8 Tips to Nurture and Grow Client Relationships in Tough Times
By Paul Collins
Editor’s Note: This article was excerpted from 100 Tips for Consulting Firms to Survive and Grow in a Recession: Click here to download your free copy of Equiteq’s ebook.
Without clients there are no fees and no future! Finely-honed client relationship skills—knowing who our best clients are or should be and how we keep, nurture, and grow them once they become clients—are the hallmark of world-class consulting firms.
Not all clients are worthy of our service—we should choose the clients we wish to serve. This is particularly true in a recession when there is a tendency to accept work from clients who pay poorly and in some cases not at all.
This is the time to invest in client relationships through management and sales focus and smart, low-cost marketing.
Tip #1 – Share Risk with Strategic Clients
As a general rule, large blue-chip clients are easier to work with, pay better fee-rates, and require larger engagements, all of which are better for profits and shareholder value. In a recession there is a tendency to take work from smaller clients that you wouldn’t normally entertain as larger ones start to spend less. Don’t do this!
Focus your attention instead on making sure you stay with your strategic clients by sharing the risks of the economic downturn. Take the initiative and offer reduced or contingent fees for a fixed period and the work will most likely continue.
Tip #2 – Get CEO / Board Sponsorship for Your Work
Who do you normally sell to in your client? The Board or junior management? If it’s the latter you are much more exposed to being a casualty of the recession than if your sponsor is the CEO or one of the CEO’s colleagues. It’s likely that your sponsor, whoever it is, doesn’t want your work to stop.
Use your current sponsor to network to the top and gain board visibility and support. Focus on how your work is helping your client weather the recession—be innovative if you have to! Get a meeting, impress the boss, and increase your chances of staying there through tough times.
Tip #3 – Maintain Long-Term Client Relationships
Long-term client relationships are the surrogate for the value implied by a large order book that most consulting firms don’t possess. They are crucial for building equity value. In a recession these are the clients you must keep happy and maintain the relationship with.
List your clients by the length of the relationship and focus your client relationship and marketing skills on keeping those closest to the top of the list. This might mean taking less margin or even doing some work for free. This will pay off in even more work after the recession and in long-term equity value.
Tip #4 – Build Project Benefits into Your Client Budgets
Making your way into the budget of your client as a specific line item is a smart thing to do under normal economic circumstances. In a recession though it can be a double-edged sword as budgets come under scrutiny and you don’t want to be removed by the stroke of a planner’s pen.
Make sure the benefit side of your costs are also included in the budget. Talk to your sponsor about adding benefit statements to the budget so that at least it will be obvious that both costs and benefits will disappear if they contemplate putting a line through your project budget. It might just make them think twice.
Tip #5 – Build Your Advocate Network in Current Clients
Most consulting firms know that they should have formal account plans for their strategic clients but many pay lip service to the activity. In a recession it will take all of the firm’s relationship management skills to ensure that your work doesn’t get cancelled or postponed due to budget cuts.
Act now! Pre-empt potential cuts by proactively putting an account plan together that minimizes the chances of being a casualty of the recession. Focus on building more advocates in the client at more senior levels and emphasizing the short-term benefits and ROI of your work.
Tip #6 – ‘Walk the Corridors’ of Your Best Clients
Strategic clients should have account managers assigned to the client who have the long-term growth prospects of the client in mind as opposed to the current live project. During a recession it’s time for them to live on the client site.
Walk the corridors of the client, keep your ears open and reinforce the benefits of your work to all who will listen. This will be a crucial part of making sure you are a valued part of the client’s plan to survive the recession also. Investing this time now will pay dividends both during and after the recession.
Tip #7 – Offer Personal Help to Your Client Sponsor
We all know that we should ask the client regularly and formally if we are meeting or exceeding their expectations but how many of us take the time to do it?
If it’s not already part of your process, now’s the time for you as owner of the business to get out to clients and proactively meet the most senior sponsor of your work to see if they are happy with progress and results. Take the opportunity to talk about the economy and ask if there is any more you can do to help them in these difficult economic circumstances. Become part of the solution to the recession in their mind, not part of the problem.
Tip #8 – Go East, Young Man!
The entire world is not in recession, just parts of it. The Middle East, for example, is growing at record rates. Normally we wouldn’t recommend expanding internationally unless your local business has reached scale and is growing, but here’s a tip that will work in a recession.
Talk to existing clients about their international operations or business contacts they have in regions that are not in recession. Get them to make an introduction and use your existing client successes as the case study to gain access.
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Take advantage of these eight tips to focus your marketing and sales activities on your client relationships, keep revenue flowing, and position your firm for the future.
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