7 Key Client Management Lessons
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:
- Lead, Don't Follow
- Partners, Not Customers
- Manage Expectations (it's easier)
- Ask for More
- Everybody Has a Boss
- Know Your Audience
- 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.