When Marketing and Sales Both Try to Direct the Same Agency

Your social media agency was hired by marketing. Lately, half its brief seems to come from somewhere else. Nobody decided this. It just started happening, and now two departments give the same account manager different instructions, and the agency does its best to please both.

The moment this actually starts

Picture a company that hired a social media agency for one purpose: demand generation content tied to marketing’s pipeline goals. Six months in, someone in HR notices the agency already has brand access and is easy to reach, and starts sending employer branding requests straight to the account manager. Nobody asked marketing first. It felt like using something the company was already paying for, not a new ask.

That is the specific trigger, almost every time. The agency is reachable, it already has the keys, and saying yes to a second department feels like a small favor rather than a change in scope. It accumulates, one request at a time, until the account manager is juggling two sets of goals on one channel.

The agency did not cause this. It responded to a request from someone who had every appearance of authority to make it. What caused it is the absence of a named client of record, someone whose job it was to say that request should not come here directly. Without that person, the agency has no basis to say no.

Why the agency cannot referee this for you

An outside vendor has no way to know which department’s priorities matter more this quarter. It sees two people from the same company asking for different things on the same channel, and both sound like the client.

There is also an incentive problem. Telling either department no risks looking difficult to the person who might renew or expand the contract, so left alone the agency tries to serve both rather than force the company to sort out its own disagreement. That is not a character flaw, it is what any vendor does when refusing a paying stakeholder carries downside and no upside.

Picture, purely as an illustration, a launch post marketing scheduled for a Tuesday and a recruiting carousel HR booked for the same week that marketing never saw coming. The agency is choosing between two client requests on a shared calendar with no instruction on which one yields.

Signs the conflict is already costing you

• Two people from the client side approve or reject the same content with contradicting notes, and the agency cannot tell whose note wins.
• The agency asks, in writing, “which of you should I listen to.” That is not mismanagement, it is correctly escalating a decision that was never its to make.
• The content calendar serves two audiences with no shared point of view, swinging in tone week to week.
• A change order or unexpected invoice appears, because the agency treated the second department’s requests as additional work rather than a free favor.

The fix: one client of record, one intake, one sign-off

The fix is to name one department, in writing, as the agency’s client of record, a designation of who owns the relationship rather than a demotion of the other department’s needs.

Once named, every request routes through that department’s single point of contact before it reaches the agency. The agency should never take a brief directly from a department that is not its named client. If HR wants an employer branding post, it goes to marketing’s point of contact, who decides how it fits the calendar.

The client of record also owns final sign-off. The second department gets a seat to request work and review drafts, useful but not a vote that can override the client of record’s decision.

The version that fails is the one most companies try first: two department heads, both cc’d on every approval, with no one named as the tiebreaker. A shared inbox is not a decision structure, someone has to own the final call, by name.

This differs from the role that needs to exist before you hire an agency at all, which is about who owns the mandate before a contract is signed. This is about a mandate that already existed and quietly grew a second stakeholder afterward. The fix looks similar, one named owner, but it is solving a different moment in the relationship.

What to actually change in the contract or SOW

• Add the second department’s typical request types to the scope of work explicitly, or exclude them, so “is this in scope” stops being answered ad hoc.
• If the second department’s requests are additive work, that is a change order conversation with the client of record, not a favor the agency absorbs for free.
• Update who is authorized to approve deliverables, naming a specific person, not a department.
• Set a standing cadence for the two departments to reconcile priorities before either sends anything toward the agency, so the agency is never the first place the disagreement surfaces.

See what counts as a change order for how to tell additive work from a request that was always in scope, and how your approval process shapes the work for the approval side of this fix.

Ready to see who does this well

Agencies used to a single named client of record tend to ask about internal governance before they ask about deliverables. Browse vetted agencies to compare how they structure intake and sign-off. If you run a social media agency, you can list your agency free.

When it is worth splitting into two engagements instead

Sharing one agency across two departments is not always a problem. If the two departments’ content needs differ enough in audience, tone, or platform that they rarely overlap, one team running two accounts under a single invoice can work, as long as everyone calls it what it is.

Watch the volume. If the second department’s requests grow comparable in size to the first’s, that is no longer an expanded mandate. It is a second client that deserves its own scope, budget line, and possibly its own agency or a separate team within the same one.

Which side of that line you are on is a budget and governance question for the company to resolve internally, not something the agency should arbitrate by continuing to serve both informally.

FAQ

Can one social media agency really serve two departments well?

Yes, but only when one department is named the client of record and all requests route through that single point of contact. Without that, the agency ends up serving two disconnected briefs on one channel, which reads as inconsistency to anyone following the account.

Who should be the client of record when marketing hired the agency but another department now uses it too?

Whichever department signed the contract and controls the budget is the natural client of record. The other department becomes a requester that goes through that contact, not a co-equal decision maker, unless the company formally restructures the engagement.