Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
Finish this Year Well and Start Strong in January
Fall can be an achingly beautiful season, but it can also be a pressure cooker if you serve clients. In this last quarter of the calendar year, you need to finish well, regardless of when you close your fiscal year. At the same time, you need to prepare the foundations for a successful start of the […]
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Seven Relationship Lies—and Rules to Replace Them on Valentine’s Day
I usually write strictly about professional relationships, but today, I want to share seven Valentine’s Day lies—and the relationship rules to replace them. Our culture promotes many misleading ideas about what makes for successful personal or romantic relationships. Popular concepts like the need to “just be yourself” or “move on if your needs aren’t being […]
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Ten Questions to Ask Your Clients Every Year
A client of mine dodged death twice. The first instance involved serendipitously avoiding what turned out to be an infamous plane crash caused by a terrorist bomb. The second time had to do with a seemingly innocuous spot on his arm. It looked like a odd-shaped mole, and he ignored it. As the CEO of […]
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How to Prioritize Your Client Opportunities
All that glitters is not gold One of my clients proudly served a leading Fortune-500 company. It was part of their key account program and often mentioned as a success story. Viewed from afar, it was a showcase relationship that generated significant annual revenues. However, when I reviewed the account with them, I realized that […]
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Earning Clients for Life as a Trusted Advisor
Competition, commoditization, client sophistication, and transparent markets mean that few services can be truly differentiated in their own right. Strong, enduring client relationships, therefore, are the lifeblood of most organizations. Long term relationships serve another key function in today’s tumultuous markets: they reduce risk for both clients and service providers. It’s not easy, however, to […]
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Involve Your Clients in the Account Planning Process
In working with many client teams on account planning, I’ve learned that there really is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach. The planning process and the tenor of your discussions for an existing multi-million-dollar, mature client relationship will be different from that for a relatively new client that is currently quite small. Broadly speaking, the following elements […]
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The Characteristics and Roles of Successful Client Relationship Managers
What are the essential roles of a client relationship manager? And what skills does he or she need to possess in order to fulfill these roles? Having studied tens of thousands of partners, managing directors, account executives, and other client-facing professionals in service firms around the world, I have identified six key roles for relationship […]
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The 3 Levels of Personal Recognition—Where Are You?
As a young consultant right out of graduate school, I immediately notice
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Four Key Ways to Add Value for Time in Client Meetings
When you meet with a senior executive, there’s one factor that usually determine
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