Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
No Client Plan Survives Contact with the Client (Part I)
Each year, a large forest is consumed to make paper for all of the client plans that are written around the world. Trees and business professionals alike generally loathe the task. I can understand why the trees are upset, but why do many client-facing executives dislike this exercise? Here are some typical comments I hear […]
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How to Price
Robust pricing is a key to profitability, yet most professionals spend little time seriously exploring how to price their services effectively. Worse, they chronically underprice as they over-react to client pressure to reduce fees and become afraid they will lose the sale. Most of you reading this deliver a high value-added service. We’re not talking […]
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Gaining CEO Access
Do any of these laments sound familiar? “We want to move up in the organization, but we’re stuck working with a mid-level director” “This is a major, target client for us. We’ve been trying to meet the CEO, however, without success. We just cannot get the access.” “We’d like to get broader visibility for our […]
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Growing Relationships: The Client’s Perspective
“We really don’t need a lot of new client relationships,” the chairman of a large professional services firm recently told me, adding, “We have a great client base already. There’s huge potential to grow and develop our existing clients.” Many companies feel the same way: That there is a large opportunity to deepen and broaden—to […]
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Relationships Are Dead; Long Live Relationships
In an era of electronic auctions, are traditional, face-to-face client relationships becoming extinct? By some measures, they are. The most important assault on client relationships is being fueled by the Internet and software technology. Markets that once lacked transparency and required a high degree of client interaction—auditing, debt underwriting, and specialized industrial parts, for example—are […]
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Introverts, Extroverts, and Billy Joel
A few years ago, I found myself—unusually—at a popular bar in Boston’s North End at nearly one in the morning. After a daylong meeting, I had gone out to dinner with a group of client executives, and afterwards they had insisted on visiting the North End, which is a charming, traditionally Italian neighborhood located near […]
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Questions to Ask Yourself
In the 1960s, a journalist asked the great artist Pablo Picasso what he thought about mainframe computers. Picasso replied, “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” I am continually surprised at the power of good, provocative, unexpected questions—and by how infrequently we ask them. I experienced this just a few days ago as […]
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Managing Client Crises
I recently interviewed a client of mine on the topic of client crises, in preparation for a program I was designing for her organization. “Do you have all night?” she asked, laughing, “They’re continuous!” Every professional who works with clients faces periodic crises or “rough patches” in his or her relationships—it’s inevitable. Because of the […]
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