If you are wondering how account management could cause you to lose a client, please pay close attention. In my experience, account management is almost as important as results. Clients typically terminate accounts when they are confused or just plain frustrated with you. What are the common account management mistakes you should avoid? What are the best tips for success? Read on!

Account Management Mistakes You Should Avoid

Not writing a fresh email. One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is sending an email to their client with all of their internal correspondences included. In other words, they went back and forth a few times with colleagues, and instead of writing a fresh new email, they just replied to the client from the last email they received from their colleagues. This allows the client to see what you are saying back and forth to one another. Depending on what was said, you could really end up with your foot in your mouth.

Not being prepared. It’s so easy to just copy and paste what someone else said to answer a client’s question. The problem is, most of the time we don’t really read what they wrote or get involved in the conversation. Next thing you know, the client is calling you to talk to you (his/her account manager) and you have no idea what is going on. They might have follow up questions with regards to the multivariate test you are running. Do you even know what they are testing or what the timeline is? You can really make a fool of yourself, and the company, if you aren’t careful here.

Not clearly defining roles. As account manager, the client expects to work with you – and only you. It is almost pointless for you to act as account manager if you are putting them in contact with your SEO, your PPC person, your usability expert, and your analytics analyst. Now the client has to try and keep five people straight. This will really stress the client out, and things won’t get done. If there is one person they work though, they’ll be more responsive and they’ll be less stressed.

Not staying in contact. As the account manager, the client is relying on you, and only you, to stay in contact with them. You should be prepared to keep them up to date with progress reports. Some projects won’t require as much input from the client, by providing them with these updates they’ll know that you are working hard for them.

How to Succeed as an Account Manager

The best tip? Make sure you don’t make the mistakes listed above. Clients are looking for three things from you:

1. Results
2. Communication (with the client)
3. Internal communication

If you can provide them with insurance on those three things, you’ll be off to a great start. My only other tip would be to never lie to a client. You’ll only dig yourself in a deep hole and put yourself, your colleagues, and your company at risk. While you may not like the mistake you made, you should always fess up. There are many ways to recover from a mistake, and lying isn’t one of them.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

How to Lose Your Clients: Account Management

I’ll be the first to admit that I make mistakes. It is natural and there is nothing I can do about it. I work really hard, and despite how often I double-check my work, there are some things that just slip by. Making a mistake could also mean that you took a risk with a new SEO/SEM technique, and it backfired. How you handle the fact that you made a mistake with your client, however, is critical.

Let’s assume you just found out you made a mistake. Instantly you fall into one of two categories: you discovered that you made a mistake, or your client did. Each situation requires a slightly different approach.

You discovered the mistake

Obviously, this is the better situation to be in. The first thing you need to do is figure out what the damage is. Did you drop from page one to the three in Google, did their conversion rate plummet, or did their site go down? It is important to document what happened and what change caused it to happen for future reference, and so you can inform the client. Next, you need to figure out the best solution to fixing the problem, and begin implementing it. One might argue that you should let the client know before you implement your fix, but I strongly disagree. Your client wants to know that you are on top of things, and that you have already taken care of the problem.

That brings me to the next step. Calmly email the client and let them know what the situation was, why you think it became a problem, and how you fixed it. The most important thing the client will care about is that it is fixed. I’d also recommend not wasting their time by coming up with excuses. In my opinion they just want to know that everything is ok now. You can discuss the details at a later time if they want. If you are confident when writing to them, you’ll get a much better response from them.

They discovered the mistake

When your client emails you or (most likely) calls you because they noticed a huge drop in traffic or that a major page on their site is broken, you’ll probably instantly become defensive. It’s natural to feel this way, because they just called you out not only a mistake, but on not staying on top of their account. Take a deep breath, and ask them to show you exactly what problem they are seeing. If you are able to, get them off the phone and assure them that you are dropping everything that you are doing to figure out how to fix it. Immediately address the issue and implement the fix. As soon as you know exactly what the problem is, and have fixed it (to the best of your knowledge), call them up and explain what the problem was and what you did to take care of it.

This can be a very awkward situation because they will be pointing the finger at you. That is why it is so important to get off the phone with them as soon as you can so your frustration doesn’t get the best of you.

As a best practice you should always document any change you made to a website, and what date you made the change. It is a great way to not only help you in a time of crisis, but to also benchmark results. In addition to documentation, it is a best practice to always create a backup or two of any page you are changing on a site. This will allow you to throw the original page back up on the site while you dissect what had gone wrong.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

How to Lose Clients: Recovering from a Mistake

Assuming you aren’t working with an expert client, there’s a good chance your clients don’t fully understand what you do. Some may argue that works to your advantage (i.e. you can charge more), but I think it causes many more problems then it is worth.

I’ve run into this issue twice in my career. The first time was at a Search Engine Strategies conference, where Bruce Clay informed us that at his company, they require all of their clients to attend a training session to get a better understanding of SEO (so they will work with you, instead of against you.) I thought that was a great idea, but I (unfortunately) didn’t listen to his advice.

About two months later I received a long, angry email from a new client accusing me of sabotaging their website (a.k.a. Robert Ford). I wasn’t sure how to respond. Why in the world would I be trying to sabotage his website? Then it occurred to me: he knows he needs my services, but he doesn’t have any idea how it works.

I responded calmly (never attack back), and explained to him why I made the suggested changes to his site (I hadn’t actually changed anything yet). He responded again, and I could still tell he was confused by the context of his email. I decided the best thing I could do was to schedule a training session with him. I asked him if I could have 1-2 hours of his time where I could go over the very basics of SEO and Search Engines so that we can get on the same page. He agreed.

At the meeting I could see relief in his eyes once he finally understood what I was talking about. It was as if I had been speaking Chinese to him before, and now I was finally communicating in English. After the meeting he sent me the a very kind thank you note, expressing how much better he felt about our relationship now that he has a basic understanding of SEO.

Now that he has that foundation, our relationship has greatly improved. He turns things around faster, he is able to add more value, and most importantly, he trusts me. Trust is such an important aspect in any relationship.

I’d recommend covering the following topics in your training sessions:

• What is SEO and why can’t I rank high without it?
• The basics on how search engines operate (crawling, indexing, and ranking).
• What the search engines can and can’t see.

The major steps in the SEO Process:

• Keyword research
• Meta tags & content optimization
• Links
• Basic architecture information (i.e. redirects)

Make sure you really “dumb it down” for them. Explain exactly what a Title Tag is. Use screen shots, or open up a browser and show them.

It may take time out of your day to do this, but having a client who can work with you will greatly improve your success with their website. I’d even recommend building it into their contract so you can get paid for that time.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

How to Lose Your Clients: Not Educating Your Clients

This series on the Gonzo SEO blog will look at the poor client management techniques that are constantly being practiced, and as a result, are costing Internet marketing companies their key clients.

Effective client management requires effective team communication. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll have great case studies to create press releases about your success stories.

Just two months ago my team had landed a new client. We were doing the average project for him: search engine optimization, analytics analysis, and helping him improve his conversion rate. Naturally it involved four different members of our team: 1 SEO, 2 analytics analysts, and 1 conversion expert. That’s four of us, and only one client.

This guy is more of an old fashioned client. He expects the utmost professionalism, and above all, he wants us to know we are working together to improve his business. So when I received an email from him saying, “I sent you the product demo page two weeks ago, why is Duke asking me for it?” I knew we had turned this client into a ticking time bomb.

Having other people help you with a project is usually a good thing. But what happens when they are all working independently towards the same goal? Well naturally some people work faster than others, and they are approaching the problem from different perspectives. When Person A gets to one checkpoint, Person B may have already been there, but the client is involved at every checkpoint. Confused?

The mistake we made was quite simple. We were all communicating with the client (a very good thing), but no one was communicating with each other (a very bad thing.) It wasn’t unreasonable for him to get upset when he is expecting the agency he paid a lot of money to market his website to be working efficiently at doing just that. We were also wasting his time by making him repeat himself.

In order to improve your team communication, you should start taking the following actions:

1. Carbon Copy (CC) everyone involved with the project on every email. Even if you are the SEO and you are only speaking to him about SEO. Everyone will know where each other stands in terms of progress with the account. In return, the client will most likely start using the “Reply to All” function so his questions/answers will also be sent to everyone. If not, make sure you forwarded it around to the team.
2. Hold 1-2 meetings a week, where you recap what you are doing for the client and where you stand on the project. It doesn’t even have to be a long meeting (and probably won’t). The 20 minutes you spend in each of these meetings will save you the hours of cleanup time you have to go through when you mismanage your client because of poor communication.
3. Brainstorm together. Get others input on the work you are doing. If you are the analytics person, ask others why they think a certain page has such a high exit rate. If you’re the SEO guru, ask for link bait ideas or keyword suggestions. This will help build everyone’s skills in the other areas of online marketing, too.
4. Create a template of all the general checkpoints you should achieve in your traditional projects. Almost like a general to-do list. Make it available for everyone to use and check off. A great tool to use is Remember the Milk.

It really isn’t that much work. You’re basically going about the same routine you always do, but you’re letting other people know about it and you’re getting their help. It’s a win-win situation.

This is a post from Taylor Pratt's blog: Awesome SEO

How to Lose Your Clients: Team Communication