Managing expectations with your clients can be difficult. It’s important to know how to manage expectations to develop a strong working relationship for the long term. If you’re looking to build a long-term relationship with your clients, here are 4 ways to manage expectations.
If you want to manage expectations with your clients, it starts with ensuring you’ve defined the process for them. Sometimes, clients might be excited and overzealous because they’ve seen your value and results for similar companies.
This is great.
However, you want them to understand the process behind the results. To deliver the best results, time can be a factor... Make sure your clients know what to expect from your process.
Never forget that your clients are reaching out to you because you are the experts providing the solution they need. Speak confidently about your process and make sure you & your client are aligned.
Setting a realistic timeline for you and your clients is important when managing expectations. Your timeline will give full transparency on what will happen during your time of partnership. It will cover your process; when you estimate, your clients will start seeing results. It also gives you the time frame to hit the deliverables you agreed to initially.
Have placeholders in your timeline for when you will be making updates or heading into the next phase of your strategy. Timelines are a great way to hold you and your team accountable for hitting your targets by a designated deadline. It’s important to make sure your team has deadlines to work against.
As mentioned above, transparency is key when building a relationship with your client. Setting up recurring bi-weekly meetings is a great way to update all parties involved with the progress of your deliverables. Chances are your client needs to keep their executive board updated on the current status of the partnership. Setting up bi-weekly meetings will help your point of contact stay on top of things with their managers.
Bi-weekly meetings are a great way to get to know your client as well. We all have lives outside of work, and it’s refreshing to talk about life updates before jumping into the swing of things. Not every client is like this, but it never hurts to use your personality. Sometimes that can make all the difference when forming a business relationship, especially if you want to upsell or get a referral from your client.
If you want full transparency through each partnership step, sending your client a weekly update can go a long way. Giving a weekly update provides transparency between you and your clients. Your client will be able to stay updated and can report back to their manager about what’s going on. Weekly updates can serve as the agenda for your bi-weekly calls. Weekly updates are a great way for your team to reflect on the work done in that designated week. It can be a great way for your team to find focus areas for the next week.
Managing expectations with your clients will help both parties in the process. Your clients can trust your solution and the process it takes to get quality results. As the product or service provider, you will be able to put all of your focus into helping your clients achieve their goals, knowing that your clients trust your solution and your approach to their business.
Key Outreach knows how to set expectations with a new client, manage their expectations, and establish a solid client relationship with your target audience. We know it’s about your clients understanding how your sales development process works. And that is what we provide as an outsourced team. Trust Key Outreach with your sales appointment setting and client management needs.
