I’d like to address you, the B2B clients. You who hold marketing management positions at your businesses. And I’d like to speak to you, experts in Marketing. You who work on Strategic Planning, you who measure results in order to optimise them, you who are in charge of advising or coaching your clients.
Your role as an expert marketer makes you an integral part of the marketing functions of your clients. You don’t simply act as a ‘provider’ of services, but as a partner (which implies a certain complicity, loyalty, neutrality, and transparency).
If you, as a marketing specialist, have a passion for your work and your client, you want everything you do to work well, because if it works well for your client, that also works out well for you. You get paid for it to work! In fact, it is because you’re an expert in your field that you got the job. Otherwise, your client wouldn’t need you.
To what extent should we defend our points of view and still have things work out with a client?
In the scope of our work as marketing experts, we need to perform in order to keep a client.
To do that, we examine in detail the aspects of an issue at hand, and we advise our clients objectively, in a structured but creative and multidimensional manner (which stems from years or experience).
But sometimes, the right thing to do doesn’t make everyone on the client side happy, and sometimes the right thing to do doesn’t always take us down the road our client expects.
Sometimes internal politics, bruised egos (everyone thinks they’re an expert in Marketing), and other such issues, take us to places that are very uncomfortable both professionally and interpersonally.
When these moments arrive, we have to defend the logic behind our recommendations (after all that’s what we get paid for), but sometimes we end up surprised by just how big of an issue we create with our recommendations since the Human Factor is a major weight in our profession.
Hence, my question: To what extent should the Marketing Specialist be involved with their client?
Saying the things that need to be said while knowing that on the client side it might not be positively received? Or, compromise and simply remain content to provide half-measures in order not to create a ‘situation’ that in all honesty shouldn’t exist in a professional environment in the first place?
As an expert consultant, how far do you go? As a B2B business manager, how far do you want your expert consultants to go in their roles as marketing coaches?
At Exo, our position on the matter is absolute. We are passionate and we desire as much if not more for things work out well for our clients. We defend our points of view in order for our client to understand the reasons behind our recommendations.
We position ourselves as best as we can to eliminate all doubt as to our intentions, but we can’t in all honesty do things halfway (in order to spare egos, fit into internal politics, etc) because, after all, we are expected to get results, and it will be us, ultimately, who will be judged and evaluated solely by the consequences of our actions.
So I ask my questions again: To what extent should we, as Marketing Specialists, be involved with our clients?
