Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
Do an “Unplugged” Performance
About 12 years ago, I was living in Rome, Italy, where I was the country head for Gemini Consulting. For a major assignment for a $5 billion aerospace and defense company, I was collaborating with a business school professor. He taught me the power of performing “unplugged” in front of clients. This professor was opinionated […]
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Friends and Clients
Consider this (true) scenario: You are a human resources consultant, and your client is Bill, the head of HR for a Fortune-500 company. You do great work for this company, and build relationships at multiple levels in the organization. Over time, you become quite close to Bill–really good friends. You get to know each other’s […]
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Client Relationships in the Age of the Mouse-Click
Seeing the Big Picture: Building Client Relationships in the Age of the Mouse-Click (Originally published in Business Law Today) In an era of electronic auctions, expert software, and online databases, are traditional, face-to-face client relationships going the way of quill pens and parchment paper? To be sure, they are under assault from many quarters. […]
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Why Would a Client Like You?
In a letter penned to her sister on Christmas Eve in 1798, the English novelist Jane Austen wrote, “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” On the face of it, this is a rather odd statement. Austen was an extraordinarily astute […]
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Big-Picture Thinking (Part 3)
“We think too small,” said the Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. “Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.” Professionals who act like the frog at the bottom of well often […]
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Big-Picture Thinking (Part 1)
ENDING THE SUMMER This is the August edition of Client Loyalty. I thought it pointless to send it out at the end of August, when many people are on vacation, but perhaps there was a subconscious reason as well: An inability, on my part, to let go of the summer! Moving from summer to fall […]
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The Doubting Mind
“I used to work for an old-fashioned rainmaker,” a client of mine once told me. “He had that ‘take no prisoners’ approach to sales and customer relationships. His motto was, ‘Sometimes wrong, never in doubt.’” Never in doubt, indeed. It’s one thing to have deep-seated conviction about your views, quite another, however, to obscure the […]
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The Mindset Of Independent Wealth
I. IDEAS FOR ADDING VALUE AND BUILDING LOYALTY Developing The Mindset Of Independent Wealth What I’m about to describe is one of the most powerful things you can do to attract and keep clients. If you are successful at it, you’ll create a palpable aura around you that is enormously attractive not only to clients […]
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