How do you become an integral part of your client's team (and why research is the most important thing in the process)

"First of all, I would like to thank the entire team for the excellent work you have done and for great professionalism on your part. Congratulations. This is a really big step forward for our company. By reading and watching what you have done we have the feeling that you are not someone we hired, but that you are a team that is employed by our company."

This is the email we received from our new client and this is the topic I'm gonna write about today.

So many people misunderstand the role of marketing in the whole business circle. Marketing doesn't have its own goals. 

The only marketing goal is to help the company achieve its goals.

This is the approach we take whenever we start talking with a potential client. Before we set up the call, we tend to find out what is the desired or expected outcome of our work, what were the marketing efforts they implied so far (if any), and if they have a budget for hiring us. Only when we have those things set up, we jump on a call and create a strategy that will help them achieve their goals.

On the calls, we're using a tool called Funnelytics to map out the whole strategy and literally draw all the funnels along with clients, during the call. It helps them visualize the work we're gonna be doing step by step, and it helps us, too, since we're recording a video which we can forward to our team to start working on the implementation. It shortens up the process! That's how we're creating the offer, too. 

We're giving clients a chance to visualize the work and the expected outcomes.

After the call comes to the research, which is probably the most important part of the process. When you do your research and you know your client, your client's customers, it's easier to get into the right mindset and write the perfect copy or create the exact visuals to follow the message you want to tell to your customers. It's this phase that transforms our team into our client's team - we're becoming them. For this specific client, we had so many different things to do: 2 lead generation campaigns with ebook downloads and email followup, lead generation campaigns with giveaway and email follow up, survey for the existing email list, 3 landing pages, 3 thank you pages, 2 surveys, one sales page, sales campaign, retargeting campaign, newsletter campaign, all followed by personalization and segmentation of their subscribers. It's a lot of work to be done! Luckily, it's the work we're used to doing, and the work we can do fast. Those are 2 things we tend to keep on the highest level - quality and speed.

To be able to do it fast, we needed to read 2 ebooks, study them, listen to the online course with 22 lessons, study the website and the way they write copy and create their visual identity on Social Media. 

If you do this part right - the research, doing the actual work gets easier.

We managed to do it quite fast, and, to be frank, quite good. If you manage to create that kind of connection with your clients, to have them think like you are a part of their internal team, you're doing something good there. 

And that's not all.

If you have a chance to give extra value to your clients, do it.

We found out that they don't have the online payment system implemented, so we offered to do it and ended up implementing more than that. We gave them access to everything we do so they can learn while watching us create and we showed them how to automate processes and make their processes faster. Clients start thinking like they are part of our team, too. See where I'm going with this?

If you go the extra mile for your clients, they will appreciate it. 

But I'll warn you about one thing I learned when it comes to relationships with clients - keep your eyes open all the time, no matter what.

You can be friends with clients...

You can have amazing results...

But...

One wrong post, only one, is enough to put you in a situation to lose that client. 

Never sleep on your clients and always keep your eyes wide open.

Be proactive.

Propose additional ideas to make your client's company better

Provide results.

And don't let them go silent on you. Silence is never a good sign.

These are exactly the reasons why you should always be 100% concentrated when you're working.

I wanted to give you a perspective of the way we do things here in DEFAULT design, and to emphasize few things that can help you do things better and more efficient!

Let me know what you thought of this article and how I can make it more valuable for you.

For more content, subscribe HERE to get the newsletter every Sunday, and, in case you need help with your business, don't hesitate to send me a message here on LinkedIn.

Cheers!

Nemanja