A few weeks ago I interviewed a major British industrialist about “building relationships from the client’s side of the desk.” He had been the CEO of a leading British company for many years, and worked with many outside service providers…

At the wedding of a dear friend’s daughter this summer, Rabbi Ira J. Schiffer performed a moving ceremony. Rabbi Schiffer, who is an associate chaplain at Middlebury College, based his talk on Maimonides writings. Maimonides was a medieval Jewish philosopher whose…

“I used to work for an old-fashioned rainmaker,” a client of mine once told me. “He had that ‘take-no-prisoners’ approach to sales and customer relationships. His motto was, ‘Sometimes wrong, never in doubt.’” Never in doubt, indeed. It’s one thing…

There are six levels of professional relationships that you should be naturally moving your clients through. The first two are pre-client: Level 1: Contact This is the starting point. We meet someone, have a brief conversation, and exchange business cards.…

Peter Drucker had an unparalleled ability to capture the essence of what’s important in management. In 1973, he wrote: “Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing…

You need to cultivate and exercise three kinds of independence from your clients: Intellectual independence. Sometimes, advisors and service providers forget that one of the reasons they are being employed is to provide independent perspectives. They want to be supportive…

In January of 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Wendell Wilkie, who had lost his own bid for the presidency the year before, to visit him at the White House. Sitting in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office,…

Clients hate sales pitches. You probably do, too. How do you like to sit still while someone presents PowerPoint slides to you? Clients don’t like boring pitches, but they love to learn. So turn your next sales presentation into a collaborative,…

Sometimes client relationships end for appropriate reasons. But you never want a good relationship to end avoidably. In Part I of this article I described four of the eight most common reasons why client relationships end. These were: 1. A reorganization or…

Every executive I speak to would like to see more collaboration among their professionals, especially to better serve clients. Collaboration among different service or product lines, and also between support functions, is essential to fuel relationship growth. Here’s what doesn’t…