There are many inevitabilities in business. Markets will harden and soften, taxes will increase and eventually you will retire. One of the most painful and frustrating of these is the fact that, sooner or later, you will lose a client. Another agency may offer them what they see as a ‘better’ deal. They may be disappointed with an element of the service they received from your staff. It may simply be a business that likes to keep service providers on their toes. It will happen.
When you lose that client, you can react both emotionally and practically. Both reactions can provide some value for the future of your agency. You just need to make sure you don’t react in a damaging way.
Don’t Feel Sorry For Yourself
The worst reaction is to feel like the client made the wrong move that was in some way malicious toward your business. If you allow yourself to play the victim, you rule out what could be a very valuable learning opportunity. Losing a client is upsetting, but it’s not the end of the world. It could even be the beginning of a better future for your agency.
Do Get Angry
Anger is not always a negative emotion. If you use it in the right way, it can benefit you in the longer term. Your agency’s value, your potential retirement, relies heavily on the revenue it generates. Losing clients not only reduces revenue but it points to the potential to more losses and a negative impact on your legacy. That should make you angry. You need to use that anger positively and make sure that losing this client spurs you on to bigger and better things.
Don’t Point The Finger
When you are figuring out where to direct your anger, don’t choose an individual or a single department. In business, every success and every failure is shared. There is no value in rooting out the ‘culprit’ when you’ve lost and client. If you blame someone, publicly or privately, you may make them feel separate from you and separate from the business. Some personalities will be motivated by that blame, but most will respond negatively. Instead, you should find ways to improve the whole agency, by encouraging collective improvement and learning.
Do Learn From It
The learning you take from negative situations, like losing a client, is the most important factor in the whole scenario. The negative impact on the agency, and its value, when you lose a client is short-term. Unless the agency was over-reliant on that revenue, you can turn it around. How you do that is to look at the things you could have done better in that relationship. Don’t focus on the root cause of the breakdown, look at the entire relationship. Then take that learning forward into every other client you ever deal with.
By avoiding self-pity and blame, and embracing the right kind of anger and learning, you can turn any situation into a positive experience. Even those inevitabilities that you’d prefer not to think about.
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