Dustin SigginsDustin Siggins

Years of recession fears have kept many companies from expanding too deeply into marketing and branding. This has forced in-house communications teams to create more value with slimmer teams and smaller budgets and has resulted in many consultancies seeing fewer clients and achieving slower growth.

Some agencies seem to have accepted this as their business model’s reality. But others have decided to create new value for customers that goes well beyond hard deliverables.

“Many vendors can do the work we need,” said Ellen Bjork, Director of Marketing and Communications for Riverside Research, a national security nonprofit. “But great vendors also understand the importance of effective communication. Being approachable makes it easy to ask questions, get the right answers and maintain transparency. Having one point of contact during a campaign ensures a deep understanding of the project’s nuances and history. And swift responsiveness is key to addressing obstacles to keep the project on course.”

Achieving this value means agencies must improve their communication processes. Otherwise, we risk in-house teams replacing tailored graphics with generic images, swapping high-quality media coverage for poorly written press releases and rejecting a digital strategist for an intern who knows how to post on social media.

And worst of all, you’ll watch the competition get paid to secure media that also serves as marketing, business development and sales collateral for the agency.

Here’s how to enhance your client relationships to achieve better results, be proactive without being annoying and create the upsell without even bringing it up.

Set onboarding expectations to create smooth sailing

The most reassuring thing in-house teams can hear is that they won’t have to pay an external adviser and hold the account executive’s hand—spending money twice and wasting time they don’t have. And the advisers must know the in-house team isn’t expecting to sit back and watch the results come in—that everyone is dedicated to spending the necessary time and expertise to create maximum results.

Otherwise, instead of creating solutions, the adviser will create new pain points on top of the ones the company was supposed to resolve.

For example, we ask our earned media clients to help us help them by spending a few weeks:

  • Showing us their in-depth goals and processes.
  • Building relationships with spokespeople and other key individuals.
  • Understanding stakeholders and the core mission.

In return, we show our processes, develop fine-tuned messaging and determine the media outlets where those messages will best resonate with target audiences.

Dan Ring is a communications consultant who previously led global communications for companies such as ACI Worldwide and Sophos. He told me consultant partners should prioritize relationships with client spokespeople in product marketing and product management. “These individuals have extensive product, customer, industry and competitive knowledge, making them ideal resources,” he explained. “The primary client contact should proactively request access to them for deep-dive briefs to understand their particular expertise, geographic locations, strengths and weaknesses and more.”

All of this is a lot of upfront work, but it’s an ounce of prevention against chaos and miscommunication later down the road. Just as proper cooking makes for good digestion, a few extra hours now create the approachability and responsiveness required to perform high-quality work on deadline with minimal need for the client’s valuable time.

Streamline the client’s involvement

Now that you’ve set expectations, you have to meet them with great results, on time and with minimal client involvement.

As an earned media company, we take pride in delivering great content on schedule. But as our quality of clients improved, we discovered that our processes also needed to scale. One client, for example, appreciated our speed, overall content quality and where we secured placements. But the in-house team lead also noticed critical technical issues that created reasonable concerns about how involved she would need to be in the editing process.

And like any content vendor, if a client has to stay on top of quality—in this case for op-eds, press releases and statements—then we aren’t delivering the streamlined results they need.

So, we upgraded by dedicating personnel to fact-check all claims made and sources used. We also added a quality control editor whose job is to scrutinize for small but devastating mistakes and to ensure content was structurally sound from beginning to end.

These clients were satisfied, their worries evaporated and we were given much more trust to generate content on our own initiation.

There’s a cost to hire extra staff and seek staffers with the skills to ensure this level of client detachment (or, some might say, client comfort). But that initial investment brings a bonus of greater profitability because there’s less time being put into each piece of media coverage, and when the client wants to invest more in the kind of content you provide, there’s nobody else to whom they will go.

Build trust today to create more value tomorrow

Companies will come to you because your product or your service is valuable. But if your value stops there, you won’t have clients for long. If a great product is worth $X, then a great product delivered ahead of schedule with streamlined in-house involvement could be worth $2X. And if the in-house team lead can see himself having a beer with you after work, it could be worth $5X! It all goes back to approachability, communicativeness and transparency—qualities that may not have much to do with the particular thing you’re selling, but they have the world to do with you … and your profits.

That’s why I’ve become an advocate of offering free tips to a client that create real value but also fit within the margins of the existing contract. These tips avoid scope creep and dodge the annoying upsell e-mail that raises questions about whether the client or his checkbook is your top priority. They can be offered organically in weekly meetings or the monthly report. And best of all, they become the upsell because the in-house team will see that the “free” suggestions led to good results.

That’s the moment when your smart work gets your partners to convince themselves that it’s worth their while to pay for more of you. And it’s when you go from being a vendor to a full partner with the in-house team, because any company worth working with knows a gold mine when it sees one.

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Dustin Siggins is the founder of Proven Media Solutions. His media and business writing has been featured at Business Insider, Forbes, PR Week and elsewhere.