As an agency or even a marketing department, you must work with clients of every possible ilk. Oh sure, your client might be your company’s CEO or it might be the marketing director of a third-party company, but when you provide marketing services, you’re nearly always reporting to someone else. So what happens when that client doesn’t have the maturity required to participate at a high level in discussions and project development? This lack of maturity might result in an abandonment of the project before completion because it seemed to take too long, needed too much development, or was broken.
As campaign architects and builders, we find ourselves working with clients who need to learn a new vernacular in order to participate in meetings and decision-making with our teams. Simple explanations are one thing, but when we spend copious time in calls and meetings simply educating, it’s time to take a long, hard look at the fit of the client.
For the immature client, working to build campaigns will be a daunting task — made so by longer meetings and hours’ long descriptions of design and development processes and you attempt to keep them in the know and in the loop. If our client is lacking the required maturity to participate in a meaningful manner, the negative impact on the project may derail efforts to the point of paralysis or even abandonment.
In an effort to find the best customers for your company, consider developing a maturity-diagnosis document. In this document, ask questions to help you determine at what level your customer will be able to contribute to conversations and decision-making. You could ask questions such as:
Do you know the difference between drip and nurture campaigns?
Does your company have a revenue goal this year?
Are you on target to reach your goal?
How will this campaign contribute to the goal?
How big is your sales team?
How are they compensated?
At what level is your understanding of HTML and CSS?
Is your website responsive; do you know what that is?
Does your website offer eCommerce? If so, what platform?
Does your eCommerce system enable you to send auto-responders?
Do you know how to modify these auto-responders?
How dependent are you on your IT department or other departments?
As you can see, the questions you might ask should span myriad topics, but which to ask will be dependent upon your company and the types of services you provide to clients.
If you are a .NET website-development company, you may need to ask questions focused more on the maturity knowledge of our client in the eCommerce space. If you provide simple blast emails, you may wish to focus on their understanding of various types of emails and SEO. In both cases, however, you are looking to minimize the overhead created by having to educate your client each step or phase of the project.
Not every prospect who dials your number or fills out a form is a customer with whom your company should engage. You are not in the business of education, you’re in the business of providing a service and the more quickly, succinctly, and efficiently you can provide that service, the more profitable you will be.
