Winning a new client feels great, especially after a tough pitch. However, the exhilaration soon fades as you start planning the onboarding process. Here’s a a cheat sheet for digital media agencies on how to handle their first chemistry meeting and create a great client-agency relationship. In many ways, this article is a great primer for junior account executives but there are nuggets of wisdom for more experienced professionals, too.
1. Getting through your first chemistry meeting
One of the most important steps in this journey is the first chemistry meeting with your new client.
Client meetings can be fun, engaging, informative, and friendly. However, they can can also be formal, rigid and even confrontational. You might even be “lucky” to witness hostilities and in-fighting between different departments or business units on the client’s side.
Although you can’t always predict whether you and the client’s team will click, you can increase your odds of having a good experience at your first meeting.
Tips on how to talk to your client during a meeting
- Never interrupt when the client or your colleagues are speaking. Let whoever is speaking take their time. Don’t rush them to the next sentence.
- Ask the client open-ended questions to allow them to share more information about their thoughts on key issues and the rationale behind their decisions.
- Avoid offering solutions immediately after a client shares information about a problem, unless the client explicitly asks you for your opinion or feedback. Going off on a tangent can derail the conversation.
- If you disagree about a topic, do not react emotionally or let your ego drive the conversation.
- Take notes and pay attention to questions directed to your colleagues so that if the conversation turns to you, you don’t get caught off-guard.
- When speaking to more than one person, ensure that you make eye contact with every member of the client and agency team, so that everyone feels acknowledged and valued.
- Leave your phone away and do not look at it during the meeting.
- Don’t overly praise the client’s product or service as you risk sounding inauthentic.
- Don’t be afraid to paraphrase in your own words what the client has said in order to confirm that you understood them.
- If you plan on showing a presentation, remember to make your content legible.
2. Understanding your client’s business and strategic goals
One of the most important steps in creating a great relationship with your client is making sure that you’re on the same page regarding strategy, tactical goals, and important tasks.
Remember to do your homework before going to a meeting. If you can, review the client’s past marketing activations and media priorities.
If the meeting is your first interaction with the client after winning a pitch, review your proposal, cost proposal, strategy, and all relevant materials you had submitted during the pitch process.
Here are some of the most important initial questions you might what to ask your client
- What are the client’s overall business objectives?
- What KPIs will you have to track?
- What are the client’s long-term and short-term priorities?
- What is the annual budget across all brands and activations?
- Are there existing media or technology commitments?
Make an effort to understand how your client’s business actually works. Research what drives their revenue, which areas bring the best profit margins.
One of the biggest benefits of working for big clients is having access to their brand health trackers. These are comprehensive surveys that gauge consumer sentiment towards the brand. Often the results of these surveys will guide future marketing priorities.
3. Defining the right workflow
Workflow and standard operating procedures are probably the most important questions during the early stages of onboarding a new client.
Your goal should be to align with your client and make sure there are no major points of friction. This is very difficult to achieve, especially when dealing with complex organizations.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of questions, but it’s a good start:
- Who are the contact people from the client’s side? Who will provide campaign briefs and approve campaigns?
- Who is responsible for creative asset creation? Who is responsible for creative asset delivery?
- Are there taxonomy and naming conventions for campaign names and UTMs?
- Ask the client to describe their finance workflow, including the use of Purchase Orders (PO).
- What is the frequency of reports that are expected? What is the format of reports? What metrics and KPIs should be covered in reports?
- Is there a centralized dashboard?
It is crucial to align with your new client on the core templates that will be used for key tasks.
4. Outlining the technology stack
Your first meeting with your new client is rarely long enough to cover everything you need to know. One topic that is often left for another meeting or a conference call is the client’s technology stack.
Some of these questions can be discussed during the chemistry meeting, but it’s better to set a meeting specifically to go through more technical topics.
Sometimes, you can be in a situation where the client is a large-scale enterprise, but with very poor IT and technology infrastructure. This means asking very basic questions or even having to explain how popular platforms and technologies work.
So, here are some questions you might need to ask your new client:
- Does the client own their own Meta Business Manager and Google Ads accounts? Do they have their own Google Ads MCC?
- What tag management solution does the client use? You can check this information ahead of time by using an online tool like builtwith.com. However, it’s always good to validate this information with your client.
- Ask the client to outline the key events and conversions they track.
- Does the client have the proper conversion and audience signal tools deployed across their websites? This include basic things like a Meta dataset (i.e. pixel), floodlights from Campaign Manager 360, or a Google Tag.
- Do they have their own DSP, DMP or CDP? And here you might have to explain what these platforms do. So, good luck!
- Is it possible to access the client’s Google Search Console?
- What is the client’s CRM solution and is it easily compatible with digital platforms? Many companies have their own internal CRM, which opens up a whole can of worms.
- Does the client have guidelines for brand safety and ad verification? What are the client’s golden rules for content exclusion across YouTube, Meta, Programmatic, and other key platforms?
Final thoughts
Once again congrats on winning a client. Тhat alone is half the battle. The second half is delivering for your client.
