How many times have we heard that question, repeated over and over and over again from the back seat? Despite our best efforts to silence the question with a satisfactory response, it seems we never get there ourselves. Can the same be said for your in-house agency?

This month at IHAF, we’re exploring In-House Agency Performance. And while there are multiple dimensions to this topic, I believe that any discussion about performance has to be based on expectations—knowing what’s most important to your customers, clients, internal partners (call them what you will). In other words, to find out if you’re “there yet,” you need to know where you’re going. And to know where you’re going, you need to know what your clients want from you.

At last spring’s HOW Design Live conference in Boston, I made a presentation to over 200 in-house agency leaders on the importance of establishing an on-going performance process based on client imperatives. We talked at length about how to establish criteria based on what clients want from their internal creative departments. While I wasn’t surprised that many of these agencies didn’t know how to structure or implement such a process, I found it surprising that even more didn’t know what their clients value or want from them most. Effectively, they couldn’t answer “are we there yet?” because they didn’t know where they were supposed to go.

Not all clients want the same thing. So, let’s get a discussion going. What do your clients want from you? What do you think they should want? What questions can you ask to find out?