Engaging with Clients: Maximizing Results with the Right Questions

Acting as an outside strategic advisor for clients can sometimes make it hard to get a defined sense of what’s happening on a day-to-day basis of the business. Sometimes your clients simply forget to clue you in. The key to inserting yourself into the conversation is regularly asking the right questions to ensure you aren’t inadvertently missing key insights that prevent you from maximizing your expertise for your client.

Knowing when and how to establish a communication framework with any client comes down to carving out meaningful time to check in, ask questions and ensure you’re helping your clients move the needle towards a core KPI. To help wrap your mind around how and why this matters, we’ve put together a series of questions that we’ve found useful when looking for fresh ways to engage new and existing clients.

A Checklist: Questions to Ask Your Clients

1. What has changed most about how you or your clients are doing business over the past 6-12 months — and how do you think this will impact the next 6-12 months? What’s surprised you most about these changes and how have you adapted?
2. What’s really disrupting the market right now? How are you proactively reacting to these changes to support your customers — and attract new customers?
3. What about innovation within the company — what’s been the greatest changes across your business in terms of how it operates, what you offer, and the impact you’re able to make in the industry?
4. What’s on the horizon for the product or service roadmap for the next 6-12 or 12-18 months? What inspired this development, and how it will continue to support your customer’s evolving needs?
5. What do you do to continually set yourself apart in the crowded market? How has your approach to customer success changed as the company has grown?
6. What about challenges? What’s changed most over the past 18 months — and how has your business learned to adapt to the “new normal”?
7. What have the pandemic lessons taught your team – and how are you leveraging these lessons to better support your customers?
8. What challenges have your customers faced most in this time frame? How have you adapted your business model to support their current situations?

Looking Ahead: Building Meaningful Relationships

We get it. You’re busy and so are your clients. But you are equally valuable to each other; tap into this resource on a regular basis to ask the right questions. Taking time to proactively gain insights from your clients about what trends they’re seeing, what’s next in their product roadmap, or what they think is really defining the future of their business can be critical touchpoints that help you generate new and valuable ideas, while creating long-lasting relationships.

Want to learn more about how PMP approaches our client relationships? Let’s connect.