How To Attend Client Meetings?

Summary: While meeting you should prepare yourself and follow certain basics. Be clear about client’s goal, budget and expectations. Overselling yourself in meeting will definitely do some damage to your business. You clearly understand the client and his requirements. You should never keep your client waiting and always present yourself professional and well dressed. In case of any mistake done, be clear and honest to client.

Client meetings can be the beginning or the end of a good and mutually beneficial agency/client relationship. Meetings, whether in person or scheduled telephone meetings, are the forum in which the agency and client communicate. Using this forum to lay the groundwork for an open and honest relationship should be the number one concern of anyone who is working with a client. If that person is you, there are some basic practices that you can use that will help you establish long lasting associations with your clients. They are as follows:

• Be considerate of your client's time. Always schedule a meeting at the client's convenience and in the location of the client's choice.
  
  
  
  
• Go into the first and every other client meeting prepared to listen very carefully to your client.
  
  
• Find out as much as you can about the client's company, the market, the company's goals and expectations.
  

To get this information, it is sometimes necessary to prompt the client. Many of them don't know what to say or what to tell you. It may be hard for them to decide what is important and what is not.

• Go to each meeting with a well prepared list of open ended questions about the client's project, the goals of the project, the specifications, the budget, or any other detailed information that you need to know.
  

Questions will encourage your client to open up and tell you exactly what you need to know to help your agency do its job, which is to meet the client's needs.

• If you are meeting with a client for the first time, do not try to sell that client on your agency's capabilities.
  

Find out instead what you or your agency can do to help the client Clients are more interested in themselves and their needs than the agency's past track record and list of successful achievements.

• To be sure that you have clearly understood your client, take a few minutes during the last part of the meeting to reflect back to the client what you think has been said or asked for.
  

That way, if you have misunderstood anything or there were any mistaken impressions on the client's part, you will both have the opportunity to clear it up right then and there, before it turns into a problem.

• If you have rescheduled a client meeting (for whatever reason) always do it in a professional way.
  

Keep your personal life and personal reasons out of the explanation about why you have to cancel the meeting. Clients do not want to hear that you have to take your son to the dentist or get home early to make dinner. That is your problem, not theirs. And it is best not to offer a detailed excuse when you do cancel. You can simply say that something important has come up at the office, and would it be possible to reschedule? While it may be a lie to say that something has come up at the office, it is always more professional to cancel a meeting because of a professional problem rather than a personal problem. Unless the personal problem is life threatening to you or someone else, mixing your private life with work related issues can give the client the impression that your personal life comes before your work. And the fact is that may be true, but you want to do your best not to let clients know that.

• Never, never keep a client waiting.
  

If you are going to be late always call ahead and ask if the delay will inconvenience your client. If it will, then find another time that will better suit the client's schedule.

• Always dress appropriately for client meetings.
  

Even if you work in the art department where everyone dresses more casually than management or the account executives, if you have to meet with a client, dress for the client.

• If you make a mistake with some aspect of a client's project, be honest and up front about it as soon as possible.
  

Do not wait to get caught to admit that something you have done has gone wrong. Your client will appreciate you candor