Organizations sometimes rely almost exclusively on sales or marketing, thinking of the two fields as interchangeable parts. This is understandable because the ultimate goal of sales and marketing is the same: to sell something. That’s really where the similarity ends, and that’s also why every company needs sales and marketing to achieve dynamic revenue growth.

How Sales and Marketing Operate

Marketing influences customers in big chunks — for instance with an email campaign to a subscriber list of 10,000, or through an SEO campaign targeting keywords with a combined search volume of millions.

Sales, on the other hand, influences customers one at a time. It dives deep into the particular needs and wants of a customer to arrive at a solution that fits as perfectly as the last few pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

Because of this difference in approach, marketing tries to smooth out differences among customers and establish a strong sales pitch calculated to persuade as many customers as possible. Sales, in contrast, is all about exceptions and customization, focusing on the unique aspects of the customer and the application.

Comparative Strengths and Weaknesses

The biggest weakness of marketing is difficulty in closing deals. In the first place, marketing relies on the customer initiating action, either by ordering something online, or submitting a phone or webform inquiry. In addition, when the customer’s need is very expensive or very complex, not only is a generalized sales pitch insufficient, but the customer wants to talk to a human (that is, a salesperson) to be reassured and to talk through the many questions there are certain to be. All this explains why the close rate in a marketing campaign could be as low as 2% — and while that is high enough to justify the cost of many marketing campaigns, organizations may be able to sell even more stuff by bringing a strong sales effort into its business acquisition strategy. Partnering with top sales recruiters can help businesses build high-performing sales teams capable of effectively converting qualified leads into customers. By bringing a salesperson into a highly qualified lead generated by a marketing campaign, the organization can lock down a sale that might otherwise slip through its fingers.

The biggest weakness of sales is difficulty in opening doors. Most salespeople hate prospecting (cold calling) because it is so hard to generate interest. Most people ignore email solicitations. Getting through to a new prospect on the phone — good luck! If 2% is a low-end marketing close rate, it is probably a high-end door opening rate for a salesperson. Marketing, in contrast, by virtue of reaching thousands or millions of people, can get the door opened — not only by generating phone or form inquiries, but also by familiarizing prospects with the brand through repeated exposure in email, on search engines, on social media, and on industry-related websites and blogs. The power of marketing to present a credible image of a company to large segments of the prospect base can transform an unknown company to a real market force in a relatively short span of time.

When More Is Needed

The need for both marketing and sales should be apparent by now. The real question is one of degree: How much sales and how much marketing does a particular organization need? That’s not always easy to answer, but here are some general observations.

• If a company’s product or service offering is very expensive and/or very complex, it’s going to need a very strong sales presence.
• If a company’s product or service has a very low price point, a massive sales force may be cost-prohibitive and require the organization to rely heavily on marketing.
• If closing deals is the big problem (especially if due to competition), then the solution is probably a bigger and/or better trained sales force.
• If opening doors is the big problem, then more sophisticated or broader scope marketing campaigns will help immensely.
• If a company’s revenues have plateaued and it wants to grow dynamically through geographic expansion, new products/services or soliciting new types of customers, then marketing campaigns will pave the way.

Marketing agencies lose clients all the time — it’s a fact of life. An important benefit of losing clients is being able to learn from the experience, to prevent mistakes that cause clients to leave — or mistakes that cause you to take on the wrong clients to begin with.

Here are a few reflections on losing clients at Straight North that we hope will help you manage your client relationships more successfully. (Many thanks to Scott Hepburn, General Manager in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his input on this article.)

Problems With Alignment

Most client churn occurs when the client experience no longer aligns with expectations. No matter what the client values most — results, attention, commodity value, etc. — when those expectations are no longer being met, clients leave.

In some cases, closer communication with the client can prevent this from happening. In other cases, circumstances beyond anyone’s control play a part. It’s certainly helpful not to set expectations too high at the beginning, which is why it’s so important to be as realistic as possible in projecting outcomes.

Problems Within Our Control

Are we delivering an exceptional service and results? Is our performance superior to that of competitors? Are we responding to client needs as quickly and effectively as we can? It’s important to assess agency performance after a client leaves.

Having a frank discussion about performance requires an agency to create an environment where expectations are high, but criticism is welcomed and taken constructively in all quarters. If the team is unwilling to recognize problems and fix them, the same problems will occur over and over, causing even greater levels of client churn.

Problems Outside Our Control

Sometimes we do everything right and still end up losing the client. Companies go out of business, change personnel, lose funding, get acquired, radically change their marketing strategy — you name it.

The best-case scenario when this happens is to see it coming. If you know or sense the client relationship may be ending, you can prepare for it in terms of your budgeting and capacity to handle new projects. Surprise losses, especially if they are significant, can be very disruptive to workflow and to morale.

Problems With Clients

Retaining clients is the most efficient way to build a business, but there are some clients that should not be retained. Some campaigns are simply unprofitable. Sometimes, doubling down in an effort to make them profitable succeeds only in taking more attention away from other clients that show more promise.

Knowing when to fight to retain clients, how hard to fight, and when to throw in the towel are tough decisions, but they need to be made and not put off indefinitely. This is where having experienced client-facing team members is invaluable. You can seldom know for sure if firing a client was the right decision, but successful agencies have a high batting average for making good calls.

Problems With Knowing

Clients will give you all sorts of reasons why they are leaving you, but let’s face it: Those reasons aren’t always the truth. It’s more comfortable for a client to say, “It’s not you, it’s me,” than to say, “No, it really is you.” Clients will obscure the truth about why they leave out of discomfort, shame, frustration, convenience or to prevent burning a bridge.

Even if you know or strongly sense the client is lying or not telling the whole story, it’s seldom wise to press the issue. If you challenge the client on the facts and get into an argument, it will be you who burns the bridge. When clients have made up their mind to leave, you’re unlikely to change their mind.

Over to You

What have you learned from losing clients that’s made your business stronger?

Much is being written about how voice search and the Internet of Things (IoT) will change SEO. Interesting as these speculations are, as a writer, I’m even more intrigued by how these things will affect language itself.

Voice commands are convenient. It’s easier to ask Siri than peck out a text inquiry on a mobile device, and easier to tell your microwave how to cook the chicken than punch buttons on a control panel. Voice-driven technologies will continue to advance, which means that as time goes on, we’ll be spending as much time talking to computers as to people. Maybe more.

Technology favors convenience just as much as humans. With technology, we usually call it efficiency rather than convenience, but it amounts to the same thing. It’s more efficient to program a voice-driven technology to handle one language than 50. It’s more efficient to have precise definitions for a small pond of words than nuanced definitions for an ocean of them.

So, human languages could be in for a consolidation, going the way of emojis and emoticons. Voice-driven technology will push us toward simple, universal terms that can be quickly and (for the most part) accurately grasped by people and computer programs alike.

In the 1800s, Esperanto emerged as an attempt to create an international language. If the official Esperanto website is any indication, it is not exactly on the cutting edge.

If Esperanto has not been a roaring success, it’s because in the past, the advantages of an international language were largely theoretical. Today, with voice-driven technology, the advantages are practical. The average person is unlikely to give up his or her native language in pursuit of a theoretical goal. He or she is more likely to do so if it makes a Google search or meal preparation more convenient.

Over to You

The day may come when people connected to technology are all speaking the same language. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Losing the uniqueness, beauty and history of our languages would be a sad development. I would rather see technology adapt to multiple languages even if it is the less efficient option. Is this wishful thinking?

• How do you see all of this unfolding?

• How are voice search and IoT affecting your marketing strategy now?

It may be asking the impossible to expect marketing agency-client relationships to last forever, but every agency would like them to last longer than a month, or a year, or maybe even five years.

The question every agency ponders: How can we improve client retention? To find the answer, it helps to break down the relationship into its four key components. If an agency performs well in all four areas, retention will improve. If it bungles the job in even one, though, a client may be gone as early as tomorrow.

Pillar 1 — Onboarding

When a client signs on for a campaign, jubilation reigns. However, at the risk of being a party pooper, I must point out — the minute a contract is signed, an agency should start worrying about retaining that client. Action steps for onboarding:

• The first few months (or even days) of a campaign are critical. Buyer’s remorse often sets in. If the agency is slow to return a phone call or overlooks a seemingly minor detail, the relationship could go into a tailspin immediately after takeoff. To prevent bad first impressions, everyone involved with the campaign must be on top of their game.

• Equally important, the agency must set the appropriate expectations, or better yet, review with the client the ones that were set in the proposal that led to the contract. When agencies overpromise and underdeliver, they get clients quickly — and lose them quickly. When agencies underpromise and overdeliver, they set up themselves to delight clients month after month.

• Agencies must make it easy for the client to ask questions and express concerns. In the early stages of a relationship, clients are often hesitant to complain, so instead, seeds of doubt are planted that slowly but surely grow into oak tress of discontent. However, if a client is made to feel comfortable calling an account manager or a partner at the drop of a hat, then any onboarding issue can be resolved while it’s still easy to resolve.

Pillar 2 — Production

Online marketing campaigns are nothing if not complicated. Lots of moving parts, approvals, reviews, designs, development projects, content creation, data collection, analytics, testing, tweaking, bidding, benchmarking — you know the drill.

It is therefore imperative for an agency to have a clear, comprehensive and documented process to manage communication and workflow — and here’s the tricky part — and review it systematically to improve efficiency and adapt to ever-changing best practices.

Many clients and some agencies believe success inevitably follows from brilliant strategies. This leads to disappointment and client loss, because no matter how solid a strategy is, sloppy execution will undermine it. Every agency must have people on staff who get excited about managing details, and are good at it. These people also must be able to work closely with campaign managers, because when a campaign is coming up short, the problem could be strategic, tactical, process-related, or a combination. Without the ability to examine all three areas collaboratively, an agency is likely to come up with the wrong diagnosis or an incomplete one, ultimately resulting in lost clients.

Things to think about:

• Do we have a documented process to manage workflow and communication?

• Does our project management platform meet our needs?

• Is our project management user-friendly and not overcomplicating our execution?

• Do we have a way to review our process to identify weaknesses?

• Do we have a way to evaluate the productivity of our staff and the quality of their work?

Pillar 3 — Performance

Of course, even if an agency has a rock-solid process, it will be judged on results. This takes us into the realm of strategy and tactics. A campaign is almost always initiated with an agency having one arm tied behind its back, because it is basing its campaign execution on a limited number of facts and limited experience with the client and/or industry. As more campaign data and testing results come in, strategy improves and tactics can be sharpened.

Sometimes, data and testing indicate the initial goals were too ambitious (or too modest!). When this becomes evident, it should be discussed with the client to reset expectations. It’s better to tell the client today that a conversion goal is beyond reach than to let the campaign twist in the wind for six months until the client figures it out.

Whether initial goals were accurate or not, agencies should review performance internally first, and then with the client, every month (and possibly more frequently during the onboarding phase). I can’t emphasize in-house collaboration enough on this score. When the relationship managers and execution team are working in a vacuum, both sides miss out on key information, with the upshot being clients are not getting an accurate picture of performance and action steps being taken, and the execution team is not getting a full understanding of the client’s expectations and concerns. As time goes on, client and agency perceptions about performance drift further and further apart until separation is inevitable.

Pillar 4 — Relationship Management

Everything discussed in this post so far has touched on client relationships — setting expectations, facilitating easy and frank communication, and reviewing performance in particular. In addition, important aspects of building strong client relationships involve:

• Being transparent. Showing all of your work in reporting, not hiding errors, and bringing clients into the office build the client’s confidence that whether results are good or bad at the moment, the agency is upfront in acknowledging the situation and committed to improving it.

• Being communication wizards. Great relationship managers can explain the technicalities of Internet marketing in everyday terms, which puts clients very much at ease. They return phone calls and emails promptly, provide complete and convincing answers — and, above all, are superb listeners. They are able to communicate client issues quickly, completely and clearly to the agency team, nipping problems in the bud and seizing opportunities to shine.

• Showing appreciation. When clients feel neglected, separation is only a matter of time. Ironically, feelings of neglect can set in just when a campaign is starting to roll. If the agency feels the campaign is a success, it may focus its attention on other clients where problems are looming. Mistake! Whether a campaign is running hot or cold, whether it is a week old or 10 years old, clients need to hear how much the agency values the business.

• Going the extra mile. When is the last time you gave a client a sales lead? When is the last time you ran a new marketing idea by a client? When is the last time you told a client about a potential supplier that could take its business to a higher level? When you do something like that for a client, the client never forgets it. And when the pressure is on, memories like that keep the client firmly in your camp.

Over to You

How do you build and maintain strong relationships with your clients?

Thinking of selling your agency? Here’s a great article to show you how: Selling Your Company.