The early bird catches the worm: keep ahead of decision maker changes at your dream clients.
When a client contact moves on to a new role, either within a distant branch of the same organisation, or an entirely new one, it is easy to lose contact.
But when I look closely at the behaviour patterns of the most successful agency leaders in the industry, they have all taken on a role as a 'career facilitator' for their brightest clients. By that I mean that they have connected their contacts to facilitate decision maker moves. Naturally, when you ease the career cogs of the brightest marketers, you make your agency invaluable and front of mind when accounts are up for change of supplier.
Now I'm not suggesting you become an exec search consultant for your favourite clients, you're probably being pulled in way too many directions to consider taking on that mantle too. But you can up your game in one respect: keeping in contact with decision makers when they move to a new role.
Firstly, you need to intel to know when they actually have moved. Often, without tech on our side, it can take at best days, at worst weeks for information like this to percolate down to you. By which time they may have already picked their new agency roster.
Instead, task your account leads (or yourself if you're the main point of contact) to turn on LinkedIn notifications for role changes.
If you have Sales Navigator, this article will help you: https://www.linkedin.com/help/sales-navigator/answer/a108112/sales-updates-in-sales-navigator-overview?lang=en
If you use normal, free LinkedIn, check out this article for steps on how to do this: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/76636/managing-your-linkedin-notification-updates?lang=en
Once an important contact has been flagged as having moved, be sure to congratulate them personally on their new role. You might do one of the following, depending on how much you value them:
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send a quick message to their LinkedIn inbox to say congratulations. Don't be tempted to use the lazy auto type option that LinkedIn offers to post on their update.
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scrape their new email from LinkedIn using a Chrome extension, so you can send a message direct to their email inbox.
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send them a postal message or gift, to their new office (if you can make out that this isn't a remote role)
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Ask them out to a popular restaurant that will be hard to refuse, if that is appropriate.
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Invite them to a special event, if you have a close relationship.
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