How to Strengthen Client Relationships

Right now, all of us are making an extra effort to stay connected to our friends and families, near and far. While we don’t know how or when business will be back up and running, we do know it's essential to keep our professional relationships alive and strong during this period.

My friend Andrew Sobel is a fellow author and world-renowned professional relationship expert. Recently, Andrew spoke with me during one of my LinkedIn Live interview sessions about his new book on maintaining client relationships called It Starts With Clients.

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Here are four tips from Andrew about how you can keep your network growing and enrich your current relationships even while the economy is on hold:

Be genuine in your initial contact. “I think the first response is talking to people and asking them how they are," Andrew says. "How are they feeling? How are their families, what's going on inside the organization, what are the big concerns of their leadership right now? And that's going to then give us some clues as to how we can be helpful.”

You don’t need to have groundbreaking news to start a conversation. One of Andrew's previous clients once said to him, “Andrew, if I waited to go see a client until I had a great idea, I'd leave my office every two years.” We need to realize that it's not necessary to come with a profound, blazing insight every time you talk to a client. “I think we've got to lower the threshold and not say, wow, I've got to have something big," Andrew notes. "You're going to have a great conversation with a client just by asking a few questions and sharing a few things. . .I think to be really effective with clients, you want to be seen by them as being at the crossroads of the marketplace.”

Approach your clients with specific needs you can fill. Think about your clients. You don't need that much imagination to make a list of the potential things they're dealing with right now: "Depending on your specialty, make a list of the kinds of things [clients] are going to be dealing with," Andrew suggests. "Then make a list of those issues and a list of some of the things you're hearing about people doing or ideas you might have. Then if I wanted to stay in touch that way, you know, maybe once a week, once every 10 days, I might write a short email to 20 or 30 of my clients and say, “Hey, I know you're busy, but here are three ideas that you may have well thought of, but that I hear about from my other clients or that I see in the market.”

Connect more often. Before, you might have about ten outreach conversations to create three leads for follow up conversations. Now, however, you’re going to have to reach out to 20 or 30 for the same three prospects. Everyone - stuck at home - is so much more heavily involved with their social media. Use that to your advantage – “If they blog, if they publish, if they post, I've had many clients very successfully comment on people's blogs and posts. [They] suggest resources to them, connect with them, find mutual connections and then grow that eventually to a phone call or hopefully someday a face to face meeting.”

The same care and concern that we show the people in our personal lives is similarly valued in the business world right now. The more genuine a connection we can establish in our business, the stronger we can fortify our networks and business relationships, no matter what shape the world is in.

The replay of my interview with Andrew is available to watch here, and if you’d like further notifications for all my upcoming interviews and articles, be sure to sign up for my email newsletter (completely different material than my LinkedIn Newsletter!) here.

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Best,

Dorie