WE Got This: How Teams Can Move from “Agent” and “Client” to Partnership

Any successful relationship requires work. How can you keep the relationship healthy and productive after the initial novelty has worn off and reality sets in? How can you get your own needs met while accommodating the needs of another? Why doesn’t my partner just agree with me about everything?

Building a successful vendor-client relationship is always a challenge. There is natural concern from the client that the vendor’s interests may diverge from their own (and in some cases, run counter to their own). For the vendor, there is concern that the client may be overly demanding, or may have unrealistic expectations. 

It’s all too easy for both sides to drop into a defensive crouch, warily circling each other throughout the process, cautious to get too close. Even easier given that there is often a lot at stake for both sides and each is worried about how a mistake will look.

How do we break out of this cycle? How can we build a productive, long-term relationship between a vendor and a client and ensure our interests are aligned, that both sides have skin in the game and see each other as part of the same team?

As ImageX and our clients worked together on website redesign projects, we confronted those challenges, and worked together to solve them. Candour, humour, listening and empathy helped on both sides. 

We learned how to work together as a team, how to overcome seemingly intractable obstacles, how to appreciate what each side could do for the other. We tackled each of these as a team, and learned how to depend on one another to power through critical project milestones.  

We’ll discuss real-world case studies from our projects and provide practical tips on how to pivot your own relationship from client-agent to partners.

In this session, we will share our experiences and thoughts on:

• How to build trust and commitment on both sides, so that both sides are looking out for one another and celebrating each other’s successes
• How to “blend” teams in a way that increases capacity while respecting the established workflows of both 
• Where we made mistakes and how we learned from them
• How to communicate and overcome challenges, and how challenges can be an opportunity to bring teams closer together instead of further apart