How often do you squawk- clients want to hear you!

It is a well-established business fact that it’s much cheaper to generate more profit from your existing clients than it is to find new ones.

This principal has been argued about and rediscovered many times over, yet it is alarming how much effort continues to be expended by agencies setting up new business processes and boldly going forth to find clients that don’t know you exist.

If the same effort was invested in client development, i.e., working proactively to nurture your existing clients and communicating with them about your brand then it could be argued that the relationship that (you believe) you have with your top contacts would be distinctly more harmonious. The disparity between the effort that is put into finding new business and looking after the business that is on your doorstep would narrow.

This viewpoint (or rather a far better description of it) was shared with a group of DBA members at a recent presentation given by Jonathan Kirk of Up to the Light. His workshop was entitled Grow your clients, grow your business, and his premise was simply that most agencies assume they get on well with their long term customers and can’t understand how they can fall out so quickly over seemingly trivial issues.

Jonathan explained the difference between empathetic client development that adds value and the brash cold-calling approach indulged by so many businesses. He characterised the types of communication in terms of general day-to-day contact, insightful analysis and genuine revolutionary concepts (using the analogy of ‘preening’, ‘crowing’ and ‘squawking’ as we would describe types of bird behaviour).

Jonathan’s viewpoints have been developed from conducting many hundreds of client facing interviews; to unlock the candid feelings of brand owners and the relationships they have with their agencies. The perception that agencies are guilty of being ‘kept the client in the dark’ about their activities, or they often paid little attention to client competition came as a surprise. So did the widely held view that Clients want their agencies to be coming forward with ideas of their own volition rather than needling to be prompted.

The three top drivers for agency reselection expressed by Clients were;

The desire for change (the feeling that the relationship was tired out and required fresh faces),

Problems with the nuts and bolts of the relationship (the quality and reliability of the arrangement- timing, cost, attention to detail etc), and

A lack of challenging perceived wisdom- clients wanting their thinking to be questioned (yes, they do!)

The solution suggested by Adam was to think strategically about the types of communication and to map out activities across fixed time scales. His viewpoint was that if agencies only ever addressed the day to day ‘preening’ and occasional ‘crowing’ then they shouldn’t be surprised if their clients finally succumb to the torrent of new agency approaches they have to fend off- around 15 a day on average.

Agencies may express surprise that a lack of ideas could be held against them, but the one area they might feel vulnerable would be regarding the nuts and bolts part; having good systems in place to keep the wheels well oiled. If clients get disgruntled it shouldn’t be because of poor account management because that’s the one area where there are no excuses.

Please share your views at editorial@paprika-software.com

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