Five tips for better client relationships
Our relationships with clients have always been important, but perhaps never more so than now. Strong partnerships allow both client and agency to benefit mutually from clearer communication and the ability to work together to solve problems. Over the course of this tumultuous year that we’re having, these attributes of good working relationships, if nothing else, will have helped agencies to access the financial visibility they need for scenario planning.
In episode 45 of the Small Spark Theory Podcast, I spoke to Alisha Lyndon, founder & CEO of B2B growth consultancy, Momentum. Over the past year, Alisha has re-invigorated the agency’s client satisfaction programme with great success. Our discussion covered the importance of planning and process when it comes to actively shifting our existing client relationships from transactional and reactive, to trusted and proactive. Along the way, Alisha had some great pointers to share about building client faith, nurturing confidence and encouraging advocacy. Here’s a summary of Alisha’s top tips.
1. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is easy
Maintaining and growing a client account over the long-term is no mean feat. The only constant is change, competition is always fierce and clients are having the ‘next big idea’ pitched to them all the time. Some clients in organisations will be ‘lifers’ but many will come into new roles as change-agents, so the client stakeholder map is always shifting, along with the politics, ambitions and priorities inside the organisation. Maintaining a broad perspective over all these changes requires diligence, and responding in a way that delivers a consistent and delightful brand experience requires a really solid process.
2. It can’t be down to only one person
Particularly as an agency scales in size, and the number of client relationships increases, it becomes more challenging to nurture client relationships and deliver your brand promise to them, consistently. It’s therefore really important to build great client experience into the values and culture of your agency so that every touchpoint with it aligns with the expectations you have set. To do the best work for clients you need to build high performance into the DNA of the agency.
3. Invest in the creation of proactive ideas
If you follow the markets associated with your clients’ businesses carefully, you’ll have the insight required to understand their challenges and spot new opportunities. You’ll therefore feel more confident about taking them considered, fresh ideas. It’s really worth investing in this. Momentum runs an internal ‘Dragon’s Den’ type activity that encourages the whole team to think about suggestions that could be pitched to clients. And Alisha frequently invests in external, objective expertise to inform proactive proposals. The primary goal here is not to sell more services (although that is frequently a positive side effect) but to develop existing relationships into true partnerships — and then look after them. Don’t stay in service mode; a customer will always be glad to know that their agency partner is going the extra mile to really learn and think about the future of their business.
4. Arrange for a neutral third-party to conduct client satisfaction audits
Client satisfaction audits have the potential to unveil a deeper level of insight about how the client really feels about their relationship with the agency, and the value it delivers to them. It can take a brave agency leader to ask questions that they might not want to hear the answers to, but it perhaps takes an even braver client to answer them honestly. With this in mind, it’s enormously helpful to arrange for a neutral third-party to facilitate these conversations on your behalf. This allows the client to answer with less censorship and means those problems that need to be tackled have more chance of being uncovered. It can feel daunting to entrust your clients in the hands of someone else, but the output will be worth it.
5. Frame the satisfaction audit as an investment in your customer
A satisfaction audit should be thought of as an investment in the customer, rather than an investment that you’re making in your agency. Straight away, this demonstrates a commitment to performance improvement and communicates your dedication to the partnership. Similarly, be clear about objectives of the programme and the benefits that the satisfaction audit will deliver; this shows that you’re driven to form a long-term relationship and helps to move you away from being seen as only a ‘service provider’. Finally, let your actions reinforce the value of the process to your client. Deliver on the feedback you’ve been provided with and show how you’re turning it into tangible action and outcomes.
Coming from the founder of an agency that has specialist expertise in account-based marketing, these tips from Alisha should leave you in no doubt that establishing better client relationships depends on taking planned action. However, I also admired the over-riding piece of advice that Alisha gave during our conversation: ‘Just get started’. It can be tempting to over-engineer the process of client satisfaction auditing, in particular. But it’s not necessary to begin with a complex strategy, or by rolling it out to every client the agency has at once. Start on a small scale to begin with — perhaps with your friendliest clients or those you feel a little disconnected from — and I’m in no doubt that the rewards will motivate you to develop the process from there.
If you’d like to listen to the conversation with Alisha Lyndon in full, tune in to Small Spark Theory, Episode 45, Building better client relationships.
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