“Early on in my career, I would say yes too much to too many requests and, and that's not sustainable in a healthy way over the long term.”
- Donald
E5. Building client relationships
Feat. Donald Harrison
In this episode, the hosts are joined by Donald Harrison, the lead producer and director at 7 Cylinders Studio. Donald shares insights from his extensive experience in film and video production. With his treasure trove of experiences, Donald shares nuggets of wisdom on everything from tackling the beast of client expectations, to why treating your work like a heartfelt collaboration can lead to magic. He schools us on the gentle art of educating clients, transforming them from question marks into exclamation points of understanding and appreciation for the creative process.
Tactic from this episode
Tactics are takeaways that a listener can do based on what we’ve discussed in an episode.
Consider times that you have been on the receiving end of a product or service. Can you think of what you liked or didn't like about the business interaction? How would you change it if you were the person providing the service? By putting yourself in a clients shoes, we can empathize with their points of friction in the business process, and perhaps use that information to craft our own idea business process. That experience is also a part of building your personal brand, that is the interaction that potential or existing clients will come to expect from you.
Homework from this episode
Homework is a way to help you apply what you’ve learned in each episode to your real world practice.
Homework #1 - Sit down and write down your own process for obtaining a client. Perhaps you haven't gotten one yet so this can be a bit of a dream exercise. What does your client need? Where do they work and what kind of produce or service are they coming to you with? How did you meet them, how did you follow up? Did you have a meeting to review or a proposal or did you send them a quote? Assess where your holes are at and see if you have a resource to fill that gap of knowledge. Hopefully it was addressed in today's episode!
Homework #2 - Take the first homework a step further and create a Client Case Study. When we start out we think that we're going to cater to all people all the time and that's just not the case. The more specific we are about our tone and messaging, the more likely that we're talking to your target client. Now you can shape your emails, e-blasts, social media posts, toward that client.
Homework #3 - What are the five top qualities of the clients you've had the most success with? Or that you want to have the most success with. What are the type of projects you're going after? The type of clients you want to work with and what are those qualities? Because then when you talk to somebody who says, Hey, I have something that you might be able to help me with, you can have something to reference to make sure that the project has a lot of the ingredients you’re looking for. And if they don't—so the fewer ingredients that the project offer has, the less likely it's probably going to be a great project for you.