Nobody can guarantee your job, except customers
October 27, 2008 3 Comments
After eight beautiful nights in The Maldives, I’m very much back into Sydney life. It’s definitely one of the most beautiful places I have ever been and provided an opportunity for me to disconnect from the digital world (no laptop but connected phone), read books (five in eight days) and have a wonderful break with my husband.
One of the books I read referred management writer, Peter Drucker, and his views on the customer, their expetations and how to manage the customer. There were a few quotes that I thought very interesting, particularly with the economic downturn noise, predictions for budget reductions and need for advertising campaigns to work harder. See quotes below:
- ‘Nobody can guarantee your job, only customer can guarantee your job’
- ‘The best companies don’t create customers, they create fans’
- ‘Customers behave rationally in terms of their own realities and own situation’
My take out from these quotes is that our customers (or clients) are more important now than ever and we need to make sure we are invaluable to them. How do you make yourself invaluable? Think about what will:
- Make your client a star in their company (through campaign success or awards)
- Keep them from being made redundant
- Present a proactive idea that will answer a business problem
- Provide them research (or articles) and synopsis
- Get your clients to their next step, role or position.
LEARNINGS
The common theme underlying them all is to ‘think about everything from the clients perspective’ and make sure you are researching to keep on top of their industry.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png)
Dominique Hind's Collective 
missed you
@CJ – Thanks very much. We missed you too.
I share a very similar view; however, I offer this little spin:
While snowboarding in New Zealand with a skier friend, he gave me an eye opening insight about the road to success. During one of our après sessions he said “choose your clients carefully”. In summary, do not be tempted by short term gains to take on poor clients that are fundamentally flawed, as you will expose yourself to a negative long-term damage.
Given today’s economic times it would seem that new clients might be hard to come by, I would translate this to mean, “plan your projects carefully. A poor performing campaign may result in the loss of the client, or worse, devaluing your reputation. Notice, the order of those 2 comments – your reputation is more valuable than your client. Clients you can win….reputations you cannot. They are much like the stock markets at the moment – years to build, days to crash!