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Tuesday Thought: Why you should set impossible goals

Every year, I set a big personal goal. A goal so large that it seems impossible to reach. But then, when I succeed, the impacts of crossing that threshold brings benefits I’ll reap the other 364 days of the year.

Entrepreneur and business leader Jesse Itzler calls this kind of endeavor a Misogi Challenge. By design, it helps us uncover what we’re capable of and tap into possibilities we don’t see now.

Over the past four years, I’ve learned a lot from this perhaps extreme form of goal setting.

Taking on my Everest (literally)

This year, I challenged myself to an endurance hiking event, set for late August. The event is to hike the equivalent height of Mount Everest over 36 hours. My initial training started lightly last November and kicked into high gear three months ago.

A few days ago, I went for one of three lengthy training hikes to help prepare for the event. As with any intentional goal setting, I identified a desired future state: the right hike in terms of distance, elevation gain, and time that aligned with my training plan. I prepared driving directions, gathered supplies and got a good night’s sleep the night before.

But the first few hours of the journey didn’t go as planned.

Our driving directions took us to the wrong side of the mountain, and we lost an hour just getting to our designated starting point. About a mile and a half into the hike, we took a wrong turn due to poor trail markings, costing us another 45 minutes as we realized we were hiking in the opposite direction. With no cell service, we couldn’t rely on GPS. And our fuel supplies didn’t suffice for the added time on the mountain. I had to stop and rest at one point because of unexpected cramping due to dehydration.

I threw my hands up and said out loud, “Let’s just go home.” After all those setbacks, maybe it just wasn’t the right day and under the right conditions to complete that training hikes.

But we stayed and finished the hike. And, as you’d expect, the trek back down the mountain was much easier and more efficient than the hike up.

A universal roadmap for big goals

These types of challenges have taught me numerous lessons over the years. This specific challenge is so large that it is equal parts terrifying and exciting. Because of it, I’ve been studying how to overcome big business or endurance challenges.

According to Itzler, setting a roadmap to accomplish big goals is the same no matter the challenge:

Identify and visualize what you want to accomplish and what it looks like when you get there.
Acknowledge the personal fear created by the goal.
Recognize your internal doubt over your ability to reach the goal.
Define your plan to achieve the goal.
Do the work and execute the plan.
Solve the right problems when you face unforeseen gaps, setbacks, and challenges. (These problems will happen. Expect them.)
Demonstrate optimism and confidence in your mental resiliency.
Succeed.

Too often, the problem phase stops people in their tracks. They become so overwhelmed by obstacles in their path that they can’t find the energy to overcome them.

What people don’t recognize is that they’re so close to accomplishing the goal – much closer than they believe and can see. And success is likely just on the other side of that challenge if they can persevere.

My recent training hike was a perfect reminder of this principle put into action. My ultimate August hike is a big challenge. Problems, small hiccups, and setbacks will arise, and we should expect this. But we can’t ever forget that success often is closer than what we might be thinking in the moment.

So, ask yourself: “Am I setting goals that scare me? What am I doing to overcome those fears? And am I closer to succeeding than I tend to believe?”

Dotted Line CEO earns Virginia Business Women in Leadership Award

Lauren Sweeney, founder and CEO of Dotted Line, was named one of the 2022 Women in Leadership by Virginia Business. This year’s list honors 42 women, culled from more than 300 nominations, who set the standard for leadership in business and nonprofit agencies of all sizes across the state.

Continue to Virginia Business for the full list of honorees and a profile on Lauren, which calls out her investment in the next generation of Dotted Line leaders.

Tuesday Thought: How your core principles can drive results

When teams put their core principles into action, they find themselves on a clear path to achieve desired results. Whether we refer to them as principles or values, these guiding tenets come alive in people’s daily conversations, decisions, and choices.

If you need further convincing, just look at Cheryl Bachelder, former CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen – a brand she helped rescue from a serious slump.

I’ve recently had the privilege of getting to know Cheryl and learning more about her mastery of brand management and servant leadership. From working on brands including Domino’s Pizza, Nabisco, Gillette, and Procter & Gamble, she knows how effective leadership can drive a company’s revenue performance.

Cheryl often talks about the need for a bold destination and a compelling strategic plan – a roadmap that gives clarity as to what a team will accomplish. While the roadmap is essential, Cheryl notes that it can’t drive superior results on its own. Rather, the roadmap is the what; teams need to decide how to work together to accomplish a plan.

This is where core principles (the how) come in. Popeyes’ six core principles are:

Be passionate.
Listen and learn continuously.
Be fact-based and planful.
Coach and develop people.
Be personally accountable.
Value humility.

Popeyes had suffered from declining revenue, a tired brand, low employee retention, and other issues for years. But look at what happened when Cheryl came aboard as CEO and rallied the company around those core principles: Popeyes’ share price grew from $8.90 to $61.31 from February 2008 to December 2016, and its stock outpaced the S&P 500 restaurant sector.

Does your business have bold goals you hope to achieve in the next year or three or 10? That’s great – it should! But you can’t reach those goals with a compelling strategy alone. Your values determine how you will work together to accomplish that strategy. Get aligned on your company’s core principles, and the work will speak for itself.

So, ask yourself: “What are my company’s core principles? Is my team aligned on them, and are they driving the results we want to see?”

What does happiness in the workplace mean for your agency?

After two-plus years of the pandemic, our world’s relationship to work looks completely different from the way it used to.

We have a better understanding of what makes us feel fulfilled on the job and what leaves us feeling high and dry. We’ve learned that a rigid 9-to-5 schedule doesn’t work for everyone. We’ve decided that we deserve to do work that matters to us. In short, happiness in the workplace is more important than it’s ever been.

But happiness can easily fall to the bottom of your company’s priority list, especially in a high-burnout industry like marketing. Obligations to clients, deadlines and agency growth can overshadow whether the people you work with even like being there.

If you’re a leader at your agency, try asking your team a few questions to see how you can help them be happier on the job.

“Do you have the flexibility you need?”

One of the key lessons learned from the pandemic is that everyone works differently.

Some of us operate best with our coworkers buzzing about in the background. Others find a day at home helps them focus on pressing tasks. Some feel they only really need to be in person for important meetings, while others rely on in-person collaboration to spur creativity.

Your team members might have found that their pandemic-era setup worked unexpectedly well, but they might be hesitant to say so – especially if your agency has largely resumed in-person work. Given the nature of professional services, most agencies can offer some work-from-home flexibility without much trouble.

Try asking your team if your current attendance model works for them. If not, dig deeper and see what kind of flexibility they need to thrive.

“Do you feel valued?”

Nobody wants to be in a friendship or relationship where they feel unwanted. That sentiment applies to the workplace, too.

Feeling valued at work doesn’t necessarily mean a beefy paycheck. The highest-paid person on your team might feel undervalued if they get a paltry vacation allowance. Perhaps they’d like more learning and development opportunities, like going to that fancy conference next month. Or maybe they just want you to give them and their work the occasional shout-out.

People also feel more seen when others invest in them as people, not just coworkers. Sure, that office social hour or end-of-quarter party might seem insignificant. But events and team-building exercises help us bond over what makes us human: family, hobbies, culture – even embarrassing high school stories.

Show your team that you want them to feel appreciated, and then work with them to determine how you can make that happen.

“Are we doing meaningful work?”

People can’t be happiest at work if they don’t want to do … well, the work.

Doing work that helps others and feels meaningful can significantly boost your happiness, well-being and even your lifespan. (We’re not kidding.) That’s what’s so important about bringing on clients you and your team believe in. When your team gets to help make a difference, it will motivate them to perform their best.

But having the right clients isn’t the answer for every struggling team member. Sometimes, people just aren’t satisfied with their role on a team. When their responsibilities don’t play to their strengths, they’re bound to feel less accomplished, even if they’re doing passable work. Imagine being a knockout swimmer. Wouldn’t you be bummed if your triathlon relay team assigned you to the bicycle leg, even if you’re a decent cyclist?

Ask your team if they find their work meaningful. If not, encourage them to seek new responsibilities or (if possible) ask to work on a different client.

Finding our Happier Place … and helping you find yours

We’ve done some rethinking lately – about our goals and our motivations, how we perform best, and what makes Dotted Line a great place to work.

Creating a positive work environment is one of our top priorities, especially given how fast we’re growing. Thanks to open office dialogue, we recently took a few actionable steps to make our team a little happier:

We started letting people work from home up to three days a week;
We adopted an unlimited paid time-off policy with a four-week annual minimum;
We adjusted our profit-sharing model to more accurately reflect team members’ hard work; and
We scheduled a series of activities in May to commemorate Mental Health Awareness Month, including in-office yoga and a weeklong walking challenge.

One thing hasn’t changed: the happiness we get from doing work that makes others happy, too. That’s why we launched our Happier Place project earlier in May.

The Happier Place involves a simple, easy-to-use landing page. Just click a button to cycle through a roulette of smile-inducing GIFs hand-picked by our team. (We’re especially fond of the rabbit taking a sink bath and pretty much anything involving a hedgehog.)

It’s been a tough stretch for everyone in every industry. We hope this humble piece of creative helps you brighten a dull moment or wind down from a long day. Visit https://findyourhappier.place/ for a quick and easy mood boost.

If you think you need professional mental health services, it’s never the wrong time to seek help. Visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness or the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Services for important resources.

Grow Your B2C Audience With These 3 B2B Marketing Tools

Business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing often comes more naturally to marketers than business-to-business (B2B). It’s in our nature to relate to other people – to draw from our emotions, passions and other human tendencies – which is what B2C is all about. It feels less natural to appeal to whole organizations rather than the individuals within them – to rely on numbers and logic more than shared experience.

These differences have given B2B an unsexy reputation in the marketing world, distracting us from a surprising truth: B2B and B2C are more similar than most of us are willing to admit.

Though their end goals are seemingly different, running a successful B2B or B2C strategy means knowing your audience. And most audiences’ decisions are shaped by information they receive through multiple platforms –platforms customary to both B2B and B2C strategies. Adapting certain traditional B2B tactics to a B2C strategy can help to meet your audience at multiple points in their lives.

Consider using these three traditional B2B tools to fortify your B2C marketing strategy and up your chances of broader audience penetration.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great tool for both building trust in your organization and diversifying your social media audience, especially if you’re marketing to millennials.

Younger audiences are often mission driven in their behaviors. They’re looking for organizations whose beliefs reflect their own, and they want to see those beliefs put into action through products and advocacy. On LinkedIn, you can draw audiences with in-depth content that unpackages complex, mission-focused topics and helps build brand authenticity.

Further, while you’re more likely to reach women on channels like Instagram or Facebook, LinkedIn leans slightly toward men. If professional males are a segment of your audience that’s proven trickier to connect with, you’ll have better luck finding them on LinkedIn.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound is typically a B2B tool because it’s great for marketing anything involving a high price point or long-term investment. Products such as business information software, machinery and consultation services have longer sales funnels, and leads spend more time weighing their options before they buy.

But prolonged sales cycles happen in B2C, too, with expensive products such as cars and homes – or long-term investments like meal kit subscriptions. Successfully marketing these consumer-facing products means nurturing leads through the awareness and consideration stages all the way to final decision.

Take our client GOGO Band, which specializes in tech-based solutions to childhood bedwetting. While our work with them is primarily B2C, their product includes complex electronic equipment and a recurring subscription model – a pricey, long-term investment. So we’re guiding prospects steadily through the sales funnel via email workflows, educational e-books and other lead-nurturing methods.

Remember that B2C inbound marketing should focus on anticipating your audience’s questions and answering them before they even ask. Rather than addressing these major questions in business-friendly formats like white papers and hours-long seminars, do it with bite-sized content like social media posts or newsletters.

Longform Content

I know, I just said to keep things brief. But longform content lets your brand unpackage complex, often data-driven topics in a way that engages the consumer’s whole brain and helps them identify with your business objectives.

Our client Worksite Labs provides quick-turnaround PCR COVID-19 testing for business, travel, events, schools and other purposes. While testing is a high-demand product (especially during the recent Omicron surge), the inner workings of the test product – and the disease it addresses – are highly complex and scientific in nature.

By producing a three-part B2C blog series that explained COVID-19 immunity, preventive practices and treatments, our team helped Worksite Labs speak its audience’s language and educate them on a complicated, widely misunderstood topic. In turn, these blogs emphasized the importance of Worksite Labs’ product and concretized the company’s healthcare expertise.

Whether you use traditionally B2B or B2C tools, you can connect with your consumers if you take the time to understand them. Depending on your product and your goals, you can send different value props to different audiences or the same value prop across multiple platforms. Whatever you land on, be consistent. At the end of the day, it’s consistency that drives consumer decisions.

Are you looking to broaden your audience and meet prospects where they are? Our team of creative, content and brand strategy experts will develop a framework that can help your ambitious brand do more business. Click here to reach out.

Tuesday Thought: How the Golden Rule Drives Success

“A successful team is many voices with a single heart.” – John C. Maxwell

“Relationships help us to define who we are and what we can become. Most of us can trace our successes to pivotal relationships.” – Donald Clifton and Paula Nelson

•••

Dotted Line’s core values guide how we work with each other and with each client every day. At the top of that list: Treat others the way you would want to be treated. But it tends to be the least talked about and most misunderstood value.

We intentionally listed this first among our six values because it’s our guiding star for how we operate in our team-based model. In other words, if we do our best to treat others well in our daily work and interactions, living the rest of our values will come to us more naturally. It’s a big reason why this is a rule we’ve encouraged our team to follow since our earliest days.

Our decisions can impact more than just ourselves. How we treat others is how we invite others to treat us. This goes beyond simply being kind to each other. It’s thinking about others the way you want to be thought of. Feeling about others the way you want to others to feel about you. Speaking to others the way you want to be spoken to.

A well-intentioned culture, competitive benefits and rock-star team members who are known and recognized by our clients – these things are all wonderful. But if we don’t build strong one-to-one relationships within our own team, nothing else really matters. Treating others the way we want to be treated is an easy start to relationship-building. If we forget this, the risk of becoming our own worst enemy becomes greater.

Bringing this Value to Life

Each day, I approach how I engage with those around me – in my family, at work, among friends and within my communities – by aiming to live this value. To start, this means treating people with kindness and respect, but it goes much further. For me, that means I want to know:

my hard work will be noticed and recognized by my people leader;
team members are excited when I join them on a new assignment;
I can contribute new ideas in a group setting without being shot down or ignored,
others value my contributions to making our team and agency better;
if I have an off morning, someone will notice and ask;
my leaders listen and understand where I want to go with my career and are proactively helping me perform at the next level; and
my peers see I’m committed to an amazing work product – one we’re all proud of – and that its completion makes the client happy and generates a big team win.

How we embrace and interact with each other will differentiate how we elevate our work and deliver consistent successes for the good of each team member, our agency and our clients.

So, ask yourself: Does the way I treat others within my organization lift them up and further our collective goals? How can I go beyond merely treating people with kindness and respect?

Is Your 2022 Marketing Strategy on Target?

Here are 3 questions mid-size brands should ask themselves to find out.

Growing a middle-market brand is no small feat. You’re often competing in markets that are dominated by big players and saturated with energetic startups.

Many of our clients come to us looking to solve this challenge through marketing, trusting we’ll turn their promotional budget into maximum ROI. An iron-clad marketing strategy is key to keeping any organization afloat, but how do you ensure lasting impact over time?

By always understanding your audience.

If you don’t know what matters most to your key demographic, and how they learn and consume information, you will lose your relevance. Why should they keep you on their radar if you cannot empathize with (and solve) their problems?

My goal is to help our clients ask the right audience-first questions to keep their marketing strategy on track. So, let’s run through the three questions you should ask yourself when putting your own strategy under the microscope.

Are you driving value for your audience?

The entire purpose of a product is to solve the customer’s problems. If your customer-facing content doesn’t focus on how your product can ease their burdens, you will lose their attention, fast.

And that would be a simple charge if you served just one audience, but that’s often not the case. Organizations need to spend the time to understand each audience (their hopes, obstacles, and behaviors), understand their potential impact to your organization (lifetime value), and prioritize marketing spend accordingly.

Thankfully, if you’re already in business, you likely have ready access to your customer base. If you ask them to help improve your services, they’ll often be more than happy to oblige.

An in-person or online customer survey is perhaps the simplest branding “health check” you can conduct. Ask customers whether you’re meeting their needs and, if not, what you can do to fix it. (And it never hurts to offer participants a small incentive as a thank-you.)

Is your message relevant to your audience?

There are two types of relevance to consider: cultural relevance and industry relevance. As the speed of business and culture continues to quicken, it’s important to show customers that you’re in touch with what currently matters in a way that separates you from the competition.

Culturally relevant brands share their messages in a way that customers resonate with and understand. This extends beyond simply using keywords, phrases, and concepts your audience is familiar with; you should mirror their values as well.

A brand’s cultural involvement drives a whopping 25% of the average consumer’s purchase decision. If your brand gives back to the community, supports social issues, and otherwise conducts itself in a way that matters to customers, they will notice.

Brands should also maintain industry relevance by taking note of major changes, challenges, and opportunities in the marketplace. A brand that adapts its messaging to respond to its audience’s excitement or concerns about these changes will come off as trustworthy and well-adjusted. COVID-19 is a great example of this – brands that pivoted to meet their audience during this unique time earned brownie points in dividends.

Marketers can pursue both cultural and industry relevance by simply keeping a steady eye on conversations in the news and on social media. It also helps to study the discourse between your competitors and their audiences to determine what works and what misses the mark. Brands that want to stay in the know should consider regular assessments of competitors’ websites and social channels to gain a quick view of market conversations and untapped opportunities.

Are you using your audience’s chosen platforms?

Every brand has a customer base that interacts with the world in a unique way. We know millennial moms are oftentimes driven to the stimulating visuals of Instagram while their boomer parents tend toward more traditional social channels like Facebook. When you focus the bulk of your budget and energy on your audience’s chosen mediums, you can maximize your marketing impact.

Also ask whether your activity on those platforms is driving the actions you want in your business. Are your customers being led to your website? Does that, in turn, lead them to make a purchase or ask for a quote? Conduct quarterly and annual analyses to see whether your strategy is yielding the desired business outcomes, not just marketing outcomes.

An effective marketing strategy requires dedicated attention to many different aspects of your audience and brand. Asking yourself these three questions – on a daily basis, not just once or twice a year – is critical to identifying diverse strategies and creating holistic solutions that may be grounded in marketing but are revenue-generating – which is the ultimate goal for all middle-market brands.

How the search for clarity fueled our latest brand refresh

A lot has changed in the past year for Dotted Line: our size, our clientele, our growing presence in the Richmond marketing space. But one thing that we didn’t expect to change as much as it did was our brand identity.

Earlier this year, as we began re-assessing our target audience, we tapped one of our brand strategists to simply crisp up our message – we expected a refresh at most. However, once we dug into insights collected from our clients and network, we realized an equal need to more clearly define Dotted Line’s product offerings and perspective.

And now, months later, perhaps you’ve noticed the fresh look of our website, but that’s just one result of our dedicated efforts to update Dotted Line’s brand positioning and messaging.

Of course, you might think that a marketing firm has the ready tools and resources to consistently update its brand, but a targeted exercise ensures you’re doing that strategically and effectively. At the same time, we saw the opportunity to practice what we preach to our clients about continuing to analyze your brand. So, we invite you to peek behind the curtain on our process and re-walk that journey with us.

The meaning of meaning

The secret to effective branding is creating authentic, personal connections between the business and the customer to foster greater trust in the buying process.

Studies show that 84% of millennials don’t trust advertising, but that 82% of individuals base their purchases on reviews and effective content that engages with consumers. In short, consumers trust other people’s perspectives before they trust a company’s paid message. Brands that communicate like people wanting to help other people create trust more quickly – facilitating a faster, more effective sales process. And the positive effects of these brand touchpoints last long after the immediate sale.

We all know actions speak louder than words. People trust actions, not lip service. Demonstrating that your organization is oriented toward its stated goal by living it through your work and beyond is the best proof point you can give a consumer.

At Dotted Line, the insights we collected – which prompted a search for deeper clarity – led us to develop a set of belief statements to serve as a North Star for Dotted Line’s brand and our team’s day-to-day work.

Beliefs fuel brand identity

Our first step was to ask ourselves some central questions. To name a few: What has happened in the past to drive our passion? What’s happening now in our world that gets us fired up? Why do we exist? And what really matters to us?

From there, we dug into what our target clients care about. We interviewed several core clients and augmented that research with team observations, which informed the creation of several target personas.

Ultimately, we arrived at four powerful belief statements:

We put creativity to work to grow businesses because problem-solving is the fastest way to achieve ambitious growth.
We start by putting the dots in a row because we know a strategically led approach fights inefficiency and ineffectiveness for our clients’ marketing.
We bring together top performers in new and traditional media to execute omnichannel campaigns.
We are people who care as much as you do. Strategic partnership requires co-ownership of goals and results.

By determining which beliefs drive meaning for our agency, we could then analyze our visuals, messaging, and client experience to see if they were consistent in executing our ideals. Moving forward, we’ll continue asking ourselves what actions we can take to generate the right moments that prove our beliefs, and how we’re teaching and reinforcing these beliefs to our team.

Brand building is never finished

The operative words in that last sentence? Moving forward. As Dotted Line continues to grow and evolve, we’re always working to build our brand: enhance our visual identity, sharpen our message, and create meaningful moments for clients.

It’s tempting to view brand building as a destination, but it is, in fact, a journey. A company that consistently evaluates its own beliefs, and whether those beliefs drive its brand identity, is better equipped to drive traffic, leads, and conversions.

That’s not just conjecture. Lucidpress and Demand Metric found in 2017 that brand consistency drove an average 23% revenue increase for companies. If your beliefs don’t align with your messaging, identity, and moments, it’s time to consider a shift.

As a team of creative, content, and brand strategy experts, Dotted Line is equipped to build your brand through collaborative, research-driven methods that yield lasting results. Click here to reach out.

Tuesday Thought: Re-Engineering Our Habits for Success

“Vision without action is just a dream.” – Joel Arthur Baker

“Destiny is not a mystery. Destiny is daily habits. It’s mind over matter. It’s nurture over nature. It’s a daily grind in the same direction. Show me your habits. I’ll show you your future.” – Mark Batterson

•••

I’ve never been a big fan of setting ambitious goals or dreams without having a supporting action plan. I talk with many people who share grand hopes for the future, but in follow-up conversations a year or two later, I learn most didn’t achieve what they’d dreamed.

Days turn into months, and behavior changes never happen to instigate the necessary activities that turn actions into outcomes. For example, a big problem with New Year’s resolutions is that we fail to consistently practice the action that’s needed for us to succeed. Whether it’s getting out of debt or getting into shape, the habits we adapt dictate our progress.

A recent Duke University study shared that 45% of our daily behavior is automatic. So if we want to see meaningful change in our lives, we must reverse-engineer the steps toward a goal to put the right habits in place to achieve that desired outcome. As I think about some of my goals this year – for me personally, for my family, and for our agency team – this topic of habits and building a successful system is top of mind.

I recently heard author Mark Batterson talk about how he thinks about his habit formation, as he explores more deeply in his newest book, Do It For a Day. He assesses his habits with three questions: “Are my habits measurable? Are they meaningful? And are they maintainable?”

Measurable: We map miles, count calories and budget dollars. Our habits are quantifiable.
Meaningful: If I take on the desired persona, I believe I can do it. I believe I am a runner, so, therefore, I am able to run 30 minutes today.
Maintainable: Can I do it for one day? If so, I can do it again tomorrow. I spent time writing today, so, therefore, I can also write tomorrow.

Batterson looked at the habits of some of the most successful leaders in American history to hack their routines. What he found is that the top trend across all of them was their ability to focus and put discipline around their daily habits. Batterson shares that we often overestimate what we can do in a year or two and vastly underestimate what we can do in five or 10.

The encouraging news is that you’re always only one habit away from any goal you set.

In those moments when I feel like I just don’t have the time, I remember that a friend told me the average person spends two and a half hours per day on social media. That’s 15% of our typical waking hours. Unfortunately, when I look at my weekly iPhone activity report, my social media usage isn’t far off (even if some of it is work related).

So how do I accomplish big goals? This week, I’m focusing on one new habit to integrate daily.

What one habit could you adopt this week to see if it makes an impact in a month?

Six Ways to Produce Award-Worthy Marketing Content for Clients

Getting to great work starts and ends with a trusting and collaborative relationship.

The most memorable modern marketing campaigns (the Geico Gecko or Progressive’s Flo come to mind) are the ones that play off relatable, human interactions and remind audiences a bit of themselves. These and other popular advertising mascots show us that, behind the brands we trust, there are people with personalities and ambitions just like us, and we bond with them emotionally.

But one-on-one connection (simulated or otherwise) doesn’t just play a role in the final commercial, print ad or radio spot; it’s a crucial tenet across the entire marketing lifecycle. Great business is built on strong and trusted client-account relationships that form with time, patience and dedication.

In my 20-plus years in account-based work, I’ve found that behind every award-winning marketing campaign is an account team that’s committed to maintaining a healthy and collaborative relationship with the client.

Here are six relationship-based approaches every account team should take toward delivering top-notch work for clients.

Communicate and over-communicate.

Nothing leads to a great relationship than clear communication. If everyone understands each client request, its individual components and the implementation plan, the resulting product will be more cohesive and powerful.

Consider Commander’s Intent, a military principle by which leaders outline the who, what, when, where and why (five W’s) of a mission’s execution plan. While your approach to team-based organization may differ slightly, the longstanding success of Commander’s Intent demonstrates the usefulness of detail-oriented planning and communication.

Communication also enables deepened personal relationships with the client, making them to feel seen and appreciated for their vision and goals. This requires patience (it took months to break through to one of my most demanding former clients), but the quality content and friendships that result are well worth it.

Keep an open mind.

Great ideas can come from anywhere. Whether a spectacular vision for a marketing campaign comes from you, the client or the most junior member of your account team, don’t ignore it, especially based on seniority. It may just become your client’s next great claim to fame.

Be detail oriented.

Details are the backbone of any successful process. Account leaders should take the time to develop and implement protocols and tools for every team member, so that even the minutiae of a client-facing project are fully addressed. From holding kickoff meetings, briefs and check-ins to setting deadlines and conducting follow-ups, each step in the process pays dividends when executed well.

Stay positive.

Not every marketing project can be award-worthy, but it’s an account leader’s job to believe it can be and look for ways to make it so. By showing enthusiasm, providing the tools and language needed to succeed and removing team members’ barriers to success, leaders create an environment most likely to foster greatness.

Even when a client gives undesirable feedback or a final product doesn’t remotely resemble its far superior storyboard, take the challenge or disappointment as a learning opportunity. The lesson learned will ultimately fuel the quality of your next piece of creative or content.

Build trust.

Keeping a client up to speed on the agency team’s every development ensures nobody is left in the dark, waiting to be delivered a product that’s vastly different than what was initially pitched. Meanwhile, providing clear expectations for team members and welcoming all questions, doubts and requests for help creates trust on the account side. The best work happens when even the most outlandish ideas can be freely and comfortably shared.

Be honest and direct.

Don’t be overly sensitive or cautious with your feedback — we’re all adults, so let’s treat each other that way. Understanding one another’s priorities, even if those priorities clash at first, is the first step toward aligning the client’s goals with that of the account team.

And if someone in your charge delivers sub-par work, the most helpful response is always constructive criticism, never disingenuous praise. Otherwise, you put the quality of the final product — and thus the client relationship — at risk.

Getting great work can seem increasingly complex with so many marketing tools and tactics at your disposal, but it can and should be pretty simple by following these steps. While it’s the account team’s responsibility, every agency team member — creative, strategy, media, etc. — can apply these key principles to improve outcomes and outputs of any client relationship. After all, we’re all in this together.