Make Sure You See The Same Future Your Client Does

Clients can be horribly indecisive. Is it that they’re never entirely sure of what they want or that they’re not entirely interested in working with you right now? You don’t ever really know.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough … there’s nothing worse than thinking you have reached an agreement with a client on an assignment only to find out you don’t know everything you really needed to know. (Note: some creative types consider this a kind of sport, especially with first-year account managers.)

The result of your ignorance can be missed deadlines, increased budgets, pissed off clients.

How do you avoid this problem? Essentially, what you need to do is get a more objective understanding of what the client is trying to accomplish. Understand the strategy behind the request, first, and you’ll find it easier to provide guidance to your team members and to identify potential additional business for down the road.

The strategic visioning process, outlined on our BrandCrafting blog, works for corporate and product brands alike.

Here are some things to keep in mind when working with a client to set their “vision” for a project or account:

1) Understand how the client defines “success” – get them to discuss success on their own terms. How are they going to know if what they spent was good for their company? Who needs to be happy with the outcome? What are the long-term benefits of a continued relationship?

2) Part of having a clear vision of success is being able to identify (fairly accurately) the financial benefits of success. Once a client can objectively identify the financial outcomes of a successful effort, they can objectively identify a budget to spend in order to generate the anticipated “return” on their investment.

3) Work with the client to describe their “vision” from the point of view of the customer/end-user. Are there any insights that result from this conversation? Can you identify any measurable actions that might help you set performance metrics down the road?

As you can probably tell, a discussion with a client on this level will require account managers to be better prepared and educated on the nature of the client’s business, their customers, competition and media. It’s well worth the investment, though, since these kinds of conversations successfully position your firm as a strategic partner rather than just a vendor.