“Push the client” is bad advice for a strategist

How many times have you heard someone at your agency say their job is to “push the client” and “take them out of their comfort zone?”

Agencies say this all the time (I’ve fallen into the trap myself) so it probably sounds completely benign to you hearing it right now. But put yourself in the client’s position. Can you imagine, meeting someone who wants to be your thought partner and help you grow your brand and career, and the first thing they say is they intend to use force to make you uncomfortable? That that’s their plan for building the relationship and doing great work together?

Does anybody really like being pushed, really? You might think of working out and “no pain no gain” and sure there’s some growth that comes from being uncomfortable. But that’s not what we mean here.

When we say “uncomfortable” we mean “wrong.”

“I’m going to push you out of your comfort zone” means “I’m going to show how you were wrong about your brand or your customers or your market, even though it’s what you do for a living. Also it only took me 2 weeks to crack it.”

How do you think that’s going to go? 

There are two problems with this approach. The first is (often) misaligned objectives between the strategist and the client. We often come in wanting the client to do innovative or interesting work. But clients hire us to move the brand or business forward. Most are more interested in effective than innovative. They may be open to the latter, but only inasmuch as it delivers the former. Innovative for its own sake rarely gets them promoted. And innovative at the expense of effective can get them fired. 

The second problem with this approach is that even if a client is open to innovative work, they have to feel confident in their reasons for choosing it. That’s the opposite of “uncomfortable.” Confidence means they feel like they’re right, which is a hard place to get to if you start by telling them they’re wrong.

So instead of telling them they’re wrong, a strategy can be more persuasive if it’s built on something the client already believes to be true.

There’s a point in a presentation to the client - the A-ha! moment - when the key insight lands just right. Heads nod, eyes widen, I’ve even heard slight catches of breath. It’s the purest moment in strategy.

An A-ha! moment doesn’t happen because your clients realize how wrong they were.

An A-ha! moment happens because you uncovered something they knew was there all along.

That’s the key to a good insight - that it is at once unexpected and familiar. Where the client’s reaction is not, “welp, I guess you were right and I was wrong.” That’s not a place where they’ll ever feel confident in what you’re going to propose next. Instead, we want a client’s reaction to be, “A-ha! I never saw it that way but it’s been there all along.” 

In my experience, when clients say “we need someone to push us” they mean the brand, not them personally.

An A-ha! insight feels a little daring in its unexpectedness, but also safe in its familiarity.