It was my first day at my new gig as a federal government IT consultant in Washington, D.C. I was slogging through the typical onboarding paperwork when a senior partner dropped by, introduced himself, and handed me a paperback book.
“Read and implement this,” he said. The cover read The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, a book with a sole focus on “the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients.”
“Client management must be important,” I thought.
This encounter occurred more than 10 years ago, in my previous profession. Before doing search marketing or SEO, I was a government IT consultant. I navigated bloated systems and untangled red tape. In the time I spent consulting at the FBI, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and the CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection), I learned quite a few lessons that apply directly to the SEO industry.
The most important lessons I learned, perhaps, were about the art and science of effective client management. Many of those lessons learned have become standard operating procedure at Go Fish Digital. What follows is the codification of our client management approach. It isn’t a sexy new link building strategy or a mind-blowing algorithm update, but it's just as critical to the success of a project.
Overarching client management principles
To start, the following overarching principles help set team expectations. The three core areas that guide our client engagements are:
- Transparency: The majority of our tasks and communication take place in a project management tool (Basecamp) that the client has access to. We want them to see and participate in our discussions, questions, and decisions. By not having this process behind closed doors, we can always go back to when and why a decision was made within Basecamp.
- Continuous communication: We communicate at the pace the client prefers, but we err toward over-communicating. To a client, radio silence means no work is being done, even if that isn’t truly the case.
- Alignment: What are your client’s key performance indicators (KPIs)? What problems keep them up at night? We make sure to align our work and reporting with what is important to the client, rather than only pushing what we think is most important.
The following nine principles are built out of these three core areas, highlighting how you put these principles to work in day-to-day interactions with clients.
It should be noted that these aren’t hard and fast rules, but rather a philosophy to guide our team (and hopefully other agencies) on how to become trusted partners with your clients. It is hard to be perfect all the time (I sure as hell am not), but the more often these nine items are standard operating procedure, the better. So let's dive in, Star Wars-style.
1. Take the time to learn the industry
I got the call from a team member to let me know a new referral had come our way. He was excited because it was a strong referral and very likely to become a client soon. I asked him about the project and what industry they were in. “Plastics machine manufacturing” was his response. Interesting... I knew next to nothing about that industry. Yet, we were very likely to have them as a client to help them market their products online. The first thing we needed to do was understand the industry, and we did this by diving in head first to learn everything we could about the plastics manufacturing lifecycle.
To make sure we have a solid foundation for a client’s niche, the team conducts a lot of discovery in the first month, such as:
- Reviewing the client’s website
- Identifying industry publications and blogs and reading them consistently
- Scheduling an in-person visit (if possible) to see how they work and meet the team
- Requesting any documentation they have about their products or services
- Watching online videos highlighting the industry, their products, and their team
- Building a lexicon document that includes jargon and definitions of words commonly used in their industry
- Purchasing and using the product or service ourselves (if reasonable and feasible)
As an SEO and marketing consultant, you will not be an expert in every client’s industry. But, it is important that you learn their space. This builds their confidence in you, helps you learn their language, and establishes trust.
2. Crush it on the kickoff call
We were kicking off an online reputation management (ORM) project with a celebrity’s publicist and assistant. Prior to the call, we gathered everyone in the company that was a fan of this celeb and did a quick research session so we were all up to speed with his movies, causes, friends, and issues. For the kick-off call, we built a detailed agenda which contained specific topics and questions. The call left the client team feeling at ease that we understood the issue and how to fix it. As a team, we were pleased that all of our early legwork (and TMZ watching) paid off.
After the sales process, the project gets handed over to a client manager like myself. The first thing I do is get a kick-off call scheduled quickly with the client and anyone from their side who will be on the project. Since this is one of your earliest communications with the client, it sets the tone for the entire engagement, so you want to be organized and responsive in getting this meeting set up.
We include on the call anyone from our team who might touch the project. This way, they hear everything from the client at the start, and the client feels good because so many people are working hard on their project.
We always build an agenda for the kick-off call, and I make sure that there is at least one item that each person on our team can speak to. This allows each employee to demonstrate their expertise in the beginning and build a relationship with the client. If it's a phone call, the client may forget just how many people we have working on the account if only one or two people speak during the meeting.
3. Have open, visible tasks and team discussions
We’ve been working with Amy for several years now, and she continually expresses her gratefulness for our transparency. Amy is a senior employee at a data security firm and is often traveling and working on other projects. By keeping track of every task on Basecamp and looping her into our work, she is able to quickly skim through completed tasks and see exactly where we stand on every project. She sees not only what we’ve accomplished in her absence, but also what’s on the horizon. Additionally, she can be directly emailed with any pertinent messages and chime in with a response to keep everything moving forward.
The goal here is to show everything except how the sausage is made. Why would you want to hide all of the time-consuming, difficult, and sometimes menial tasks you’re doing? Showing the client everything we are doing for them helps drive home the value of our service and keeps them from getting antsy about the occasional slow result.
The only place where we hold back a little is on drafts of deliverable reports. We keep those in our team Dropbox and simply reference the folder path when discussing them on Basecamp. We’ve found it keeps clients from getting hung up on things that we haven’t quite finished.
4. Respond within 24 hours
I was just breaking into online marketing when I heard something on the radio that caught my attention. My favorite show, The Sports Junkies in Washington, D.C., were looking to build a website for a new venture. They talked about how annoying it was to work with web designers because things always get difficult. In a moment of inspiration, I sent them a short pitch email that ended with, “Messages don’t sit around in my inbox. I respond immediately.” The next morning, someone from the show emailed me back, saying “I’m not sure why exactly, but I think I can work with you." I’ve worked closely with them ever since, and that relationship has helped springboard the Go Fish Digital brand in D.C.
From that original encounter on, I’ve always placed a high value on responsiveness. You know that person in your life who feels like you're late if you're on time? That’s how we are with this 24-hour response time rule. If you truly take 24 hours to acknowledge a client’s request, it may be within the time frame, but it isn’t honoring the spirit of the rule itself (37 pieces of flair, anyone?). It doesn’t take much to send a note saying, “We are on it”.
This is another area in which we err on the side of overdoing things. Even if the client sends an email that might not normally warrant a response, we still ping them back to let them know it was received.
One of the chief complaints about service-based companies is a lack of responsiveness. Counteract that by being committed to quick responses.
5. Be organized
The director of marketing at a large financial organization likes to meet with our team weekly. We review the previous week’s progress and talk through our tasks for the next few days. This client is especially chatty, so without a formal agenda in place, there was the potential for the calls to devolve into a free-for-all, which would be inefficient for everyone. Because of situations like this, we always send a formal agenda ahead of time, which keeps us all on track and demonstrates to the client that we understand their goals and respect their time. Of course, we always allow our clients to ask questions or bring new things up. For the most part, though, we try to stick to the agenda.
Disorganization is frustrating. Sometimes you just have to deal with it. A spouse or child who misplaces everything, a friend who can’t remember an appointment, or a co-worker that never replies to important emails. While in these instances there is nothing you can do, a client who’s fed up with her vendor’s disorganization can simply get a new vendor. So we stress the importance of being ultra-organized on the project.
Have well thought-out agendas. Follow those up with meeting notes and action items if appropriate. Keep Basecamp organized with to-dos and messages. Communicate clearly. Always use calendar appointments. It’s the little things that show you are professional.
6. Be flexible and adaptable
We work with a large car sales website that aggregates all car listings from across the web. When you're dealing with a site that has over 3 million pages, it's important to focus on optimization opportunities that scale. We identified site speed as one of these optimization opportunities. The site had been particularly laggy, and I was doing my best to get to the bottom of the issues with their CDN. Alas, I was stuck.
Fortunately, one of our other team members is Akamai certified and has configured CDNs for multiple large government websites. I looped him in; he started throwing around big words like “nodes” and “end points.” Some magic happened, I assume, and everything was fixed. The site was now blazing-fast and the client happy that his SEO team resolved an issue he didn’t even know they could help with.
No project is ever the same, which is great. How boring would it be if you applied the exact same strategy and principles to different projects, over and over?
We're always looking for ways to show additional value to the client. Whether it's by helping them with something out-of-scope or helping with deliverables that they have to pass on to senior management, there are always ways for us to contribute value. Although there's nothing wrong with up-selling, we don’t often like to say “that is out of scope” for a task that wouldn’t take us too long or be too difficult.
Additionally, we're very flexible in terms of how we work with a client. Is the client a phone person or email person? Are they hands-off, or intimately involved in the details? We try to get a good feel for this, and then adjust how we work with them based on their preferences.
7. Be in front of the technological curve, not behind it
Our new yacht charter client had just finished their first month with us and we were reviewing everything that had been done thus far. It was all very positive, and during the call, the CEO casually said, “I love the internal communication tool (Slack) so much that I’ve started using it at my other company.” Clients want to feel like you are doing things efficiently, effectively, and with the latest technology.
In our field, change is the norm. Every time Google launches an algorithm update, it can mean that a tactic that's worked for us for months or even years is suddenly obsolete. We’ve found that one of the best ways to avoid any surprises here is to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to strategies and tools.
I’ve mentioned our project management tool, Basecamp, a few times now. It may not have all the bells and whistles of others, but it’s dead simple to learn and our clients pick it up without any help from us.
We also use Slack both internally and with clients for brainstorming sessions. Slack provides quick access to the entire team, which is helpful for most of our day-to-day communication.
In addition to tools, we’ve found that everyone on the team needs to be comfortable with a core set of tech-savvy tasks:
- Reviewing and editing HTML and CSS
- Testing, installing, and configuring WordPress plugins
- Editing a WordPress theme
- Running ScreamingFrog against a site and reviewing the results
- Performing more advanced Excel functions like vLookups and pivot tables
- Examining a website’s DNS and understanding each element
Being tech-savvy in all areas of our business reinforces their trust that they are with the best team. Clients expect us to be tech-savvy, so we don’t want to let them down by looking like noobs.
8. Have an escalation path to turn to
While project work was underway for one of our financial sector clients, a reputation crisis popped up that went beyond our defined scope of work. We had worked with Google in the past to get certain defamatory web pages removed, but this particular case required some legal expertise. Luckily, we had a highly specialized ORM attorney in our network who was equipped to handle situations exactly like this. The client was grateful that we had a trusted expert on call and felt like their issue was being handled by an elite team that could deftly handle any issue that arose.
If things aren’t working, clients like when you have options to turn to. Bring in an expert from your team or even an outside consultant, but be sure to sell it as a unique offering or connection that you have. Being able to escalate situations to special people and processes when the initial solution doesn’t work keeps the project moving forward and prevents clients from seeking solutions from other agencies.
9. Show you care on a personal level
Our client was having his first child, a baby girl. That is certainly a time to celebrate, so we made a nice card and sent it to his family along with an edible arrangement when his bundle of joy arrived. It went over great, both with the client and his wife.
I hesitate to call this a tactic, since caring should never be manipulative. Let's just call this a reminder to care. Small talk at the top of calls, for example, can go a long way in establishing a more personal connection than the robotic client/agency relationship. It's hard for introverts like me, but I force myself to do it because it gives the relationship more depth and meaning. At the end of the day, your reputation as a person is more important than building brands or making money.
Final thoughts
We do our best to instill these values in our organization and make it clear up front what our expectations are of every employee. Over time, these nine principles have evolved and will continue to do so as we work to continue building a good agency with a strong reputation.
Maintaining a positive relationship with the client is everything. Delivering on the results you sell and adhering to these nine principles will help both you and your client achieve success.
Do you disagree with any of these principles? Or are there others that are important to you, either as a provider or as a client? Let us know in the comments!
All effective client campaigns can base the majority of their success upon communication. Often a client will voice their major concerns in a kickoff call, and it's important to listen carefully and make note of the things they find most important. Setting their expectations at that point is essential, as is building a communications channel that they can rely upon - keep that communication flowing, and it does make for a happy client who is aware of all of the steps that are underway on their behalf. Thanks, Brian.
So very true, Bill. I even notice this when I'm on the other side of the relationship with our vendors; I love the vendors that are open and communicate with us frequently, even if things aren't always roses. On the flip side, when I feel like a vendor is ignoring me or I'm an afterthought, I'm much less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt when there are issues.
I suppose it is just human nature - communication is key to all successful relationships in life, and agency/client is no different :)
Client management doesn't come naturally to many! It's a completely different set of skills to know how to market a website online and how to manage client expectations.
Totally agree, Cynthia! It is funny because in other industries (e.g. government consulting), it is the opposite - there are firms that exist solely because they have great relationships but there deliverables are terrible (and in some cases, don't exist at all).
Really great post, Brian!
It really puts a lot of pressure on a company to live up to all of these, but if you want to stand out, it's what you need to do. I've personally found that good communication (and fast response time) with the client is one of the key points to keep a client happy. If they know you care and work hard for them, they're much more likely to trust you to deliver results.
P.S. I love the art work!
You're spot on - it is definitely hard to consistently live up to these but definitely what needs to be done. The extra effort certainly pays off in the client retention and happiness department.
Good read and reminder! Being Flexible and Adaptable is sometimes a difficult but invaluable aspect of the client relationship - be action oriented and prepared to put your hands in a little bit of everything. Oh, and the 24 hour rule - a definite must!
"hands in a little bit of everything"
Preach.
How do I like this twice? This post literally had me cheering and shouting 'Oh Yes' which I am positive disturbed my neighbours.
Some of these things I already do and others I will be experimenting with after this post. I've not used Basecamp but I am pretty sure Asana has a similar ability to add clients outside of the organization.
I would love to hear more on this if you're open to sharing?
Yes, totally open to sharing! Which part are you looking for more info on?
Openness with the clients and how you manage that transparency, (especially with Slack) & resolve conflicts when there are the inevitable hiccups.
The other thing I am super interested in is your research in an industry for each client. I thoroughly believe this is a major reason why many companies SEO or PPC is mediocre and doesn't achieve results because they have no idea how to reach the customers of their clients.
Sure, happy to share!
We actually don't let clients into Slack (yet). We purely use that as an internal communication tool, and on one occasion setup a channel when we worked with a freelancer who was helping us with a very specific issue on a special project. Other than that, it is all internal communication. We have a general channel, team channels, and channels for specific focus areas in the business (technical SEO, content, etc). This seems to work well for us.
For Basecamp, we heavily use project templates to help us form a project plan for months 1 and 2. But, these are also highly customized for what the client needs. After that, we build monthly or quarterly project plans and put those into Basecamp and execute on them. Most things are visible if a client wants to look-in. The few exceptions are:
1. We don't like people learning on Basecamp. It is ok if a team member doesn't know a strategy or tactic and needs to ask questions, but we don't like this to happen where a client can see it. As a client, it can feel off that someone doing something for you has never done it before, even if they are receiving a lot of guidance and it is a totally normal process.
2. We don't love to put draft versions of documents out there for clients to read. So, when we are communicating back and forth, we usually will point to where it is on Dropbox. This is enough for other team members to quickly find it, but clients do not have access so they won't be able to open up a draft. We've just found that it is much better to deliver the final, polished version in most cases.
As for researching an industry, we don't have a standard process. It is usually a combination of free-form research, reviewing what influencers are sharing, and getting as much information from the client as we can - on both websites to read and who to follow. We'll never be as good as they are, but we like to get very comfortable with the ins and outs what they do day-to-day.
Thanks Brian!
That's really helpful. As I said, its definitely been something that I have been toying with for a while now just haven't actual implemented.
Thank you for sharing some details :)
I can't downplay how important that quick response suggestion is. There's nothing I hate more, as a client or as a vendor, than someone who won't reply to emails or questions for days or weeks on end. It makes the entire project run behind and then everyone gets annoyed.
Great tips for the practice of our business more effective. May the Force be with you
great tips for any agency or start ups. Client base focus is a key for me. totally agree with your theory.
Great post! 100% agree with the importance of communication. Good communication channels with a client can also help you learn and adapt to their temperament or communication style. Some clients prefer deep analysis and lots of details on every aspect, others just want to be told what they need to do in order to facilitate a project. An early focus on communication can avoid awkward situations with clients and help you tailor future interactions based on what they prefer.
Totally agree - every client is a little different, and paying attention to those subtletiees early on can help prevent some awkward situations.
I really dig the "Escalation Path" graphic. That is more or less what Rey was doing when she went to meet Luke. "Time to escalate!"
Thanks! Even prodigies need escalation paths. It gives clients a level of comfort and it also just feels good to be the trusted advisor who helped a client solve a problem, even if it wasn't you doing the solving.
We all know the theory, the problem is the practice, as i guide is a great article, but always come the uninspected problem, anyway, this points have to be in wind all the time.
Thanks Brian for your recommendations. I loved the originality of placing photographs Star Wars for each star tips. May the Force be with you ;)
Thanks, Enrique! Appreciate it :)
Great post on an often overlooked aspect of the industry. I've found that it's extremely important for clients to feel like they know exactly what's going on every step of the way.
indeed! Some clients care less about day-to-day activities than others, but we still go out of our way to keep those less-engaged clients in the loop. If we just let them float along, if something goes wrong, it can be jarring for them since they haven't been involved throughout.
Totally agree! The best would be to have a common program both us and the client to see everything that's going on, or doing regular meetings with aaalll of the info, which would take maybe longer to get.
really great post, i've seen people fall (and fail) in-between these steps and missing theme etc. Hope more people impliment some of these which is easier to say than do.
Definitely hard, but really worth it :) I'd love to see a shift in our industry as well towards tighter client/agency relationships
Some great points here along with fantastic images. I think that you really did a fantastic job in laying out ways to handle a client from utilizing caring tactics at the end to show a personal side to even project management with basecamp. The biggest part was on the various levels of communication that you brought up from learning the industry (very big in my experience with clients) to even being in front of technology. I have been freelancing and now have been contracted with a company and these tactics are perfect in both areas for myself.
Thank you for this contribution to the moz community and these notes are impactful to any SEO/Marketing person, firm, agency ect.
I think your point about being "flexible and adaptable" is really important and gives smaller businesses a leg up over their larger, unyielding competitors, but there is definitely a limit.
For some clients, if you're too easily swayed by their input and give in to their requests over and over, you can end up looking like a pushover and the quality of the work you produce can suffer. Just good to remember that you're the expert -- at least, most of the time ;)
I like the "personal care" section. I think repo can do things that may not be done all other things combined
Not much to add... you nailed it! :)
I worked in an enviroment where step 1 was constantly skipped... it makes it virtually impossible to successfully move to any of these other steps without it.
People can get great suggestions from this article.The points and pictures in this article very informative. Thanks a lot.
It was very depth client management read. What you learn at universities/colleges for years after paying ridiculous amount of fees was easily said and made available by Brian Patterson in this article. Thanks, indeed for this wonderful article.
Thanks!
Thank you.
Good article Brian, I think you hit the nail on the head :)
I think that if you consistently apply the 9 principles (provided you deliver a good service ;)) you'll be way ahead of 90% of the competition. Nice!
Great Post..worht reading it Brian. For sure, we will be using few useful tips from your post.
This is really a great post, you've done a great job on this. Keep it up!
Dear Brian,
Totally agree on the 24 hours rule! I don't care if it's 6am or 9pm, I always respond my emails at the moment and hope my clients do too. I think it's very irresponsible for someone to answer an email like 3 days later. I can understand that if a client is busy SOMETIMES could answer a day after I sent it, but of course just sometimes.
Really cool post BTW!
Totally agree - quick response time is so important and helps a client feel/know that you are there for them. I think slow response times sort of signals to a client that they aren't a top priority for you.
Not counting, but these are some very effective points-of-client management every client relationship manager should abide. One should actually live the role, literally!
Thank you,
Rodwell
Brian, Really true that need to understand about customer industry, no matter you are doing SEO or developing customer application..
I am totally agree with all point but sometime its hard to follow all thing..
Love it Brian! Hope other agencies steal this.
We do not give access to team conversations, it has the unintended side effect of feature creep and reduces creative input from the team. Basecamp is for our team and we built an automated platform on Google Drive for client task management, comments, and campaign goal tracking. The automated system works in real-time and sends updates automatically when we hit goals and milestones.
Thanks, Joe. I hope others use it too! (I should note that the title was created by the Moz team - it is a great title, but I'd feel vein titling my own article that way :)
Basecamp is certainly imperfect, and we do use the private post function a fair amount, but the visibility clients have outweighs the negative for us. Your system sounds really cool and seems like it could solve a lot of the issues with standard PM software.
Something many in marketing and in PPC/Paid Media don't take account when starting out in their career. Managing a client is almost more important then managing a campaign.
Brian! Very good customer management compared with photographs of Star Wars, enlightening :) When you offer services, the most difficult is to maintain the trust with your clients from day one and always meet their expectations. Great post!
Thank you for sharing, Now it's time to implement it!
Communication is an important part of any successful project. I like the way you present that.
Great post!! thanks and congratulation!! Goog job.