Familiarizing Yourself with your Client's Business

For those in client service, the pinnacle goal we can achieve is understanding our client’s business as if it were our own. Living and breathing our client’s business and industry not only has massive implications on the value provided to your clients, but also in the opportunity doorways opened for incremental growth in your partnership via the trust gained through closely integrating yourself into the client work.

From personal experience, some of the best conversations I’ve had with my clients stemmed from surfacing industry news unprompted to my clients during regular touchbases.

Clients having an agency partner that operates under a similar mindset as someone on their team relieves some of their stress in being the middleman between C-suite directives and agency operations.

What does Familiarization look like?

Familiarization with the client

Familiarization with your client provides client partners with the preemptive capability to address clients needs through their agency’s capabilities. A deep understanding of your client ins-and-outs can also empower agency partners to provide more accurate client forecasts. This can come through the lens of better understanding their:

Product(s)/Service(s)

Goals
Obstacles
Philosophy
Preferences

Familiarization with the client industry

Similarly, a deep understanding of major shifts in your client’s industry provides agency partners with the ability to preemptively forecast major shifts to their clients business. Ongoing opportunities for ingraining yourself into your clients industry includes:

Macroeconomic trends

Monitoring major shifts in the economy can allow you to preempt risky client conversations versus tackling them reactively.

How strong is the economy?

Competitor movements

Ongoing assessment of your client’s competitor landscape gleans leverageable opportunities specific to their industry.

Where are our opportunities?

Government interventions

Continued assessment of government interventions and regulations in your client’s industry, and the roadblocks felt across competition.

What are the unavoidable barriers?

Following Industry thought-leadership communications

Closely following releases from thought leaders in your client’s industry provides you with future-state predictions of where placing bets on your client’s behalf now will yield the most success in the future.

What does the future look like?

Implications of being well-versed in your client’s business & industry

Familiarization with the major considerations in your client’s industry puts you in the mindset of the client and their consumer, which provides you the opportunity to be a greater client asset. When you are proactive in conversations with your clients around major shifts to their business/industry, you foster the opportunity for:

Growing trust with your clients
Improve initiative success
Expansion of your partnership

Methods for Familiarization

Becoming a customer

Placing yourself directly in your client’s customer journey opens you up to identifying more objective opportunities for your clients (e.g. reducing conversion friction, on-page messaging opportunities, etc.).

Industry reading

Signing up for relevant industry newsletters is an opportunity to keep up-to-date on major industry shifts and considerations that could impact your client.

Google Alerts (Brand & Competitor)

Set up Google alerts for your client and their competitors to get a day-by-day understanding of major shifts in the industry, and identify opportunities based on competitor movement.

Press Releases through PBI

Running press releases and quarterly releases through PBI and n-gramming themes then tying back those words to your analyses to better speak their language

Consumer Sentiment Analysis

Reviewing through product reviews, reddit posts, etc. allows you a deeper understanding of successes/pain points when a consumer engages with the business

Keep Researching!

Businesses and consumer demands are constantly changing and evolving. Keeping a constant pulse in the frequent evolutions of your client’s business demonstrates your dedication to their success which, in turn, parallels your agency’s success. It’s in your benefit to ongoingly invest time into keeping up-to-date on the latest industry news and evolutions to your client’s goals or strategy. Interested in partnering with an agency that is committed to understanding your business? Fill out the Seer contact form today to get started.