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1. Build Trusting 

In any type of relationship, trust is the foundation that holds it together, including those formed in the workplace. Establishing trust early on is a vital component in building a strong and long-lasting client relationship. To achieve this, make use of every opportunity to connect with your clients in a meaningful way. Pay attention to the details they share with you and bring them up in your next conversation to show that you’re invested in them. Whether it’s asking about their child’s soccer game or dance recital, take the time to acknowledge the impact they have on your client’s life. Be an active listener, show attentiveness, and communicate with a clear purpose. Foster a culture of transparency by having open dialogues and visibility with your clients, giving them a sense of security in your partnership.

2. Be Empathetic

When it comes to client relationships, it’s important to remember that your clients aren’t just business transactions – they’re individuals seeking your services. Make an effort to see, hear, and value them as both consumers and people. Building a true partnership means showing your humanity and empathy. That means taking on their problems as if they were your own, considering their perspectives and experiences, and understanding their priorities. When you can truly walk in their shoes, you can best support them and build a partnership that lasts. Remember the Platinum rule: treat others how they want to be treated, and watch your client relationships flourish.  

3. Take Responsibility

Mistakes happen, even to the best of us. But when they do, it’s essential to respond with transparency and humanity. By acknowledging and taking responsibility for any errors, you show your commitment to integrity and build trust with your client. Don’t shy away from discussing how to prevent similar mistakes in the future, and don’t wait to deliver bad news. Honesty upfront is always the best policy. Demonstrating ownership and maintaining transparency will show your client that you’re serious about their business and dedicated to providing the best possible service. In fact, owning up to mistakes may even increase their confidence in you!

4. Be the Expert

To be seen as a true expert in your industry, you must not only possess in-depth knowledge but also have a thorough understanding of the services you provide. Once your clients trust your expert opinion, they will rely on you for guidance and advice. Therefore, it is essential to maintain that level of trust by consistently demonstrating your expertise.

Remember, your clients turn to you as the expert to lead them to success. They need you to exude confidence while helping them achieve their vision. Understanding their needs and partnering with them to develop a solid strategy is key to building stronger client relationships. Don’t forget to clearly articulate goals, next steps, and the “why” behind your plan. Collaboration is important, but it’s equally important to maintain your expert voice throughout the process.

5. Track Progress

Tracking progress is a crucial aspect of any successful strategy, and it’s essential to have the right tools in place to do so effectively. There are numerous options available, such as Google Analytics, ad network conversions tracking, KPI tracking, Data Studio reporting, and more. Using these tools will enable you to demonstrate the success measures and areas for improvement with data to support any decisions made.

One example of how to improve progress tracking is by utilizing comprehensive reporting. At Go Fish Digital, we use Looker Studio to create dashboards that update in real-time, pulling information from various sources such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console, Laravel, Sheets, and more. Our clients can access up-to-date performance data for their accounts in one place, at any time, providing ultimate visibility.

These reports also allow clients to review data for different date ranges, campaigns, and ad groups, giving them the ability to filter down to relevant information. Providing clients with transparency and visibility into their accounts is crucial, and utilizing tools like Looker Studio can help ensure that they are fully informed about the progress being made.

By leveraging tools that can increase visibility for your client, you will be able to better identify areas of strength and opportunity in your strategy. In tracking progress, you can ensure that you are able to  adjust the figurative sails throughout the storms as needed at the first signs of possible concern. 

6. Be Yourself

The last tip on our list is quite possibly one of the most important of them all, be yourself. Sounds easy enough right? This is one area that anyone else around you would absolutely fail at replicating, no matter how hard they try. No one can be as “you” as you are. It is important to recognize your strengths and lead with those strengths when communicating with your client. Ask yourself, how can I make my client feel seen, heard, and valued? 

As an example, I consider myself to have quite the sense of humor. I enjoy getting to know what makes my clients feel comfortable, but also very much enjoy learning what makes them laugh and smile. There is value in providing comfort, laughter, and understanding with clients. I believe that this in turn assists greatly in the relationships that I have built with them. 

I bet you didn’t expect homework from this article, but set aside some time today or tonight to truly do some self reflection! Take a moment and genuinely think about the parts of yourself that shine, those attributes that you can pull forward when communicating with clients. How can you make your clients feel seen, heard, and valued by leveraging more of your natural strengths? In the wise words of Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Final Thoughts 

You now have a few new tips to take with you into your existing and future client dynamics! In the beginning, it can be a daunting task trying to create the firm foundation necessary to foster strong and lasting client relationships. It will take more than delivering great results. It will require a well-rounded approach accompanied by a genuine time and thought investment. However, you have the tools necessary in order to make your relationships with your clients truly exceptional. 

6 Ways to Build Stronger Client Relationships is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

1. Leadership and Team Management

Set the tone. To successfully manage the project from start to finish, you need to confidently lead the team as both a motivator and support system.

Lead through goal setting. As a project manager, keep client goals top of mind when scheduling work. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks and scheduling and lose focus of the overall project goal. However, if you lead by example and keep that goal top of conversation during internal collaborative meetings, day-to-day communication, and client discussions, it’s going to benefit both the internal team and the project as a whole.

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Lead with support and accountability. Everyone works differently, and you learn that very quickly as a project manager. This means that you may have two identical projects but each project will operate differently if you have two unique teams. You need to learn to manage the various ways in which different team members do their best work.

This may mean that one team member works in a linear fashion, one prioritizes hard tasks first, one works best collaborating with a team, and one prefers to work as a lone wolf. It’s not your job to tell someone how to work. It is your job, however, to give them the tools and information they need to be set up for success, do their best work, and hold them accountable to that standard.

2. Communication

Communication is at the core of every project management role you’ll take on. It’s all in the details: Slack messages, g-chats, phone calls, emails, video calls. The way that you communicate with your colleagues and clients through these avenues can make all the difference.

As a project manager, the details outlined within communication can be the difference between a task being done correctly or incorrectly. You need to effectively convey both the small details within a task and the big picture details of an overall project. When in doubt, always over-communicate.

Outside of internal communication, you can’t expect clients to know or understand what the internal team has done without sharing those details. When communicating with clients, take the time to communicate big-picture wins with the work that’s been done by the team.

3. Expectation Setting

Alongside leading a team through effective communication, you need to set proper expectations for the project. Resource management, time management, and scheduling all come into play here. 

What needs to be completed? Who can complete it? And when can it be completed?

Before you can set expectations, you need to take a realistic look at the project workload, the team, and existing schedules. Rarely, if ever, will a project fit exactly into the perfect schedule. Once you accept that, it makes things a little less stressful. Being honest with yourself, your internal team, and clients about what can get done and when is going to make everyone’s life easier in the long run. 

You’ll find if you give yourself and your team the appropriate amount of time to do the great work they’re capable of doing, the quality will shine through. 

4. Problem Solving

You’ve heard it before: Work smarter, not harder. It’s wise to take this approach as a project manager when faced with the inevitable obstacles that come your way.

You’ll be tested with countless scenarios where there’s not a clear answer or outcome. Don’t overcomplicate things. If you’re not sure where to start, ask for help. Don’t feel like you need to shoulder the burden yourself. 

Conversely, if you notice a teammate is struggling and it’s outside of your day-to-day role, step in and get familiar with their workload so you can lend a hand. Utilize the tools at your disposal, as well as your colleagues, to maneuver through situations that initially may seem unsolvable. Don’t be afraid to break the standard process in order to get something done. It’s more important to pivot and find a solution, even if it’s working outside of your comfort zone.

5. Negotiation and Flexibility

Negotiation and flexibility go hand in hand with problem solving. You may have the next month of work scheduled perfectly and then you hop on a client call and priorities have shifted and everything needs to be rearranged.

As a project manager, you will constantly be trading off one task for another, re-prioritizing, and negotiating internally and externally in order to hit a deadline. You’ll often have conflicting workloads where something is a priority for the client, for example, but won’t really move the needle in terms of performance. You’ll also run into instances where you need to trade off one client’s work for another to meet a deadline or deliver on a high-priority item. 

The key to success is to be flexible. Understand that when you set a schedule, 90% of the time, it’s going to shift.

Every role and team is unique, but if you keep these five core skills top of mind, you’ll find it will make you that much more efficient as a project manager and that much more reliable as a resource for your clients and internal team.

Top 5 Project Management Skills for Success is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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In addition to putting a pair of human eyes on every resume that comes in, I am every candidate’s main point of contact. Naturally, this means I get asked a lot of questions. But there is one question in particular that I get asked pretty frequently:

“What does your company culture look like?”

Oh, boy – where to start?

The Key Ingredient to a Flourishing Culture

When a candidate inquires about culture in 2018, they are asking what it feels like to work for your organization. They want to know how much trust you will place in them, how they will relate to their coworkers, how casual or buttoned-up your atmosphere is, and what potential growth or promotion opportunities exist. And for some companies, it can seem like a loaded question.

But, here’s a secret. The way to create your organization’s desired culture will always be the same. It’s not branding or social media posts or office furniture – it’s the people.

Suppose that XYZ Company wants to create an office culture based on flexibility and creativity. Their mission statement touts their out-of-the-box thinking and innovation and expression of individual personality is encouraged. They even offer unlimited PTO and bring in ping-pong tables, nap pods, and maybe a bark park so employees can bring their dogs to work. However, having these cool things in place isn’t enough to build a culture. Regardless of how much a company invests in the trappings of creativity and unconventionality, it’s the people who occupy the office that determine the nature of the place.

Finding the Right People for the Job

A company must do more than simply look at past work experience when reviewing a candidate. They need to know whether the candidate is a great culture fit. How much direct supervision does this person need? Are they comfortable with asking questions and admitting what they don’t know? Does a competitive atmosphere bring out the best in them or the worst? Are they more likely to thrive when creating their own way of working, or in faithfully adhering to long-held practices? These are all questions that you need to make sure you answer before bringing a person on.

Hiring folks who feel most comfortable in a more cutthroat, every-man-for-himself environment can kill open collaboration. Someone who flourishes under strict direction from management may flounder in a flat work structure. An employee who is less intense about her work lowers the bar in a competitive environment where others thrive under pressure. And let’s be clear – it’s not that these employees have the wrong idea about how to work. They may be terrific assets in the right environment. But when an employee is placed into a culture that doesn’t match their work style, the results can be disastrous.

Our Culture at Go Fish Digital

We are fiercely protective of our office culture at Go Fish Digital. We want a workplace that buzzes with collaborative energy, allows employees to find their own best work style, and reduces the time and number of approvals needed to turn a good idea into reality. And because we are so protective of our culture, we are particularly choosy (some would say picky) when it comes to building our workforce. Our interview process is fairly lengthy and asks a lot of the candidates moving through it. In the end, we are rewarded with a staff that creates our ideal culture. Our employees are unafraid to ask questions. They are extremely generous with one another, not only with their efforts but also with their time and their personal expertise. Our employees seek professional growth, but never through competition.

We are very picky, but, honestly, all organizations should be. The people you have at your organization are not only shaping its culture, but they are also actively shaping its future. While it may be easy to dismiss culture as a fad or consider it as an issue that only concerns less serious organizations, potential employees legitimately care about this part of the job and its importance should not be overlooked.

Aside from the culture question I mentioned before, there is another one that lags only slightly behind in its frequency. I’ve come to expect it, and I can answer it right away.

“What do you like most about working at Go Fish Digital?”

That’s an easy one. It’s the people.

A Great Company Culture Starts With One Key Ingredient is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.