Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
How Useful Is Your Account Planning?
Does your organization have a client account planning process? If so, let me ask you some questions about it:
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How to Broaden Your Client Relationships
How do you broaden your client’s perception of your capabilities? This is a complex problem. Clients tend to pigeonhole their providers and put them in little boxes. Often, they are not even familiar with all of what you can offer. .
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How to build Peer Relationships with Your Clients (Part 3)
To become a client’s trusted advisor, you must be viewed as a peer. In my last two posts I talked about the importance of demonstrating professional acumen and C-Suite behaviors. In this post I explain the importance of values alignment for a senior executive who is bringing someone into their inner circle.
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How to Build Peer Relationships with Your Clients (Part 2)
To become a client’s trusted advisor, you must be viewed as a peer. In my last post I talked about the importance of demonstrating Professional Acumen. In this post I set out the "c-suite" behaviors you need to exemplify if you want to be accepted as a peer by senior executives.
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How to Build Peer Relationships with Your Clients
To become a client’s trusted advisor, you must be viewed as a peer. This doesn’t mean you must become a literal peer. If you work with a CEO, for example, you will never be their strict peer in an organizational or hierarchical sense. But if you want a seat at the table with them, they need to consider you as a peer in three areas: Professional acumen, behavior, and values. Let’s look at what these are and how you demonstrate them. In this blog I will cover point one, Professional Acumen.
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Outstanding sales call preparation
How often do you jump into a car or taxi and show up at a prospect’s office ready to ask questions and pitch your solutions—but without really having prepared? Many senior executives I’ve interviewed have told me this happens all the time. And, they usually add, they aren’t impressed with someone who walks in knowing very little about their business and their issues.
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Questions to ask senior executives
When you meet with a senior executive—someone who is a leader in their organization—you need to think carefully about the questions you ask. Don’t ask boring, general questions like “How’s business?” or “Can you tell me about your strategy?” With top executives in particular you need to add value for time. Prepare carefully so that your questions can be specific, not general. Politely challenge them. Ask questions that will help get at the root causes and help redefine the problem . Get underneath their thinking. What options are they considering? How are they going to make an important, upcoming decision?
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Breakthrough Moments in Relationships
Great advisors often have moments when they forcefully demonstrate qualities such as great conviction, perceptive big picture thinking, and independence—or when they simply act rapidly and decisively on their client’s behalf. These instances illustrate how great advisors distinguish themselves from ordinary ones. Here is one of my favorite “breakthrough moments” of a truly great historical figure—General George Marshall, who became Roosevelt’s most trusted military counsel during World War II:
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