7 Key Client Management Lessons

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A few weeks ago I was asked to teach a "Client Management 101" class. I was happy to do the class but wasn't all that excited about its title.

I believe that the basics of client management are mostly intuitive.  And the parts of it that aren't intuitive can pretty easily be found in a book or online.

So a class on the basics of client management wouldn’t be very interesting or insightful and wouldn’t really make the listeners any better at client management -- not to mention it wouldn’t be very fun to teach.

So I decided not to teach the basics; instead, I came up with a list of 7 key lessons or insights that I've picked up over the years that would've helped me quite a bit had I understood them when I started my career.  Some of them are provocative and many of them are counterintuitive.  I decided to keep the list to 7 because it forced me to pick the most interesting.

I put the 7 lessons into PowerPoint, added some personal stories and took the class through each lesson one by one.  The class was very well received and spurred some great conversation during Q&A.

I thought I'd capture and share what I presented on this blog.  Here are the 7 Key Lessons:

  1. Lead, Don't Follow
  2. Partners, Not Customers
  3. Manage Expectations (it's easier)
  4. Ask for More
  5. Everybody Has a Boss
  6. Know Your Audience
  7. The Bigger the Crisis, the Bigger the Opportunity

Posting them all at once would make for an extremely long blog post…so I’ll post them individually over the next several weeks.