How to treat client meetings as an agency account manager

Did you know clients spend 7% of their working week managing all supplier relationships?

You'll be just one of many suppliers your client deals with.

So you have very little time to create an impression - and after each call/meeting with you your client will form an impression whether you like it or not.

So every touch point with your client counts.

A (hopefully obvious) example of two extremes:

Scenario 1: After your meeting, they hear nothing from you for 3 days

Their impression = you don't care, you've forgotten about the actions you agreed, you don't know what you're doing, your other clients are more important etc.

Scenario 2: Within 24 hours of your meeting they get an email from you thanking them for the meeting with bullet pointed actions, timings and next steps

Their impression = you are proficient, professional, organised, you care etc?

And just like that your reputation could be sealed as either 'they're professional' or 'they're ineffective'.

Being thought of as the latter is irritating for clients at best and relationship damaging at worst.

So if you want to be seen more like a trusted advisor and not order taker, treat every interaction as a performance.

And like any performance, you want to be:

1.???Prepared

2.???Proficient

3.???Provide value?

Let's look at an example of what that means in practice.

Let's suppose you have a meeting where you'll present an idea and a cost estimate (you're bringing your strategy director into this meeting and you're also meeting your client's boss for the first time).?

1.???Prepared

a.??You'll have called your client in advance to confirm the meeting time and ask if there's anything other than the agenda points they'd like to cover or if their boss would like to see anything particular from the presentation.

b.??You'll have already had a catch up with your strategy director to bring them up to speed on who is in the meeting, their role, relationship issues/background to the client business and agreed your roles/responsibilities.

c.???You'll have pre-empted any questions/push back you'll receive from the client about the idea or the costings and rehearsed your answers.

2.???Proficient

a.??You'll open the meeting, make introductions, reiterate the purpose, your roles and what's going to happen e.g. you'll ask for feedback throughout

b.??You'll thank the client at the end and let them know you'll send a short summary of what was agreed within 24 hours together with any copies you've agreed to send.

3.???Provide value

a.??As well as the follow up pack, you'll attach a piece of additional information that you referenced in the meeting that you thought might be useful e.g. a trends report that included a statistic that you'd cited during the meeting.?

Even when we're rushing from client meeting to client meeting getting sh*t done, we need to think about the impression we give our clients during those micro moments in their day when they interact with us.

To your account management success!