What Is Client Management? What To Expect & Tips

Being a freelancer comes with a whole onslaught of worries and responsibilities. One of the biggest issues many freelancers face is how to manage client expectations, not only when negotiating new deals but also when handling existing clients.

This, frequently overlooked, skill of effectively organizing client interactions is known as client management. For freelancers, it’s a necessary skill to master if they want to get the most out of their client relationships, 

So what is client management? This article will go over everything you need to know about the most effective skills and tools necessary for building and nurturing solid client relationships, and the common pitfalls that you should avoid falling into.

What Is Client Management: The Basics

Client management refers to the entire process of overseeing and coordinating client interactions and ensuring client satisfaction. It includes activities such as onboarding, project management, feedback review, and upselling. Freelancers typically handle client management by themselves, while companies tend to have a dedicated role that acts as a client manager.

Client management shouldn’t be confused with customer management. Customers tend to make one-time arrangements since they will purchase a good or service and end their engagement. Meanwhile, clients will sign up with long-term cooperation in mind, which makes it important to build a healthy relationship that will inspire them to stay as long as possible.

What Makes Client Management So Important?

Having an effective client management strategy is important for several reasons.

• First and foremost, it increases the client retention rate — the rate at which clients are likely to stick with your services for a longer time. A higher client retention rate increases profit in the long run, as it means that you can save money that’d be spent on marketing to attract new potential clients.

• Happy clients will also refer new clients to you. Authentic referrals from loyal customers often make the best and most effective marketing.
• Clients who are content with your relationship and have all their expectations met will usually be more appreciative of your efforts, making them easier to work with. Their extensive experience with the process of collaborating with you will also make future cooperation more effortless.
• Loyal, long-term clients will be more likely to close deals quickly, without driving hard bargains.
• It’s much easier to get feedback on your client relationship approach and explicitly learn about client expectations, making it easier to collect relevant data and build a successful client relationship strategy.

Crucial Client Management Skills

Although maintaining good client relationships might seem like a no-brainer to people who haven’t had to deal with client or customer relationship management, in truth it requires developing and building upon a specific set of skills. We’ll go over the most important ones.

Industry Knowledge

Many freelancers work as independent contractors for clients in industries outside of their own. For example, freelance writers tend to specialize in a particular niche, such as medical writing, e-commerce, or SaaS.

Having extensive industry knowledge of the target niche will help you do your work more effectively and show your clients that you care about their industry. It’s a much better optic than looking like you’re in it to make money without scratching beyond the surface

People Skills

Having solid communication skills is necessary for building client trust. The trick is in balancing a professional approach with a human touch — while strong professional etiquette is the basis for all client and customer communications, the client will appreciate you showing genuine interest in them.

Try to remember important personal details about your clients, such as names, dates, family status, and important life events. Be patient, flexible, and understanding with them. This should help demostrate that you’re ready to go out of your way to listen to their concerns. Clients will appreciate this, and most will return the favor.

Honesty

It should go without saying but being consistently honest with your clients is an absolute must. Hardly anything can harm your reputation as much as making claims, only to end up failing your clients’ expectations.

Be aware of your capacities and limitations, and don’t promise things that you can’t deliver. Everyone appreciates having clear expectations from their professional partners, so ensure you and your client are always on the same page.

Customer Service Skills

Being aware of customer service etiquette is of immense help when dealing with an abundance of people in a professional context. Though a lot of it is tied to general people skills, professional knowledge of how to handle clients and customers is irreplaceable.

You should be an active listener, aiming to be attentive and patient with your clients. Communicate your ideas clearly and guide your clients to communicate their ideas in the same way too. Know how to be adaptable and adjust your priorities to help your clients when it’s necessary.

Problem-Solving Skills

Problem-solving skills refer to critical thinking, information processing, decision-making, creativity, and other mental skills related to the ability to solve problems quickly and effectively. The most efficient problem solvers can break an issue down into smaller, more manageable parts, and then systematically solve them.

While managing clients, you will inevitably face issues that neither you nor your clients could have foreseen. Being able to solve them with minimal fuss helps get everything running as it should as quickly as possible, reducing both your and your client’s frustration.

Positive Attitude

Having a positive mindset will convince your clients that together, you can overcome any challenges and obstacles that you come upon during your business journey. Clients are instinctively drawn to professionals who radiate confidence and enthusiasm.

To keep a positive attitude, the most important thing is to keep a healthy work schedule that lets you take care of all your needs properly. Overworking yourself will cause stress and will ultimately just make you lose motivation for your work.

Organization

Properly organizing your work also means being able to set aside a fair amount of time for each of your clients. That way, none of your existing clients will feel left behind, and you’ll have enough time left to accept new clients.

If you have trouble organizing your time between clients, try using a scheduling tool to help you out. This can take a lot of stress and effort off your mind, and help you refocus on more important and pressing tasks.

Calm

Certain clients can be difficult to handle, and many freelancers find it hard to keep their cool in the face of that. Still, remaining collected even in the most difficult circumstances is the hallmark of any professional and something that any client manager has to master.

Keeping a cool and steady mentality regarding the tasks at hand also makes you appear more confident about your work. Your clients will see this confidence as a sign that you can make for a reliable and trustworthy partner in the long run.

Attention to Detail

During your regular client interactions, there will inevitably be a few situations where you may miss some essential details required by your client. Still, greater attention to detail can keep these incidents to a minimum, keeping your clients happier.

Being consistently inattentive to your clients’ briefs, demands, and concerns will build up frustration among your clients, and potentially even lead some of them to terminate their contracts. To avoid this, never gloss over the details you may initially see as irrelevant.

Common Client Management Pitfalls

When building an effective client management process, there are several common mistakes that client managers should do their best to avoid. Here are the most critical ones.

Neglecting Existing Clients

Neglecting your old clients in favor of new ones is a surefire way to lose trusted client relationships that you’ve spent months or even years building upon. Although the prospect of collaborating with exciting new clients may cause you to lose sight of your old partnerships, you should always prioritize your trusted, loyal partners.

For most freelancers, loyal long-term clients tend to be the bedrock of success. Having a successful, long-term business relationship with a client who trusts your expertise is often the best reference one can get and can function as a gateway for many new opportunities.

Miscommunication

Most disagreements between freelancers and clients arise over simple miscommunication, but such incidents can prove fatal for your working relationships. A lack of communication can have comparable results — it’s always preferable to act too inquisitive than to work with unclear directives.

Always clearly listen to your clients’ goals and ideas and be clear about your own boundaries and capacities. With such an approach, managing client expectations should be a breeze.

Inconsistent Service Quality

Clients expect professionalism and diligence throughout their engagement with you. Receiving services that are substandard to what they are used to from collaborating with you can seriously erode trust and cause them to see you as an unreliable partner.

To remedy this, make sure to hold your own work to a consistent standard, look over any potential flaws and errors before submitting it, and do your best to avoid working in a rush. Sometimes extending the deadline is a better option than delivering subpar work. 

Disorganization

Hardly anything can jeopardize your client relationship as much as ignoring their emails or calls and missing hard deadlines, valuable information, or milestones. Whenever this happens, it’s usually a result of simple disorganization rather than bad faith, but that doesn’t make its consequences any less destructive.

If you have issues organizing your work, don’t shy away from using client management software to help you out. Workflow tools can help streamline your communication and keep track of all relevant data, documentation, and deadlines.

Tips on Building Effective Client Relationships

Client management can be a fickle activity, and the right course of action often depends on the exact industry that your clients are in, plus the exact kind of service that you provide. Still, these several tips should help you manage clients no matter what niche you are involved in.

Ask Your Clients for Their Preferred Communication Channels

Letting your clients choose their preferred communication channel may make communication somewhat less convenient for you, but it’s a price worth paying for the appreciation your clients will show you for being as forthcoming.

You can easily remedy any inconvenience on your side by using a client management system. Many of these tools include all-in-one messaging capabilities that let you keep all your messaging platforms in one single place.

Share Your Milestones and Important Results

Transparency goes both ways, so just as you should be open about your failings and limitations, you should also show off your wins whenever it’s warranted. Don’t be shy about demonstrating your professional value.

Clients will see your milestones as proof that you are consistently getting results. It will raise your professional reputation and convince existing clients that they were right to hire you, as well as potential clients that you are worth hiring.

Provide Value and Education to Clients

Most clients will know how to appreciate it if your services add some extra value on top of the finished product. In the information era, knowledge immediately translates to money, so there is hardly a better way to do so than by providing valuable know-how.

Clients love to learn about new industry trends, product updates, and changes in their industry, so if there is anything you feel that they may want to know but don’t, make sure to share it with them.

Use the Right Customer Relationship Management Software

Client relationship management software lets you automate most of your everyday tasks and helps you manage clients way more effectively. The best software in the category can centralize all your client management needs in one single place, removing the need for other tools.

Good client management software saves time and effort, increases overall work efficiency, and leaves less space open for potentially fatal professional mistakes.

What Is a Client Management System?

A client management system refers to the whole client management structure that freelancers and businesses adopt when dealing with current and prospective clients. Nowadays, the entire client management pipeline can be handled by dedicated software solutions.

We’ll go over the best client management solutions that will help you get the best out of your client relations.

Honeybook

Honeybook is an all-in-one client flow platform designed to provide a united space for all necessary client interactions. You can use it to invoice clients, sign contracts, book and schedule tasks, manage your projects, and much more. It also lets you automate your workflows, saving you further effort.

You can purchase Honeybook in one of three available plans, costing $19/month, $39/month, and $79/month.

Pipedrive

While primarily a sales platform, Pipedrive includes features that make it one of the ideal choices for client management, too. It’s one of the best software solutions available on the market concerning project tracking and management. You can use Pipedrive to track your key performance indicators, giving you a good idea of the effectiveness of your client management strategy.

Pipedrive comes with a total of five possible pricing plans, ranging from $11.90/month to $74.90/month.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based all-in-one CRM software tool that lets you view and manage your client pipeline from anywhere in the world. You can use the cloud platform to create a centralized CRM board and share it with your clients, who can see an interactive roadmap of your ongoing projects. It also includes an array of communication features that keep all your messages in one place.

Apart from a free version and a custom-priced Enterprise plan, this client management tool offers three pricing plans ranging costing $10/month, $12/month, and $24/month.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Client Management a Hard Skill?

Client management is a crucial skill freelancers need to possess to succeed. It could start off as challenging, but with a clever strategy and a CRM tool to help your efforts, it shouldn’t be too hard to integrate client management into your daily workflow.

How Can Automation Help in Client Management?

Automation can help with a lot of minor tasks. For example, to automatically send a client a birthday greeting on the target date, and AI can be used to respond to simple inquiries that don’t necessarily require human oversight.

Wrapping Up

Regardless of whether you are working solo or running a freelance agency, getting a grasp of client management can be a tough nut to crack. Still, it must be taken seriously by anyone aiming for business growth, looking to bring more clients to the table, and aiming to make the existing clients fully satisfied.

We hope that our primer helped you learn more about client management and that you’ll find the knowledge useful in your future endeavors. If you found the primer helpful and informative, make sure to share it with others who may also find it useful.

Of course, if you have any ideas on the topic that you believe are worth mentioning, let yourself be heard right here in the comment section, and share this with a fellow freelancer looking for client management tips!