How to reach more senior clients, with Jenny Plant

Transcript:
Account managers tell me that their day to day contact at the client side is too junior. And they really need to be speaking to more senior people at the client side in order to get any decisions made about expansion of the account. So I want to break it down and talk through some ideas for you. And I've got five ideas for how you can navigate the organisation and reach more senior clients without upsetting your key contact. So before we get into the five different ways, the key thing to do when wanting to speak to more senior clients at the agency side is to really understand their business. Now, it kind of is obvious, but the more senior you are at a client organisation, the more close you are to the business challenges, the business objectives. And therefore before you go and present yourself or try and speak to these more senior people in the client company, you want to really do your research. What is the company doing? What is their strategy for the year? Do we have a copy of their marketing plan? Do we really understand their objectives, and actually, who are the individuals that we want to reach? Now, if you're dealing with an enterprise level client, then if you go on to seekingalpha.com, you can download a transcript of the C suite conversations and the presentations on a quarterly basis to the investors. And this is where you can literally read from the words of the CEO, the CFO, what their plans are, where they're focusing their energy and time in the coming quarter, or the coming year. Are there any new products coming down the pipeline? Are they expanding into new territories, what's happening at a macro level in the organisation, and also go onto their website, download the latest report and accounts, read the chairman's statement. And really find out about who the company are, who their key competitors are, what brands or what products or services drive their business, so that when you try to reach these more senior people, you have that background understanding of the client business. One of the biggest complaints that clients typically have about agency account managers is that they don't have business acumen, they don't understand the client business well enough. So don't fall foul of that and make sure that you do that research to start with.

 

 

So let's talk about the different ways that you can get access to more senior people. So the first suggestion I have is to conduct a client listening study. And this is where you would invite as well as your key contact, more senior people within that organisation to give you feedback on your agency performance. Typically, more senior marketers are often at the pitch process initially when they're choosing an agency but then over time, they might disappear, while the more junior staff take over with the more tactical implementation of projects. So first of all, we may have lost contact with those senior people, but they are aware of us, they do know that we are their supplier, or you may see them now and again, at different types of meetings, but they're not really day to day contacts and you want to speak to them, you want to reach them, but you really don't want to upset the person that you're dealing with on a day to day basis. So if you conduct a yearly client listening study, you can invite these people to give you feedback. And  I always recommend using first of all, if you want to carry this out, internally, then maybe it's this senior member of your senior leadership team who could conduct those interviews with these senior client leads, and ask them for feedback, what's going well, what have been some of the challenges? What can we do better? But also use that opportunity of interviewing them to talk about their business. What are your future plans? What do you have coming up in the future? What can we help with? How can we help more? And how can we add value?  Alternatively, if you don't have someone internally that has the capacity to do that, or, or perhaps isn't in a position to do that, then I would always recommend using an external consultancy, like Relationship Audit & Management, they are hugely experienced in carrying out client audits. They have a huge amount of benchmarking data, they have a question set that is very, very well established. And these guys really know their stuff. They sit down with your client, and they listen for what's not being said. They ask the difficult questions, and they will squeeze the information from the client, and they will come back with some gold. And so you're getting a perspective on how the client sees you. And what what success looks like for them, maybe some of the areas that they see are your development areas. And that will give you the information you need to decide what is going to be the right approach. And it sets the ball in motion for you to do a follow up meeting with that senior person to thank them for participating in the study. And in my experience of dealing with Relationship Audits & Management, I invited them in to audit a relationship that I had at while I was at Publicis and that the information that they shared with me after that audit, which was really painful, by the way, because it wasn't particularly glowing. And then the action points that we took as a result of that feedback that we got really allowed us to extend that relationship by at least two years. It was massively valuable exercise and hugely valuable to the company. And that's why when I left Publicis, I went to work for the consultancy, Relationship Audits & Management for about nine months. And I was carrying out these audits myself. And I was quite surprised at how clients really open up to an external third party. And they tell you stuff that they might not be telling you to your face in the agency. So regardless of whether you want to reach more senior people, I just think carrying out yearly audits of your relationships is really good practice. So that's the first one.

 

 

The second one is to decide whether you have a good relationship with the procurement department. So some of your clients, particularly the large clients, will have a procurement function. And, you know, it's really procurement are the linchpins, within any organisation, they have access to all of the decision makers, and they're really great to get on board to help you navigate the organisation. Now this might not be relevant for you if your client organisation isn't big enough to have a dedicated procurement team. But certainly, if you are looking at how to reach more senior people, then make sure that you establish a relationship with procurement. And I do have a podcast episode dedicated exclusively to how to navigate procurement,  how to establish relationships with procurement. So I will include that link to that episode in the show notes. But certainly procurement are people who could open doors to more senior clients.

 

 

The third way is to conduct a quarterly business review, if you're not already doing it,  and I'm not talking about a weekly status meeting on the status of the project. I'm talking about creating opportunity to sit down with your client and their senior team on a quarterly basis so that not only is can you evaluate how far you've come with the current scope of work, to make sure everything's on track, maybe review metrics, but also for it to be forward focused, you know, what, what projects do they have coming up in the future. And also, it's an opportunity for us to be proactive and bring some insights, market trends, maybe customer insights, competitor information, things that are changing in the external environment that will be valuable to our clients. So it's certainly not a passive meeting. It's very much about future focus, and most quarterly business review meetings and it doesn't have to be called the quarterly business review it could be a, you know, a quarterly strategy session. But essentially, it's where you would have more senior leaders. And also, if you've made changes to the agency, maybe you've acquired another agency yourself or you've hired a new team, and you're now offering a new service, it's an opportunity to update the client on what you're doing. So again, a quarterly business review is typically attended by the senior clients. And therefore, that could be an idea for you to propose to the client, that you conduct one on a quarterly basis. And also going back to the previous point, procurement are often facilitating these types of meetings. So that's idea number three.

 

 

Number four, is to create something of value for their senior clients. And it could be a senior executive briefing around future trends that you've spotted, industry changes, legal implications coming up that you want the client to be prepared for, again, external environment focused, future value creation focus. And you could create a webinar, a round table event. And you could say to your client contact, you know, we're offering this senior briefing session and this is typically attended by more senior clients. So, you know, who would that be from your, from your side, I can give you a quick executive briefing now to give you the highlights of what we'll be covering on that. And then you are equipping your key contact to then find out on their side who those most relevant clients would be, and who would be most interested in attending that.

 

 

And then finally, number five is to consider who do you have on your team at a more senior level, that could be introduced via your contact to a more senior level client on the client side. So let's suppose you're dealing with a marketing manager, and you want to really understand who the Chief Marketing Officer is, you'd like to create contact with them, then instead of you being that point of contact, perhaps you ask for your CEO or your managing director to be introduced to their Chief Marketing Officer. And then they can have a peer to peer relationship. And then you maintain the peer to peer relationship with the marketing manager. It goes without saying that you want to do your research online beforehand to understand who all the individuals are, you can always ask for an organigram to understand the names of people and contacts. You can also look on LinkedIn, to find out who the individuals are that you need to establish a relationship with, and also consider connecting with them on LinkedIn.

 

 

So I hope that's given you a few ideas to consider when thinking about trying to establish relationships with more senior clients. There are a few more ideas, which we cover in the Account Accelerator programme. So if you're interested in finding out more, it's all about creating a plan, a client centric plan, to increase your revenue from your existing clients. And I will be running that in September 2021 again, so if you're interested in more details, please get in contact. It's Jenny Plant on LinkedIn, or jenny@accountmanagementskills.com. Until the next time, see you soon.