Own The Damn Fence.

Client Services, the gatekeeper.

The role of client services shares some very common responsibilities across agencies. Once commonality is ownership of the client relationship, being the face of the agency to the client’s organization. This critical responsibility includes a full-view of the client, their business and their market. Client services needs to intimately know the client, what they sell, what their goals are, who their competition is and how they sell. In essence, client services needs to know “everything” about the client and their business.

Most often, client services also provides leadership for the agency team assigned to the client. They need to intimately understand the scope of the engagement(s), the team and their skills and styles, and ensure that the agency meets their commitments relative to the client’s expectations.

These crucial and dual roles of providing leadership to both the client organization and to the agency’s internal team often manifest in metaphorically “walking the fence” of simultaneously advocating for both parties. Double-agents? In many ways, yes. And it’s critically important that client services do an equally effective job in their advocating for client and agency alike.

It’s client services job to ensure that both client and agency remain fully engaged, productive, and happy. In doing so, client services need to not just walk the fence, but they need to embrace the critical role in every way possible and own the damn fence. At the end of the day, client services will be judged by their ability to juggle the myriad wants, needs, personalities, and situations, and still deliver great results. It isn’t always easy, but that’s the job. And great client servers will embrace this challenge and will thrive in it — they WANT the responsibility, they WANT to own that damn fence.