Recently, I chatted to Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions.
We discussed the importance of demonstrating to clients the results you’re achieving for them at three levels. Tim calls this the ‘triple metric’.
The Triple Metric
For each level you quantify the results you achieved for the client:
Level 1: Project level outcomes
e.g. you delivered on time, on budget and to the brief – and document these metrics
Level 2: Department level outcomes
e.g. you ran a campaign to launch a product and can demonstrate the speed of product uptake
Level 3: Corporate level outcomes
e.g. as a result of the campaign launch you helped the client increase their market share and can show the % increase
Why document your impact?
There are several reasons you want to capture the results you’ve helped the client achieve:
1. Asking the client for more money
At the point you want to suggest additional ideas or ask the client for more money, they’ll be more likely to consider investing if they can see you’ve already achieved results for them
2. Changing client contact
Clients come and go. They may leave their job and you’ll have a new client contact. This is a ‘red flag’ moment because new clients often want to work with their previous agencies! We need to be documenting the outcomes so we keep a record of how we’ve achieved outcomes over time. This helps any new client taking over see we’ve been consistently adding value – it also helps you prove your value to other (possibly more senior) client stakeholders in the client’s business.
3. Keeping competitors at bay
If we’re able to demonstrate the outcomes we’ve achieved and the impact we’ve had on our client’s business, we stand a better chance of not being displaced by our competitors – your client’s name is probably on the prospecting list of one of your competitors – if they are approaching your clients to work with them, we’d better have some evidence as to why what we are doing for the client is delivering an ROI!
Quick story that reinforces this point:
I was speaking to an agency owner who told me he’d received a call from a client who wanted to speak to him about having ‘a review’.
When a client asks for a review it usually means they’re not happy or they want to leave. He suspected the worst.
In preparation for the meeting, he decided to run a report to find out what return the client was currently getting on the campaign they were running.
He discovered from all his analysis that the campaign had been performing brilliantly and had been getting his client a 25X return on the investment!
When he presented the findings to the client, the client didn’t say much at first (due to the surprise) but then was so pleased decided to increase the retainer from $9,000 per month to $18,000!
[Now you may be surprised why the agency owner wasn’t sharing the results with his client on a regular basis anyway – but that’s another story!]
Action summary
So in summary, make sure to:
1. Document your results (follow the triple metric suggestion)
2. Share the results to demonstrate to the client how you’re helping them achieve their desired outcomes (have monthly performance meetings if you have access to the metrics and aren’t already or ask the client to share results if you don’t have access directly)
3. Show the client these results before you ask them to invest more money with you in new ideas so it ‘anchors’ their choice of you as their preferred supplier (and dissuades them from inviting other suppliers to quote for any new work)
