EPISODE 83 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: YOU’RE FIRED! HOW TO LET A CLIENT GO WHEN IT JUST ISN’T WORKING OUT

Sonya:
What's worse than being fired by a client? Being the one who has to end the relationship. When parting ways absolutely has to happen, here's how to do it without burning bridges. Including a couple of scripts that you can use if you are unsure how to have that conversation.

Sonya:
Welcome to the Boom Your Biz Podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonya McIntyre-Reid and each week, I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate, empower and inspire business owners and myself along the way.

Sonya:
Confession time. I used to think that the girl bosses and she heroes I read about had these incredible businesses that just ran like clockwork. I assumed that things just worked for them. And on the odd occasion, if problems with their clients arose, they did so for a handful of reasons. Their customer service sucked, that they weren't getting results for their clients, the leader account manager of the business had a bad attitude or they just weren't working hard enough. Boy, was I wrong. It can be a bitter pill to swallow but sometimes you just are not the right fit for a client. Some clients have unrealistic expectations about the amount of time you'll spend on their account each week and confuse hiring an agency with hiring a full-time team member.

Sonya:
Sometime a client signs on for a service without fully understanding what's involved. In our case, clients often confuse social media management with PR and expect a completely different service to what we offer. Sometimes you start offering one service and then look up six months later and realize that the scope creep has got way out of hand. And sometimes you realize that there's a mismatch in values, personalities or temperaments and you just have to call it a day. There's an art to discontinuing a business relationship. It's vitally important that you do it in such a way that you don't burn bridges or give them any reason to badmouth you to their industry peers, or worse, leave a negative review on your business pages. So, how do you fire a client? Trust me, it doesn't have to be a traumatic experience.

Sonya:
Firstly, you need to decide whether or not you actually want to fire them. If you're in the business of dealing with other humans, there are going to be times when you're busy and tired, they're busy and tired. And the smallest thing, like the tone of an email, can be taken out of context and blown out of proportion. If you feel like the relationship is salvageable and worth saving, then you may need to look at creative solutions. Do they need a new account manager or a point of contact? A timeline of deliverables? A better understanding of what's involved with their project, in order to manage expectations? For us, there's often a perception that setting up an ad campaign is a 20 minute job or a website can be whipped up in an afternoon. And while technically these things are possible, the quality of the work would be below average, at best.

Sonya:
If you decide that, no, you're not overreacting and, yes, you do want to end the relationship, the next thing you need to do is make sure you've got your house in order. Take a look back over the client's contract and make sure you've kept up your end of the bargain. There's nothing worse than having a client claim that you haven't delivered upon the agreed upon outcomes. So, to cover yourself, make sure you have met all of your obligations before you pick up the phone. Part of being a business owner is learning to have those tough conversations and they don't come any tougher than when you're letting a client go. You have to walk a fine line between making sure the client understands you'll no longer be working together and making sure you leave them feeling heard, valued and above all, supported.

Sonya:
A couple of do's and don'ts for you. Do schedule a meeting with your client, you don't want to catch them when they're driving or distracted. Do write out key points or even a script, so that you stay on point and just don't wing it and waffle on. Do have a follow-up email ready to go after the meeting, so that all parties have in writing the main points you discuss, such as a finish date, obligations of each party before the end date and referral details, if you're sending them onto someone else. But more on that later. Don't make it personal. Chances are, your client is going to be mortified that you don't want to work with them anymore. There's no need to place blame or get nasty. Don't cut off the relationship effective immediately. If your contract requires a notice period to see services, good practice is to give your clients the same amount of time as a courtesy. Don't leave them high and dry. If you can, give them the names and numbers of a few other providers in your industry, that might be a good fit.

Sonya:
In my opinion, the quickest and most effective way to deal with this situations is to jump on the phone and follow-up with an email later. This is because tone doesn't always carry cross in an email and sending an email can feel like a bit of a brush off from your client's perspective. Again, aim is always to be diplomatic but clear, that the relationship is coming to an end, give the client a solid end date and leave them feeling positive about their experience with your business, if possible. Here are two examples of how I'd do it. For the clients who expect the world at a basic package budget, hi, client name, as you're aware, our agency has experienced significant growth lately and this has made us reassess the way we do things and the clients we'd ideally like to be working with moving forward. We've decided to really niche down and mainly work with Facebook and Google ad clients and only provide social media services for those clients on retainer for paid ad services.

Sonya:
Unfortunately, this means we're going to have to wrap things up at the end of the month. However, we're not going to leave you high and dry, I'm going to send you an email after this meeting with a few agencies who offer similar packages to us and we've created your content up until the 30th of this month. Now, in some cases, a client is going to love you so much that they ask you how much your packages are so that they can keep working together. In this case, there are two options. You can throw a wild number out there that you're fairly confident they can't afford or you can say, we're at capacity at the moment but I'll shoot through our rates with my email and you can let me know if you'd like to go on the wait list. Again, this is where you quote a figure that is above industry average.

Sonya:
The client probably doesn't realize how much they've crept out of scope, so there's no need to embarrass them or hurt their feelings. Having said that, it's impossible to walk it back once you've allowed someone to overstep. In this case, it's best to let them start afresh with another agency. For the clients who have displayed rude or disrespectful behavior to you or your staff. Hi, client name, I've spoken with my team about your project and the general consensus on our end is that, perhaps this isn't a great fit. I get the impression that you might work better with a team dedicated to your project only and perhaps an in-house hire might be more appropriate. I can also recommend an agency that specializes in the additional PR and print media requirements you have. Or you can insert what other service they're going out of scope with. On our end, we'll finish up the outstanding task by the end of the month. So, if you could please work with your account manager to ensure that everything she needs to make that happen, that would be great.

Sonya:
I think we're leaving you in a great position with your website build complete and your ad's currently getting a good return on ad spend. So, your next IO agency should be able to hit the ground running. I'm going to send you a confirmation email with our end date, any assets we required to finish up and a couple of agencies referrals, should you wish to continue working with an agency as opposed to someone in-house. We've all had clients who seem to think their project is the only one you have going on at any given time or that signing their contract on Monday means the project will be finished by the end of the week. This is the kindest way of letting them know that they have unrealistic expectations of the amount of time and resources and agency would allocate to their projects. Some businesses really do need a full-time marketing team and they just don't know it yet.

Sonya:
In any case, where you've had to fire a client, it's worth sitting down after the dust is settled and taking a really good look at what went wrong. As with all lessons in business, if you don't stop, reflect and create an action plan, you may be doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Do you have the feeling that the client was a good fit? If so, why did you choose to work with them anyway? And what were those red flags? Write them down so you can refer back to them the next time you get that familiar feeling. Were you too eager to please in the beginning? So, you didn't set effective boundaries. If this is you, don't be hard on yourself, especially if you're just starting out. I don't know many business owners who aren't super eager to please straight out the gate.

Sonya:
Again, this is a learning exercise, so how can you be sure that you're not getting calls on weekends or texts outside of business hours? I believe it comes down to my next point, which is communication. In your onboarding process, did you clearly communicate your preferred method of communication, business hours and how often the client should expect to hear from you? And did you take into consideration your client's business hours and preferred method of communication? Not everybody operates on the same schedule as you and most have a preference for communicating, that may not be matched up with yours. In our team alone, we have one team member who loves jumping on a Google Meet for face-to-face chats, another who doesn't love videos so much and would much prefer to email, one who likes to jump on a call so they can control the tone of the conversation and another who like WhatsApp. And when you look at our clients, a lot of them prefer to send texts and voice notes.

Sonya:
To avoid unnecessary irritation, it's good to have a conversation upfront with your client. A simple, how would you prefer we contact you? Is the way to go here. In my agency, we set it out from the get go. How often clients receive reports, when they can expect their monthly meeting, the ways they can contact us. And if you've listened for a little while, you'll know that Wednesday is our deep work day, with phones that go on do not disturb and our email auto responder goes on. To give my team a solid chunk of uninterrupted work time. It can be hard to enforce boundaries, especially if you're the face of the business, but not enforcing boundaries makes things so much more difficult in the long run. And finally, this is a big one, did you manage expectations effectively? We know that a website build can take a week for copy to be written and approved, another week for graphic design and branding to proved and at least two weeks for the web developer to create a really good website, more with custom coding and special plugins.

Sonya:
But does the client know that? No, not unless we tell them. At the end of the day, nobody likes to fire a client. But one thing we've noticed that Linchpin is that, every time you let the troublesome client go, there's a dream client waiting in the wings to take their place. And even though, in an ideal world, every client would be considerate and responsive, business is humans dealing with other humans. You don't like every person you've ever met, so why would you expect that every client you take on would be a perfect fit? Business, in all aspects, is a game of trial and error. And the ones who win are the ones who make decisions quickly, treat people respectfully, learn from the situation and move on, leveling up every step of the way.