Two people asked me the same question in three weeks, which is usually how I find out something is not personal. Both younger strategists, both good, both at agencies I respect. Both of them said some version of the same sentence: the client approved my recommendation and then nothing happened.
The second conversation was at Ovation, over a coffee that went cold while she walked me through the deck. The deck was good. The analysis held. The recommendation followed from the evidence and I could not find a hole in it.
That was the problem.
Nobody hires a strategist to be right. They hire one to make a decision survivable for the person who has to defend it in a meeting you will never attend.
It took me years to see I was doing this. I have sat in pitch rooms where I won the argument cleanly, watched everyone nod, and then watched the work ship exactly as it would have shipped without me. I called that a client problem for a long time. It was a me problem.
Approval is not commitment. Approval is what a room gives you to end a meeting. Commitment is what happens six weeks later when the recommendation costs somebody a budget line, a headcount, a product they championed. If you have not made the recommendation carryable by that person, it dies quietly and nobody tells you.
Three things I do differently now. One, I pre-wire. Anyone who can kill the work hears it from me alone before they hear it in a room, so their first reaction is not performed for an audience. Two, I write the version they can repeat. Not the twelve-slide argument, the one sentence they can say to their boss without me there. If they cannot say it back to me, I have not finished. Three, I name what the recommendation costs, out loud, before somebody else does. The strategist who says this will be unpopular with the sales team keeps credibility. The strategist who lets that surface in week five loses it.
None of this is about being less rigorous. The analysis still has to hold. But rigor is the cost of entry and persuasion is the job, and I spent a long time thinking the first one earned me the second.
Approval is what a room gives you to end a meeting.
I sing karaoke twice a month at a bar in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby and the floor sticks. I am not good. What I have learned there is that the crowd does not reward the person who hits the notes. It rewards the person who commits so hard that the room decides to be on their side. I think about that more than I would like to admit at work.