Distinguishing Between Why Clients Come, Stay, and Leave

We make some pretty serious mistakes in running our firms when we don’t make distinctions between these three phases:

• Why clients come to us in the first place.
• Why they stay with us.
• Why they move on.

I want to talk about each of these phases and how confusing one phase for another gets us in trouble.

Why Clients Come

I should point out the obvious, here: when a client comes to us, they are leaving another agency. I’m aware of that, but I want to focus only on why they come to you. In other words, how they choose a firm like yours, and not why they leave the incumbent.

Elliot Aronson, the social psychologist, famously said: “Human beings aren't rational animals; we're rationalizing animals who want to appear reasonable to ourselves.” All that to say that I can’t pretend that this is all scientific-like. But I did talk a lot about the Orders of Differentiation already, and that’s certainly how we should understand it (article and podcast episode). That covers the main criteria that reasonable (i.e., rational) clients use when choosing a firm: horizontal or vertical specialization if you’re a small- to mid-sized firm, or size, first, and then the same specialization criteria if you’re a larger firm.

There are many other what I call “qualifying characteristics” that help drag the decision across the finish line, too. Things like:

• Pricing methodology.
• Staffing models.
• Unique IP, including how you use data.
• Previous connection to you.
• Case studies that mimic their situation.
• Proximity.
• Reputation.
• Referral.

The above list goes on and on, but in a world that is becoming increasingly complex by the minute, specialization is becoming more important all the time.

Are there exceptions? Sure. A few clients will never choose a specialized agency. And our weird little world hangs onto that “one in a thousand” example and extends it to their entire existence, to their own peril. But generally speaking, clients choose you primarily because of your clear specialization. That’s unpacked further in “The Business of Expertise.”

What’s the big mistake here? It’s listening to why they leave the other agency and conflating that with why they come to you. “They didn’t bring fresh ideas but were just mailing it in. They quit listening to us like they did at first. Their strategy wasn’t all that deep. Some of their people were great and others not so much.”

So you hear that and what do you do? You go straight for the “More Better” approach: “We really listen. We really do strategy. Our people are the difference.” And so on.

But “More Better” is not a good strategy to attract clients, for two simple reasons:

1. There’s no way of assessing those claims until they are a client, and no matter how bad their current agency is, the devil they know might seem safer than the devil they don’t.
2. Every freaking firm is claiming the same thing. In other words, no one is claiming the opposite. “Well, you know, we tried that great service approach, and we finally had to drop it because it was too expensive to have fantastic account managers on the payroll. I hope you understand.”

Why Clients Stay

Let’s talk about why clients stay with you, next. While it’s nonsense to think that clients will come to you for the client experience, the client experience is very, very important, and here’s why.

Clients aren’t experts at what you do, and they aren’t in a position to judge that work. They may have opinions about it, and they are in fact paying the bills, but you’re the expert and you’re leading them, assuring them that this or that strategy is the right one.

But you know what they are an expert in? How they are treated as humans, because they are humans (most of them) and they are in a valid position to evaluate that experience. I’ve said many times that clients notice deficiencies in the quality of the account management and project management long before they notice deficiencies in the quality of the work itself. But here we are, spending inordinate amounts of time getting that last little thing perfect—something they won’t even notice—but don’t pay attention like we should to how they are treated.

No, clients stay because:

• You keep leading the account.
• You’re honest about your strengths and tell them when it’s not in their best interest to hire you for something.
• You don’t keep pulling last year’s plan out of the file and modifying it slightly for this next year, but instead default to zero-based planning for the next.
• You don’t sell them things they don’t need.
• You don’t lock them into recurring revenue engagements that are more in your interest than theirs.

You could wrap all those things up and just call it trust and competence. But again, that’s not why they come to you. They assume all those things will be true, and they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You’ll usually get one big opportunity to screw things up without getting fired, but you’re gone the second time you mess up.

Why Clients Leave

Now this one is pretty easy! Clients leave, usually for one of these reasons:

• You take them for granted and quit earning the relationship. This is the biggest one.
• You keep changing their main client contact, and this is especially irritating to them if they have no say in the choice.
• There’s a breakdown in trust, either because of a lie or not accepting the blame when you should. Or even some indiscretion when you say something after a third drink while celebrating a success.
• There’s a change in client leadership and they bring their own agency in, replacing you.
• There’s a firm-wide review, driven by the finance people, to whittle down the number of “vendors” that they work with.

And here’s the biggest mistake we make with this. We listen to why the incumbent agency is fixing to lose that work, and we assume that we’re getting the work to fix that. No, that’s why this new relationship will last and not why it starts in the first place. Why the incumbent is losing the work is not the why for you winning it.

If this still isn’t sinking in, flip the script a bit. If you’re going to hang your hat on why you think clients come to you, you need to be intellectually honest and also incorporate why they leave you.

Finally

As humans, though, we tend to listen to the favorable parts: “this new client told us that they really need better leadership” and that’s why they chose us. But remember that some other agency heard the same thing when one of your clients left and went to the new firm, instead.

The reason clients come, stay, and leave are usually distinct, and we’re going to make some bad assumptions if we mix those up. The reasons are true, but they only apply to certain phases. Over to you.