on your draft, they aren’t necessarily judging your credibility. They are likely just detail-oriented or preparing to defend the work to their own bosses.

The Lesson: Don’t panic. View questions as an opportunity to arm your direct client with the answers they need to sell the work internally.

5. Pick Up the Phone

Finally, Izzy’s biggest pet peeve? Agencies who write proposals based on assumptions. “The biggest mistake is not trying to get a client on the phone,” she said. 

The brief you receive via email is rarely the real brief. By jumping on a call, you uncover the political context, the “why now,” and the internal pressures that never make it onto the written page.

Summary

The gap between agency and client reality is often smaller than we think. Clients like Izzy don’t want a vendor who is scared of them; they want a partner who will guide them.

A huge thank you to Isabel Parashos for her radical honesty. If you wish to watch the full webinar recording, you can find it here.