1. Below average (or perhaps very uneven)?
2. Competitive?
3. Truly differentiated versus your competition?

Would you like your clients to say, “Working with you really is different”? How valuable would that be, from a retention and referral perspective?

You may not explicitly think about it this way, but in fact you play quite different roles with your clients. I have identified the six most common and important ones. Each is valuable in its own right. By recognizing these roles and cultivating them intentionally with your clients, you will add more value and dramatically strengthen your relationships. 

That’s a question I get asked a lot these days.

Everyone has lists of contacts. Everyone has past clients. Some of them may need what you offer—right now. But how do you make the connection in a way doesn’t feel like you’re a door-to-door salesman? How do you get someone interested in having a meeting with you? (The quick answer is your answer to the same question: What gets you interested in meeting with someone who offers a product or service?)

Addressing this challenge is not as difficult as it may seem. In this newsletter I’ve laid out a very straightforward set of principles and strategies that will help you create new leads out of your network.

First, there are four principles that should guide you:

“I had three or four good discussions with a prospective client about doing some work with his company, and now he doesn’t return my phone calls or emails.”

“They have our proposal but I haven’t heard a thing back from them. I’ve called and left several messages but gotten no response.”

Advisors and other service providers are rarely satisfied with the level of responsiveness from the executives they are trying to sell to. But in the last few years the unresponsiveness seems to have grown into an epidemic. I’ve been a consultant for 32 years, and it’s the worst I’ve seen.

Why is this happening? And how should you react?

Another client of mine, a senior executive in a large global consulting firm, echoed this sentiment: “Selling cycles are much longer that they used to be. Procurement is usually involved, and they can be brutal at squeezing down the price. Sometimes, after you invest a great deal to educate the prospective client, they just decide to do it themselves.”

Since 2008, many business professionals are feeling pummeled by intense price competition and ever-harsher client demands. They are asking:  Is becoming a client’s “trusted advisor” an antiquated aspiration in a world where clients seem mainly concerned with getting the lowest price? Is it still relevant when procurement routinely comes between you and your executive clients? Do relationships, in short, really matter anymore?

Does your organization have a client account planning process? If so, let me ask you some questions about it:

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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.