Working as an office manager in my early 20s, I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Many of its principles still hold true today, and they guided me through multiple career transitions. Success in most careers comes from our interactions with people – whether clients or coworkers.
For years, those principles of human connection, combined with technical knowledge and expertise, helped digital marketers succeed.
Agencies made sense of the machines for clients, and strong relationship-building allowed them to retain those clients over time. That model is now being challenged.
As AI has become fully embedded in PPC platforms, the question has become unavoidable: what prevents clients from relying on an entirely AI-built approach?
What agencies have that AI can’t duplicate is their relational side – the ability to connect with others and understand, strategically, what business owners are actually after.
1. Ask questions
The key to discovering who people are and what makes them tick is to ask.
Sounds simple, really, but so much of communication gets lost in translation or is left up to assumption.
When I go into a sales call, I bring a list of questions. How much can we find out about this potential client in this half-hour window?
Likewise, when I conduct a strategy call, I have a list of questions: some for me and some for them.
What is this potential client looking to accomplish? What about their current strategy is or is not working? How can we improve upon this strategy?
AI can’t do this yet. Our interactions with it are primarily one-sided (at least at the time of this writing).
We may be able to have a conversation with it, but AI is never the initiator. We go to AI asking it what it can do for us using ideas we already have.
AI is not interested in who we are as people or in sussing out our specific pain points.
We can never discover a new pain point without asking, and we also can never find it out if we don’t listen, which brings me to the next point.
Dig deeper: 6 tips to build PPC client relationships
2. Talk less, listen more
How often do we find ourselves in conversations with others, only waiting for the silence so we can interject with our own thoughts?
I’m guilty of this. I’ve also found that clients and client prospects really just want to be heard.
So, let them explain themselves, then ask them more clarifying questions, and let them talk more. Continue to listen.
It’s amazing what you can find out about a person if you go into a call with absolutely no agenda beyond learning about the other person.
Let them continue to talk, do not interject, and see what you are able to find out.
Try not to fill the silence unless it becomes uncomfortable and you, yourself, have agenda items to cover based on what you’ve learned.
I find this type of approach is usually easier to do in sales calls….
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
