Effective client management is an art
Image by dbking via FlickrI was just reading Sally Whittle’s post about how ‘clients suck’ and was reminded of an incident this week. Sally’s premise is that it’s hard to deal with some client’s egos. My response is client ego becomes less of an issue as you become more experienced and skilled in PR consulting. Here’s my anecdote:
A young writer on our team was tasked to write an appointment release for a new guy at a client company. I sat down with her and went through the questions she was planning to ask (as you would with an inexperienced team member).
She called the chap and explained the purpose of her call, asked if he had time for the interview now, or should she call back? He suggested she send him her questions by email and he’d reply as soon as he could. Sounds pretty straightforward right?
Well when she reported this to me my reaction was this: “That was the wrong course of action. Instead of having a five minute chat with him, you’ve now given him work. It will be last thing on his task list because it is not his work. He’ll tell his boss who will ask to see the questions. His boss will fly off the handle because ‘marketing’ is forcing a bunch of work on his already over committed team. He’ll fire off a nastygram to the marketing director. The marketing director will email the PR manager. The PR manager will ring me and tell me to fix it.”
I got the call two hours later. We’re not going to announce the appointment after all.
Bottomline, something that should have taken up five minutes for a junior member of a client’s team ended up taking up to two hours of senior management time.
Mea culpa. I should have cautioned my writer that she might be requested to send questions and counsel her against sending them before she even picked up the phone. A more experienced client handler would never have used the word ‘interview’. She would have asked for a ‘chat’ and explained to the new appointee that he’d see the copy first and that his boss and the head of marketing would sign off everything before it went out. The key is to make him feel comfortable and eliminate any sense of risk.
But like I said in my comment on Sally’s post…it takes time and effort to build client management skills. You can’t rush it. You learn as you go. Just enjoy the journey.
Filed under: public relations
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Good example Sheryllynne. I too always encourage execs not to hide behind an email and just get on the phone to a client. A five minute conversation with a client (or journalist) can result in so much more than spending five minutes drafting an email and sending it off into the abyss. PR is about building relationships and too many people forget the client side is just as if not more important than the media side.
You said it Paul. Also, I agree with your three strikes policy. We can but advise. If the client listens and then takes another course of action, that’s their decision to make. You have to respect that.
[...] Effective client management is an art – Read about an interesting case of managing one’s client. [...]
Face to face has been and always will be best.
To really get your message across you need to talk to the client/customer to show that you care.
Good PR means relating to the client, something we often forget.
Agreed Steve. But if you do really care, as most of do, it will shine through no matter the media you use to communicate.
Commenting usually isnt my thing, but ive spent an hour on the site, so thanks for the info