Working with clients isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Whether you work in marketing, commissioned art, law, or finance, you probably have a few pain points that you deal with on a daily basis when you interact with your clients. Maybe it’s a lack of communication that causes your relationships to suffer, perhaps there’s not a whole lot of mutual respect in your relationships, or maybe you’re even missing payments from your customers. One thing’s for sure: working with clients is no walk in the park.
However, if you’re willing to make some changes to your process in order to improve your client relationships, things can become much easier for both parties. In this post, we’ll go over 5 tips to help you enhance your client management skills in 2020.
Table of Contents
1. Be grateful
If there’s one thing we can agree on with challenging or easy-going clients, it’s that no matter what their disposition or communication habits look like, both keep your business up and running. Without clients, you wouldn’t have work to do, revenue to record, or a livelihood to live on.
Here’s another thing to remember. Difficult clients care, for the most part anyway. They expect things to be perfect because that’s what they hired you for.
The point is, your clients—even the difficult ones—keep your business going, so be sure to show your gratitude for their business. Whether that means buying them corporate gifts during the holidays or showing your appreciation in your correspondence, take some time to remind yourself that they are the people you have to thank for your paycheck at the end of the month.
2. Keep organized
When you think back to any quarrels you’ve had with current or previous clients, the issue probably arose because of a lack of communication or organization. Maybe they weren’t looped in to a certain process or perhaps they misunderstood the outcome of a project. How do you combat these issues? Keep organized! It’s as simple as that—we’ll discuss communication in more detail in just a minute.
As for staying organized, make it a point to keep all client communication records handy and up-to-date at all times. This way, you can both protect yourself if an issue comes up and you can also make it an accessible resource for clients, too.
One helpful tool to do this is to use an automatic speech to text transcription service on client calls. Once you’ve finished the meeting, keep a copy for yourself and send a copy to the client, along with a list of action items as well as an abbreviated summary of items discussed.
3. Touch base
As we mentioned before, miscommunication is a detrimental ingredient in a recipe for client disasters. To avoid this, it’s essential to be clear with your communication and keep updates consistent. One way to make sure your communication is hitting the mark is to use an online editing tool to a) ensure you’re communicating professionally and b) help you craft messages that are conveying the right tone.
4. Revise your invoicing system
Missing payments is probably the worst thing that can happen to your business, for obvious reasons. But the reality is, things slip by the wayside—unintentionally or otherwise—so you need to be more careful with invoicing than you might think. Investing in an invoicing system is essential if you want to keep your finances and client communication in order.
If you bill on an hourly basis, you’ll want to be sure that the invoicing tool you choose either has a time-tracking system or can be integrated with one. This is important for you and your clients in case they ever ask to see some proof of time or want to review past bills.
5. Be transparent
When you work with clients, you’re building a partnership and the best partnerships are honest with one another. Whether you’re slated to miss a deadline or aren’t hitting the marks you need to, it’s important to be transparent with your clients. Of course, this comes with communication. So keep things updated and clear at all times!
Wrapping up
No one really prepares you for dealing with clients in the real world, and you certainly can’t predict how your clients will react or not react to different things. But with this guide, you can definitely make your client management processes more seamless than ever!
About Carson Derrow
