Unprompted Updates: The Retention Move Hiding in the Gaps Between Meetings

I was recently catching up with an executive contact of mine, whom I hadn't talked to in years and that convo jogged loose something I hadn't thought about in a while. Something that can help you and your team continually and organically remind your clients of their brilliance in hiring you in the first place. And, along the way, bolster client retention.

And what's this magical thing?

Unprompted updates.

OK, that doesn't sound super exciting. But it really is. What it means is being purposeful about bringing insights to your clients that help them hit their goals.  And here's the critical part: without them asking you for them. Yeah. Being proactive is the whole game.

One important thing to note: the insights, or "chestnuts," as I like to call them, don't have to be mic-dropping bangers. They just have to be thoughtful, meaningful things your client might not have seen or discovered otherwise. And most chestnuts land in one of two buckets: Industry Updates and Performance Updates. A few examples:

Industry Updates

• A notable event or announcement that dropped in their industry (or yours) that can impact your work together

• Moves made by their competitors (e.g. product announcements, price changes, new features or services, acquisitions, divestitures, etc.)

• Customized notes and summaries from webinars or conferences you or someone on your team attended

Performance Updates

• The movement of a critical KPI outside of an expected range

• The results of a test or analysis that are particularly interesting and warrant notice outside your normal status meetings

• Something you want to test, try, or pilot as a direct result of a notable movement in their performance data

What one actually looks like

Here's the thing: this doesn't require a tech stack. When I was leading an SEO division years ago, one of my Team Leads set up a shared Google Doc: nothing fancy, just a running list of links to noteworthy industry updates that any account team could pull from when they wanted something worth sending a client. Dead simple. And it worked.

AI, Slack, and automation takes this up several levels (more on that below), but you don't need AI to start. In fact, right before I left that agency, I ran a little experiment on myself: I used Zapier to pull messages out of a Slack channel into a Google Doc, then had ChatGPT for Sheets draft client-ready updates from them. Rough around the edges, but you could see the future from there.

Frequency

When I was running that division, we tried to drop at least two unprompted updates on each client, per month. The whole idea was that these updates lived outside the usual weekly or bi-weekly status call and monthly performance review. These chestnuts were meant to land in the interstices around those meetings and quietly tell the client: we're thinking about you, and we have your back.

Quick story on why I believe in this. Our founder had been doing this for years, and our retention was excellent. Here's the kicker: I didn't fully grok what he was doing or the importance of it (I'm famously not a practitioner, lol), so when he stepped out to focus on strategy and R&D and I took over as Director of SEO, the practice quietly fell off.  We all didn't pick up the slack, and TBH I didn't know to ask my leaders to. Then we hit a nasty run of churn.

As part of putting the wheels back on the cart (there were several causal factors), we institutionalized what my founder had been doing. I built the (pre-AI) version of almost all the ideas below, and my Team Leads ran the playbook. Retention recovered. To be clear: that turnaround was a lot of tactics and a lot of people rowing in the same direction and not one magic email. But unprompted updates were a real part of it.

How to do it

The biggest thing: don't overthink it. Train your team to share things of value and not just "news." Beyond that, anything is fair game so long as it's aligned with your client's goals, opportunities, and challenges.

This is also a great chance to think about your client three-dimensionally. There's the day-to-day contact, her boss (say, a Director), and maybe a "big boss" — a VP or CMO. They don't all want the same thing:

• The day-to-day POC lives in the tactical: performance movements, test results, and how-to's on the tools and features you're using together.

• The Director wants that, plus the strategic stuff. So, industry shifts, competitor moves, where the puck is going.

• The big boss cares almost entirely about the strategic and the "so what for my business." Send less. Make it count.

Are you tracking the unique goals, needs, and challenges for each of those people? Because the same piece of news can become three different updates depending on who's reading it.

The communication itself should be super simple, so it's not onerous on you or your people. You want this quick, easy, and (eventually) muscle memory. A simple email or Slack template works:

• What: The interesting thing you saw, read, discovered, or calculated. Link it, attach it, add a TL;DR.

• So What: Why it's relevant to your client: how it connects to a goal, a challenge, or something you discussed previously.

• Now What: Your quick take on it. What you'd do with it, what it implies, whether they should worry about it or not. This is where your expertise shows up. Show a little of that SME stuff.

• Next Steps: The ask!  Anything from "FYI, no action needed" to "let's cover this on our next status call" to "can we grab 15 minutes in the next couple of days?"

Let AI do the watching

This is a great opportunity to put automation and AI to work. And here's the trick with that: every one of the ideas below follows the same shape. A source feeds a channel or a folder; an AI watches it and flags what's material to a specific client; then it drafts that item in the client's context for your review. Change the source, keep the machine:

1. Client wins — a Slack channel where the team drops wins in the What / So What / Now What format. Makes it easy for AI to see what’s going on and do something with it.

2. Competitor intel — subscribe to each client's competitors' email newsletters; AI summarizes them and flags material moves. Updates a client intel MD file.

3. Industry updates — a channel where the team drops links plus a one-line POV.

4. Conference debriefs — the team dumps notes into a Drive folder; AI builds a master set of summaries and surfaces the client-relevant bits.

5. Your own content — point the same watcher at your blog or YouTube channel for new posts worth forwarding.

Let me walk one of these all the way through, so you get the sights and sounds of how it actually runs. Take the industry-updates channel:

• You spin up a #industry-intel channel. Your team drops links as they find them, each with a one-line POV.  Just what it is, who it impacts, why it matters.

• An AI agent watches the channel. For every drop, it checks the item against what it knows about each client: their goals, their competitors, the KPIs you're chasing together, the people you deal with.

• When something matches a specific client, it pings you (not the client) with a drafted update already in that What / So What / Now What / Next Steps format, pre-personalized to that client's context.

• You (the human expert!!) read it, add your take, decide if it clears the bar, and hit send. Or don't.

The AI does the watching and the first-draft matching. You do the judgment. That last step is the whole point, and we'll come back to that in a minute.

Old school works too

You don't need any of the above to start. Other great sources of potential updates:

1. Set alerts in your dashboards or analytics platforms.

2. Set up Google Alerts on your client's CEO, CMO, or product name.

3. Set change alerts on your client's competitors' pricing pages, services pages, etc.

4. Block specific time each week just to review client performance. (Tip: do the weekly review out loud in a notetaker app and drop the transcripts in a client-specific folder. AI can pluck out the chestnuts)

5. Use clipping tools to capture links, reads, and blog posts. (Tip: have an AI grab those clippings, summarize them, and drop them in a folder.)

Bottom line: there should be no shortage of valuable insights you can proactively share. And you can supercharge all of it by using AI to bump your findings against what it knows about each client's goals, challenges, needs, and interests. And those of the POCs and executives you interact with.

Key thing to bear in mind: this is an editorial job

You want these updates to land as truly value-add. So there's an editorial component here.

Dos

• Establish a threshold for sharing, up front. What rises to the level of "send it"? That's a good discussion to have with your team.  Lean into that editorial call together.

• Ask the client what they'd actually want to know. What would they find valuable?

• Encourage team members to help each other by sharing insights and ideas.  Maybe once a month (Week #3, Client Health is a great time to do it!)

• Use these updates as micro-moments to showcase your team's expertise and thought leadership.

• Share differences of opinion on things you surface, and tell them where you come down, and why.

Don'ts

• Don't assume everything you find is valuable. There's a balance to strike. You don't want your updates to become just more noise.

• Don't feel pressure to share. If you've got something with real impact, send it. If you don't, don't. The value is the process you build to constantly watch your client's back, not hitting a quota. This is the balance to strike!

• Don't take whatever the AI hands you and drop it blind into an email. Lead with your expertise. Editorialize. Have an opinion. Tell the client whether to worry about X, or not to worry about X.

The gold you're sitting on

Something agencies and consulting firms 100% undervalue: the fact that you work with several different clients. I can't tell you how many times I've spoken with a CEO, CMO, or senior exec who asks me, "What are your other clients doing about this?"

Obviously you maintain confidentiality. But a line like, "We've got four or five clients grappling with this too. What we see work is X, Y, and Z" — that's GOLD. That's true value. Depending on the client and the engagement, it can be a massive part of the perceived value of the whole relationship.

Here's how it fits: this is an unprompted update too, maybe just a rarer, heavier one. You're not dropping this every week, and it's usually aimed at a senior decision-maker, because the guidance is strategic in nature. But when you know a given client is struggling with something three or four other clients in your book have already navigated (and could be ahead of them on) don't wait for the QBR. Drop them a short note if it'd help.

The bottom line

Being proactive, i.e. keeping an eye out for your clients' interests and flagging performance pickups or challenges, is incredibly helpful. And understanding why takes a bit of applied empathy. More than likely, your corporate client is in meetings all day, dealing with admin stuff, onboarding new people, navigating politics on Slack, taking training before some deadline, sitting on task forces. What does that mean?

• They're not in your performance dashboards as much as they'd like.

• They don't read all the industry posts they bookmark.

• They don't get budget to attend every conference they want to.

• They end up working through the free lunch-time industry webinars they signed up for.

And they certainly don't speak with dozens of brand leaders each week the way you and your team do.

So, being thoughtful and building a little process and a few AI workflows around tools you already have (Slack, Google Drive, Claude, etc.) lets you show clients you’ve got their back. That's what they pay you for. And it's great business, too. Consider the cumulative impact of dropping unprompted updates over time: each share, each mini-POV, each chestnut that helps a client unlock a bit more value makes you ever so slightly more indispensable.