Growing our clients

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Charleston. You know, we were with a peer group this week, and we were talking about the struggle of helping your account service team understand that it's their job to grow their book of business by 10%, to grow the clients they already serve. And that part of the problem is they don't know how. And it starts with them not understanding a) it’s their role. But then they have no infrastructure or way to measure or a way to help each other or a roadmap of how to grow their existing clients. A lot of AEs will say, well, this is their budget and I'm not a salesperson. It's not actually about being a salesperson, as you know.

In fact, most of you watching this video are natively good at this, at growing clients. And the way you start is by asking great questions. And so we know this is such a big problem in agencies. This is why Danyel and I are teaching a brand new workshop in April about how to grow your existing clients. But one of the first steps that every AE can and should take to start thinking about how to grow their book of business is the way they prep for meetings: status meetings, update meetings, whatever it is with a client. And the way we prep is normally put together an agenda, and we think about all the things we need to bring. But what we don't think about are the questions that we should ask. And we don't anticipate the way – different ways the conversation could go. Not around the work, not around the projects, but around the client and their business.

And so one of the first things you can do is talk to your AEs about how they prep for meetings and help them develop a shortlist of 3 or 4 really good, probing questions that demonstrate their desire –it has to be a legitimate desire – their desire to understand more about the client's business. To dig in deeper into something that's going on inside the client's ecosystem that may or may – may or may not impact marketing, but it does impact the client. So we anticipate where the conversation might go: What's going on in the business? What are their competitors doing? Things like that. We're prepping there. And then we are walking into that meeting – yes, we have to give them the update on all the projects, but more important, we have to we have to be smarter about their business walking out of that meeting than we were when we walked in. And that starts with great questions, and you are perfectly equipped to coach your team on how to develop those questions. But first, they have to develop the muscle of knowing they shouldn't walk into any client meeting without that level of prep.

Okay? We'll talk more about this next week.

I'll see you then.