Our success as paid traffic service providers is determined primarily by the results we get for our clients. However, there is a lot of nuance in how to do that well from a variety of perspectives, including strategy, tactics, relationships, reporting, and communication.
This module is divided into three broad categories — preparation (how we set the stage to improve our probability of success), execution (how we approach our work to get the best results), and relationship-building (how we engage with clients over time).
In each of these categories there are two perspectives — yours as the service provider and the client’s. Understanding and respecting both perspectives is critically important.
Let’s start with preparation.
Preparation
Everything begins with precise, mutually-confirmed definitions of success for you and your clients.
The client has hired you to produce specific business results. This seems so obvious, yet it’s so easy to overlook. We need to know what those desired results are, with precision and clarity, and we need to get confirmation (preferably in writing or on a recorded call) that our understanding of the client’s goals is accurate.
It is not enough to hear what a client says and assume that we understand. We need to listen carefully, ask clarifying questions, and then repeat back to the client our interpretation of what we have been hired to accomplish at the appropriate level of detail. Capturing that in writing, with confirmation from the client, is very important.
My agency provides clients with statements of work that capture the work to be done, account access required, reporting frequency and methods (phone, Zoom, email, Slack, etc.), and payment schedules.
I don’t particularly like this type of work, and I avoided it for many years (at great cost to my sanity). Learn from my mistakes and eliminate ambiguity ruthlessly.
This is an opportunity to establish yourself in the client’s mind early on as a professional. Interview the client, get to the core of what they’re hiring your to accomplish, listen intently, ask probing, clarifying questions, and then summarize your understanding in a statement of work. It is much better to uncover a misunderstanding early, before the relationship is in motion, than try to solve an issue later when you’re deep in the work.
Be aware that there are two types of results — ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. Clients generally describe hard results, leaving the soft results unspoken. Clients often are unaware that soft results are important too.
A ‘hard’ result is what you were explicitly hired to accomplish — drive traffic, generate leads, generate customers, etc. ‘Soft’ results are specific to the client. They’re often experiential and unique to individuals. Examples of soft results include:
- Education (the client’s desire to learn more about digital marketing / paid traffic).
- Status (looking good to the boss, bragging about results to colleagues).
- Praise (from the service provider or other team members).
- Intellectualizing (talking in-depth about marketing campaigns, strategy, and tactics beyond what is necessary to do the work).
Pro tip: go through the Audience and Offer Masterclass, Part II, and use the Value Proposition Design Canvas as a brainstorming tool to externalize and capture your client’s functional, social, and emotional needs / jobs.
The soft results often show up as social and emotional gains.
If you do this over time for individual clients, adding your observations from conversations, emails, and meetings, you’ll build a very accurate ‘dossier’ for each client’s specific needs. Capture those insights in ways that are accessible (e.g., a Google doc, Evernote note, etc.). Pay attention to the language clients use in meetings — what they say, how they say it, and what they emphasize are powerful hints about what’s really important to them.
For hard results, start by understanding how the client’s business model works. I cannot stress enough how important this is. You must understand how your client makes money and how your work contributes to that as accurately and succinctly as possible.
For example, if you drive traffic to a front end offer where the goal is break even CPA relative to AOV (including your management fees), you need to know the client’s maximum allowable CPA and the AOV for every campaign that you run.
Ideally, you also would know LTV at the campaign level as that data accumulates over time. There is power in getting right to the point with a client, making it clear you know their functional goals with precision, and then reporting results within that same framework using language that matters to them.
However, one word of warning — do not make assumptions about performance goals. I have made this mistake more times than I want to admit. It often appears obvious from our perspectives as service providers that a client wants a certain result (e.g., high-quality leads). The client may even tell us that.
But, you might run into some dissonance later when you report your efforts, and that’s a signal that there’s more research to do.
For example, I worked with a client several years ago who had very clear goals related to lead generation. She was explicit that she wanted high-quality leads, not necessarily low-cost leads, and she agreed enthusiastically with the plan to start slowly, conserve ad spend, assess and confirm quality, and then scale.
She mentioned — repeatedly — that she supported a 60 — 90 day timeframe to assess results.
And that’s exactly what we did. 10-15 leads per day for a seven-day mini-course followed by a three-part webinar series, all leading to a $4,000 offer. The fastest a lead could convert to a customer was eighteen days, and we knew it would take 60 — 90 days to really understand how that strategy would perform (adjusting along the way).
At the end of week one we had generated fifteen leads per day (100+ leads total). We were able to measure subsequent email open rates, content consumption, and the quantity and quality of replies to questions in the emails. However, we did not yet know if any leads would convert to customers (and wouldn’t know for another eleven days, minimum).
That’s when I started to notice the dissonance.
- “Why is this taking so long?”
- “What if these leads don’t convert?”
- “What if I spent $X and this doesn’t produce any customers?”
Again, we had agreed on a very clear plan — 10-15 leads per day, seven-day email series, three webinars, $4,000 offer, with a 60 — 90 day time frame. The client understood the plan, confirmed her support, and we executed against it. However, the client’s tone changed significantly and that was a signal I needed to investigate and make some changes.
In this example, we decided to increase lead volume from 15 leads per day to 50 for five days, then we paused the campaign and waited to get data on that first group of 350+ leads.
The client’s unspoken need was velocity. She was not comfortable with the uncertainty of spending less money for a longer period of time to get a result, despite what she had said during our initial planning conversations. Instead, spending more money faster, then waiting (without spending more money) to get a result worked for her.
Eventually, ROAS for those first 350+ leads was 7.5. That functional result was important, of course, but the experience of how we got there was as important to the client, even though that was never explicitly communicated. That’s a critical insight to think about as a client-services professional.
A corollary to this idea is that clients often identify goals they say are most important, but then their actions and feedback suggest otherwise.
For example, I worked with a client who is incredibly smart in his field, and he had produced a tremendous amount of detailed, technical content to explain how his product worked.
That content appealed to a very small subset of his audience. It was far too complex for most people who were only interested in 3-5 high-level results his product created. Overwhelmingly, prospects weren’t interested in the minutia of how the product worked, and they were overwhelmed by his content.
We were hired to generate leads, and the specific metric that mattered most, we were told, was the number of calls scheduled with sales reps.
After reviewing and testing the detailed, technical content, it was obvious that it wasn’t working. We needed something new that focused on the needs of the vast majority of the audience, not a tiny, super-technical subset.
At first the client agreed. But, the second round of content was as detailed and technical as the first. When we pushed back (and wrote a sample 10-minute tutorial script), the client was visibly uncomfortable.
Over time, the unspoken need was very clear. The client said he wanted a specific outcome, but what mattered more to him was the process to get that outcome. He wanted prospects to understand the depth and complexity of his creation, he wanted to talk about it with people who could understand and appreciate it, and that drove his decision-making more than the metric he said mattered most.
Eventually we parted ways (amicably) because we could not meet the overall objective with the other, unspoken constraints.
This is very (very!) common. Some clients want their ads to look a certain way and that’s more important than how those ads perform. Others confuse what they like (video, copy, images) with what their prospects respond to, or how they buy with expectations about how others buy.
You’ll also find that some clients are ‘armchair specialists’ who are interested in paid traffic, read about it, and follow people who teach it. “So and so says we should be doing X…”, “I got an email from paid traffic guru X yesterday and she said the only thing that matters is Y…”
(If you find yourself in that specific situation, my advice is to look for the exit as soon as possible. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years explaining to clients how the guru model works — that’s time I can’t ever get back.)
In my experience, fighting these underlying forces is futile. Instead, notice them, identify them with precision and clarity, and if appropriate, communicate them back to the client respectfully.
That can be an uncomfortable conversation and that’s OK. Be respectful, acknowledge your understanding of the results you were hired to achieve, explain what the client also seems to value, and ask for clarification. Often the client isn’t aware that s/he has competing (and divergent) priorities, and that can lead to a very quick resolution.
Or, if not, you have externalized the issue so everyone is aware. Then, whenever you’re reporting results, if there are questions about performance you can refer back to earlier conversations and show explicitly how the client’s decisions impacted the overall results.
The key here is minimizing emotion. This isn’t about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or bad. Focus on the language of results dispassionately. Do not assign blame. “XYZ didn’t work because you insisted of using a picture of your cat…” doesn’t make friends or influence people. At least not positively.
Another important element of preparation is assessing your client’s marketing sophistication. Don’t assume, for example, that they’re a marketing expert because their title is marketing director, marketing manager, or marketing associate.
I have worked with many marketing professionals who didn’t understand marketing basics. Seriously. I worked with one marketing manager for a division of a very large company who complained, incessantly, about their Facebook ads. When I asked him to show me what he meant, he opened LinkedIn on his phone and showed me a competitor’s ad. (There are some things you can’t make up.)
I also have worked with the VP of marketing for a very well known, internationally recognized brand, and he did not have even the slightest grasp on marketing basics.
Assessing your client’s marketing sophistication is particularly important when you work with smaller, entrepreneur-lead companies. Often the owner / decision-maker does not understand marketing and you need to invest extra effort explaining and educating.
It’s also perfectly OK to avoid unsophisticated clients altogether. That’s not always possible, of course, or you may find yourself working with teams with varying degrees of marketing sophistication.
For example, I have a meeting this week with a client I’ve worked with for more than a decade. The owner has a razor-sharp understanding of marketing as it relates to his business goals. His marketing team, however, lacks even a basic understanding of marketing principles. That creates a dynamic where the owner provides direction with clear goals, but the marketing team then adds friction, ambiguity, and complexity.
The solution, in this example, is to consistently reframe conversations around the owner’s explicit goals. If we didn’t have those goals, the relationship would be unmanageable.
If you choose to educate your clients, pay very close attention to how receptive the client is to your efforts. You’ll find that some clients (or team members) are very receptive, while others feel challenged (or worse, threatened). If you’re a self-motivated learner (of course you are — you’re here) — it’s easy to assume that others are too. In my experience, those characteristics are rare.
In addition to clarity about what the client wants and needs from the relationship, you need to be equally clear about what you want and need from the relationship as well.
Some possible examples include:
- Appropriate, predictable financial compensation.
- To be treated professionally, with respect.
- Autonomy (to apply your experience and expertise on the client’s behalf).
- Positive feedback from the client.
- Referrals.
What matters most to you? Early on the driving factor most likely will be money. There is no business if you’re not making enough money to pay your bills. However, take the time to think about what you want, overall, and make a habit of benchmarking your clients relative to those desires.
As you grow, you can create space for new, better clients by eliminating less-ideal clients. If, for example, you can work with five clients total as an individual service provider, you have five clients, and two score low on your specific criteria, replace one with your next (better) client.
That’s a great way to maximize your ability to work with clients as a solo provider before you hire help (and take on additional expenses). It’s also a way to have a tight, focused, happy team when you grow. Difficult clients are a tax on you and your team’s emotional well-being — take that seriously.
As a service provider, your overall goal is to position yourself as a trusted advisor. This reduces decision-making friction in the relationship and that has widespread, positive effects. There are many benefits from this positioning — your experience of work will be more enjoyable, and your overall results will be better too.
Remember, it’s (much) easier to keep a client than it is to acquire new clients. Investing time and energy early in client relationships to understand the full spectrum of your client’s goals is worth the effort. Systematic growth / progress requires customer retention to ensure we’re not taking three steps forward and then two steps back all the time, and knowing with precision what motivates your clients is a powerful lever you can use.
Results — Overview
Once we have a clear understanding about the client’s explicit and implicit goals, needs, and desires, we can focus our attention on doing the work we were hired to do.
Here’s a list of suggestions from my decades of experience working with clients.
No. 1 — get initial results as quickly as possible. Be wary of over-preparing at first (be willing to dive in on something existing if necessary, then do the background deep dive).
There’s always a temptation to get everything right first before taking significant action. Ideally, we would have the time, energy, and the client’s enthusiasm to do that. In my experience, that’s rare.
However, don’t do work for the sake of doing work, especially if you know that you’re unlikely to produce a significant positive result. Often I will be very explicit with a client and explain that there is a lot of work to do to prepare, but I’d like to get some results at the same time (as long as that does not detract too much from creating and executing new campaigns).
To do that, I look at existing campaign performance to see if there are any obvious opportunities. For Google Ads, that could be an ad group with too many keywords, not enough negative keywords, and / or under-performing broach match.
In that scenario, I would improve an existing campaign by focusing on 1-3 keywords that have performed well, add any relevant negatives that had been dragging down performance, and use modified broad, phrase, or exact match depending on the situation.
That’s an easy win.
For Facebook, often it’s not quite as obvious or easy. Turning off under-performing creative can be helpful. Replacing incongruent images, rewriting the first two lines of copy for existing ads, and adjusting audiences also are options.
Whenever you’re working on a legacy campaign, it is critically important that you explain to the client that you are making incremental improvements to something that already exists while you create new campaigns. You are creating a ‘quick win’ for the client while you’re working on creating much bigger and better wins, and it’s important to communicate that.
This is a relationship-building opportunity. Explain that, ideally, you’d like to take the time to get everything right, but you also see the situation from their perspective and you want to create value as quickly as possible.
No. 2 — be very careful when listening to clients about their audiences and offer performance. I have worked with clients, large and small, who have told me long, detailed narratives about their audiences that had no basis in verifiable reality.
I’m often reminded of the phrase that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Listen very closely to what the client says about their audience. Ask clarifying questions. And, respectfully and graciously, ask questions about how the client has developed that understanding.
Then listen, carefully. You’ll often hear one-off stories about individual conversations, email feedback, the owners’ or executives’ experiences, etc.
Rarely will you be presented with actual data.
That does not mean that the client’s understanding of their audience is incorrect, but it does mean that it’s your responsibility to verify their perspective.
Start with the client’s understanding of their audience, and then add nuance and texture to that over time. For example, if the client believes that their customers are primarily males who are fifty-five years old and older, but the data shows that their buyers are primarily women over forty-five, capture that information, share it with the client graciously, and adjust your efforts accordingly.
This is another situation that has nothing to do with being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It’s about identifying and affecting the factors that drive results. If the client’s description is ‘right’, that’s great. If it’s ‘wrong’, who cares. It’s a place to start and then iterate your way to success on the client’s behalf.
Pro tip: it’s worth your time to go through an abbreviated version of the Value Proposition Design Canvas exercise (Audience and Offer Masterclass, Part II) to better understand your client’s audiences, and to create messaging specific to each audience.
No. 3 — If the client already gets a lot of traffic, start with retargeting (GDN and Facebook).
If your client has a proven offer and is getting traffic already, the fastest way to get results is with bottom of the funnel retargeting.
Start by identifying key inflection points in their existing process, and then work backwards from the ultimate goal.
For example, let’s assume your client has blog traffic that gets a lot of traffic, opt-in forms on all of that content, and a seven-part email series after opt-in that leads to a core offer.
There are two powerful leverage points in this simple system:
- Prospects who click through to see the offer and don’t buy, and
- People who view blog content but don’t opt-int.
I would begin by retargeting the prospects who don’t buy. There are a lot of options to do that well depending on your client’s setup. If the client sells with a VSL, retarget prospects who don’t buy to written content. If your client sells with written content, retarget to video/VSL.
If you’re using a traditional sales page approach, retarget non-buyers to story-based content where the narrative arc leads the prospect to the sale.
The sky is the limit.
Once I had a basic retargeting system setup for converting more prospects to customers, I would turn my attention to converting more visitors to leads. I would start by creating a qualitative filter (e.g., a prospect has to say on the page longer than 15 seconds).
And I would retarget specifically for lead generation (ideally, something inspired by Sphere of Influence, but other alternatives could work too depending on your client’s specific needs).
Retargeting existing traffic is high-leverage and high-value, and it’s a great way to look like a hero early in a client relationship. It’s also a performance amplifier for all of the campaigns that follow.
No. 4 — if the client does not have a lot of traffic already, start with middle of the funnel prospecting (leads / low-cost offers).
When clients aren’t getting enough traffic to retarget, or the quality of their traffic is a mismatch with their goals, start with the obvious middle of the funnel work.
My definition of ‘middle of the funnel’ is anything that leads to an opt-in or equivalent engagement, including long form content (e.g., Sphere of Influence-inspired multi-page presell site), downloadable / viewable resources (PDF lead magnets, free videos), webinars, and free virtual events.
Often middle of the funnel work is exactly what we’ve been hired to do (especially if your client sells primarily by email).
Do the obvious first (and best). It’s tempting to ‘warm up’ audiences with top of the funnel content knowing that will amplify our middle of the funnel efforts. However, that creates a time lag that we don’t want. Focus on middle of the funnel first, and add fuel to that later.
No. 5 — make sure that the top of the funnel is feeding the middle of the funnel.
After retargeting and middle of funnel campaigns have been created, turn your attention to top of the funnel content to build awareness and begin to create desire.
In general, top of the funnel content ‘warms up’ audiences. Examples of top of the funnel content include blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, social media updates, infographics, and succinct expressions of your ideas (captured as quotes, statements, etc.).
The keys to making top of the funnel content work for clients are congruent messaging and economics.
Congruent messaging means that you can draw a clear conceptual line between the first point of content a person has with your client and an eventual sale. This seems obvious, but it’s so easy to miss.
The phrase I like best to describe what I mean is “don’t use bait for fish you don’t want to catch”. If you are selling a product or service that appeals to a specific subset of a large audience, don’t try to attract the entire audience!
A common mistake I’ve seen that illustrates the point is mixing a DIY crowd in with a done-for-your audience. If your offer appeals to people who want to do something themselves, top of the funnel content should appeal to those people too. However, if your offer appeals to those people who want someone else to do it for them, don’t create top of the funnel content that explains how they can do it themselves!
Each client has their own nuances and texture. My advice is to think like a lawyer and build your case for the top of the funnel content. Explain — in writing, or out loud to a colleague — why the top of the funnel content will attract high-quality prospects who can be converted to happy customers. Don’t allow fuzzy thinking.
Why is this so important? In a word, economics. When Facebook traffic was inexpensive, broadly-inclusive top of the funnel content worked. As Facebook has become increasingly expensive, the economics of ‘warming up’ audiences with top of the funnel content has become increasingly difficult. You may even find that it doesn’t work financially.
Test, verify, and adjust as necessary.
No. 6 — focus ad spend to cycle improvements faster.
Once you have clearly identified what you’re trying to accomplish with a paid advertising initiative, focus ad spend narrowly on that specific goal to get a meaningful result as quickly as possible.
This seems so obvious, yet in my experience, it’s rare. What I see far more often is ad spend that is distributed across many initiatives simultaneously, which extends the time to get a result (significantly) and blunts the speed at which you’re able to iterate toward success for a client.
Step 1 is to know the result you’re trying to achieve. For example, testing creative, testing audiences, scaling a campaign that’s working, etc.
Step 2 is to clearly articulate what you’re trying to achieve, and how you’ll know if or when you have achieved it.
Step 3 is to focus as much ad spend as possible on that specific test to get the result you want.
And, step 4, is to respond immediately to that result.
For example, let’s assume that we want to do a simple A/B ad copy test with two Google search ads to determine which messaging gets the best engagement as measure by clickthrough rate.
We could spend less money for a longer period of time, which means we delay the benefit of the test. Or, we could spend more money, get a result, and then reap the rewards from that improved performance sooner.
The important thing to consider here is not specific testing strategies, but the underlying idea of why and how we test. Yes, a case can be made for ongoing testing, expressed by perpetual efforts to ‘beat the control’. However, that is not an excuse to be lazy about testing velocity. When we formulate clear guidelines for a specific test, it is in our client’s best interest if we get a result quickly, and respond to it immediately.
No. 7 — study the competition.
This is especially true if you’re in a market with sophisticated advertisers. Pay attention to your client’s competitors. Are they testing? If so, what are they testing? What is structure of their funnel? What’s the offer? Are they spending money on top of the funnel awareness building? If they are, what are they doing? If they’re not, what do you think that means?
The goal isn’t to copy strategies. Instead, the goal is to spark creative thinking.
This is particularly helpful when you have clients in different markets. Often you’ll find that ideas from one market can be transplanted into another market. If you work with clients in the same market, consider studying other markets for idea generation.
Becoming an open-minded, method-agnostic student of your craft is a high-leverage worldview to embrace. Look around and pay attention to what seems to be working, and make a habit of studying (and reverse-engineering) what you find. That will hone an incredibly valuable skillet.
I started out in the early, Wild West days of paid traffic and none of us really knew what we were doing because the industry was completely new. Everyone studied everyone, and the pace of learning and improvement was extraordinary. That’s still available to you, and a high-leverage place to start is by observing your client’s competitors and sophisticated marketers in the big three niches (make money, health, and relationships).
Even if you choose not to pursue similar strategies, awareness of those strategies, and the intellectual exercise of understanding and dissecting what you observe is valuable.
Communicate Results Clearly and Frequently
I discussed a long list of potential issues with clients in Client-Services Module 2. I’ll add some nuance here as it relates specifically to getting and communicating results.
It’s important to understand that your client’s perception of what you do and how you do it is critically important in a client-services relationship. You’re evaluated by what you accomplish, and fuzzier factors related to how involved you appear to be with the client’s accounts.
Early on in a client relationship I like to have a ‘day in the life’ conversation. That’s when I explain, in detail, the level of engagement I and my team have with the client’s account(s), daily (if applicable), weekly, monthly, and beyond.
For example, it’s common for members of my team to look at client accounts briefly every day. When I share that with a client, I am 100% transparent that this is not a deep dive — it’s a quick check in.
Then I explain what happens at each interval. If we’re testing, there’s a rhythm of asking questions, testing, and responding to answers. That might be every 72 hours, weekly, biweekly, etc.
Longer time horizons (monthly, quarterly, seasonally) require different work for different outcomes. I might, for example, compare last month’s performance to the same month’s performance for the past several years for some clients to better understand trends.
Every 2-3 months I like to do a more strategic account review, looking at what we accomplished, and carving out time to think deeply about what we might be missing.
The specifics of what I do aren’t important — what’s important for you is that you create opportunities to explain to your clients what you’re doing and how often you’re doing that. In my experience, this conversation reassures your clients that you’re taking the relationship and their needs very seriously.
It’s also a way to educate clients, develop a common language, and eliminate (or diminish) reactionary questions when a client doesn’t fully understand what you do and becomes concerned about what, exactly, they’re paying you for.
A little reassurance goes a long way in preventing these potential problems.
Regular, consistent communication is critical for the long-term health of client-service relationships. If I look back on my ‘greatest hits’ list of failed client relationships, the single most important factor in each was a failure to communicate regularly and effectively.
Finally, whenever possible, train your clients to re-orient to, and focus on, the big picture. Emphasize the ultimate goal you’re trying to accomplish, and what you have been doing relative to that goal. Keep the conversation out of the weeds. That’s not always easy — some clients want to focus on the minutia of the relationship. Acknowledge that, and build a habit of reframing conversations at the highest possible level.
This is increasingly important over time, especially as members of the client’s team come and go. Does everyone in the room know the high-level goals? Can everyone articulate those goals and the strategy you’re using to achieve them in thirty seconds or less? If not, there’s extra friction in the relationship that needs to be eliminated.
Two more pro tips to wrap up this module.
Pro tip #1 — make a habit of drawing attention to whatever the client does well. You will build significant relationship equity when you call out individual team members for their positive contributions whenever possible, especially when you do that in front of whoever they report to.
If someone delivered early, contributed to a particularly high-performing campaign, shared (or inspired) an idea the lead to a big win, etc. — give that person positive, public credit.
Never hesitate to share the spotlight. It will feel good for the other person, feel good for you, and will continue to position you as a respected, confident professional.
A corollary to this idea is to accept praise graciously. If you’re called out, acknowledge the reinforcement and then thank everyone who contributed. As a service provider, you’re part of a team, and playing well with others pays significant dividends over time.
Pro tip #2: be willing to say “I don’t know…” followed by “…but I will find out and report back”.
I am astonished how difficult it is for most people to say “I don’t know.” We’ve been trained to believe that not knowing is a failure. Your role as a service provider is not to know everything. Worse, it’s very easy to see when you truly don’t know and you’re grasping for an answer.
I’ve been in so many meetings where a question was asked — usually by an executive or owner — and it was clear the person who was asked did not know the answer. Yet, s/he tried to answer the question and the rest of us watched in agonizing slow motion.
Very early in my career I was asked a question and, before I could think, I said “I don’t know.” If I had left it at that, the situation would have been awkward. I was one of twelve people around a conference table, and I remember, nearly twenty years later, that several people seemed visibly uncomfortable with my answer.
However, I added the second, critical part of that sentence — “…but I will find out and report back…”, and that made all the difference.
After that meeting the owner of the company pulled me aside and told me that was the first time in twenty years in business that anyone had ever said that to him, yet he had countless examples when it was clear the person answering a question truly didn’t know the answer.
For some reason that has stayed with me, and it’s a phrase I use comfortably.
Add that phrase to your toolkit and you’ll see how liberating it can be. Even better, often it seems to improve the dynamics of client relationships. There’s a confidence built into that phrase that’s hard to explain.
Summary
When you choose to work with paid traffic clients, you’re choosing to be in two businesses simultaneously. The first is the business of results, and the second is the business of relationships. This is a not an either/or choice, it’s both/and.
Results and relationships reinforce each other. If you’re exceptional at getting results you can get away with more in relationships, and if you’re exceptional at building relationships, you can get away with accomplishing less impressive results.
Ideally, you want to be great at both, and the key to doing that is understanding that both benefit from disciplined practice. Learn and improve your craft, and become a student of building better relationships. Start by paying attention to your clients’ spoken and unspoken needs and desires, and over time you’ll become increasingly aware of the wonderful nuances of working with, and being, human.
NEXT: Client Services Q&A Call #2, Module 3