Andrew Sobel
Building Enduring Client Relationships
Services
Consulting
For 25 years, Andrew has worked closely with the senior management of many of the world’s leading corporations and professional service firms to help them clarify and achieve their most important goals. He has in-depth experience in strategy formulation—in particular the development of pervasive customer focus; strategy implementation; and the creation of high-performance organizations. As an independent advisor, he has a singular purpose: to help his clients meet and exceed their business objectives and create shareholder value. His approach is based on a participative process, often using workshops and retreats, that empowers senior executives and strengthens their role. Several important perspectives pervade his client work:
- A global, multicultural outlook based on having lived and worked abroad for 13 years.
- A senior management perspective, gained both from having consulted to many top management teams and from serving as a managing director in one of the world’s largest consulting firms.
- A thorough understanding of the dynamics of great client and customer relationships, gained from unique, primary research he has conducted in this area over the last ten years.
The starting point for working together is usually several phone conversations or in-person meetings to clarify and shape the issues and identify the best mode of intervention.
Here are two typical examples of Andrew’s recent client engagements:
Building a Client-Focused Firm: A major international law firm established Client Focus and a corresponding Team Approach to clients as one of its major strategic initiatives. It needed to overcome several hurdles, however. These included organizationally distinct practice areas that rarely worked together, metrics and incentives that inadequately measured and rewarded team behavior, and a lack of systematic client planning processes.
Approach and Results: Andrew and the firm’s executive committee worked together to create a multifaceted client focus program. Some of the elements included:
- A series of consistent, clear communications from the chairman—in a variety of media—to thousands of employees around the world.
- Establishment of a new and well-defined relationship management role and team structure to support a group of the firm’s most important or highest potential clients
- Implementation of a professional development program to enhance partner’s trusted advisor skills and help the new client teams create their first-ever strategic client plans.
- The creation of senior partner “coaches” to help mentor the client teams.
- Revision of the firm’s partner review process and criteria to better support long-term investments in building client relationships.
This program has resulted in far-reaching changes to the way the organization’s professionals think about and manage their client relationships. Significant new opportunities with existing clients have been identified and captured as a result of the greater integration between disparate parts of the organization and a more strategic approach to managing major relationships. Revenues from clients with assigned teams have grown at three times the rate of the firm as a whole.
Restoring Growth in a Key Market: A leading international consulting firm wanted to restore consistent revenue growth in one of its largest worldwide markets. Issues included a lack of long-term investment in and teaming around key clients, excessive internal focus, a lack of clarity around the role of the client relationship manager, and a very financially-oriented client planning process.
Approach and Results: Andrew worked with this firm’s senior management to define and implement four initiatives that helped reinvigorate the revenue base in this market. These included:
- A series of facilitated forums for client relationship managers to share and codify best practices for creating client partnerships.
- A redefinition of the role of client relationship manager.
- A new approach to staffing client assignments to ensure that resources are sufficiently dedicated to each client and that there is fuller representation of the firm’s service offerings and functional capabilities.
- A new client account development process that emphasizes many-to-many relationship building; deep, reflective strategizing with the whole team present; and ambitious aspiration-setting rather than conservative forecasting.
A note from Andrew about his client base: I feel that publishing “client lists” is neither useful to prospective clients nor discreet vis-à-vis past clients. Where appropriate and allowable I can share information, one-to-one, about the kinds of firms I’ve consulted with and the types of work I have done. Needless to say I have worked with leading organizations in just about every segment of the professional services and financial services markets. Senior references are of course available when a discussion about a prospective engagement has reached the right stage.