It's Not Them, It's You: Why Clients 'Don't Get It' and How to Fix It

There comes a point in everyone’s career when they do the digging, look at 100% of what’s available to them, and then present the 1% back to a client. That then flows seamlessly into creative that is in perfect alignment with the strategy, reflects the business, and will achieve the goals, growing the business in ways that go beyond the original brief. It is art. It is science. It is the smallest intersection of the Venn diagram of Excellent Work.

The client looks at the screen, then at you, then at the account director, and then at you.

“I like it, but I don’t think this is it.”

You spend the next twenty minutes listening to half-baked reasons, looking at furrowed brows, and slowly, over twenty minutes, you feel yourself dying inside.

The client finishes their coffee, and the account director says that we’ll look at it and get back to them early next week. Hands are shaken, doors are opened, and the client heads off to their next thing.

You all head back into the meeting room, and then the cry goes out:

“Why the fuck don’t they get it?”

An hour will now pass as you try to figure out how to get them to do it.

The problem is, it’s not them. It’s you. Usually.

It’s seductively easy to start to kick the client when the work doesn’t land. It is easy to say that they don’t get it, that they don’t understand the basics, that they don’t have the budget, that they haven’t read this article or that tweet. Fuck me, the high horses we will climb. Here’s the secret.

Clients do get it. And if they don’t, it’s because you don’t get them.

Let’s be clear. On both sides, ego is at play. We’re upset that they didn’t get the combination of genius and more genius. And some clients don’t feel comfortable explaining their discomfort. But our job is to make it as easy as possible to sell our work to clients. We’re the service. This relationship isn’t 50/50.

Here are some reasons why you fucked it.

Clients have Clients

The ideal scenario is that your client will let you present when it needs to go higher, which usually gets in the way of their value. After all, why do we need a marketing person in the business if it’s always the agency that’s presenting? As I said, ego. However, that ego may be caused by the company culture. While you’re working with the marketing team, they work with the business. If you’ve made the work hard to hand over to the marketing team to present, the pushback may be around the next stage rather than the work. I love the work of Russell Davies and have done many presentations that follow his approach. It makes for a great presentation but a fucker to hand over. This makes clients nervous. That makes them nervous about the work because they don’t know how to sell it to their boss. Or, even worse, bosses.

This means taking a less purist approach to the presentation. Speaker notes are useful, but you can’t rely on them, as sometimes someone is plugging their computer away from where they are sitting. Building notes on the page can work, but then it starts to be a script on a page. You can create two presentations, one for you and a “Fisher-Price” version for the client, but who has the time for that? Ideally, you talk to the client at the start and try to work out how it will be presented. Ideally, it’ll be you, and then you can create the presentation for all use cases at the start. Whatever the approach, build empathy. Don’t assume that the client wants to present your work but that they have to for a range of arcane reasons that have got fuck all to do with you.

Too Much, Too Late

Strategists love a good “A-ha” moment. They think they’re fucking Columbo. You get briefed, you head off into the wilds for forty days and forty nights and come out of the wilderness with tablets of stone. Then “one more thing”. You’ve lived with it for forty days and forty nights, and then expect a client to get it in 90 minutes. You’re so excited about the destination that you forget about the journey. And the client needs to be taken on that journey, and I don’t mean Around the Brief in 80 Slides.

I like catching up with the client every week for a check-in. This makes them feel like they are part of the process; they can guide, contribute and see your thinking. Rough is good. A showcase in sausage making. This isn’t to share creative, oh fuck no, it’s to share thinking. And I do mean share. You can get out your own way quicker if you have the client as your Sherpa. Bury your ego, accept that the client knows their business better than you, and learn from it.

You're in Love (with Your Own Ideas)

In the early days, I just couldn’t believe that I nailed that idea, that approach. I mean, whoa. I then started to fall in love with my ideas. And when you’re in love, the faults that you see in the work are excused as the parts that make you fall in love; it’s all part of the whole. And when anyone criticises your new love, then you’re the fuckwit. You’re just too superficial to get it, you don’t see it. And as irrationally as you got to love, you carry on with defending the work. Over time, I’ve realised that focus is useful, but it gets to the point that the work is never yours; it’s always paid for. It’s a holiday romance rather than a sweeping love story. Or, get over yourself.

You Haven't Thought It Through Enough

Ok, your presentation was amazing; it was pure fire. Everything you had is on every slide. Everything. And then you get hit with a question that isn’t covered by the presentation. That’s not fair. I mean, it wasn’t even a good question. And sure, you got to answer, but you fumbled a bit. But it doesn’t matter. All the stuff you care about is in the fucking presentation. I’ve been here; it’s the curse of spending an amount of time on the detail, intricately building out the narrative. Every point is curated to within an inch of its life. I tend now to do a half-day debate boot camp on any presentation, where I look for the reasons not to like and address them in my head before any meeting. I can go into a rabbit hole of “what if” looking to cover any possible objection.

To be clear, this isn’t the presentation run through which tends to be, have we got everything, this is more, “What the fuck can I object to here”. And that can be quite painful as you and the team unreasonably pick through your work. Resist the temptation to “Ah, but” every response. You need to work on the challenges rather than sound defensive. Lean in and jujitsu the fucker. This half day of pushing against objections sometimes uncovers the bits that should be defended, highlights the bits that you can let go and helps bring the client with you.

Client beating is too easy. Of course, there is the exception that proves the rule. Some clients just don’t get it. But I think they’re very much in the minority. Some are over their heads, and some are looking myopically at the brief rather than the bigger picture. But I feel that clients have it tough. Helping them to “get it” is 80% of our job because they pay the bills. By taking the time to change the meeting post-mortem chat from “Why don’t they fucking get it?” to “What the fuck can we do better?” you’ll be doing everyone a favour, doing less work, doing better work, getting quicker sign-offs. That nailing it.