Articles
Explore over 350 articles that will help you grow your client relationships and improve your personal effectiveness.
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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Adding More Value
At one of my recent workshops, the participants were discussing what is different about managing client relationships today compared to ten years ago. A hand shot up: “Clients want twice as much value for half the price!” I hear this lament frequently, in fact. No question: Today’s clients (often former consultants, law firm partners, or […]
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The Ring of Power
In JRR Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, there is a gold ring, forged by an evil demon, which is the centerpiece of the plot. The owner of the ring is granted near-immortality, and placing it on a finger renders the bearer invisible. The ring’s immense power is a corrupting influence, however, and eventually […]
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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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