Putting Experience To Work

While working with hundreds of clients over the past 24 years, I have found that the relationships which are most comfortable for my team and especially for our clients, are based on partnership. You may be thinking either: well duh! or you’re asking yourself if you truly have this partnership experience with your clients.

“Partnerships” as opposed to “working relationships” come out of a deeper desire on both sides of the equation - the supplier and client - to create a true understanding of what the requirements are for the client company and how the client wants the product or service delivered. Each and every client has individual needs and requirements, some are dependent on corporate directives, but I have found that most are personal to the individual client contact. So, therein lies the need to create and maintain a deeper and connected relationship.

For those of you reading this who think that a deeper understanding of your client is not of interest to you, I suspect that you are in a “one-time sale only” business and therefor this does not apply to you. If however, you are in a business maintained and grown through your clients, there may be some pointers for you here.

Many of us subscribe to the idea that it is far less expensive to keep clients you have and grow with them than it is to keep finding new clients. Assuming this is true, let’s look at how it is possible to create longer lasting relationships with clients you already have.

Example
I recently won a new client through an introduction from one of my longtime clients: Rob Engelman. We’ll talk about Rob more in later posts. The client is a very large home improvement product manufacturer and they have a newly formed marketing department - about 2 years old. The whole staff met with me and it was clear from their questions that they were not happy with their current design group and were looking for a better solution. Here are some of the questions I asked them during our first meeting.

1. Who have you been using for your creative development for your products?
2. What have they done that you really like. Is their creative amazing? Is their customer service to your liking?
3. How long have you worked with them?
4. What don’t you like about your relationship with them? (Listen carefully to this answer as it is very important - you will learn not only what the supplier is not delivering - you also find out what the client’s real needs are). Ask for more information about this so that you get a very clear idea of expectations.
5. What are you looking for now that you were not getting?

Once I have a clear picture in my mind of where they are coming from, what the expectations and frustrations are, I then ask for information on upcoming projects that my team and I can look forward to bidding on.

Engage
So, the partnership begins, there is information, clarification and a request from me regarding potential work. The part of this that tends to deepen the relationship into a partnership is not only my laying out my capabilities, and the client laying out their needs, the true connection - I believe - comes from a true concern on my part for the client’s success and even more important, that the we both understand that we must co-create the project/relationship in order for the project to become successful.