How to Dodge the Dreaded Question “What are you doing for me?”

“So, what exactly are you doing for me?” Ah, the dreaded and often unexpected question that cuts you like a knife during a client call. You brush off the accusatory torpedoes with pure grace—mostly because you have mastered the art of generically recapping your daily responsibilities—but eventually you grow tired of consistently defending your worth.

Despite your determined attempts to define what you do, highlight your value and justify your budgets, somehow the question continuously emerges.

So, how do you avoid being asked this all together, earn your client’s trust and move on with your job? Simple. Show them the numbers they want to see.

Gone are the days where it’s sufficient to report on media impressions and advertising equivalencies—clients want REAL, tangible metrics that demonstrate return on investment and progress. They want to compare current and historical lead conversions, sales and revenue. It’s this type of data that can prove your value and spur the client to ask the question, “What would I do without you?”

Capturing and reporting on all forms of conversions is the first step in proving the campaign ROI. Once you have complete data to analyze, you can evolve your campaigns based on return instead of best guesses.

This brings us to the next question: how do you gather the metrics clients want? Again, simple. There are a variety of technologies you can utilize to collect and analyze important metrics, such as web analytics, marketing automation, bid management, and a customer relationship management solution (CRM). In many cases, you likely have these tools already in place—potentially even feeding performance and lead information to one another.

Another tool to consider—that is extremely valuable, but often overlooked—is call tracking. Surprisingly, the 2014 Marketing Score Report found that 53 percent of organizations do not utilize call tracking.

So final question: how do you know if your campaign could benefit from call tracking? If there is a phone number displayed on any of your client’s promotional materials, there is a chance that someone may call. The problem is, you have no way to account for that valuable conversion and lead information, unless you have call tracking set up.

These platforms can capture every call your online and offline promotional activities generate, or be configured to only track calls from specific campaigns or activities. This way you collect only the data you need to optimize campaigns and demonstrate progress to clients.

The best part: it’s not just another technology you have to implement and manage. Through APIs, call tracking platforms can feed captured call data—including channel, campaign, ad, keyword, email, etc.—directly into your existing marketing platforms. This type of integration creates one dashboard from which to assess and evaluate your campaigns, and then make strategy and budget allocation decisions to drive ROI.

To avoid another frantic presentation, meeting or unexpected conference call, make sure you’re equipped with the information that will help your clients understand what they would lose without you.