I’ve always been an advocate for speaking to your clients, and at the end of 2020, I took my own advice and conducted some of my own interviews with my handful of etc clients.
The responses were insightful, humbling and gave me real clarity about understanding where my value lies and the potential scope of my work going forwards.
I wanted to expand on my own experiences – especially as speaking directly to clients is something I encourage all my clients to do. So I asked Carey Evans from Relationship Audits to join me in a chat about how to successfully speak to agency clients about their expectations and feelings towards you and your services.
Essential to any and all client relationships, conducting client interviews or ‘audits’ allows you to identify problems, solutions and possible opportunities.
During the course of our discussion, Carey disclosed that during his time spent with agency clients he discovered,
“a huge 61 per cent (of agencies clients) have never been asked by their agency what their expectations of them are”
He poses the question, ‘how on can you manage the business if you don’t know what your expectations are?‘
Carey discusses how to ‘USE’ clients better, USE being an acronym for ‘Understand’ ‘Secure’ and ‘Expand’. If you understand what’s going on, it helps you secure the business. Once you’ve secured the business, you can look to grow the business.
Carey also shares his top tips for effective client discussions, including;
- Speaking to someone removed from the person you chat to every day to get the most truthful feedback
- Asking open ended questions
- Practicing active listening – letting the client talk and avoiding setting the agenda to suit your own questions
- Checking for understanding at the end of the conversation
- Offering clients the opportunity to go off the record
- Taking action on what they’ve shared
Give it a listen, there’s some really interesting take aways, and it might just push you to open up the conversation you’ve been avoiding, or simply taking a stock check of your current client relations – no matter how well you think they’re going.
This video and lots more content appeared in my latest Rambling On newsletter, you can sign up, here.
Andy.