The Hate Sandwich You're About to Eat

Blair gets David to share a part of his upcoming book about how all client relationships have a cycle of love-hate-love that we have to be prepared for and push through.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, today I'm going to interview you as we do, but we're going to have what I suspect is going to be a broad-ranging discussion on a topic that you suggested that does not have a name. So, I've taken the liberty of naming today's episode. I'm calling it the hate sandwich. This is why you don't run a naming firm, you run a training company. When you say we're going to have a wide-ranging conversation, that's usually a hint that you don't think I've got a deep enough subject chosen and you're going to have to find a way.

David C. Baker: Yes.

Blair Enns: Oh man, you know me so well. A wide-ranging discussion, because you have this crappy idea here that I don't agree with at all, so state your premise. Let me back up a little bit, because I know this is from a forthcoming book. Am I allowed to ask you about that forthcoming book?

David C. Baker: Yes. You're allowed 42 seconds per [crosstalk]

Blair: Because you haven't published a book in like six months.

David: [laughs] It was all ready to go before all this stuff hit. This is about the world's worst time to introduce a book. So, it's kind of sitting there.

Blair: What's it called?

David: Actually, it's called Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors. Then the subtitle is Covert Techniques for Remarkable Practice.

Blair: Okay. It's this book, right, got you. I don't know why I completely blanked on this. For some reason, I thought it was a different book.

David: Because you act interested but in the end, you aren't.

Blair: "No, David is not writing a book, never heard anything about it." Right?

David: "Oh, that, yes."

Blair: Okay. You suggested that we talk about essentially the cycle of relationships with your clients, how in your model-- I was going to say in your mind, there's this pattern that goes love, hate, love, where your clients love you in the beginning. Then they hate you. Then they love you. Have I captured that correctly?

David: You have but this is also the time when I need to say that a love sandwich is more appropriate because hate is in the middle. So, this is a love sandwich.

Blair: Hold on. It's a ham sandwich. It's not a bread sandwich. We named the sandwich after what's in the middle. Okay. We're a little bit punchy because we just spent the last hour together answering questions for a DBA webinar. As we noted at the beginning of that, it's like, we're usually done with each other after 30 minutes. We're 60 minutes in, and we're going to try to record 30 minutes. Okay. Do you want to explain love, hate, love, where did this come from and what's the basic premise?

David: It comes from the book that is meant for all of my audience to help them think through how to be good advisors. One little section in there is about this path, this journey that seems inevitable in terms of how your clients might think about you differently as time unfolds. The reason that idea came to me years ago was just sorting through, I have this electronic folder.

When somebody sends me this thank you email, I consider that so precious that I save it. Now I have three of them after 25 years. No, there's a lot more than that, but I was looking back through that. Sometimes when I get discouraged about something, I'll go read those, and it just warms my heart about the impact that I've had on somebody and so on. Then I just started noticing that oh, when do I get these? At what point do I happen to get these? I started to look at that from my own practice, which really isn't all that important or interesting to our listeners, but I started to look for those same clues in my clients by surfacing what was happening with their clients, and it was the same thing.

So, it interested me to think about I guess that flow, how does the timing work? What's that arc look like in terms of how your clients think about you at different points. When I sent you the topic idea, I was fully prepared to say, "What? Like that's more of a two-minute conversation, David, come up with something more substantial." I was glad that you were interested in talking about it. You've actually written and talked a lot about this. So, this is our chance to bundle up our various thoughts and put it into something that is hopefully coherent to people.

Blair: As you were explaining this, I had this big grin on my face because I'm doing the first pricing creativity bootcamp. There's six training modules, six classroom sessions. There's 20 owners of 20 different firms going through this. We just had the first classroom this past week. People have got into the first module, they're showing up in the first class and there's a guy I know, you know him too, I've worked with him over the years. He was quite a few, sort of saying, "I got so much value out of this first module. It's just raving."

It's just the highest compliment you could hear. And I'm left thinking, "Okay, we could just end it now" and you would have gotten your money's worth but I know this is not how this story ends.

David: Right. You're going to hang on to that email and balance it against the other one you're going to get later.

Blair: The same person in a few weeks is like, because the hard work is coming.

David: Right.

Blair: The hard work is coming and the opportunity for me to fail as a facilitator is coming and the opportunity for him as somebody who has to implement the advice to fail it, that is coming. The hate is coming. I've been through this enough. I've seen this movie. I know, if not how it ends, I know what's next in the journey. The same person who's just raving about all the value is equally likely to be complaining and to be thinking negative thoughts about me in just a few weeks' time. That's the cycle that you're talking about, right?

David: It is. Using that as an example, how do you judge how well a relationship went with a client and by extension our listeners, can you even judge how well a client relationship went right now at the early part or mid part of a relationship? I suppose you could. Right? But isn't the ultimate test more, is your kid in jail or not? So far, neither of my kids are in jail. That's really good. That's success in my book. No, actually my standards are a little bit higher than that. But it just brings up the point that we have to think about this longer arc of time.

Unless clients dip down and rise higher, unless we're prepared mentally to accept the fact that our clients are going to feel about us differently at different points, then we might be too surprised and might even get discouraged about it.

Blair: Yes. I think the big mistake we make early in our businesses is we take the momentum, whether it's up or down, our esteem is going up in the eyes of the client or it's going down. Then we project out into the future based on that momentum. It looks just fantastic or horrible. The truth is it's going to correct. Then it's going to correct again. It's a real mistake to read too much into those moments. I think you and I are sitting here as business people who've been running our businesses for 20 years.

It took us a while to learn those lessons. I'm also thinking of, as I was telling you the story of the one person in the program, we have another client who just a couple of weeks ago was raving about one of our offerings that he has enrolled in. He said, "I don't know why everybody isn't in this forever." Then yesterday just decided he's done.

David: Oh, yes.

Blair: When I first heard the comment from his coach that I don't know why everybody doesn't do this forever. I thought, "Yes, just wait." You know, 60 days later--

David: Yes. What you just said fascinates me. I'd never quite thought about it that way, where you are projecting the future based on the arc. Things are a little worse today than they were with your client a week ago, so you just assume they're going to continue to get worse forever and that's not healthy. Neither is it healthy to assume that they'll continually get better.

Also, you've got to look deep into your motivations as a business owner, we could do a whole another episode on how does this play out with your employees and what they think of you and your leadership. When you have a gauge and you're trying to measure something that changes quickly and it changes so quickly that the needle would be almost unreadable because it's moving back and forth, you dampen that needle. That's what we're talking about, is to have some sort of a dampening source in there to make that work. Just so we catch the Twitter stuff before it happens. I don't know if that word is damping or dampening. I think it's dampening, but I'm not sure.

Blair: I'm okay with either. Let's begin at the beginning.

David: That's a good place to start [crosstalk]

Blair: What I want to ask you is where is the beginning? Is it from the moment you're hired or is it from the moment the client becomes aware of you? When do they fall in love with you?

David: Well, they usually fall in love with you before they explore the notion of working with your firm, I think, or they wouldn't even explore that notion. They'll sometimes tell you that when you ask them, "Hey, how did you hear about our firm?" And they'll tell you. Sometimes they won't because they don't want to give you any unfair advantage. Then sometimes their fear or their impression of you, the good impression of you is magnified by the whole process, the whole sales process. This is where I need your feedback as well, but it seems to me like you're not intending with your clients to help them create a sales process that's entirely enjoyable the whole time because sometimes that doesn't foster the truth. It's okay to have moments during the beginning where there is a little bit of tension, maybe not tension, a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of silence that you're not sure how to fill and so on, but yes, it starts at the very, very beginning where they're drawn to working with you because of what they've heard, although it's probably a mixed bag, especially the more well-known your firm is, they've heard a mixed bag. They feel like, "Okay, overall I think the benefits seem to overwhelm the negatives here. We should look into working with this firm" and then their sales experience. They'll never forget their sales experience with you as a firm. That to me is something we don't talk enough about.

Blair: That makes a lot of sense and if somebody works with creative firms on this, I see a lot of what I consider to be horrible, sales experiences, but I think back when I was doing this, to me, they just seemed like best practices. I think the client loves you most in the moment they decide they're going to hire you. Not in the moment they say it because often there's a gap between, but in the moment when they say, "Okay, you're it," that's the moment when you have the most power. They decide you're the one I want to work with.

David: Right.

Blair: Now, there's a bunch of things that have to happen between the moment they decide that you're it and the moment the contract is signed. What I would say here, just my opportunity to insert the notion that you will never have more power in the buy-sell relationship or the relationship than you do in this moment. It often feels like you don't have that power for reasons I don't fully understand. It would be like you courting somebody and then that person saying, "Okay, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with," but they don't tell you that. They withhold the information because they want to get some things from you, that happens on the client sides.

I think we need to acknowledge the moment the client decides it's you, you have a lot of power and then some things happen. Maybe procurement gets involved. Maybe there are other processes that they have to implement and maybe they try to beat you down on price. Maybe that turns into a difficult negotiation. We should talk about that because that can erode some of the love, but you have a lot of ability in this moment when they decide you're it to affect the rest of the journey forward. The journey to assigned contract to an agreed-upon price and to a relationship in which the roles will be predetermined by what happens next.

David: You have this leverage, but you have to use it kindly, confidently and not misuse that leverage. The strength of that leverage comes from how badly they need you in this moment in the sense that you are either solving something that's keeping them up at night, whether it's losing their position at the firm or having to explain some very embarrassing sales trends or whatever it is or it could be just getting things off their plate so they can concentrate on some other things. When you have that moment and when they tell you how much time-- Or is it just all over the place, how long is that gap between those two moments?

Blair: Well, it really depends on the organization and how formalized they are about buying creative or marketing services and also depends on who's involved, if I'm understanding your question correctly, like the gap between when they decide you're it and then when the contract gets signed.

David: Right.

Blair: It's an unfortunate reality among large marketers these days that the moment the marketer decides, "Okay, you're the one I want," they then have been trained and told that they need to step out of process and let a professional negotiator in the form of procurement step in and negotiate to the final agreement.

I think what those client organizations and the procurement department in particular don't appreciate is there has to be this relationship of, let's call it trust instead of love, there has to be this relationship of trust and belief and faith in the other party. It's often eroded through the negotiating process. It's rarely eroded through the negotiating process when the client or the marketer is doing the negotiator unless they are going to be a bad client anyway.

David: Right.

Blair: A good marketing person working for a good organization can step aside and let somebody come in and employ hardball negotiating tactics who doesn't really care that the process leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the agency and then affects the relationship between the agency and the marketer. Maybe this is just me forcing a tangent on going after procurement people again.

David: Well, does that mean that agencies ought to have their version of procurement officers so that the two top-level decision-makers on both sides of the table will be able to work together well with fewer bad feelings because while the client steps aside and lets procurement take over, often the person at the agency is still managing that second process and there's nobody to hand it to if they step aside, right?

Blair: Yes. When you get to the larger agencies or creative or marketing firms, not just ad agencies, what happens in that moment gets handed off to procurement. I'm describing it as a lot cleaner than it always happens. Then it gets handed off to finance on the agency side and then those two parties can kind of, neither party there is emotionally attached to the work, the way the marketer would be and the way the agency team that would be doing the work. With those parties, then negotiations can become quite personal. When you have professional negotiators on both sides, it's actually kind of a, I'll call it a fair fight, but it's not about it being fair. It's about people understanding each other in the same terms.

Blair: Let's get through that gap. Let's say everything goes fairly quickly and smoothly from the moment the client decides to hire you to the moment they hire you, they look at you and think, "You can do things for me those other firms I was talking to can't. I really believe that you're the one. Let's move forward together." You get into the engagement, so you begin the honeymoon period, right? We use that term, where both parties are in love with each other. Then what happens?

David: Then the prenuptial gets worked on, right?

Blair: That's the contract, right?

David: Right.

Blair: Let's say we get through the prenup. We sign off. We have the ceremony, we go on a honeymoon, we're in love, everything is working perfectly. I hate this metaphor, but let's keep going. Where does the hate come from? Where does the middle part of the sandwich, what's the source of it?

David: It's mainly I think from unmet expectations which could be a problem because the creative firm, the digital firm, the agency, PR firm, they're not very good at meeting the expectations they've set or it could be that they have allowed the client expectations to just run out of control and they haven't brought them in, but I think at the base level, what's happening is that you are beginning to earn your reputation in this middle space. The people that they have been hearing about you from are the ones who are not in this middle space.

They have gone through the middle space and they've discovered that it's worth listening to you and that it's worth shoving this pain, this discomfort down and that you should just follow their directions as much as you can. Still think about it. That's what they're hearing but now we have the new relationship, which is past the honeymoon stage, right in that phase where you are earning the big money. This is where you are exercising your external objectivity, you're pushing back on things that they don't necessarily want to hear. At a very human level, they're discovering that you're not going to do their job for them. They're still going to have to do their job.

You've got this phrase about, you don't give me homework, I give you homework. It's sort of, "Oh, I've still got to be the client here." I still have to fight my internal battles and build consensus around what you're suggesting. I still have to find the money that we need to do this. I have to admit that what we did last year wasn't as effective as I hoped it would be. This is the messy part of a relationship, but this is what bonds you together. It's those bad, tough times, those difficult conversations you've had. This is what really makes the relationship much deeper and more meaningful in a business setting. It's the messy middle.

Blair: I think it's the struggle that you have to go through to make the relationship worthwhile. You're talking about this, I'm thinking my kids are all older now. The youngest is 18, and I've spent a lot of time thinking, "I don't think they suffered enough when they were younger." They had to put up with me, but the skills you learn and the appreciation you develop when you have to suffer, those are invaluable. When you have to suffer with another party, those are really valuable bonds. When you and your client go through this phase where things aren't going well and if you're able to work through that, there's great reward on the other side. Now, we're not talking about buyer's remorse, this hate in the middle because that often happens quite early. In fact, buyer's remorse typically sets in even before the client buys, like in the moment between when they say you're the one and the contract gets signed.

Any space from that moment forward, there's an opportunity for buyer's remorse. Generally speaking, I think the rule of thumb out there is you can expect the potential for buyer's remorse to last for about six months, but that's not what we're talking about, is it?

David: No. It's past that. It's down in the dirty part of working. This is also why I think it's important to not bait-and-switch who your clients will be working with because whether it's true or not, and most of the time, I think it's not true. Whether it's true or not, you're not the best person as the principal. That's who you are listening to this. You're not the best person to manage a client relationship. It's usually somebody else.

The best use for you in a client relationship is to bounce in and out at a high level but not to be the day-to-day person. This is the day-to-day stuff. This is when you don't just take orders, you question them. This is when you are thinking more about the client's best interests than they are. This is when you have often worked for that client longer than your contact has and you just feel duty-bound to do what's right.

You suddenly build a spine again, the spine you lost in the sales process. You build the spine again and you are more willing to lose this relationship than you were during the sales process, sadly. You start saying what you think when you should have said that earlier, to use your phrase, and this is the hate sandwich. This is the hate in the middle of the early love and the love that comes later. We cannot try to avoid this. This is just a part of what it means to do good client work. If you don't have hate in this sandwich, then you are not doing your job.

Now, you don't want the hate to be spurred because you're just an ass and difficult to work with. You miss social signals. You don't hedge your thoughts very carefully. That's not what we're looking for. We're talking about somebody who's doing their job and because-- If you take, I don't know, I get really sensitive when I think about a child or a pet, like my dog suffering. This is watching through the window and it looks like the physician, the vet, whatever is harming the child, but they're doing what's necessary. In the moment, the child hates them, but years later, they'll understand how that worked and why that was important.

Blair: Maybe we should be rethinking the word hate. Maybe there's a better word, unless-- I mean just stop me if that would require an extensive edit of the book.

David: No. "Not enjoy" maybe is a better phrase.

Blair: When I was making some notes on this before we started recording, I thought, "Well, is it a simple smile curve if we're going to graph this out?"

David: Yes.

Blair: "Is it just the appreciation or love is high, then drops down to low and then it's up high again." I wrote, "Is it an adoption curve? Is it like the Gartner hype cycle curve? Like is there an existing curve? Like is it just a standard smile curve?" In the training world, we talk about how there's this initial enthusiasm first and then there's this dip when people try to apply the new thinking and the dip is sometimes referred as the trough of uncertainty or the slew of despond. That term came from Milton and I love it. The slew of despond. It's a bit like the hype cycle curve where everybody gets really excited in the beginning, the enthusiasm is super high.

Then in the application, you realize, "Oh, well let's put the hype cycle apart." In training, in the application, "This is hard, this is really hard." If somebody explained it to me, you have these new techniques, you apply them, it's hard to develop the new muscles. So, you go back to the old way, but now, you know there's a better way, so you feel even worse than you did before training. Do you see an equivalent in the relationship where it's like, "Okay, these guys are great, these guys are great, this is getting hard. Oh my God, why did we even do this? This is so hard. I never should have hired these people." Does it get that bad?

David: It does. I think what you're talking about raises a fundamental problem with how agencies manage their client relationships, because during and towards the latter part of that relationship, you don't want your clients to feel like what they've done is just simply get a longer to-do list and it becomes even more apparent that they are a failure in that. This is where the best firms simplify their recommendations to a manageable list that can be accomplished to make it easier for your client to not feel the pain of all these undone things, to make sure you're focusing on the absolutely most important two, three, four initiatives and nailing those. That will make this hate cycle in the middle last a shorter period of time, I think.

Blair: It's interesting, it wasn't on this recording, but the one we did just before this for the DBA webinar, you were advising somebody who had posted a question and you said, "At times like this--" And we're recording during the corona pandemic, which is the years 2020 to 2026. "At times like this, you're as much a coach as you are an entrepreneur." Just those words of yours are ringing in my ears as you're describing this scenario, and I know your book, there'll be a lot of application for our listeners, but it's really meant for people like you or people who want to follow in your footsteps of being an independent advisor. But there's a lot of that applies to, you don't just show up and dump all this.

Of course, you're being hired to do a bunch of work, but your point, you're not freeing the client of maybe not a volume of tasks and to-do's but of difficult decisions and taking responsibility for things and having conversations and selling things internally. You're not freeing the client from that. In this moment, if you want to be effective at what you do, you have to be a coach. You can't just dump this stuff on your clients. The people who have these coaching skills tend to do better. You help your clients through these tough moments because so often if you want to transform your clients, nobody goes through any form of transformation without some form of struggle.

David: Right. If you want to avoid this middle sea of despondency or whatever you call it, trough of despair-

Blair: The slew of despond.

David: -I pictured this ship out there with all these board-sailors on it and the wind has died completely for two months. If you want to avoid that middle period of despondency, then all you have to do is simply take things off your client's plate and then you're not pushing back. You're an order taker. You are simply doing what they're asking, and they're grateful, but they're grateful for different things.

They're grateful that they can keep focus on other things. You're not changing their business, you're simply just a hired gun. You can see how some firms try to avoid this, and this is particularly true if they have a client concentration problem. You can see how firms step back from pushing back on the client and simply resort to taking things off the client's plate. That's just not how you're going to earn a lot of money. That's what leads to really long client relationships that don't do much and that don't result in any pricing premium.

Blair: Is your overarching advice on this topic to just understand that the middle is coming, the hate in the sandwich or whatever, the slew of despond and see this as your opportunity to forge a really valuable relationship to actually make things a lot better on the other side, just see it as an inevitable part of the journey. Maybe like Ulysses, you have to lash yourself to the mast or whatever the metaphor is, but you have to pass by this part if you want to get to the good part beyond it. So, do embrace it and learn how to deal with it well.

David: Yes and if you sense that you're about to enter a relationship with a client who may not allow that or may not be comfortable with that pushing back, then it's your obligation as an expert to force this middle period to happen sooner. Maybe even during the sales process to see how they're going to react to pushing back. When this happens inevitably and it's going to happen in any good relationship between an agency and a client, when this happens, don't despair.

Just look and say, "All right, what part do I own in this? Did I manage the relationship poorly and has that contributed to this hate that I'm feeling? Or is this just what happens when I do my job?" Keep the high-ground, don't enter into emotional discussions with your client and just recognize that it's not the end of the world. It's not as bad as it feels nor is it as good as it feels when you're in the love part of that relationship.

Blair: This is a lot like buyer's remorse, which tends to happen early, even though the way we're talking about, it might happen later, but it's so similar. I just want to share this story that's in every book I've ever written, including the one that's no longer in print and it's this idea that in the '80s, the Marriott Corporation did a study to see where loyalty came from, who among their guests were the most loyal and the assumption was that they were going to find that the guests who stayed in their hotels who had a flawless stay were most loyal and that's not what they found.

What they found was that the most loyal clients were the ones who had a problem with their stay who brought that problem to the attention of a staff member and had that problem promptly resolved. If you extrapolate from that and just assume that there is going to be a problem or in this bigger context, there's going to be this difficult period and the loyalty, the length of the relationship, the esteem that will accrue to us in the eyes of the client is all going to be determined by how we navigate through that tough path, then I think you're preparing yourself for successful outcome. Does that make sense to you?

David: It does, yes. I was just shaking my head yes as you were saying that. It's such a great example. We don't want to turn off the hot water to every hotel room so that we can then solve the problem, just before everybody [crosstalk] but this healthy push-back, this healthy solution to the tension doesn't happen unless you have the kind of relationship with your clients that allows two-way honest communication.

By two-way, I really do mean two-way. The client needs to be willing to hear from you what you're really thinking during the relationship, not just in the sales process, and you need to be willing to hear from them as well, but don't ever read too much into anything that's happening in one of these single phases.

Blair: Yes, that's great. Why don't we end it right there. That was a worthwhile discussion, at least it was to me. We'll let our listeners be the judge. When is the book out?

David: Well, it's ready to go, so as soon as, I'm guessing in the fall at this point. I'm really excited about it. I'm terribly nervous about it too, which probably means that's probably good, right?

Blair: That's a good sign. Fall of 2020, can't wait to see it. Thanks for this, David.

David: Thank you, Blair.