It’s been a while since we’ve written on here and we wanted to update you on exactly why that has been.

We’ve been working hard on converting the ebook version of The Me Agenda into a fully-fledged, physical handbook. This has taken a lot of re-design, re-shaping of content, adding new content and space for you to write down your own actions and thoughts….but we’re finally there now and we thank you so much for your patience.

Today is a bit of a milestone - it’s the day that we’ve got a meeting with a real-life publisher to talk about printing, distribution and sales and marketing. Things are getting real. As in, physically real!!!

If you’re interested in the process of taking a physical book to market, let us know and we’ll keep you updated with all the ups and downs along the way.

But this wouldn’t be a Me Agenda blog without bringing some value to the table - Our thought of the day to help keep you in tune with your client’s Me Agenda:

Listen to understand, not to respond

This can be quite difficult as it can be a little scary to feel like you’re letting go of control in the conversation. But by doing this, you are winning twice - one, in that your conversation will be so much richer, you’ll get on your client’s wavelength so much faster and build your relationship, and two, your client will get much more of what they genuinely want and need. Winning all round!

To your success,

Yesterday we digested the news and talked about what the potential upsides and downsides could be for both clients and client-facing people. A couple stood out for us that we think you would definitely be wise to consider as things ease.

See, we believe there is going to be a massive rush to organise face-to-face meetings as soon as possible with as many of your clients as possible. Catching back up, re-connecting personally, grabbing a coffee…anything to shake the virtual dust off the relationship and bring it roaring back into real-life glorious technicolour.

Thing is, so will every other person and their agency, meaning clients will be inundated with meeting requests that impeach on their time with little or no value delivered.

Put it this way. Unless you are in their top two or three favoured relationships, you’re going to be staying in your virtual meetings with them for a while yet. So the question becomes twofold:

1. ‘Should I even bother to try to arrange a face-to-face meeting? What’s the point when things have been going pretty well over the last crazy year?’

2. ‘How can I develop a relationship good enough to be able to get a face-to-face meeting?’

For both those questions, the answer is - it depends. Even more than before. But the good news is that ‘depends’ can be rationally and objectively defined against the criteria in the chart below:

We all have to accept that some of the changes that have happened will be staying with us for the foreseeable future. One of those changes will be the more considered thinking as to whether a face-to-face meeting is even worth it, compared to a virtual conversation. From both sides. For example, we see international travel to meetings becoming a much more difficult activity to justify, therefore local might be the wise play for the time being.

Note that these dimensions will be considered by both you and your clients:

Geography: Perhaps most obviously, but the further away the less likelihood of moving straight back to in-person meetings

Relationship: The more transactional/fragile/distant, the less likelihood…

Moment: The less important the moment for the client, the less likelihood….you get the drift

The good thing is, now you can see that these dimensions can be used to help you prioritise those clients where you even stand a chance in the first place of getting an in-person meeting, or help you control costs, or identify where you have knowledge gaps…it’s a very useful exercise to do.

The even better thing is that the ‘Moment’ dimension can be used to help build relationships with those clients you want to get closer to. That is, the more important the moment to the client, the more they’ll be open to having a conversation with you. We cover how to find those moments out, how to approach clients with real relevance and how to run brilliant conversations in the book.

So the bottom line? Don’t be an inadvertent nuisance to your clients. It would even be a blessed relief to some if you say that virtual may be the best way for the time being (but ask them if they’re happy with that too). Your time will come, and you’ll have priority clients identified using the dimensions above. But don’t forget those other clients. Keep delivering value and being relevant and some may even come to you asking to see you in real life. Something we all are frankly desperate to get on with.

- Shorter

- Scheduled

- Task-based

- Remote

...than before. The personal connection before/during/after meetings is in danger of being lost, and that's key to your differentiation.

Showing C.U.R.I.O.U.S. behaviours in your conversations opens and keeps that connection, and leads to growth with both your clients and prospects.

In the book we give you the template, the S5 meeting structure, in which to lay out these behaviours in a way that makes your client and prospect conversations flow.

The CURIOSITY comes through you staying in the Situation Analysis for longer than you may currently do. Before you do that though, in this virtual world the importance of developing warmth is even more critical.

The RISK-TAKING comes by you actively listening to their answers, then when you think you have enough information, providing your own perspectives and/or opinions. In real-time, so there may be the chance that what you say proves to be wrong. That’s the risk, and it’s something that leads to you providing value in your conversations. And guess what? If you do that in your client conversations then they’ll be happy to speak to you, because they know they’ll get something for that expenditure of their time.

The New Year is rapidly underway and now we’re all back into the swing of things, be they lockdown-restricted or otherwise, we wanted to give you our top tips for developing client relationships in 2021. Because although some things never change, the importance of some things to your clients do!

1. Stop client relationships becoming transactional - we banged on about this enough last year. It’s still true - beware the virtual erosion of the depth of your relationships. See previous blogs for how to combat this.

2. Stay on top of your relevance - your client has new goals for 2021. Do you know what they are and how you can help?

3. Efficacy v Effectiveness v Efficiency – focus shift for 2021. You had to ‘just get on with it’ last year. This emphasis is still here but slightly less this year. How much of an impact you have (effectiveness) and how you do it (efficiency) are creeping back up the charts.

4. Proactively build in thinking time/bring back the commute! For a lot of people at the moment your commute is walking downstairs. Bang goes your thinking and exploring time on your commute. But you still need this outlet; how will you rearrange your time to fit this in?

5. Pay heed to quality in innovation. There was a mad scramble to innovate last year due to the pandemic. There’s no excuse not to re-focus on the quality of innovation this year.

6. Be easy/simple to work with. The importance of this to your clients in wanting to work with you should never be under-estimated.

7. Know how to break through structured days. Back-to-back Zoom/Teams conversations and meetings means your unscheduled call is unwelcome. Unless you’ve got something important (to your client) to say. Do your research.

8. You still gotta be human. If there’s two facets to this to focus on, we’d say bring empathy and your own vulnerability to the fore of your client conversations.

9. Amidst all the task-based work, look after each other. Yep, this isn’t just your own personal struggle but your teams’ and colleagues’ too. Encourage a bit of social time and bring point 8. into it with them as well.

10. It’s even more important to bring value to every interaction than ever before. And to know how to do that, buy The Me Agenda :-)!!!

Even taking just one or two of the tips above and having a go at them will help you with your clients. When they become something you do automatically, try another. Hell, why not make it a personal challenge to do them all this year?

To your success,

The good thing is that there are some super-simple, and we mean ridiculously easy, ways to keep connected and we’ve included three for starters in the video below. Start implementing them now and you’ll find your clients will be happy to keep the relationship as good as it can be through the virtual platforms available.

A short blog today, as we’re going to get straight to the point so you can spend your own valuable time thinking about how you can flex to take these changes into account.

From speaking with end clients, agencies and observing businesses in general, we see the following changes having an impact on the way everyone works, and they may have even crept up on you without you even noticing.

1. MORE internal competition - specifically for budget and resource. If you think about that, your client contacts will be battling for these two things more, so helping them to win these crucial battles will also help you.

2. Everybody’s at max capacity of their bandwith - and it’s being filled by just getting things done. There is less care for each other and that’s not great. Or sustainable. Do you see this in your own business? It’s understandable, it can be one of those things that just creeps up. The question is, now that you know, how can you bring some care back in?

3. Increased demand for suppliers to deliver the same for less…and that’s at best. More often than not it’s delivering more for less. Expectations need to be managed, lines need to be drawn, negotiation skills need to be dialled way up, and efficiencies need to be found.

4. Tough balance between innovation and quality - everyone’s working at such a rapid pace to catch up or keep up that innovation can sometimes be rushed and lose quality. Yes, good enough is good enough, but there’s some slippage into not good enough.

5. More structure in everyone’s day means unscheduled = unwanted. If you’re in new business on the agency side, trying to speak to someone via an unannounced call may well be feeling a little tougher right now. That’s partly down to people now planning a far higher percentage of their day than pre-Covid. Why? Virtual calls/meetings. These are also squeezed down to shorter time slots, around 30 minutes, so more can be squeezed in. The result? No room at the inn for your sales call, an informal chat, a ‘quick question’. You’ve gotta stand out even more and give them a reason before you speak why you deserve a scheduled slot in their frantic day.

There are good and bad sides to each of these points. We’d say firstly to have a look at your and your client’s businesses and see which of these are affecting them the most. Then form a plan of action to mitigate for them. Simple to say yes, tougher to do. If you have any questions or need a helping hand feel free to get in touch.

To your success,

You can feel it, see it, hear it. On the TV, on radio, online. Excitement. The first true rays of light breaking through the clouds of Lockdown and 2020 in general.

We’ve obviously got to temper the excitement until more is known about the potential vaccine that was announced yesterday. But for us it marks the first time that there is a sense of real progress in the fight against Covid, rather than only being able to defend against it. And it feels bloody wonderful.

This post may strike you as too early but we believe that you, our wonderful readers, will already be thinking about the proactive things that need to be done if you are to be ready to get back to ‘normal’ as early as next Spring.

We’re running a seminar with a few hundred people at one of our clients in a couple of weeks, talking about those proactive things that need to be done, with a particular focus on client interaction. Our structure looks like this:

• What’s happened outside their business - it’s been tough for everyone, you’re not alone

• The unnoticed, subtle changes that have happened in moving from face-to-face to virtual interactions

• A poll - we’re going to ask the audience about their own experiences and what’s been tough

• The FUTURE - what we think has changed permanently, split into the three influencing factors we’ve identified

• How to keep and build client relationships with those changes in mind, using three simple tools

• Q&A

Looks like a fairly standard structure, right? But if you look closer, there are a couple of areas there where we’re overtly bringing ourselves as human beings into the discussion. We’ll be doing this throughout the session too.

Why is this important?

Partly because of the reasons outlined in our last blog, but it’s suddenly become even more important now. There’s a chance things could change quickly, with the vaccine potentially becoming available within months. And so client teams need to be ready to handle:

• The return to face-to-face conversations with clients

• The continuation of virtual conversations in many situations

They need to manage both in proactively different ways, because they are different ways of interacting. But the common theme is that in order to successfully keep and grow those client relationships, they have to bring their own ‘human’ into the conversation. Otherwise the relationships become transactional, undifferentiated and shallow. Something clients aren’t looking for at this time. They’re looking for efficiency absolutely, but there’s room for that AND creating a deeper, memorable and lasting business relationship with them.

The future’s looking up, here’s to your success.

The rays of sunshine that the title highlights are about the feedback we received. Every virtual session we ran, we asked for two or three people to share their progress on implementing what they learned in the previous session. There was a lot of progress, from breaking through to real understanding of what their clients wanted to achieve, to writing proposals that were so much more exciting to read!

In the last workshop though there was a learning that really opened people’s eyes in how they interact with their clients. I (Dave D) try to explain it briefly below!

It’s been a bonkers year. Mind-bending, in fact. And we know you’re probably up to your neck in busyness beyond belief, trying to get back on track to have a successful end of year, salvaging 2020….

Could we ask you to hang on a sec though? Just, stop for a moment?

See, we’ve seen a change over the last six months that could have profound effects on your sales in the here and now AND for the foreseeable future. That change is a move from the supplier-client relationship being the mainstay of differentiating and winning new business, to a much more transactional state of affairs.

Why?

That’s easy. Virtual interactions are sucking the colour out of relationships.

There are a LOT of plus points to virtual interactions, don’t get us wrong. Saving the environment, saving time, generally being more efficient, saving money, people can come together from multiple locations in the world….all brilliant positives of everyone being forced to do it. And the positives are incredibly easy to quantify.

But there is a price being paid for all this. Check it out:

Having spoken to clients, there are big numbers of them doing back-to-back 20- or 30-minute meetings with suppliers. In those meetings they are literally ticking off checklists of functional stuff that needs to be done. It’s totally action-focused.

You may even have subconsciously slipped into this way of working if you manage a remote team - far more talk about tasks and far less talk on a human level.

And with all the objective cost and time savings, it’s now so much easier and quicker for your client to have an exploratory conversation with one of your competitors - takes up far less time, no skin off the client’s nose etc. They get the chance to look at things they simply didn’t have the time to look at before. They can go ahead with projects without you even knowing it was a consideration, receive more competitive proposals than ever and generally be more knowledgeable about what’s available to them in your market.

And while this is all happening, it reduces room for the depth of the supplier relationships that they had. They probably don’t even notice this is happening, but you might be seeing some of the fallout if you have strong client relationships. Is it harder to book an hour or longer with them? Less chance to run through your proposal with them, or discuss briefs? These can be indicators that your relationship is changing, and you need to act fast to ensure you stay relevant, win business and retain your share of wallet.

How can you do this?

That’s something we’re drawing up our thoughts on right now and in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more on that and sign up to our email list for further thinking.

In summary, at this point in time maybe it’s not fully shuffled off it’s mortal coil. And certainly in many industries there has been little change to the way business is done in 2020. But in others big things are changing, and fast, and the way we used to sell and manage client relationships is changing too.

In this blog we’re looking at how agencies, and in fact all client-facing companies, can maximise their relevance to their clients against this reality of massive noise and uncertainty. David Armes talks with Paul Griffiths of Client Advocates about the four key things to do to get match-fit.

Getting fit for 2021: How to stay close to your clients

Everyone knows it’s more important than ever to keep building your business during these tough times. Crucial to this is ensuring you constantly stay relevant to your existing client base. If that means changing what you do then so be it, more on that below.

It’s also crucial to tell them, and potential new clients, how you can help as a result of those changes.

Here are the four vital things we think will help maximise your chances of having a successful 2021.

One: Check your offer

Just as you have likely needed to change some things in your business, so have your clients. Clients are in a period of organisational re-design. What we’re hearing from them is that they now need something different from their suppliers to match their new needs.

What should suppliers do?

The thing to do first of all is to ask your clients what’s different and therefore what their new needs are. Then shape your offer to fit. We get that this can be really tough, believe us we’ve had to go through this exact process! Letting go of the past way of working, finding your offer is no longer relevant, changing fundamental things…all painful learnings but learnings that have to be acted on in order to stay relevant into 2021. Finding out what’s changed in your clients’ businesses first will help to make the process at least efficient, in that you won’t be wasting your time and energy developing something that may not be valuable for them.

Two: See if you can re-purpose what you already have

Not every new client need means having to build a brand new service or offer from scratch. Sometimes, what you already do will just need tweaking for it to become relevant again. For example:

-          Delivering it in a different way – thinking about format, timings, who it’s delivered to etc.

-          Finding out what’s of most value to your clients now in your existing offer anddelivering that with absolute reliability

-          Re-packaging your offer and clearly communicating it, to emphasise how it helps with the new needs your client has

The important point to take away from this is that you don’t always need to invest significant time and money in developing something brand new in order to stay or get relevant. In most cases it’s a combination of mostly elements from the existing offer with just one or two changes to become match-fit once more.

Three: Tell people about what you’re famous for

This sounds simple, but it takes courage. Right now we’re seeing a lot of suppliers saying to their clients ‘we can meet any of your needs’. This isn’t useful to clients.

The courage comes in when you take your re-shaped offer, pin it to your mast and go all-out to make yourself famous for delivering it. Relentlessly campaign it. When your message is that clear, and the value that obvious, clients will understand your relevance in their worlds. And believe us, clarity and value is exactly what clients are looking for right now to help set themselves up for 2021.

With this being so important, it’s critical to ring-fence not just investment behind the campaign, but crucially ring-fencing the right resource to do it. And by the right resource, we mean people who can run the sales and marketing effort most effectively across digital and ‘real-life’ channels. For example, we aren’t the most knowledgeable about digital, so we need someone who knows how to get our message across effectively using social media. Our ego has to be taken out of the equation!

Four: Invest in your people wherever possible

Even though it’s been a tough year and more restrictions are in place for the next six months at least, there have been some positives coming out of this new way of working. Working from home has led to increases in productivity, realisation that offices may not be needed after all therefore costs have been reduced, and reductions in pollution are just some benefits being seen.

There is another side to this however, and that’s how to keep your people engaged, motivated and energised in this environment. There is a direct, proven correlation between engagement and productivity and now the novelty of the situation has gone, businesses need to find new and creative ways to keep engagement high.

One of the things we’re hearing in our conversations with our clients is that they’re people are beginning to lose that feeling of development and progression. Without that, engagement is tough to maintain. When engagement begins to fall, then productivity falls alongside it and that means that there is a danger that client needs begin to become unfulfilled.

What can you do to turn this around or head it off at the pass, especially when you may have been told to minimise ‘discretionary spend’? Well, we would say this, but keep developing your people! Get creative - virtual training has really taken off. Take advantage of it - you can still develop your teams, even if they’re at home. We’re training teams globally in this way right now, with fantastic feedback and results, and there are cost savings to be had.

With these four core areas managed effectively, you have a business that is fit for 2021.