Love is the greatest thing….

You can’t be in this business and not love people: be interested in their motivations, know what creative makes their eyes water, what strategy has resonance with their targets. Relationships with your clients have to be genuine and deep to survive the current climate. Building relationships isn’t always easy, like in any personal relationship you have to be prepared to listen, intuit, and build your interaction step by step. If you demonstrate care with briefs, really put in the extra effort on all levels of client service through the project and give good value for money (whether this is a ‘summer’ discount or a credit on hours not used), this will be remembered by the client. Loyal clients are wonderful, even when they move on from particular roles or leave the company, they will still take your call and you may even win them back as a new client.

You can have all the creative strategy and wonderful insights in the world, but without trust and belief in a client services person, you won’t get repeat business. We have highly educated and seasoned clients now who know what they want and understand the marketing patter extremely well. If the idea is not relevant or authentic, you will have lost them.

For me, you have to fall in love with your client, find something of interest in them as a person, learn their style, meet them on common ground, be there for them - within reason - become indispensable. You need to be the first person they call for a solution. You will have your disagreements and bad days, this is the normal part of any relationship, but you have to aim for the smallest amount of dissonance in the client relationship. Experience will have ironed out the commonly made universal mistakes, excellence in account management should be the goal. Don’t make assumptions. Strong client relationships is an art, for the quick buck merchants in advertising and marketing, this will have been a tough year.