This is the question: Can I talk to your clients? Any good marketing company is going to have lots of clients that will happily give them testimonials. That’s why when you go to my website, I’ve got about 25 testimonials from clients.

How We Answer This Question For Clients

When someone wants to hire us, they ask us, can we talk to your clients? We typically don’t give them any contact information. My partner tells them that their names are listed on our website and to call them. That way, we’re not skewing anything.

The biggest thing is that if they’ve got clients that are happy and have gotten results, you can talk to the clients and ask them what’s it like. Are they responsive? Have you gotten results? But, the most important question is can I talk to your clients?

Our caveat is always that you can talk to them and ask our clients, but our clients are busy, and the only way that you’re allowed to call our clients and ask about us is if that’s the only thing you need to move forward. If you’re still on the fence and you want to talk to them, but are still unsure, don’t call them. Don’t waste their time.

What If Campaigns Were Not Working?

I don’t think we have a single client that wouldn’t give us a good recommendation. That’s true even for clients that we’ve been struggling with, even if something was not working one way or another. It’s marketing. Nothing is 100% perfect, and that’s important too.

When you talk to a marketing company, you have to understand that Google and search engine optimization does not always work. That’s something that marketing companies just won’t tell you. There’s a randomness factor in Google that drives me up the freaking wall. There are times when SEO and search engine optimization just does not work.

I’m pounding my head against that brick wall right behind me because we’ve done everything. This works for every other client. We literally cannot figure out what is going on. We don’t know why this isn’t working. But, sometimes it just doesn’t work.

How Companies React When Things Go Wrong

One of the real telling points of a company is how do they react when things go wrong, when they run into a campaign that isn’t working. We’ve got clients that’ll tell you that we came out of pocket and paid for AdWords, or we came out of pocket and paid for social media campaigns, or we suspended their payments for a couple of months. That’s a true test.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work, or sometimes things go wrong, but the real test is how do they handle that?