Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '50+ Things You Should Learn About
Your Client'
Posted by RobOusbey
Six years ago I stood in a client's board room with a list of SEO
recommendations that I was convinced would earn me big smiles, firm handshakes,
and and maybe even a celebratory slap on the back. Instead I was met with icy
stares and nonchalance to my suggestions.
This was despite all my preparation to understand various intricate SEO
bestpractices, as well as the quirks of their website and CMS. I just had no
idea what this team believed in, or what angle I should use to persuade them to
get things done.
It was July 2008, and I decided:
SEO is easy. Consulting is hard.
Every day that I've been at Distilled, I've had the pleasure of learning more
about online marketing, but I've also been able to learnthrough research,
practice, observation and teachinglots about the skills that make someone an
effective consultant.
There are many
manytraits of a greatconsultant that can be developed, but one necessary skill
is:getting to know your client and understanding how you can be effective for
them. This knowledge is how you unlock your ability to talk to them about the
problems they're facing, discover the problems they didn't know they had, and
lets you be best set up to deliver solutions that they will actually understand
and implementand which will make a real and impactful change to their business.
Obviously this getting-to-know-youphase is important enough to invest real time
into, but I've found there are a bunch of hacks' that can help you get up to
speed on an organization and its individuals. I want to share these quick tips
and tricks with you, as well as a bunch of other questions that are worth
answeringeither through research, by observing the client, or by asking
outright.
Throughout this post, I've shared examples and anecdotes from my own consulting
experiences.
If you'd just prefer the TL;DR version,the top two or three questions in each
section are highlighted, or you can see the full list of my'50+ things to learn'
in this downloadablecheat sheet.
How much profit does the company make from each additional customer?
How are the company's financials; are they profitable, or making a loss?
We'll begin with this section because it's so cut-and-dry that it's little more
than business 101'. However, some of the seemingly obvious money-orientated
questions can be overlooked; I met with one marketer last year who had
absolutely no idea what the profit was on each sale he made, or which sales he
was making or losing money on; it reminded me that sometimes you do have to make
sure to ask the right questions and then go digging for the answers.
It's worth approaching this at two distinct levelsfrom the perspective of
individual transactions, and the overall view of the company or department.
On a transactional level, we want to know the revenue & profit. For a retailer,
that usually means understanding the average revenue associated with each
purchase. For some businesses, there may also be a lifetime value' (LTV) for
each new customerwhich takes into account repeat purchases or the average length
of time a user stays signed up (for a subscription product, or a SAAS company
like Moz).
For those businesses, it's also important to understand the the marginal
profit' of each purchase. (The amount made on each sale, after the cost of
actually providing the product.) Since most marketing teams also have a good
handle on their cost per acquisition' (the amount they spend to attract each
conversion, etc) it's particularly important to view this in the context of the
marginal profit from each sale. Where marginal profit is significantly higher
than CPA for a particular marketing channel or tactic, it might indicate an
opportunity to increase investment in that channel.
As well as understanding profit margin, CPA, etc, for your client's
transaction, it's worth getting to know what these look like for similar
companies or others in their niche. This maytake some hunting around and
research online, butwill give you an insight into how aggressive your client can
afford to be when it comes to beating their competitors.
On a business level, it's worth making sure you have a handle on certain
financial metrics such as revenue and operating profit. For larger / public
companies, I typically prefer to research these sorts of things myself. If you
have the time and interest to read through financial statements, Google is
usually the fastest way to find these documents. (Search for the company name
plus annual report' or 10k'.) However, various sources have done a good job
making financial information easily digestible; I'm fond of MSN Money (e.g.:
their page for Yelp, showing an $7.9m loss ) or simply Wikipedia (e.g.: their
page on Dell, showing a $2.3b profit.)
For anything other than a fast-growing startup, knowing the company's current
profitability is usually more interesting to me than revenue, as it can often
guide their approach to marketing investment. A company with very little profit
(or who is making a loss) is likely to be interested in very strategic spending,
with a well understood path to return. A company that is flush with profits
might be more able to include some more risky tactics in their marketing
strategy.
Does your POC have more of an analytical or emotional personality type?
How does your POC prefer to communicate on project matters?
Above everything else, the relationship between a consultant and the people
within a client organization is perhaps the biggest factor in determining how
successful the engagement will be. Although building any relationship takes
time, there are a few things I like to uncover (or just directly ask about) in
order to speed up that process.
Beyond just knowing each person's role in a team, I want to understand whatthey
are responsible for (what do they actually do from day-to-day?) and what they
are accountable for. The accountability' includes what they are measured on.
(Which is the most important thing to happen or improve so that they would be
celebrated/rewarded; what would they be criticized for if it didn't happen?)
For my main point of contact inside an organization, we often phrase this as
"what would make you look good to your boss?"which can help set at least one
clear objective for the engagement. Plus, helping your contact to be successful
has a fantastic side-effect: as they get promoted and move up their
organization, it can give you greater access, wider influence, and bigger
budgets to work with.
There are many frameworks for how people view situations and make decisions,
such as
Myers-Briggs, the learning modalities, etc. I love the incredibly simplified
approach of assessing whether someone is analytical (driven by data, talks about
facts, wants to know about ROI) or emotional (driven by personal connections,
talks about vision, wants to hear stories.) Although categorising people in such
a binary way is clearly a gross oversimplification of human nature, I've found
the value in this is that you can make an assessment of someone within justa few
minutes of meeting them, and immediately better tailor your approach to them.
As part of getting close to your client', I also like to ask (to individuals or
a team)
what they have been excited about recently. When you have to start making
recommendations to them, knowing what excites them gives an insight into the
kind of answers they'll respond well to, or what is most likely to get
implemented quickly.
Working quickly to understand how different individuals like to communicate can
reduce friction and repays the time invested very quickly. I've worked with
people who will reply to emails within minutes, people who prefer you to pick up
the phone and call them, people who are great at running meetings, even people
who always respond to messages on GChat / Skype. (And conversely, some people
will have an out-of-control inbox, some never listen to voicemails, and some
never get anything done in meetings.)
Related to communication styles, it's valuable to understand how people like to
receive reports & updateswhether from consultants or their own team-members.
Find out how often you're expected to prepare reports, the style (lots of data,
bottom line metrics, written explanations?), the formats (email, spreadsheets,
slide deck format, online dashboards?) and the audience (a project lead, a whole
team, executives, juniors?).
From a reporting perspective, I've worked with a branding guy who
"left the numbers up to other people", and was more interested in a monthly
face-to-face where we recapped the status of each initiative & campaign, and
I've known a successful CMO who reviewed a three-page spreadsheet/dashboard each
morning and would chase down different team members to ask about the story
behind changes in different numbers. In both cases, providing metrics & updates
in a way that fit their existing process let them understand my information and
respond to me more effectively.
Who will be making the decisions that affect your project?
What constraints does the team have to balance when making decisions?
Early on in my consulting career, I overlooked the value of investing time in
how organizations make decisions. Naively, I would deliver the right answer' for
a client, and be frustrated when they didn't decide to immediately put all hands
on deck implementing my brilliant ideas.
Through conversation with members of your client's team, you will hear about
decisions that have been madeat both the high/strategic level, and down at the
tactical level. Within those stories is the information about what criteria were
important, and who the influential people were. To kick-start these
conversations, you can ask
"which projects were big successes internally?" or "which big decisions do
people still talk about?"
It's easiest to understand the decision making process when you're clear on how
a team's success is measured. I once worked with a marketing team who were
measured and bonused on overall conversion rate of visitors. I failed to
persuade them to invest in SEO because even though it would have brought a fire
hose of new traffic and customers, organic visitors to their site converted at
~6%, which brought down their current ~8% average. I was gobsmacked, but once I
understood their situation, I realized I had to go to the CMO instead to explain
why the teams current objectives were counterproductive.
An aspect of this which can take longer to grok are the constraints, roadblocks
and objections that a team faces. While some are quite easy to ask about (eg:
the team that has a limited budget to invest in marketing activities), some are
only uncovered throughout a project (eg: the boss who wouldn't A/B test pricing
in marketing emails, in case a customer found out that someone else was offered
a deeper discount.) Effective consultants will be respectful of an
organization's history, values and beliefsbut great consultants can balance this
with knowing when to challenge those things.
Finally, a great hack' I learned from one colleague at Distilledis that there's
a lot of discovery value in asking a new client
"what made you hire me for this project?" This forces them to provide insight
into how they made a very real, very recent decision. Plus, by exposing what
they valued in making the decision, it also does a lot to set expectations and
anagenda for the engagement.
What criteria are used to prioritize new tasks or projects?
How does the team tend to run / use meetings?
How risk tolerant is the team?
Beyond just how plans are made, I always want to discover how work is
prioritized, the criteria for that prioritization, and how the plans are shared
with the team. Occasionally, a team will perfectly implement the Agile
methodology, others rely on an odd Waterfall-esqe model, many have something
less formal still. Understanding their processes lets you know, for example,
whether quick & easy wins can be hustled up the backlog, or whether they will
have to wait their turn'.
Related to processes are the tools a team uses for project management. They may
rely on Trello/Basecamp/MS Project, or a wall full of sticky notesand it'll be
up to you to integrate yourself.
I'm always fascinated by the meeting culture' at different companies. I've seen
companies where the most effective work happens during impromptu five-minute
stand up meetings, and organizations that are crippled by the archetypal
terrible' meetings (too long, too many people, no agenda, no actions, etc.)
Understanding whether I need to be in the room' to help make decisions, or
whether to avoid any unproductive time-sinks, improves my effectiveness as much
as my sanity.
There are myriad other cultural factors worth picking up on relatively quickly.
How you behave with them, and the recommendations you make could be influenced
by:a team's degree of risk tolerance (eg: a marketing team might be happy with a
PR story that raises some controversy around their brand, butwouldn'tdo anything
that puts their rankings at risk of a Google penalty)
their bias to action (are they in the Facebook-esque mold of move fast and break
things'?)
their hunger for success (how invested are the team members in the
organization's achievements, or to what degree is this just a job for them?)
For some cultural factors, you just need a trusted person who can give you the
inside track, rather than waiting to recognize them yourself. For example: I've
seen everything from companies that were run like non-stop frat parties,
tocompanieswhere bad language was highly frowned uponso it's good to know which
sort of team you might be talking to.
What is the company's mission / vision?
Does the team you're working with believe in these things?
There are bunch of very straightforward questions here, which typically don't
have simple answers. What is the company's vision? (IE: what do they believe
about the future and their place in it?) Do they have an explicit mission' or
purpose'? What are their stated values? (For instance
Distilled, Moz and Amazon are all very public about these.) Do they have a
BHAG?
Beyond these things, do they have a company strategy (or marketing strategy)
that is congruent with the vision/mission/purpose?
However, beyond the
presence of things like a mission statement or values, I like to understand how
much the team members have bought into all of these things, or whether the CEO
is alone in believing these things. This tells me how much to rely on those
values in working with the team. For example: I've seen Amazon employees make
certain decisions explicitly because "this demonstrates a bias for action", but
that buy-in' doesn't exist at every company.
Does everyone in the the team have a good understanding of the company's USP,
customers, etc?
How much knowledge of your niche (SEO, social media, etc) does the client's
team have?
With each new client, you may have to invest time in reading and learning about
an industry that you're unfamiliar with. (The client can obviously explain lots
to you, but probably shouldn't be your only source; they may be snowblinded, or
only viewing the niche through the lens of their own organization.)
But as a sense-check: don't be afraid to get your client's team members talking
to youabout the company's work and their industry. A memorable experience was
being in the room with the marketing department from a tech company, where 50%
of the team admitted to not really understanding the industry, or their
company's services.
In the other direction, don't skip over getting a sense of the team's
understanding of your industry, whether that's marketing, social media, SEO, UX,
etc. I overlooked this with one of my early clients, and realized far too late
that I was talking to a room split between experienced marketing people, and
product people who didn't know the first thing about SEO. (One quote that stuck
in my head, maybe 45 minutes into the session:
"so you're saying that links are good?" I learnt mylesson very quickly at that
moment.)
Research senior people and your point-of-contact online to find their favorite
concepts or metaphors.
Sign upto all of theirmarketingemails.
Beyond just asking questions or reading about the things I've mentioned, I also
like to do a bit of stalking to see how a company's leaders talkfor exampleabout
their industry and how they use their values when speaking.
The company's CEO, CMO and your point-of-contact are great people to research;
Twitter feeds, blog posts and bylined articles are easy places to start, but you
can usually find webinars, keynotes or presentations to watch as well. Framing
concepts using their own favorite words, phrases and metaphors can be a quick
route being better understood.
In terms of ongoing research of a client, there's an old (but still worthwhile)
recommendation to set up a Google Alert for their nameboth to watch the organic
chatter that exists around the brand, to make yourself look very on-the-ball,
but also justto find out about the other marketing/PR activity that your
contacts may not have known enough about to mention it to you.
In addition, I suggest signing up for all of the client's email marketing
lists, in order to see a side of their content that is hidden from the web or
search engine spiders.
One of my colleagues will routinely go through the customer process' for every
new client, to learn more about how they manage their funnel. (She now has
everything from insurance quotes for her fake grand piano, to a contractor
listing for her fake plumbing companybut always find insights that would have
been missed otherwise.)
Finally, spending time in a client's office can be an expensive, but worthwhile
endeavorparticularly early on in a relationship. While trying to discover the
answers to everything I've talked about above, it's illuminating to have a room
with a good mix of team members. While one person is talking, watch everyone
else for their reactions. A nod of approval, a roll of the eyes, pursed lips, or
a deep breath can all mean different thingsand it's worth catching that person
later to ask their opinion, or (if you're feeling really confident) mine for
conflict there-and-then with the group.
I hope you've been able to find at least one new question or shortcut here, to
give you extra insight into new clients. The
summary cheatsheetis here, and can even be downloaded in PDF formatso you can
load it onto your phone/tablet/Kindle and take it with you to client
meetings.Download it now!Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer
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