Hi, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This is Season three. We're talking about consultants and consulting. And today, specifically, I wanted to bring up the topic of client management.

We talked in the past about getting results through our clients and we've talked about selecting perfect clients. So, that's the only ones you work with. Client selection is the number one determiner of profitability, and I would add of joy in your work with clients. Client selection is incredibly important. But once you have that client on board, the next most important thing is client management. We have to manage the work and the clients so that we are able to achieve results through them, right? Sometimes, we do things where we achieve results for them, but very often we still have to work with them to facilitate the getting of those results.

So how do you manage a client? We don't, they don't report to us right? We have authority very often and we have influence, but we don't have direct management responsibility of them. There's this wonderful negotiation and this nuanced process of working with them and through them to get results. So I have some principles I'm going to bring you today about how I have done that in the past and how my clients are doing it, and how you can do it to have more success in your client relationships.

So the first thing I wanted to start with is to get on the same page with the client at the beginning of the work. Start the relationship on the same page where you and they have a shared understanding of their needs, their goals, and a shared understanding of our expectations together.

In the proposals episode, I talk to you about having the proposal and literally reading it to them word for word so either in a face to face meeting in person or on it in a format like this where you can look into the video camera and virtually into their eyes, and say things to each other face to face so that we are all on the same page about what this agreement says. Once they've signed that agreement and they are our client, then we want to say, okay, what are we committing to doing? What's the plan for this? Where do we go from here? And to make sure that we're very clear about those qualities. I really like to read these things aloud so that we all look, you know here's point one, and we look at each other and we say, yes, we agree. Everybody has an opportunity at that point to speak up and ask questions or say that's not what I wanted to agree to. You know I really took this from when I bought my first home. The real estate agent sat beside me with the contract that I was about to sign, and she read it to me like I was 12 years old and I really appreciated that because I might not have read it so thoroughly and then certainly there were many things there that I didn't understand that I got a chance to discuss with her but at the end of that, had I been in her shoes, I would have said my client heard all of this and looked me in the eyes and said she understood it. That is what we're doing again with our clients and I think it's really important and it's a great way to set the tone for how things are going to go. There's nothing more important in these relationships than to have clear communication and the foundation for that communication is trust, shared understanding, shared vocabulary, and shared goals. All of that common ground that we get on begins by starting on the same page.

Now, some of the things I'm going to talk about are more of a guideline than a rule. But whenever it is possible, I want you to work with the principal of the organization. C level person, decision maker, economic buyer, whoever is the person in the organization that had the power to hire you, to write you that check and bring you in, that is very often going to be your point person or your main contact. Now, sometimes, there'll be somebody else who reports to them who will be your person. But you want the highest person on the ladder of the organization to be your main contact. The reason why is because very often that person, by dint of their authority, they drive those projects, they drive the work and they drive their people on their side to make sure that things happen, and that's really critical. The exception to this, you can work with another person if they're a committed implementer, that's the only time to go to somebody who isn't the ultimate high authority.

So I've been in situations where I was hired by an owner of an organization to work with someone else who reported to them. As long as that owner was involved, everybody was committed and excited. As soon as they left the virtual room, so they weren't on the day to day of the engagement, then I kind of felt the energy of everyone else relax. So, if the boss's eye isn't on us, then we don't need to be as involved in this and then, that puts a lot of pressure on us to really kind of cheerlead and build up this commitment and motivation within them that isn't necessarily in them naturally as a part of being an employee of that organization. So, having that owner or leader in the organization there can help us, as the consultants, to get better results for them and through them. An exception to this, as I mentioned, is I've been brought in before by owners who had like a right-hand person and when I worked with that right-hand person, that's the committed implementer that I'm talking about. And they got all kinds of things done that the owner wouldn't really have been able to do. So in either case, what I'm asking you to do is look for the person who can help you to get the best results for themselves on behalf of the company and also from the team. If you are working with the team and you've been delegated by the economic buyer to the team to work with them, make sure that they either have an internal flame that is helping them to be committed about implementing what you're doing with them or the leader, and having to report back to that leader is enough to keep them motivated and moving forward. Either way, I think it's important for you to have agreed upon reporting back to that economic buyer about the progress, not just beginning and end, make sure that they are being kept abreast of the progress on a regular basis so that you never get them coming in and saying nobody's telling me anything, even though you might have expected that the team, the internal team, would have been doing that. I think it's always really important for us to be telling that person, “Here's how things are going.”

Ok so kind of a whacking thing here, I want you to expect things to go great, but plan for catastrophe. When we go in on these engagements, very often we have these wonderful ideas about how things are going to go. Everybody's high fiving. They're excited about the engagement and then we get into the hard slog. So sometimes it's just the fact that it's a long process and we're, you know, we're digging into things because we're doing transformational work. That's the thing that makes it hard. And sometimes just big, crazy things go wrong. You know, there's a scandal inside the company, someone gets fired, your principal contact gets promoted, leaves the company, something else like that happens. So I want you, as you're planning for your engagements, we do the visioning to see things how we want them to happen. As you're running the visioning, I'd love for you to just do one scenario in which everything went catastrophically awry. That gives us a chance to work our backup scenarios, our plan B. Just so you know, we heard in the Play episode, when Gary Ware was talking to us, that what play allows us to do is to try out creative problem solving in a low stakes environment. There's nothing more low stakes than your imagination so if you're just imagining, well imagine that my principal person gets fired, quits, gets a promotion and I have to work with somebody else, then what would I do? Imagine that we go to do our first find savings in the organization and we actually can't find that many savings. We only find half as many as we think we can or imagine if we launch a major marketing initiative and it fails, it doesn't go that well, then what would we do? If you plan for catastrophe, you're going to have resilience when there is failure, because most likely there will be mistakes, there will be failures, there'll be little things that go wrong. There likely won't be a catastrophe but if you're planning for that and you have some backup plans in place, then you're going to be prepared when other people wouldn't.

As part of that catastrophe, one thing I love for people to keep in mind is miscommunication. What happens if something went wrong? How would your contacts at the client, how would they react? What are they like when they're mad? What are they like when things go wrong? This is super important because I've experienced this before with clients where something that I would consider a small thing went wrong and I had someone have a real temper fit about it. And I was like, “Oh, look how interesting.” So is it just that the person is hot tempered or is it that I need to teach the client, “This isn't a big deal, this is a big deal, this isn't a big deal.” So, that actually is an overreaction to something that you think might be really bad, but it isn't bad or oh wow this is a really big deal.

“Let's calmly work through this together or I feel that you need to vent, you can vent to me, but then we need to move on from here.” So in occasions where I have had some sort of a conflict mistake, bad things happen in the beginning of the relationship, it's been incredibly illuminating for me because I work in these long-term transformational engagements. It's been helpful for me to see how this client handles conflict in a reasonable adult way, because that's not always the case. So it’s actually isn't the worst thing in the world if you do have some sort of screw up early in the process that you get to handle with a client, so either you get to apologize and see how the client handles that, how they respond to that, or if there's a misunderstanding you get to see how we come to terms with the fact that it wasn't how I thought it was, and we both were not quite communicating clearly, or if there's a screw up on the client's part, we get to see how they take responsibility or not. And do they apologize because not everybody finds that easy to do.

So I actually, I don't encourage you to cause a bad thing to happen, but I encourage you to be open to if there is conflict in the beginning, it doesn't mean the relationship is doomed or like, “Oh no, this is going to be a terrible, difficult client.” I really encourage you to bring your most mature problem solving and communication skills to that situation because you have the opportunity to create a great long-term relationship with this client.

Conflict is opportunity all right. Well, we're kind of in the negative realm and looking at the things that can be positive in the negative realm, what I want you to do is to be a time pessimist. I've spoken in the past about the downsides of being a time optimist. Like a lot of us, we feel like things never take as long as we think they're going to take. I have spoken in the past about how so often we think that we can do things in a way less time than we actually can. And so I might say, set aside an hour for that activity and find out that actually takes me two and a half hours, or I might have a whole day to work on something and it takes me the whole day to work on it and less instead of getting it done in an hour because I only left myself an hour. It's really an eroder of trust to miss deadlines with your clients and in client management what I think can be really important is for you, in your work with them, when you're setting expectations with them to teach them how long it takes them to do things and to help them to be time pessimists so that they develop a habit with themselves of making deadlines, of getting things done in the right amount of time that it actually takes them, instead of thinking that things are going to not take them very long. Especially when we bring in new habits to a client, a lot of times they think they can get it done in a short amount of time because they don't really know how long it takes. That's where your clear communication can be important and from your side, estimate that things are going to take one and a half times longer than you think they're going to take and tell that to the client. That way they learn you as a person who gets things done in less than a lot of time or definitely always by the deadline.

Another important detail and kind of a theme in working with clients and in managing your clients is around payments. A lot of times payment, sometimes payments are clean, clear, easy right just taking care of, it happened in the background, never a problem with it just goes through all the time. And sometimes payments are used as a kind of subconscious communication device to express unsureness, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, lack of commitment, all kinds of things like that. So what is really really important is that you never begin work until a payment has been made so you need to have received a payment before you begin the work because real commitment follows that payment. And the next thing is, if you have payments that are coming from an organization, then it's critical that you have a contact within that organization who is chasing those payments down and ensuring that you get paid on time. I bring this up because more than one of my clients has been in the situation that they are on the phone to the payroll portion of the client you know the finance offices to the H.R. department or to the payroll department or somewhere in an organization where they're needing to get their status as an approved vendor dealt with, and then they're needing to get their checks processed and things like this. You don't want to be in a position of managing that internal organism of the client. You need to make sure that your contact, this is something you agree to before the work begins, your contact in the company, it's why it needs to be a principal level person, is facilitating that process and charging that through because that can't be part of your job. You need to be working on getting results for the client and it's the client's responsibility to make sure you get paid, even if it's this gigantic behemoth of a bureaucratic organism. They need to deal with getting you paid. So I say this because very often people realize they need to do that once it's a problem. And if you'll put this into your process before the agreement closes, like at the signing of the agreement this is already part of it. In these initial meetings, when we get on the same page, one of the things we're going to get on the same page about is that they're going to handle all the payments and make sure that they go through on time. You'll provide all the information, anything they need, they can reach out to you but they are responsible for running that through. That’s going to make a lot of a happier relationship. All of these subconscious shadow communications that can sometimes happen through payments aren't happening, we don't need that aspect, we want clear, crisp communication from all sides.

The last nugget that I want to leave you with about client management is helping them in the very beginning to get quick wins. We're managing many things, when we manage clients, we are managing their participation and their skills, their enthusiasm. So all kinds of hard skills and soft skills and I think that we give the project or the engagement like a shot in the arm if we can get some quick wins at the beginning. So what are some things that just in the first 30 days you can go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and everybody who's involved in the project goes, “Wow, okay, I see the potential for this. This is not like six months from now, we're going to see this or twelve months from now, we can get this really fast.”

I had a client who came to me for part of the reason that she decided she came to me in the first place was that the people doing her website couldn't update it to her correct address. She had been in touch with them; they just wouldn't get around to it. Now, that's not my business, I'm not in the business of correcting website addresses, but it's something that was in my power to do for my team and we were able to quickly get that done for her as soon as we pried that information, the login information out of the hands of this former person. Now, what's great about it is I wonder if that organization knew that hundreds of thousands of dollars would be coming to us because they were not able to do the small thing. Sometimes, a small win is just like a small, irritating detail that's annoying the client that they just want to have fixed and that stopping that annoyance is a quick win in other cases what I'll do is messaging. I have a client come to me who hasn't been able to communicate something for a really long time. I put that into a crisp message within 48 hours and already they had lit up from that.

Your version of that might be finding one hundred thousand dollars in upside, getting these receivables and cutting these costs, letting go of this thing. You know, maybe that's something that you can do quickly. So Identify what are the quick wins of all of the stuff that we've got planned out that we can get in the first week, then the first 30 days. What can we get immediately so that the client feels like, “Whoa! This is a great decision and I'm excited about dedicating my time to this over the next year.”

I've talked to you in the past about getting rest so you're at your best about working with perfect clients who bring out the best in you. All that we want to do for you is to put you in a position where you are, at your best, delivering your best work, bringing your genius into the world and Client management is about you doing the exact same thing for them, helping them to be their best, be at their best, and to work with you so that you can do for them what they've hired you to do. If you take a look at just these few things that I've mentioned today, I think you're going to see yourself on the path to better client relationships, and that means better results. With that, I wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business.