THE MARKET GRAVITY RELATIONSHIPS
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Client advisory groups or boards are not boards of directors, which I would discourage you from forming. As long as you are taking the risks and providing the talent, a board of directors can serve no purpose that an advisory group cannot. Meanwhile, a board has certain significant drawbacks in terms of restrictions on your activities and divulgence of personal business affairs. The advisory board has all the supportive elements of a board of directors and none of the disadvantages. (It is also considerably easier to form, alter, and end when necessary.) No matter what you call your efforts in creating special relationships and forums—symposia, conferences, meetings, boards, committees, gatherings, sessions, task forces, councils, or something else—your goal should be the same: to create opportunities for peer influence to sell your services to prospects and to create opportunities to solidify and extend the ongoing relationships you’ve formed with existing clients. These alternatives provide you with great leverage in these marketing pursuits.
THE VALUE-ADDED DISCOUNTING PRINCIPLE OF NEVER LOSING CLIENTS Every book needs a clever acronym. Maybe this is mine: TV-ADPONLC. On second thought, I’d probably better explain. The value-added discounting principle of never losing clients (TV-ADPONLC) is simply my way of emphasizing that the longer term the relationship, the longer term it is likely to be. No, this is not a truism. At birth, an individual’s life expectancy may be 77 years. However, once that individual has reached 40 successfully, the life expectancy is probably about 80 years. And once you’re 79, the odds are that you have a few more years left. In other words, the longer you live, the longer you probably will live. Client relationships follow these actuarial realities very closely. But not for the same reasons. As you have no doubt realized by now, my path to millions of dollars in business is through the establishment of long-term relationships. The creation of these relationships is, in turn, based on creating and implementing the valueadded qualities that enable you to improve the client’s condition. The sustaining of these qualities and this improvement over time create a bond that is quite difficult to break because your worth to the client increases geometrically as you move from project to project. You are not merely the sum of the performance-evaluation system you implemented plus the customer survey you conducted plus the creation of educational strategies for the human resources area. As you’ve engaged in these projects, the client organization has imparted information to you that has made you wise in the organization’s ways