Community Workshop: From Vendor to Trusted Advisor — How Agencies Earn a Seat at the Strategy Table

About this session

For years, agencies have fought the same battle: clients say they want strategic partners, yet too often agencies are treated as vendors — briefed late, kept to execution, and judged on deliverables alone. The agencies that earn a seat at the strategy table rarely get there through better campaigns. They get there through trust.

Drawing on more than 20 years in marketing — leading in-house teams, managing agency relationships across markets, and now advising as a Fractional CMO — Dimi Ilieva has seen the partnership from both sides: she has hired, challenged, and fired agencies, and built the rare ones that became indispensable.

Duration: ~45 minutes

Suitable for: Agency owners and account leads, freelancers and consultants who work with clients, and in-house marketers who brief and manage agencies.

Language: Bulgarian

---

What we’ll cover:

• Why clients treat agencies as vendors — even when they say they want a partner, and what actually creates that gap
• The trust-building behaviours that turn a supplier into an advisor — and why they matter more than the quality of the campaign
• Hard conversations, handled well — performance, budgets and expectations, without damaging the relationship
• What agency leaders misunderstand about executive decision-making — how choices really get made on the client side
• Speaking the language of business outcomes — rather than marketing activity, and why that shift changes the conversation
• Both sides of the table — lessons from hiring, challenging and letting go of agencies, and from building the rare ones that became indispensable

---

What participants will take away: a clear-eyed view of what actually earns an agency a seat at the strategy table — the behaviours that build trust, the conversations worth having sooner, and how to talk about business outcomes rather than deliverables. The most valuable agencies aren’t the ones with the best campaigns; they’re the ones clients invite into the room before the brief is even written.

About the speaker

Dimi Ilieva is a Fractional CMO and executive coach with more than 20 years of experience in marketing — 15 of them in senior leadership roles at international companies. For over six years she served as Chief Marketing Officer at myPOS and sat on the company’s Board of Directors, playing a key role in its growth and expansion across more than 30 markets.

Her career spans product companies, services, software, fintech and marketing agencies — a breadth that has given her a wide perspective on how modern marketing is evolving in an increasingly digital world. An International Coaching Federation (ICF) certified coach, she works with managers and teams on leadership development, communication and accountability, partnering with companies to build sustainable marketing models and high-performing teams.

Dimi holds two MBAs (in English and French) and completed a leadership programme at Harvard Executive Education. She is an active mentor and speaker in initiatives that support young professionals, entrepreneurs and future business leaders.