Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
The Powerful Tension Between Relationship Virtues and Commercial Virtues
I recently attended a conference where New York Times columnist David Brooks was the keynote speaker. One of the main themes of his speech was the tension between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” In our success-driven culture, he explained, we strive for resume virtues: achievement, recognition, wealth, and other material accomplishments that are admired and lauded. […]
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Your Most Powerful Differentiator –The Live Performance
An extraordinary shift has occurred in the music business, and it holds an important lesson for us. Over the last decade, sales of recorded music have steadily declined. This includes all types of music in all formats—CDs, digital downloads, and so on. At the same time, concert ticket revenue for live pop concerts has steadily risen. […]
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Your Most Powerful Differentiator –The Live Performance
By Andrew Sobel An extraordinary shift has occurred in the music business, and it holds an important lesson for us. Over the last decade, sales of recorded music have steadily declined. This includes all types of music in all formats—CDs, digital downloads, and so on. At the same time, concert ticket revenue for live pop […]
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Fair-Weather Friends?
A few weeks ago I interviewed a major British industrialist about “building relationships from the client’s side of the desk.” He had been the CEO of a leading British company for many years, and worked with many outside service providers and advisors during his career. I interviewed him in front of a large group of […]
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The Wisdom of Maimonides: Relationships With a Transcendent Purpose
At the wedding of a dear friend’s daughter this summer, Rabbi Ira J. Schiffer performed a moving ceremony. Rabbi Schiffer, who is an associate chaplain at Middlebury College, based his talk on Maimonides writings. Maimonides was a medieval Jewish philosopher whose is considered one of the leading rabbinical thinkers in history. The scene before the arrival […]
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The Importance of a 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 to obscure the truth with overconfidence […]
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The Six Levels of Relationships: Where are Yours?
There are six levels of professional relationships that you should be naturally moving your clients through. The first two are pre-client: Level 1: Contact This is the starting point. We meet someone, have a brief conversation, and exchange business cards. We may stay in touch over the years, but there is little interaction. The individual […]
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Your Business Has Only One Purpose—Are You Focused on it?
Peter Drucker had an unparalleled ability to capture the essence of what’s important in management. In 1973, he wrote: “Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” We all know, […]
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