Private: Intelligence

Are you an Over Reaction Syndrome sufferer?  Client service can be a difficult business, but it can be even harder if you over react to everything that comes your way, especially when it comes from the clients! 

It’s not something you can find in a book as this is some pretty “new science” we’re talking about here, but it’s real and its prevalent in our industry!  Over Reaction Syndrome, or ORS as I like to call it, stems from the lack of a plan or a roadmap being put in place.  When you don’t have a roadmap for your business, everything that comes your way can seem like a priority.   Some call it a strategy, but I like to cast a wider net and consider it a roadmap.  A roadmap is inclusive of a strategy, but it also includes a series of concepts, priorities and some future vision that can provide a filter for where you want to go with your business.  Its natural that a company will create this for themselves if they want to be successful, but it’s also natural that an agency or any other client service person would, and should, do the same.  Unfortunately there are too many situations where they don’t, and those are the people who suffer from ORS!

If you are a client service person, the very first thing you should do is sit down and establish a basic roadmap for your client.  If you’re on the agency side, it can be about where you want the client to go, where they should spend money, or what kind of innovations you think they should consider.  If you are a publisher it can be as simple as your projected growth for the account and how you expect to get there.  A roadmap allows you to have a place to start.  Its an initial point of reference, and it’s a filter that allows you to evaluate every client service request that comes down your path, and determine how you should react.  Lets face it – this is a reactive business.  However, you can mitigate the over reaction by having some context to determine what your reaction should be.  How far should you go, how deep should you dive.  In 99% of client service situations, you are hired because you are the perceived expert in a specific area, and the clients are paying you as such.  If you are the expert, and you have a roadmap put in place, then you should not be afraid to push back or say “no” to some client requests if you have a rationale and a hypothesis that is based on actual strategic thinking.  Your roadmap can allow you to do that.

When you don’t have a roadmap, you can quickly and easily succumb to ORS.  The symptoms of ORS are easy to spot.  Your day gets longer, and every time the phone rings you experience a sense of dread and fright with the direction that is inevitably awaiting you on the line.  You sleep fewer hours, you get a little bit touchy with people.  You feel out-of-control, and the fact is you are!  ORS is the signal that you are no longer acting in the way that you were perceived.  You are no longer the expert, you’re an order taker!

This doesn’t mean that when the client calls, you can tell them “no” all the time.  This doesn’t mean clients are wrong.  It simply means that you are supposed to be engaging in a relationship with your clients, and unfortunately you’re not!  You’re a servant, or as they will tend to put it – a vendor.  The differences between a partner and a vendor are well documented, but I can tell you that more vendors suffer from ORS than do partners.

The development of your roadmap will help you to avoid ORS.  It can take a day or it can take two weeks, but in any new engagement and in any new role, you should always first sit down and draft a roadmap to work with.  The roadmap will change, it will evolve.  It should be considered a dynamic document, but the point is that its there.  It’s simple.

Have you drafted a roadmap for your current role?  It’s never too late to correct this issue and ORS can be healed.  Give it a shot!!