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Can you really treat your client like your best friend?

By Jono Marcus

April 25, 2014 | 4 min read

I read the following blog with interest Clients are agencies' best friends..., and while I agree with the general call from the legendary Matthew Charlton to not “form relationships [with clients] without depth and integrity” (as well as his contention that fee-grabbing is a quick way to ruin client relations), there are other larger priorities at play for agencies too.

Jono Marcus

Simply imagining clients are your best friends and acting accordingly, can dampen down other crucial agency impulses.

The most crucial role for an agency is to inspire the client through three methods:

1. Create a potent, evocative shared client/agency goal.

2. Focus the client’s attention on what most matters to their business, towards what will generate the most marketing success (which may sometimes be the hardest thing for them to see).

3. Address the elephant in the room, whether or not the client wants to address it. And on the back of that, simply be there for the client full stop.

All these priorities may be bitter medicine for the client initially, but for the greater good will often have to trump simply treating the client as a “best friend”.

You never have to be prepared to walk away from a best friend if they will not take your advice, or if they treat your staff without due care, or if they prove impossible to work with – for the good of your overall business you do all those things if things go wrong with a client.

I would propose that agencies need to treat clients not like friends, but like clients; you can care deeply about their problems, challenges and listen carefully to identify their needs, but you must be distant enough to be able to act as an agent provocateur and a teller of hard truths.

Ultimately, it is great if your client likes you and sees you as a friend, but this is not vital. What is essential is that they find it hard to imagine how they would operate without you.

You can ensure this by:

1. Spotting problems facing your client before they do, and adding value beyond your specific marketing remit.

2. Working out how you can help them specifically advance their own career, as well as their brand’s success.

3. Giving them quality time.

4. Providing contagious energy (and often optimism).

5. Most important: your agency must provide consistently high quality work to them, day in day out – and make sure that work is frequently surprising. The element of surprise is crucial.

How to deal with the situation if you are failing on all or any of these fronts is another story. But a positive resolution will only ever come through acknowledging where mistakes have been made and fighting hard to keep that client’s business.

Like a friend would fight to save a friendship maybe; but perhaps more like a talented artist would fight to keep his studio intact and his muse in place. The artist might win his fight, but it is a cold-blooded exchange: by staying, the muse can expect to inspire great paintings, which will then be sold to keep the studio space and to generate a living for all involved.

So while I agree that kindness, treating clients generously and friendship are a valuable part of business life. Your longest serving clients will generally prioritise being exposed to your creativity, provocation, sometimes brutal honesty and intelligence very slightly ahead of the qualities that would simply make you a fine friend to them.

Jono Marcus is a partner at creative agency Inkling and is currently writing 50 Ways To Happier Clients (In the Digital Age), published this summer.

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