Client Communication

Summary

In this insightful talk, Patti Douglass outlines effective strategies for client communication, applicable not only to businesses but also to everyday interactions. By analyzing the role of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, the importance of understanding client preferences, and the need for transparency, Douglass emphasizes the significance of building strong client relationships. Practical tips on exceeding client expectations, maintaining regular meetings, offering solutions, and the art of the sales pitch are discussed at length, offering listeners a comprehensive guide to enhancing client relations.

Highlights

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for managing client interactions and data. 🖥️
• Salesforce is a major player in the CRM space, influencing global spending. 🌐
• Different types of CRMs cater to sales, marketing, and service needs, each designed to optimize specific business areas. 📈
• Transparency, timeliness, and regular follow-ups are cornerstones of effective client communication. 💬
• The art of sales pitching involves deep knowledge of the client's goals and challenges, along with tailored solutions. 🎯

Key Takeaways

• Understanding clients' preferred communication channels is key to successful interactions. 📞
• Transparency builds trust and fosters better relationships with clients. 🤝
• Exceeding expectations through thoughtful gestures can delight clients and foster loyalty. 🎁
• Regularly scheduled meetings ensure smooth project progress and open avenues for new opportunities. 📅
• Always be prepared to adapt your pitch to suit the client's unique needs and preferences. 🔄

Overview

Patti Douglass walks us through the intricacies of managing client relationships, asserting that whether we recognize it or not, everyone deals with clients in various forms. From students to co-workers to paying customers, understanding and optimizing these interactions is crucial. A major tool in this endeavor is CRM systems, which help businesses manage customer data and interactions effectively. Among CRMs, Salesforce stands out as a global force, a testament to the growing importance of organized client communications.

Douglass shares insights on communication best practices, emphasizing the necessity of getting to know clients and their preferred modes of communication. She highlights the importance of transparency, even when things go south, and using timeliness to exceed customer expectations. Drawing from personal experiences and industry examples, she demonstrates how these principles can transform client relationships, leading to better business outcomes.

The talk takes a deep dive into the mechanics of a successful sales pitch. Here, understanding a client's objectives, pain points, and competitive landscape become paramount. Douglass advises thorough preparation, from researching the client beyond digital footprints to rehearsing presentations meticulously. Whether you're an account executive or handling client interactions at any level, these strategies ensure your pitch resonates and your solutions align with client needs, ultimately paving the way for successful partnerships.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Client Communication The chapter 'Introduction to Client Communication' begins by broadening the definition of 'clients' beyond the traditional business context. It suggests that in various roles, whether as professors, coworkers, or volunteers, everyone interacts with others who can be considered clients. This perspective applies in many areas of life, not just in conventional client settings.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Understanding CRM Systems The chapter titled 'Understanding CRM Systems' begins by introducing the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, which involve a combination of practices, strategies, and technologies used by companies to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer life cycle. Salesforce, a recognized leader in the CRM industry, serves as a key reference point in the discussion.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Types of CRM Systems The chapter discusses different types of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. It begins by highlighting Salesforce as a major player in the CRM industry. Salesforce, described as a huge company working behind the scenes, is a significant force in customer relationship management, representing the largest and fastest-growing category in enterprise application software. Additionally, the chapter notes that CRM worldwide spending is expected to reach $14.4 billion, emphasizing the substantial investment and growth in this tech sector.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Effective Client Communication Practices The chapter titled 'Effective Client Communication Practices' discusses the importance of client relationship management (CRM) tools, with a particular focus on Salesforce which is noted as a major player in the CRM industry. Although many CRM software brands are available, Salesforce is emphasized. The chapter suggests watching a specific YouTube video by an expert on sales for a more detailed understanding of CRMs, implying that it might provide insights beyond what the chapter could offer. It sets the stage for understanding CRM's role in effective communication with clients.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Importance of Transparency The chapter titled 'Importance of Transparency' delves into the role of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in business operations. It highlights how sales CRMs are utilized to drive sales by acquiring new customers. The chapter notes the common experience of receiving emails from businesses, both ones previously interacted with and new ones, indicating that the recipient's information is stored within multiple CRM systems. The discussion emphasizes the transparency aspect in handling and communicating with customers through these CRMs.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Timeliness in Client Communication The chapter focuses on the importance of timeliness in client communication. It discusses different types of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems and their roles. A marketing CRM is used to monitor the success of marketing campaigns, a service CRM is intended to enhance customer support and facilitate additional sales opportunities, and a collaborative CRM emphasizes teamwork and the sharing of customer information. All these systems aim to improve the relationship between a company and its customers by ensuring timely and effective communication.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Regular Meetings with Clients In this chapter, the focus is on regular meetings with clients can streamline communication and save customers time. When different organizations share information, customers are spared the hassle of repeatedly explaining themselves through phone calls or emails. An example given is from the Providence Health System, where inter-communication within its parts helps relay patient information seamlessly to their physicians also within the same system.
• 09:00 - 11:30: Offering Solutions and Exceeding Expectations The chapter discusses the importance of communication and information sharing, not only within different entities of the same company but also between different companies, to benefit both customers and organizations. It highlights that small business CRM solutions are available for really small businesses, which may not have as many features due to affordability constraints.
• 11:30 - 12:30: Importance of Follow-Up This chapter emphasizes the significance of follow-up in customer service. It highlights how keeping accurate records of previous interactions, such as purchase history and service appointments, can enhance customer experience. By knowing when a customer last engaged with your services, businesses can maintain timely communication and remind them of necessary services. This practice is beneficial for both small and large businesses alike. Additionally, the chapter touches on the importance of understanding your customers in general communication.
• 12:30 - 16:00: Preparing for a Sales Pitch The chapter 'Preparing for a Sales Pitch' discusses the importance of understanding clients and identifying their preferred communication channels. It highlights the universal relevance of this understanding for both businesses with direct customers and those serving clients. The author shares their personal experience, having worked initially in client relations with advertising agencies and then in a manufacturing company aiming to replicate successful account management strategies.
• 16:00 - 19:00: Best Practices for Presentations The chapter discusses the service model used in advertising agencies, emphasizing the importance of treating big clients with special attention. It highlights the role of an account executive in understanding client communication preferences. Furthermore, it suggests that this approach is applicable to companies like Starbucks, which also prioritize understanding customer interactions.
• 19:00 - 20:00: Importance of Listening to Clients The chapter emphasizes the importance of effective communication methods, such as choosing between texts, emails, or mail, especially in healthcare organizations. It highlights the value of transparency, stressing that although it may be tempting to lie to avoid trouble, honesty is always appreciated and requires courage.
• 20:00 - 21:00: Tailoring Solutions to the Client This chapter explores the importance of tailoring solutions to clients, using a case study where a customer faced issues with a Lazy Boy purchase. The issues included lack of transparency about product readiness and the absence of proactive solutions from the company. The lesson underscores the need for businesses to effectively communicate and offer solutions without prompting, to ensure customer satisfaction.

Client Communication Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 you may not think you're going to have clients per se you just have customers or maybe neither but in life we have clients we have students when we're professors we have co-workers we have administrators we answer to we have our clients we volunteer for the people that our organization serves so this applies
• 00:30 - 01:00 to everyone and it covers an array of topics we're going to start with a entity called customer relationship management or CRM systems and these are a combination of practices strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer life cycle according to sales for force a
• 01:00 - 01:30 huge CRM if you've done business anywhere you've probably heard of Salesforce it's behind the scenes but it is a big big big company that handles customer relationship management and it is that CRM is the largest and fastest growing Enterprise application software category and worldwide spending on CRM is expected to reach $14.4 billion
• 01:30 - 02:00 in three years according to Salesforce we're going to talk about Salesforce a lot because they are the biggest player in CRM but there are many other brands of CRM software if you want to know more about it specific to Salesforce especially you can watch this YouTube video it's probably just a video that better explain crms than I will do is it comes straight from an expert on sales
• 02:00 - 02:30 course there are many types of crms sales crms are there to drive sales and to get new customers and that is you know you you see emails all the time from companies you have done business with and trying to get you to buy more and you get emails all the time from companies you have not done business with your name is in a CRM it's in many actually but when you get one of those emails you know a
• 02:30 - 03:00 CRM is managing a relationship between a company and you a marketing CRM is there to track marketing campaigns so there is a campaign done by a company and the CRM helps them figure out if it's doing its job a service CRM will give customer service or customer support with sales and marketing of course any it's an opportunity to do more sales when you need help a collaborative CRM is where
• 03:00 - 03:30 different organizations share information so and it really saves the customers sometimes so you don't have to explain yourself all over again on the phone or in an email although you often do anyway but for instance I might go to one part of Providence Health System and then it communicates with my physician who in that system as well
• 03:30 - 04:00 but that's all within the same company even though it's different entities two different companies can communicate and share information too for the benefit of the customer and the organizations then a small business CRM is available to really small businesses it may not be as sophisticated they can't afford as many features but but it
• 04:00 - 04:30 gives them a good experience at least they can go back and see what you bought six months ago when the last time you showed up for a certain service that you are supposed to be doing every month or every six months or every year and so it's it's available for the smallest business and the biggest business let's just talk about client and customer Communication in general some really good practices first of all you want to really get to know your
• 04:30 - 05:00 clients and know their preferred communication channels now this goes for both businesses that have customers and businesses that have clients I have always worked in some sort of client relations and I started doing that in advertising agencies and then I've also done it for a manufacturing company that wanted to sort of duplicate the the account
• 05:00 - 05:30 service model that we use in advertising agencies they had some really big important clients and they wanted them to be treated importantly and so as an account executive I would get to really know these clients and how they like to be communicated with but this also applies to companies that have customers like Starbucks and you know they'll ask
• 05:30 - 06:00 you do you want texts or do you want emails do you want mail um a lot of times Healthcare organizations will ask that one and then transparency is always important one thing that I have learned is that sometimes it's tempting to lie when you're trying to stay out of trouble or even keep your organization out of trouble but everyone appreciates transparency it just takes courage sometimes to admit
• 06:00 - 06:30 mistakes another professor of this course has given the example of trying to get a chair from Lazy Boy and they were told that their chair was ready and they went to get it and it wasn't ready nor had it ever been ready but they were not transparent about their error and then they didn't even offer Solutions she had to ask for Solutions so there were a lot of things that went wrong in
• 06:30 - 07:00 that interaction but let's go back to the client model like if you have a big business client of some time you always want to be transparent with them we said we could do it in this amount of time it looks like it's going to take this much time or more budget or whatever the case may be timeliness is important and Disney I've always heard that Disney has learned the art of under promising and overd delivering for instance if you're in a line for a ride
• 07:00 - 07:30 and it says you're going to wait 45 minutes that probably means that you're going to wait 35 minutes because they know that you will be very pleasantly surprised if you get through a line more quickly than they promised then if you got through in the time they promised or unfortunately if they went over time that will not even be acceptable to you so they've learned
• 07:30 - 08:00 how to under promise but the best thing to do is to at least meet your promises and then exceed them if you can you want to schedule regular meetings with your clients and that was a practice I always did as an account executive in ad agencies is have regularly scheduled meetings probably once a week for big clients sometimes more often but smaller clients may be less a often and one thing we learned to
• 08:00 - 08:30 do in the Ad Agency was we'd have regular meetings to go over all the things that were doe all the projects we had open and where we were on them and we'd show them ideas that we were working on but we also started doing less frequent meetings maybe monthly or quarterly where we would open up our minds get out of project mode get out of deadline mode and say what do we need to do for this client that is for
• 08:30 - 09:00 the greater good of this client what are what holes do you have like and they'd say well it's come to our attention that we want to expand our senior program to even younger people maybe people who are 55 and older and that will be a whole new project and not only did that serve them well so that we weren't just all in busy mode and paying attention only to those projects that were open but it
• 09:00 - 09:30 would let them think bigger and do more things for their clients meanwhile for our Ad Agency it meant more business because we would open more projects then and serve them better and it was really exceeding expectations and they really appreciated it always offer Solutions in that Lazy Boy example what they really did wrong was they were just going to leave her hanging and you know they knew they created a problem they knew that
• 09:30 - 10:00 the chair wasn't ready and she finally said okay just tell me what are my options at this point and they said well we can order it for you and it will take three months or we can refund you your money and really she didn't like either of those Solutions but it was especially bad that they were going to hang up and not even provide some sort of way way to
• 10:00 - 10:30 solve the problem and then you know really do whatever you can to exceed someone's expectations if you told them you were going to bring them this on Tuesday bring them you know two ideas or you know you know some businesses that will just surprise you with a treat I've had that happen when I ordered from someone on door Dash they just put in a an order of sweet potato fries that I hadn't ordered and said we thought
• 10:30 - 11:00 that this would brighten your day today that doesn't happen very often but you know sometimes it's nice to do something like that for your customers and then always follow up it's so easy to say oh I'll get back with you on that because I don't know the answer or I'll get back with you with some estimates and then you just forget about it you have to write those things down a one trick that my husband uses is he'll get he'll say here's my business card write down your
• 11:00 - 11:30 information on the back of it and and then what we're talking about and then you like he would use his own business card to call back that person with good information and he'd do it so fast sometimes he'd have it to them before they were even back in their city if they were at a conference or something another thing that he do is he'd hand he'd write what they wanted or what he
• 11:30 - 12:00 needed from them on his business card and hand it to them and say do me a favor and call me with this information so that I can help you with it but have some system for followup now we're going to talk about the sales pitch which is one of our projects in this class but let's just talk about it in general and specifics one thing you can do is watch this video
• 12:00 - 12:30 if you would like it is Mark Cuban's way of selling Mavericks tickets when he was new because Mavericks were in the tank and he needed to get fans there and he put himself in the thick of the sales pitch and you can see what happened from there so when you are going to do a sales pitch you need to find out a lot of information
• 12:30 - 13:00 what is their shortterm goal their long-term goal their biggest challenges for their company and reaching their goals and this is when you're going for a piece of new business it might be with a current client or it could be a completely new client and how can how can what we do help you with those problems who are your competitors what is your business model what technology do you use and who is
• 13:00 - 13:30 your biggest target market for this project or in general and you want to go beyond just Google it's great if you can talk to the client and get them to sit down with you and just tell you everything they know so when you do a sales pitch a good structure is to introduce the topic and yourself and you know of course do something attention
• 13:30 - 14:00 getting and do an over overview of this prospective client's company and again like beyond what you could have found on the internet but you want to summarize what you know about them and then establish your own credibility and why you are in a position to help them talk about the pain points that you have identified of this client talk about the solution that you have come up with for them what the
• 14:00 - 14:30 timeline is going to be and be very honest about that again you don't want to overpromise you want to be sure you can do what you say you're going to do and do it in great detail a budget that they are going to expect to invest in this and a call to action we would love to get back to together with you in a week after you've
• 14:30 - 15:00 had time to look over all of our documents our proposal the budget the timeline and get a a decision from you or get next steps from you or find out what objections you have what concerns you have so we can talk through them that's a great thing to do because then you have the opportunity to overcome those objections and so many
• 15:00 - 15:30 times they are talking to different people and they don't give you the opportunity to explain something that they were unclear on or they had a concern about and then just open up the conversation extend the conversation you can maybe get questions from them right there on the spot concerns that kind of thing so in these presentations some of the best practices are to show up
• 15:30 - 16:00 first my husband who works at the Texas Tech Alumni Association loves being the first one there especially if the business is official if there is going to be a chapter meeting he gets there very early he helps the volunteers at the chapter set up for it he wants to greet people if the client might get there 15 minutes early you need to get there earlier than that and be there waiting for them be set up test your technology
• 16:00 - 16:30 test any videos you don't want that to be an embarrassing moment a distraction and practice with everyone on your team if you have a team presenting I have told you this before I've told many people this the first time you practice something like this it's usually terrible but if you practice it again it's so much better if you practice the third time it's still
• 16:30 - 17:00 better and by the fourth and fifth time you're just getting it down pretty solidly so don't be scared to run through it run through it in your mirror it's not fun it's not pleasant but it makes all the difference don't think you can wing it just because you put together the PowerPoint doesn't mean you're prepared to talk about it smoothly certainly I can tell you that the people who did not put together the PowerPoint aren't inside of the head of the person who did and sometimes they
• 17:00 - 17:30 struggle with what you wanted them to say at that moment so it does take runthrough for sure and then stay on track try not to get off into tangents and personal stories that were not supposed to be part of it and then be ready to answer questions because there should be questions if things go well and then what if the client says hey my friend who referred me to you to begin with said that
• 17:30 - 18:00 you had done this for them why why aren't you presenting that you can say do you think that would be a better solution for you because we can do that be ready to Pivot and serve them but also don't just be a yes person be prepared to explain why you thought this was a better solution for them but if they want what they want they want what they want and you give them what they want you know I had someone come and quote
• 18:00 - 18:30 well we had someone look at our backyard and the reason we chose him to bid on this project was we went to some people's house and their yard their backyard was shaped like ours which is kind of shallow and kind of wide and we liked how they had handled that and I said the one thing he came over and I said the one thing I really don't want is like a big roof right here past this big window we have in our living room because I feel
• 18:30 - 19:00 like that'll block all this beautiful light that comes into our living room and so I we'd rather have something off to the side like our friends he came back with a $5 52,000 estimate and that was if we just did cement flooring or patio you know like no tiles or anything and it was a huge huge space right there with a big
• 19:00 - 19:30 big roof right where I said I didn't want it and I said how much space would there between be between the end of this and our fence and he said oh about three feet and I said well I don't know if anyone wants to go stare at the fence like that but he not only first of all he didn't listen to me and then second he he didn't seem very open to coming
• 19:30 - 20:00 back with the other thing and you really want to listen and not dig in I know as a creative person sometimes it's hard to give up your ideas their babies but if the client wants it be ready to give it to them and the best thing you can do in a pitch is tailor it to the client you might have templates but really learn about that client and give them a solution solution that is best for them