Over the months of planning and building your sand castle, you have built many different relationships.  Through communicating with various suppliers, estimating your budgets, setting and maintaining your goals and wiring the communications hub – you’ve built relationships with the dump truck driver, the financial planner and the building inspector.  These are all important relationships that you should continue to nurture, even after the initial project is complete.  Isn’t the point of building the best sand castle on the beach that other people notice it and want you to build theirs?  And it never hurts to have the reputation of organized leader who’s also a team player.

Working day to day with clients, partners and co-workers can cause you to take them for granted.  Sometimes you put off their requests or just plain forget to reply to their emails.  It’s not that you don’t value their relationship it’s just that they are not top of mind, especially as new clients come in to play.  You may feel that you’ve already built these relationships and that since they’re not going anywhere you need to focus on building the new ones, or expending all of your energy proving yourself to them.

Make All Your Clients Feel Important

Maintaining relationships are just as important, if not more important than building the new ones.  A client will only take getting the bare minimum attention for so long before they start to feel they will get better attention elsewhere.  Everyone wants to be top of mind and treated as the most important, but finding that balance may require tough choices.  However you decide to maintain and build relationships, always keep the client’s needs in mind.  Do a quarterly check of what changed in the relationship from the last quarter.  Were you more responsive? Less attentive?  What can you do over the next quarter to better assist them with their goals?

Every person has a unique personality and the key to success in any business is to figure out a way to make everyone believe that you still make their goals your priorities and will continue to go the extra mile to make sure of their success.  You’re only as good as the people around you, so support your partners and internal teams.

It’s been a long road and quite a bit of growth since we decided to play in the sandbox together last September.  We hope these tips on bringing the team together, managing budgets, successful communicating, setting and maintaining goals, and creating a succinct message have helped you in your partnerships with clients and agency partners.

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