Creating professional client relationships

How do you create lasting relationship with clients who buys your professional skills? Here's some learnings to take away.

Backround intel: Know the company, people, current methods, media investment model, internal capabilities, market situation and direction, clients emphasis in general.

Get engaged: Know customers personality, listen, listen, ask questions and listen! Adapt customers style and mindset, create business relevance by sparring and show that you have more to offer than just a standard idea or model.

Move around: Get to know clients internal decision makers, make more questions and adapt their agenda. At best you can join their agendas together and create more meaningful learning space and synergy.

Become trusted: Next round of discussion is about opportunities, joint discussion of how to make most out co-operation. Discussion can be directed with research, case studies and success stories. In the end you should have a clear offer to be delivered for the customer. Set next appointment.

Make proposal: Connect proposal to everything you have found out. Make proposal for a process, not a single shot. Process enable more face time and result real co-creation. Close the deal.

Create scalability: The key people who hold most insights must be constantly on the move. You need other people who are always available and make certain that there is reaction capability. Expand trust by introducing new people who hold different knowledge than you do. This is the only way to scale the relationship wider and deeper. Make small projects to show your capability and scale them bigger in to major client relationship

Stay in touch: Call and ask how’s everything going. Meet clients in order to keep things going and growing.

CARDINAL RULE: Only propose something that you would do your self and what you truly believe in. This business is about TRUST. Honesty pays back. Professional is as good as his word.

What we believe in is co-operation that is almost symbiotic. This is actually how we have trained our clients sales teams to operate. This is also what we believe in our selves. The external insights on the business and the internal knowledge of the current operation enable business design which takes away blind spots and makes it possible to break status quo in the market. Creation of NEW business is only possible when you change your perseption of the market and the company. Create customer insight that reveal customers sacrifices in their choices and ways of creating long lasting and valuable customer relationships. What ever you suggest, it must pay off for the client.

There is no free consulting. There's only creation of trust and relationship. Each encounter with the client should add relationship capital. Instead of doing one shots, the business comes from co-creation and learning together. External professionals value increase when he has knowledge about the client corporation mindset and still keeps the distance that enable avoiding the blindspots of the internal management. The best possible ROI for the client is an outcome of such a relationship. It's also the best place to be in for the professional him self.

Taivas Lab - MCPC 2009 8.10.2009

Taivas Lab & workshop: Co-creating Me

360 million people have googled Harry Potter. This means that hundreds of millions of people probably are also active enough to talk about him to others... Thus marketing the books more effectively than any ad ever could.

Companies are not statues but organic entities that evolve continuously. Customers are not a threat but an innovative and active force that can help a company in becoming stronger, more desirable and more successful.

Traditionally brands have been cocreating people, offering them means to express their identities. Today people are cocreating companies by participating in marketing or even in product development. They do this invited or uninvited. Taivas Lab looks at ways in which companies can work as Editors in Chief of themselves, letting people get involved in making a company an icon.

Viewpoints during the day will include both social and other innovative media and platforms. Cases range from Habbo Hotel, virtual world for teenagers to Forum, the central Helsinki shopping mall where two young women will live 24/7, reporting their lives and shopping through videos, photos and text entries.

Taivas Lab will consist of keynote speeches and team work sessions that utilise rapid prototyping for giving participants both thoughts and solutions to walk away with. Any participant is encouraged to provide Taivas Lab with an actual business problem to be solved during the day with colleagues and both academic and business experts.

Puhetta johtaa Rory Sutherland