Taking Care of Existing Clients

Here’s how to revitalize your existing client relationships and put them back on a growth track.

By Andrew Sobel

While you are looking for new clients, what’s happening to your existing clients? If you’re not romancing them with the same fervor, your relationships will slowly go stale.

To realize the full potential of your existing client base, you must first understand why good relationships go bad. Here are a few issues that can weaken or harm a seemingly healthy relationship:

• Low energy. You no longer have the same energy and enthusiasm for the client that you used to, and you stop going the extra mile.

• Reactivity (not proactivity). You get used to the client giving you more business, and you stop being a proactive agenda setter who actively challenges the client and brings new ideas and perspectives to them.

• Slowness to respond to industry events.

• Insufficient communication. You communicate less and less, leading to a perception of reduced value.

• Atavism. In the sales process, you take a big-picture view with prospects, exploring their agenda for key priorities and discussing their aspirations. But during the actual delivery of the work, you become an “expert for hire.” You talk only about operational execution and project milestones — no more big-picture discussions!

• Lack of feedback. You stop caring about what your client thinks of the relationship and stop asking for their feedback.

• Poor actual or perceived quality of work. When communications are poor and expectations are not properly understood, your client can come to believe that a job that is actually objectively well done is not up to snuff.

Revitalizing Your Relationships

If any of the above looks familiar, here are some strategies for revitalizing your existing relationships and putting them back on a growth track:

• Treat all old clients like new clients. You have to bring the same enthusiasm, new ideas, effort and excitement to the 100th meeting with your clients that you demonstrated in the first meeting when you were wooing them.

• Ask yourself: What would my competitors do to try to win this client’s business? This is not a rhetorical question because in fact, your competitors are regularly trying to win a greater share of your client’s business. Think through what their strategies might be and examine which of those actions you should be taking yourself.

You need to bring fresh points of view, insights, and ideas to your long-standing clients on a regular basis.

• Be like the Beatles and evolve your songs. The Beatles built a global fan base and sold over 1.4 billion records by constantly evolving their music. They retained existing fans and continually added new ones. Each successive record was a significant evolution in their music. You don’t want to sing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ year after year to your clients! You need to bring fresh points of view, insights and ideas to your long-standing clients on a regular basis.

• Add talent to the team. This is especially pertinent if you work with a firm. Continuity of relationship managers is essential, but it’s also good to occasionally move some team members from a client relationship and add new talent. This is good for your staff and the client because it can bring fresh thinking to the engagement.

• Add value in new ways. Is there a well-known academic or industry expert whose ideas would be relevant to your client? Can you use collaboration technologies to better connect with your client? Can you do a better job of helping your client on a personal level? For example, can you provide a sounding board about their career or expand their network by making valuable introductions?

• Do a relationship review with the client. This is a chance to better understand their view of the relationship; to get a renewed sense of their emerging priorities and goals; and to add value by having a big-picture, agenda-setting conversation.

• Make an unexpected investment in your clients. For example, clients are always interested in developing their people. What can you offer to help transfer skills and capabilities to your client’s organization? Is it a lunchtime seminar on a topic of current interest or a custom webpage or web portal you set up to help them access your most relevant content?

• Get an objective party to review the relationship with you. Familiarity doesn’t have to breed neglect, but it can certainly engender myopia. Ask an experienced colleague, who is not involved in the relationship, to sit in on a planning and review session. They won’t be wedded to the same assumptions you are basing your thinking on and may offer a fresh perspective.

Andrew Sobel is author of It Starts With Clients: Your 100-Day Plan to Build Lifelong Relationships and Revenue (www.andrewsobel.com/clientgrowth) and creator of the eLearning masterclasses Building Your Clients For Life and Building Relationships That Matter.