Annual Client Meeting Playbook

The information you provide in these meetings should inform your client that you understand their current challenges and goals and that you are the trusted partner who can help solve their challenges and help them achieve their desired goals. Here is what we do in our agency to prep for our client review calls.

Select Your Clients
If you have dozens or hundreds of clients. My recommendation is to select the clients you love working with and that care about growth, that pay you without issue, and whom you believe you can deliver the best results for. Start there and work your way down the list. Here’s a template we use to schedule this call.

Review Pains, Desires, and Goals
We review past meeting notes, client questionnaires, emails, or details in our CRM for pain points, challenges, or goals mentioned by the clients. This helps us understand what our client’s primary needs and cares are. If there isn’t much, we make sure to ask them that on the call. Here are some examples of them:

1. 1. What is your primary goal for the next quarter/year? Why is that important?
   2. What current challenges are you facing in your business? What is it costing you?
   3. What are the biggest challenges you foresee in accomplishing these goals?

Identify Wins
Identify all the wins you’ve helped your client achieve over the last quarter or year, and be specific with your data. Not sure what to focus on? Here are some examples:

• If you offer website care plans or retainers you can report on the number of lead forms filled on the site, and how many click-to-call actions were made on the phone number from mobile devices. If you aren’t tracking these as goals in Google Analytics, you should do so ASAP. Make sure to set a lead value for both goals.
• If you do local SEO or related services, show them the Google My Business / Google Business Listing calls, and traffic directed to the site, and quantify a value for it. How? For example, what would the client pay to get paid traffic to their site? Let us say, for example, it was $5 per click for house painting services and there are 100 clicks from the Google Business Listing to the site that would be worth $500 in traffic. Traffic and keyword reports are common examples of this as well.
• ROI is not always measured in leads or customers but can also be the peace of mind that the site has not crashed, been hacked, or X forms and features have saved the company staff X hours a week, for example.

Review Google Analytics
We review their Google Analytics to see what pages are performing well and could do better and what important pages are not performing well and how we can improve them. Our goals here are to Identify specific pages and opportunities and present some solutions. Examples of this could be:

• Page speed optimization for top-performing pages.
• On-Page SEO for pages with good traffic but aren’t ranking in the top 1-5 positions on Google. Or for important pages that aren’t getting much traffic.
• Identify opportunities to make pages that are converting well do even better or analyze why certain pages with good traffic have below-average conversion rates and optimize them.

Run and Personalize Audits
Whether we built a site six months ago or 2+ years ago doesn’t matter. I usually run a website audit, on-page SEO audit, and GMB audit using My Web Audit. When I want to emphasize the opportunity for a competitive advantage, I’ll also run the competitor analysis report and usually focus on just that report on the call because it offers a high-level overview of what is included in the other three reports.

These four audits take me 15 minutes to run and give me enough actionable insights to present to our clients. If the client is an e-commerce client, we would run the e-commerce audit vs. the website audit and usually include a page speed audit since page speed impacts SEO and user experience, directly impacting conversions.

The ROI report is the best way I’ve seen to help our agency present the value of our services and future pace our clients into visualizing the growth potential.The goal of running these audits is to collect insights on areas around SEO, website conversion optimization, user experience, etc., so I can present these as opportunities for our clients to address to gain a competitive advantage and grow their business.

This way, during the meeting, if our client, who runs a local home remodeling company, mentions they would like to get more traffic, I can focus on on-page SEO and GMB profile optimization. If they are getting a lot of traffic but want to convert more of them, we might focus on conversion optimization points the report has indicated that need to be addressed.The end result is we can show them vs. tell them what is possibly hindering them from getting the results they desire and how we can solve them. I’ll show exactly how that is done in the next section, where I review the meeting agenda.

We follow a specific structure for our client review meetings that has proven to be very effective. Here’s an outline of our meeting agenda:

• Intro
  I say HI and connect personally with all of my clients. I give them an overview of the meeting agenda, so they know what to expect, the sequence of things I will cover, and how long I need their undivided attention.
• Review Quick Wins
  It is important to remind our clients of their wins over the last quarter or year related to the service they have invested in with our agency. If you aren’t doing this every month via some client reports, call in-person meetings, or smoke signals. You should be. We only reinforce this in our client review meetings to clearly show them where they started and where they are now after using our services. It is important for both our team and clients to celebrate the wins we have helped them achieve. Examples of these in our agency are — an increase in targeted traffic, improvement in keywords, number of leads generated on the site, revenue generated on an e-commerce site, hours saved by their team because of automation we built, or how the changes to the website have increased their conversion rates. You get the idea.
• Discuss Growth Goals
  Discussing our client’s goals for the next quarter or year is how we learn what is going on in their business and where they want to go. For example, recently, we found out a client had problems with their legacy database that they used to quote our work. We realized we could rebuild it as a web app vs. them looking to another provider. A few years ago, we lost a large commercial construction client who began a branding initiative without informing us because they saw branding as different from website design services. The branding company did the rebrand and convinced them it was in their best interests to have my agency implement the brand styles they developed. We learned from that experience, and now we educate our clients on the importance of branding, what to look for in a branding company, and what elements we need to provide us, like style guides, to ensure their website reflects their new branding. This helped us close a 10K website refresh for a client that just finished a rebrand. The point is to learn your client’s challenges and goals so you can proactively support them as a trusted partner in whatever capacity you can.

Present Opportunities
Ahead of the call we gather insights from the different audits and present them as challenges that our client needs to address to continue to gain a competitive advantage and achieve the goals they stated earlier on the call. Here are a few things you’d have to keep in mind when presenting;

1. Measure what matters — Only measure what’s important to your specific client. For example, if a local business tells us they want to generate more traffic to their website. I’ll focus on the Google My Business audit, on-page audit of their top 5-10 pages, and some conversion elements we identified that could be implemented to help them rank better and convert more of the traffic into leads or customers.
2. Prioritize based on impact — I want to continue to deliver the best bang for their buck, so we always start with the issues that are going to present the best opportunities for growth. Our reports help you prioritize those recommendations.
3. Present in a way that’s easy to understand — My goal is to show my client that I know what I’m talking about and why it matters and for them to understand that I am the trusted expert who can help take care of it all for them. I avoid going into the details unless they specifically ask. Most of the time, their eyes glaze over when I speak in technical terms vs. results they can achieve by investing in the recommendations I’m proposing.

Pro Tip: I’ve found that researching and comparing our client’s online presence to industry leaders locally and nationally to ensure that they are doing better in as many areas as possible is a great way to bring additional talking points to the meeting and WOW our clients.

Q&A + Next Steps
Once done with the recommendations, I pause and allow our clients to ask questions about what they’ve learned. I answer questions they have. One of the most common ones we get is, “How much will this cost?” At this point, I’ll usually present them with a range, i.e., 4-6K or 8-10K, and then see what they have to say.If they agree, we move forward and let them know the work will usually be done in a few weeks. If they say we don’t have the budget to do everything, I give them two options:

1. Let us focus on the high-impact items within X budget.
2. I request they increase their monthly retainer for X months till we complete the work.

I emphasize that the sooner the work is done, the sooner they will see better results. I also let them know that we have limited bandwidth because we are also speaking to our other clients. So if they want the work done sooner than later, they should commit ASAP.

If they agree, I will reiterate what they agree to and tell them I’ll send them a follow-up email and invoice. I avoid proposals or agreements during this process. We know what work needs to be done. They know the investment and are agreeing to it. Anything not specified explicitly in the follow-up email will not be included as part of the scope of work.

Here’s a sample meeting follow-up template we use. I intentionally keep it simple. In the email, I include a short video (3-5 mins max) with an overview of everything to recap the scope of work, investment, and next steps we plan to take.

If the client, for whatever reason, isn’t ready to sign off. I make sure to schedule the next meeting before I end the presentation.

Quarterly and annual meetings are an easy way to generate revenue for your agency while helping your clients. Now to see results, you need to take action. Pick the first 5 clients you want to schedule the meeting with, customize this email template, and click send!

Remember, people are busy and have other priorities; follow up at least 3 times, if needed over 6-8 business days if you don’t hear back. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and give them a call if needed. It’s important for you to believe in yourself and that your services will help them get better results.

Remember, your main goal is to connect the audit insights and talking points during your presentation with the client’s pain points and desired outcomes for the next quarter or year.

What I like to do is group my talking points based on outcomes our clients care about. For us, the top 3 are:

• More leads and sales
  This is usually the most common desired outcome, so we spend most of our time here. Common recommendations come from doing a website audit, on-page SEO audit, and GMB audit using My Web Audit. I’ll also run the competitor analysis report when I want to emphasize the opportunity for a competitive advantage. I usually focus on that report on the call because it offers a high-level overview of what is included in the other three reports. The ROI report is the best way I’ve seen to help our agency present the value of our services and future pace our clients into visualizing the growth potential.
• Saving Time
  Think about what sort of features, functionality, and automation you can implement to help them save time. This could help them do things more effectively, saving them time and money.
• Brand Awareness
  What can help them increase their brand awareness/visibility online? This could include GMB/GPL optimization, social media strategy implementation, on-page SEO, etc.

We talked about the DOs when doing your presentation, now let’s talk about the DON’Ts. You can take your presentation pretty fast if you avoid making any of the three common mistakes mentioned below.

• Offering Too Much Detail
  Offering too much detail to the client. When you do this you’re probably going to overwhelm them and lose their attention. Keep your presentation focused on the most important points.
• Using Technical Jargon
  Speak in terms your clients understand. Avoid technical terms and acronyms. Focus more on the results your services offer when the recommendations are followed vs. the specifics of the Service. I.e. writing schema markup or discussing the need for minification of their code and how it helps with page performance.
• Avoid Discussing Unfamiliar Topics
  Every now and then a client brings up some new tech or strategy they heard about. I try to avoid discussing topics with which our client is unfamiliar with, or that we may not be subject area experts on as this can end up derailing the entire point of your meeting. I request they table that for another call since we’ve taken the time to put together an actionable plan to help them with their goals.

Your success is ours. If you have any questions or need additional support in executing this strategy, post them in our FB group here or jump on our weekly Ask Me Anything Call (details here) and get personalized help.