The best clients
At my last agency job we wanted to better understand which clients we were most successful with, in order to identify and pursue other clients that looked like them. Sort of an “eat your own dog food” exercise, we treated it like any other strategy project, compiling data from each client and looking for patterns. Someone had the idea of creating personas. Great idea but it didn’t work because the way we were looking at our clients was as businesses, not people. This unlocked an insight that - like most good ones - was hiding in plain sight: clients aren’t brands, they’re people.
Once we realized this we were able to sift our clients (the people) into the personas we created. I hope I’m not giving away any IP here, but one was the Diva - the CMO at a typically flashy brand who wanted to be famous and win awards. Another was the Prover - an ascending leader with an agenda of disruption and more ambition than political capital. I remember also the Safe Player - yeah, you know what that person is like already. There were a few others also.
“Clients (as people) are the 5th C in the 4Cs: Company, Category, Consumer, Culture - and Client. ”
As an agency, sifting our clients into these personas allowed us to see who we’d have the greatest opportunity to succeed with, which informed with RFPs we’d respond to, how much energy we’d put into pitches, and who we might pursue with outbound initiatives.
As strategists, this blindingly self-evident realization - that clients are people - should impact the way we work as well. When we’re asked to solve a problem, we’re not just solving a brand’s problem or a business’ problem - we’re solving a person’s problem. Because it’s people - not brands or businesses - that make decisions. And the decisions people make are influenced as much by their personal motivations, beliefs and biases as they are brand or business objectives.
The best clients for strategists then are the people who we most like to work with. Maybe they share our curiosity, or are values, or are humble even as leaders. Whatever it is, you don’t find it from looking at 10-Ks, corporate websites and user research.
That means that it’s the strategist’s job to understand the client as a person, as well as they understand the client as a business. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
(And it’s probably why pitches - if you’re a strategist - feel so tenuous and unsatisfying. We feel like we never have enough time. We can figure out what the brand needs in a week, but we have no idea what the client person will react to because we haven’t gotten to know them, or often even met them.)
What to do with this information? A few things:
Use your stakeholder interviews to learn about your stakeholders, not the business. This seems obvious but it’s really easy to see someone for their expertise and institutional knowledge, and overlook their personal motivations. Make sure you have some questions that give them a chance to open up a bit. And be prepared to throw out the questionnaire entirely if they want to go a different direction. Your primary objective here is to build a relationship, not collect facts about the business you can find another place or another time.
Stalk their socials. See what story they tells you. How often do they change jobs? How quickly are they promoted? Do they post, comment, lurk? Does the way they describe themselves online match with the way they present themselves in person? Obviously LinkedIn is a good place to start, but seeing if and what they post on Instagram, Xwitter, Threads or Facebook helps you see them as whole people.
Break the grid. Maybe there is an expected protocol about who contacts whom and through which channels and at what intervals. Ignore it. Find something your client might find interesting - an article or social post - and send it to them by email, or tag them in it on LinkedIn. Treat them like you would if they were a colleague at your agency. You’re not trying to become their bud and you’re definitely not trying to impress them with how smart you are. You’re trying to connect as one person to another person.
The mistake some strategists make - that I made for a long time - was seeing the client as standing in the way of the solution - or of compounding the business’ problem.
The reality is that clients are the 5th C in the 4Cs: Company, Category, Consumer, Culture - and Client.