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Key Takeaways Change happens so quickly now, and it can be difficult to maintain long-term business relationships. When a customer has new people moving into key roles, there is constant tension regarding different priorities.
When a client starts to limit communication and second-guess your work, trust your gut. It may be time to leave them and find others who do recognize what you bring to them.
It’s important to have regular check-ins and healthy debates with customers. When they no longer want to do that — it’s a sign.
Have you ever had a customer unceremoniously dump you? It happens every day for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s your fault. Sometimes it’s not.
During the first few years of my company, I had an opportunity to bid on a project that would be a long-term contract. It was an exciting new employee communication vehicle that would help a well-known manufacturer improve employee business literacy. The company had facilities, showrooms and sales offices across the country. This video would be a monthly review with lots of features, financial information and more to keep everyone focused on the right things.
For many years, we were included in the strategy, planning and execution of communication. Over time, I worked closely with six CEOs and numerous internal communication specialists. The company referred others to us and that helped us grow. We helped them by donating videos to support their charitable efforts. When the economy took a downturn, we helped them by being more efficient and watching the budget as if it were our own. We became a trusted partner handling sensitive company information — so trusted that we literally had the keys to the headquarters and were on internal voicemail.
As time went on over the 30 years of business together, they experienced economic downturns, reduced staff and the need to change their business model. That spurred us to aggressively seek out new customers in industries that were thriving. Business did improve, and they started to grow again. During the last few years we worked with them, I kept suggesting ways to refresh communication and some newer ideas for content creation and distribution. Every time I was politely told things were fine. Something just did not seem right; they did not want to devote the time or budget to the project. It started to get stale — month after month, it was the same thing.
One day after we had been out on location, I got a call as I was leaving the office. My contact told me that we should finish that month’s communication and they would no longer need us. Truthfully, the relationship had been on the downturn for a while. So, it was not completely unexpected. Fortunately, I was prepared. And you should be too because clients love you — until they don’t. Here are a few things to consider.
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