For Agencies
How to Handle Client Revisions on Outsourced Content
The revision round is where outsourcing quietly becomes unprofitable, usually because the agency absorbs it.
The arrangement makes sense until the client sends feedback. Then someone has to interpret it, decide what is a legitimate revision, and get it done — and in most agencies that person is an account manager doing it themselves because it feels faster than explaining.
Whose Revision Is It
Feedback falls into three types, and treating them identically is what makes revisions expensive.
- The brief was not met: A revision the supplier should absorb without discussion.
- The client changed their mind: New work, whoever pays for it, and worth naming as such.
- The brief was wrong: Yours, and the cheapest of the three to fix if caught early.
Most disputed revisions are the third type, presented as the first.
Pass Feedback Through, Not Around
Rewriting client feedback into a polite brief loses the specifics that made it useful. Forward it as received and add context where it is needed.
If your supplier includes client feedback in the revision round — ours does — then filtering it yourself is unpaid work you are doing on their behalf.
Stop Rounds From Multiplying
- Collect all feedback before sending any of it. Three separate emails become three rounds.
- Resolve contradictions internally first, since a writer asked for two opposite things will pick one.
- Identify the actual decision-maker early. Feedback from someone who cannot approve is a round wasted.
- Send the first draft early enough that a second round does not threaten the deadline.
The most expensive pattern is a new stakeholder appearing at round three with objections to the premise. That is a briefing problem at the client end, and it needs raising there rather than being absorbed as revisions.
What Good Looks Like
A supplier whose revisions run until the brief is met, and who counts your client's feedback as part of that brief, removes the calculation entirely. There is no round budget to manage and no argument about whose fault it was.
That is how our white label service handles it — the round most suppliers bill for is the one an agency should never have to absorb.