7 Ways to Fight for Your Most Important Clients
Some clients are too important to lose.
No one wants to be in this position, but a lot of us are at risk in a big way.
We know in the pit of our stomach that there are some clients that we cannot afford to lose. Diversifying your customer base, your product line, your market share... yes, yes, yes -- these are all good strategies and advice for the future.
But what about now? What about when you discover that a client who is too important to lose is at risk, what is the "now" strategy for that? I have been there, it's ugly, and you had better play for keeps -- because it is for keeps.
Here are some of my recommendations:
1. Don't play fair - It's your client, which means that you should have the upper hand with unique access, information, and contacts -- not your competitor or even the client taking the work back in house. Use them all. Ignore the warnings from the client about information and contact black-outs. You have to be careful and crafty, but this is not a drill. Get your leverage working and work it hard.
2. Get personally involved - Do not get your data just from your front line people. They are only getting part of the story, probably from other front line people. You have to make the senior appeals and get the bigger picture, deeper story personally. Don't try to get this by email. Call and visit -- push for sooner rather than later and for more people to visit, not less.
3. Start with fear - There are switching costs everywhere when moving from your company to another, amplify them. Your client has lots of other initiatives right now, emphasize those and why undertaking a switch will interrupt those other important initiatives. Focus their attention on the benefit ratio of switching costs versus performance improvement efforts with your firm.
4. Increase the size of the decision - The bigger the decision, the more the status quo is favored. In this case, you are the status quo. You need the client to see this as an enormous undertaking -- bigger than they thought. Then you can show that the effort required to improve will be less than all the effort it will take to change providers.
5. Take responsibility, make concessions - There is little sense in arguing about the problems. You are better to take notes and ask questions, then more questions, and still more questions. Even when you may not be able to agree with the challenges, you can at least acknowledge why the customer is upset. Often we are the scapegoat for the client's own poor internal performance. Now is not the time to argue percentages of blame. Now is the time to ask, listen, and understand.
6. Demonstrate immediate changes - You need to figure out some things that you can do IMMEDIATELY. Change your representative on their account, waive some disputed charges, pull a collaborative team meeting between key touch-point people on their side and yours, provide a price reduction....DO SOMETHING NOW. It shows a sense of urgency, commitment, and progress.
7. Tip your hand - Play the emotion card. Your biggest clients know that they are your biggest client. They may not know that pulling their business from your firm will cripple or close your company. People are not heartless. If there is an understanding of the true impact, there may be more openness to work with you to improve things rather than just cut and run.
No one likes to be under the gun, but it happens. Step one, stop the bleeding. Step two, execute the bigger strategy so that you can be less critically dependent on just one client.
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