Speaker 1: We are all bombarded with the latest sales script, with lead generation strategies, with ways to get more clients for our digital agency. What nobody talks about though is how do you manage those client relationships? How do you keep people hiring you again and again? And in this video I want to flip the script because we learn best by understanding what we should not be doing. So I'll share with you the best ways to ruin client relationships and lose money so that you can avoid them in your daily business. Hi, I am Jan Koch. I run the List Building School Virtual Summit and I am a proud Cloudways maverick creating content for digital agency owners and freelancers to help you scale your business. In this video I want to share lessons I have learned the hard way about keeping client relationships intact. And what I'll do is I'll share four mistakes that I have made that actually made me lose significant amount of money because the clients were not coming back. So that you can avoid these mistakes and you know how to keep client relationships working rather than maybe subconsciously even without noticing it ruining client relationships. So let's dive right into this. The biggest mistake I have made so far, point number one, is to have unclear communication channels. What do I mean by this? I mean that when a project started I did not tell my clients to only use email. I accepted phone calls, I accepted WhatsApp messages and I thought the more ways a client could reach me the better off I am because the more accessible I will seem to be. What this caused though is big misunderstandings that actually hurt the projects massively. Because information was scattered across so many different channels I had a hard time staying on top of the to-dos and the feedback that the clients gave. My team had a hard time and even the clients didn't realize what stage the project was at and what they actually were giving us as feedback for these specific milestones. Have one communication channel preferably an email address that goes into a customer relationship management tool or project management tool so that your entire team has access to the information that is coming in from the client. Lesson number two is based on having no clear communication channel which is having slow response times. So when you have a mess in your project, when a project is not going as planned what I would do in the beginning is I would search for a solution. I would try to fix the situation before responding to the client. Sometimes that would take multiple days. Now put yourself in the shoes of the other person. What do they think? They think I am ignoring the problem. They don't know that I'm looking for a fix for the problem. They don't know that I'm looking for an alternative solution. So they just think I'm not hearing from Jan. Doesn't he care about my project anymore? Doesn't he care about me as his client? So what you want to do is at least let the other person know that you received the email and that you will get back to them as soon as possible. Always keep the communication going in your project. Lesson number three be proactive in your communications. I wasn't and the best way to ruin a client relationship is to not be a leader in the project and to always wait for the client to ask you for how the project is going. If you are not giving them let's say a weekly update and you always wait for them. Hey, how's the website coming along? Hey, do you need anything from me? Hey, what's the status with our project? You are doing your best to frustrate the clients to make them feel that you are not driving the project forward. And in return they won't hire you again because who wants to work with an agency or with a freelancer who seemingly doesn't care about getting a project done and getting the work done that they've promised. Point number four set wrong expectations. That's a great way to ruin client relationships. When you try to win the project promise them the pie in the sky and have no idea how to fulfill on those promises. And truth be told when you are an agency when you are a freelancer sometimes you promise things that you know in theory how to do but you have never built them. That's okay as long as you have a reasonable strategy to actually deliver on the promises made. But if you promise them a full-fledged website build for let's say $2,000 and you already know there is not a snowball's chance in hell for this project to go fully through with just $2,000 worth of budget. That's just deceiving and that's almost fraudulent and it is a surefire way to ruin a client relationship and to lose money. And here's a bonus number five be unprecise and be unfriendly. Always keep your messages as vague as possible. Do not give clear timelines. Do not communicate clearly what the status of the project is, what the team is working on or what you are working on if you are a freelancer. Keep the client in as much insecurity and vagueness as possible if you want to ruin the relationship with them. What clients actually want is a clear roadmap. You should give that in the beginning of the project already. Give them the most important milestones with the date of by when you want to achieve them and then keep people updated throughout the project. Now here are four things that I've learned myself to improve communication with clients and keeping them coming back to me. Number one is setting clear expectations at the start. Make sure they know to only contact you at this specific email address. Ignore everything else. Don't train them that you will respond to calls that haven't been set via email first. Don't train them on responding to WhatsApp messages or Signal or Instagram or whatever. Make sure they send all the information in email. Step number two define the response times. Make sure that the client knows when to expect a response from you. Is it one workday? Is it two business days? Is it 12 hours? Is it six hours? Depending on your service level agreement you should set the right expectations right from the get-go to avoid any confusion and frustration. Point number three practice inbox zero every single day. And I know this is a big one but honestly it makes a boatload of a difference. If you go through your inbox and clean it up to zero new emails every single day it doesn't mean that you've worked through all the emails and that you've solved all the problems that you've responded to every single email. What this means is that no information gets lost. That no information sits idle in your inbox. But you process the information and you plan the task if you have to do something. You delegate if somebody on your team can do something. You archive the information so that it is accessible for all the team members. Or you just delete the email because there's nothing you can do and it doesn't need to be archived and nobody needs to know about it. That is a simple four-step process to achieve inbox zero every single day. And bonus tip number five if you don't already use a CRM. There are tons of free rock-solid customer relationship management systems that you can use to spread information across the team. Even if you are just a one-person business use a CRM so that you have one source of truth. You have one place where the data about all the customers is set and tracked. I personally use HubSpot's free plan. It is a little bit like shooting with cannons on birds. It's way too much for what I needed to do but it integrates with my email system. So whenever somebody sends an email to the support inbox for the projects, it gets added to HubSpot, it gets added to the task management system. So I have two places, one for to-dos, one for customer data. And that ensures a smooth collaboration in between the team members. If you want more insights like this on how to scale your digital agency or how to go from freelancing to building an agency, make sure to hit the like and hit the subscribe button on this video and the Cloudways YouTube channel. We have more videos like this coming out every single week. And let us know in the comments. What is one of your best practices to keep client communications working and flowing smoothly? What are some of the mistakes? If you're willing to share some of the mistakes that you've made or lessons that you've learned, that'd be awesome because the entire community would benefit from this. I'll see you in the next video.