All For One E-Book

Andrew Sobel

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 453

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Corporate clients are demanding more value from their external advisors, and consolidating their business around a smaller number of firms. These trends are forcing a variety of service providers--from consulting firms to large banks--to confront a series of difficult challenges: * How do we create an 'all-for-one, one-for-all' culture in which the whole is greater than the sum-of-the-parts and we succeed in leveraging our global network to deliver value to clients?" * How do we mobilize the right people, resources, and ideas--across a multitude of organizational and geographic boundaries--into each and every client relationship?" * How do we evolve from a trusted advisor to a trusted partner and build multi-year, institutional relationships? All for One answers these questions with an innovative and comprehensive model for developing enduring, institutional client relationships--what Andrew Sobel refers to as Level 6 Trusted Client Partnerships. It offers readers ten specific strategies that are thoroughly supported by case studies, best practices from leading firms, and implementation tools. The individual professional is principally responsible for five of these strategies, while the firm--the institution--must support and drive the other five. When you successfully execute against all ten of these building blocks, you develop long-term, professional-client partnerships that provide great value to the client and high levels of personal satisfaction and profitability for the service provider.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

PART I - A Road Map for Building Trusted Client Partnerships

Chapter 1 - Reaching Level 6: Trusted Client Partner

Citigroup and Royal Dutch Shell

Booz Allen Hamilton and the U.S. Navy

Underpinnings of Trusted Client Partnerships

Importance of Reaching Level 6

Chapter 2 - Employing 10 Integrated Strategies

Do You Have a Client-Centered, Collaborative Culture?

Conclusion

PART II - The Five Individual Strategies

Chapter 3 - Strategy One: Becoming an Agenda Setter

What Is an Agenda?

Principal Concerns of Senior Executives

Pressures on Senior Executives

Agendas and the Executive Life Cycle

Evolving through Three Stages

Industry Knowledge

Approaches for Engaging in Agenda Setting

Tools of Influence

Helping Your Client Implement an Agenda

Agenda Setting: What Successful Trusted Advisors Say

Conclusion

Chapter 4 - Strategy Two: Developing Relationship Capital

How Many Is Enough?

The Critical Few: Developing Your Relationship Hubs

The Many: Developing Your Broader Network

Models for Building a Network and a Client Base

Conclusion

Chapter 5 - Strategy Three: Engaging New Clients

First Meetings

Conversational Techniques

Listening Pitfalls

Engaging with Senior Executives

Getting to Know Clients as People

Accelerating Trust

Conclusion: Relationship-Building Principles

Chapter 6 - Strategy Four: Institutionalizing Client Relationships

From Trusted Advisor to Trusted Partner

Conclusion

Chapter 7 - Strategy Five: Adding Multiple Layers of Value

What Is Value?

Determining What Is Valuable for Each Client

Value Tools

Conclusion

PART III - The Five Institutional Strategies

Chapter 8 - Strategy Six: Targeting the Right Clients

The Right Client

The Right Executive

The Right Issue

Value to You

Improving Client Targeting across the Organization

Conclusion

Chapter 9 - Strategy Seven: Building a Client Leadership Pipeline

Role of the Relationship Manager

Capabilities of the Relationship Manager

Recruiting Potential Relationship Managers

Developing Relationship Managers

Supporting Relationship Managers

Measuring and Assessing Relationship Managers

Conclusion

Chapter 10 - Strategy Eight: Promoting Collaboration

A Tale of Two Firms

Consequences of Not Collaborating: Feral Children

Roots of Collaboration

What Gets in the Way: Survey Results

Strategies to Build a Collaborative Culture

Collaboration in Complex Services Organizations: The U.S. Joint Forces Command

Conclusion

Chapter 11 - Strategy Nine: Listening to Clients

Surveys

Relationship Manager Reviews

Independent Client Reviews

Senior Management Visits

Client Events and Forums

Conclusion

Chapter 12 - Strategy Ten: Creating a Unique Client Experience

Creating a Unique Client Experience

How Do You Design a Different Client Experience?

Standardizing the Client Relationship Experience

Conclusion

PART IV - Frequently Asked Questions and Conclusion

Chapter 13 - Answers to the Most Commonly Asked Questions about Building Client Relationships

Conclusion

Chapter 14 - Conclusion

Index

Additional Praise forAll for One

“The concepts in Andrew Sobel’s All for One are powerful and essential. The best professional service firms understand that achieving the position of trusted partner should be the goal of all of their efforts at building client relationships. Sobel’s 10 strategies provide a very clear path to achieving that goal—for individual professionals and for their firms.”

—Peter T. Regan Executive Chairman, The ERM Group

“Andrew Sobel has once again broken important new ground for the professional services industry. All for One is a masterpiece that delivers dozens of pertinent examples of how the best in the business build trusted client partnerships, and all professionals can learn important lessons from it. My one regret in reading the book is the knowledge that my competitors also have access to it!”

—Donald Lowman Managing Director and Board Member, Towers Perrin

“In today’s marketplace, deep personal and institutional relationships have never been more important. In All for One, Andrew Sobel sets forth compelling relationship strategies for both the individual and the organization, and supports these strategies with insights into the how-to that is so often missing.”

—Michael S. HamiltonPartner, Chief Learning & DevelopmentOfficer—Americas, Ernst & Young LLP

“All for One offers high-impact, practical advice on building enduring client partnerships. Andrew Sobel once again shows us his amazing empathy and insight about client relationships.”

—Jaideep Bajaj Managing Director, ZS Associates

“All for One is a great, practical guide that provides an invaluable framework for building enduring, trusted client relationships. Andrew Sobel has delivered an essential read for all professionals, one that is deep with insights, advice, and leading-edge best practice.”

—Diana Brightmore-Armour Chief Executive, Corporate Banking, Lloyds Banking Group

“Trust is the grail for the professional advisor. And never has it been more important or elusive. In All for One, Andrew Sobel offers a master-class in building business relationships. Drawing on the experience of leading companies he lays out a clear path to achieve the ultimate advisory role as trusted partner. A must-read for anyone who purports to give business advice.”

—Andrew Laurence Chairman Worldwide Corporate Practice Committee, Hill & Knowlton

“Even the best relationship manager can learn from Andrew Sobel’s All for One. It clearly demonstrates how the best institutional client relationships are developed, and shares practical advice that business books often promise but rarely deliver.”

—Mark Read Director of Strategy, WPP

“All for One lays out a highly practical framework for building a culture of relentless client focus and focusing a firm’s human and financial capital to deliver real value to clients. Enduring client partnerships are essential to financial and reputational success, and Andrew Sobel delivers powerful insights about how to systematically cultivate and sustain them.”

—James Bardrick Co-Head, Global Industrials Banking, Citigroup

Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Sobel. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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eISBN : 978-0-470-48534-7

To Mary Jane, Christopher, Elizabeth, and Emma.Thanks for the love, laughter, and support.

Introduction

Transforming Your Client Relationships

A variety of powerful forces are now creating unprecedented opportunities to partner with clients and add value in new ways. This book presents a road map for capturing these opportunities and building trusted client partnerships marked by depth, breadth, and longevity. It is organized around 10 fundamental strategies that combine to help you create a powerful, all-for-one, client-centered organization. These strategies have been identified and codified through an extensive, multiyear study of large-scale client relationships built by a wide range of highly successful services firms.

Why is this important? For your clients, these enduring, institutional relationships can increase value, reduce risk, and accelerate change. For you and your firm, they are the bedrock of your success. In good times they will fill your sails with wind, and in a difficult economy they provide essential ballast that will keep you on an even keel.

If you’re in any type of service business, such as consulting, law, accounting, financial services, advertising, or technology services—you’ll benefit from studying these essential strategies for building, growing, and sustaining long-term, trusted client partnerships.

Two analogies can help us to understand the challenge of building these flagship client relationships that usually account for a disproportionately large share of a firm’s revenues and profits. Consider, for instance, the number of stars that we can discern in the night sky. From any one location on Earth, you can see about 2,000 stars with the unaided eye. In total, however, about 6,000 stars are visible from our planet. If we look at service firms, this raises a question: How can you ensure that, when the need arises, each individual professional can effectively see all 6,000 stars—that is, can possess a full understanding of your firm’s complete capabilities and resources, or have an effective line of sight to a major client relationship and all the activities that surround it around the globe?

Consider as well the giant Redwood forests in northern California. These ancient trees can live to be 2,000 years old and reach over 350 feet in height. Although their roots are actually fairly shallow—growing only four or five feet into the ground—they spread out for up to 125 feet away from the base of the trunk. The roots interlock with those of all of the other nearby trees, thus creating a powerful defense against the storms and high winds that might topple them. This second analogy hints at the importance of collaboration and a sense of interconnection between professionals who must work together to create and sustain large, institutional client relationships—those “tall Redwoods” among your client base that need broad-based support in order to thrive and endure. In other words, the ability of individual professionals in a firm to see the whole picture, and their capacity to collaborate and live in a state of interdependence, are essential to the All for One approach.

Is it enough to have a cadre of skilled but individualistic rainmakers? Not any longer because developing trusted client partnerships is not a solo act. My first book, Clients for Life, articulated the journey from expert-for-hire to trusted client advisor. All for One sets out the next challenge, which is to evolve from a trusted advisor to a trusted partner. This is, in many ways, a more complex and challenging task; one that requires a comprehensive set of interlinked organizational capabilities rather than the simple derring-do of a single rainmaker. Today’s large service firms—with their global infrastructure and substantial overheads—can only serve their clients effectively if they create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

The title All for One captures the need to mobilize the right people, ideas, and resources from wherever they may reside in your organization—the all—into each client relationship—the one. The one, of course, could also be the individual relationship manager who must be supported by his or her entire firm. The phrase comes from The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas. “One for all, and all for one” is the motto of three inseparable young men—the musketeers of the title—who are members of the king’s guard in France. Each of them puts the group’s interests ahead of his own, and the group always comes to the aid of the individual. Isn’t this how it should be in any great organization?

We face a number of trends that are dramatically affecting client relationships. Some of these are merely extensions of long-standing developments—for example, greater client sophistication and the use of procurement processes to buy services. Others are more recent and still unpredictable as to their eventual impact, such as the advent of technologies that are creating new opportunities to collaborate across boundaries and tap into the wisdom of crowds. I’ll briefly mention the most important of these trends and pressures, which need to inform your relationship-building strategies:

• Demands for more value for money: Clients are under relentless pressure to do more for less, and they are passing this pressure on to their professional advisors. The increased use of procurement techniques to buy services is a manifestation of this pressure. If properly executed, a trusted client partnership can enable you to leverage your overheads and in fact deliver greater value for money.

• Demands for more value for time: Senior executives are now subject to so many demands that time has become a truly precious commodity. Only those professionals who understand how to add value for time will survive in the executive suite.

• Service outsourcing and offshoring: For example, GE and other large corporations routinely send legal work to India to be completed by U.S.-trained Indian lawyers at one-fifth the rates charged by their U.S. counterparts. Some professional services are following the path of manufacturing jobs and are being either outsourced, which is an opportunity for domestic players (e.g., a Hewitt Associates or Towers Perrin will take over a variety of human resources [HR] services for a client), or sent to lower-cost centers in India or even China.

• The need for foresight and risk reduction: Executive turnover has accelerated, and corporations have become intolerant of financial, operational, or market surprises. Helping clients avoid these surprises through effective foresight and risk management has become an essential capability.

• Simultaneous consolidation and fragmentation: In the past five years, many clients have consolidated the number of service providers that they are willing to use in just about every market. Clients are moving from using hundreds of law firms to using a dozen; from dozens of banks to five or ten; from hundreds of marketing communications companies to one or two; and so on. If you don’t have the scale and skill to land in the consolidated group that remains, you may be out of luck. At the same time, we continue to see the separation of “brains and brawn” as small boutiques split off from major firms and thrive by concentrating on specific niches.

• The advent of Web 2.0 applications and advanced collaboration technologies: These are just beginning to alter the way service firms work with their employees and their clients. Their ultimate impact is years away, but it will be profound. Firms that embrace these new tools will find it far easier to establish an all-for-one, collaborative culture and create more intimate connections with their clients.

Another way of thinking about the challenges that service providers face is to look at how the nature of client relationships is changing. Table I.1 summarizes these.

Service firms—especially those in traditional fields such as law and accounting—are generally slow to evolve. The most successful ones, however, are going to respond to the rapid evolution of technology and changes in the competitive structure of markets by significantly altering the way they build and manage their client relationships. The rest of this book lays out a clear path that shows you how to do this by improving your existing practices and employing some new ones.

TABLE I.1Three Epochs of Client Relationships

What are firms doing to respond to these growing client demands for more value? How are they innovating? What are they doing to put twenty-first century relationship-building capabilities into place? Chapters 2 through 13 include dozens of case studies that you’ll find interesting. As a preview of what’s to come, let me give you a quick sampling of some of the practices that you’re going to read about in All for One:

• Balancing short- and long-term goals: Environment Resources Management (ERM), a major environmental consulting firm, has created leading-edge mechanisms to balance achievement of short-term financial results with long-term relationship-building goals. One of these programs is targeted at 50 of their senior partners, who are evaluated on two distinct balanced scorecards. One scorecard, which drives cash bonuses, is for short-term financial goals; the second, which drives stock awards, focuses on growth and development goals that are directly tied to the firm’s long-term growth and development agenda—including relationships and service excellence. Everyone’s scorecard—both before and after the evaluation process is completed—is posted on an intranet and can be reviewed by any one of the 50.

• Enhancing dialogue with your clients: Bain & Company, a global consulting firm, uses its Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology to strengthen relationships with its own clients. Dispensing with traditional market research, where third-party agencies ask clients dozens of tedious questions, Bain asks every executive it works with in each client organization a simple question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend Bain to a friend or colleague?” Research shows that only clients scoring 9 and 10 will become active promoters and spread positive word-of-mouth about the firm; the rest are “passives” or “detractors.” Follow-up phone calls with active promoters and detractors create an ongoing dialogue that has proven invaluable to Bain in its relationship-building efforts.

• Accessing innovation: Citigroup’s Global Corporate Bank has created an innovation network comprised of 50 up-and-coming Citibankers from all around the globe. On a regular basis, this group surfaces innovative ideas and practices from all different parts of the bank, which are then codified and shared with relationship managers who are leading Citigroup’s key client relationships. A complementary program called “Passing Down the Wisdom,” led by senior bankers, helps to further improve bankers’ relationship-building skills by formalizing the apprenticeship process.

• Leveraging collaboration technologies: IBM uses online technology to hold “innovation jams” that link employees, clients, and other collaborating parties in virtual brainstorming sessions. The first innovation jam was held in 2006. Subsequently, $100 million was allocated to fund the new ideas that emerged from this 72-hour session, many of which have been successfully implemented.

• Supporting relationship managers: HR consulting firm Towers Perrin maintains an extensive support network for its client relationship managers (CRMs). This includes a knowledge management system that gives any CRM immediate access to a wide array of service offering content, best practices, and intellectual capital; a highly structured series of monthly conference calls with all 400 of their CRMs; and a special fast-track program to develop emerging CRMs.

• Bringing new ideas to clients: Cognizant, one of the fastest growing technology services companies in the world, implements “big ideas” programs for key clients and has earned an enviable reputation for innovation in a commoditizing market. Using collaboration technologies, they draw new ideas for improving the client’s business from their project teams on a monthly basis, filter and develop them, and then present them to senior management each quarter.

• Customizing the relationship experience: WPP, a leading $12 billion marketing services company, is creating an entirely new advertising agency—from scratch—to serve Dell Computer. Called Enfatico, it will replace nearly 800 individual marketing services agencies that Dell previously worked with. Enfatico is being tailor-designed to serve the Dell account, and it will eventually be staffed with 1,000 professionals drawn from multiple disciplines and locations around the world.

• Creating new service delivery models: Entirely new approaches for adding value to clients and lowering the cost of doing business are emerging in a variety of markets. For example, London-based Eden McCallum has created a new consulting firm model based on 400 independent consultants, most of whom have worked for leading general management consulting firms. They charge about one-half the rates of established firms and give clients greater ownership over the staffing and delivery process. Alternative legal services companies have developed along similar lines. These offer—on a contract basis—experienced attorneys (who have often worked at top-tier law firms) to clients who want lower rates, flexibility, and more control over the work.

You will read about these and other examples in All for One, which is based on five years of extensive research I have conducted into the foundations of trusted client partnerships. Through the Client Leadership Forum, a peer-to-peer best practices sharing group that I direct with my colleague James Kelly, I have had the opportunity to conduct in-depth studies of a dozen leading service firms in a variety of markets. I have drawn additional examples and findings from another 20 organizations with which I have either worked or interviewed for this book. I have not tried to select the absolute “best” firms in the world at all aspects of building an all-for-one, client-centered organization because they don’t really exist; each firm has different strengths. Instead, I have identified a series of best practices that I’ve drawn from a large sampling of truly excellent service firms. Some of these companies, such as Citigroup and IBM, are large and well known; others, like ZS Associates, Parthenon Group, and ERM, are smaller but exceptionally innovative.

In many of the examples and case studies, I provide the name of the company and the individuals involved, but not always; sometimes I have been asked not to disclose these details. In many cases, I have simply used the title relationship manager to identify a variety of partners, managing directors, account managers, and client service officers I have worked with over the past several years.

This book is divided into four parts:

• Part One presents case studies of two extraordinarily successful trusted client partnerships, defines the six levels of professional relationships, and summarizes the 10 strategies required to arrive at Level 6.

• Part Two contains the first five of 10 strategies for building trusted client partnerships. These five are mostly, but not exclusively, the responsibility of the individual professional.

• Part Three contains the last five strategies that have to be driven mostly at the firm level; you can think of them as institutional strategies that require specific commitment and support from senior management.

• Part Four changes the pace and presents the 17 most commonly asked questions that have been posed to me about building long-term client relationships, along with their answers. This section complements the 10 strategies with tactical advice on how to deal with a variety of vexing relationship issues. Chapter 14 concludes the book.

This book serves as a guide and road map to creating an all-for-one culture and developing more trusted client partnerships. Whether you are an individual professional responsible for managing client relationships or a member of your firm’s leadership, you’ll find, in almost every chapter, ideas that you can apply immediately.

PART I

A Road Map for Building Trusted Client Partnerships

1

Reaching Level 6: Trusted Client Partner

This book describes the 10 essential strategies that are required to build long-term, institutional client relationships—what I call trusted client partnerships. These partnerships are broad and deep, and they are characterized by many-to-many relationships at multiple levels. They usually endure for years. They account for a small percentage of most firms’ client relationships, but they contribute a disproportionately large share of their growth, profits, and intellectual capital. They can be hugely beneficial to clients, and often result in greater value, lower risk, and faster execution. You need them in good times, but even more so in tough times. The 10 strategies that I introduce in the coming chapters are largely the result of an extensive study I have conducted of large, institutional client relationships; they also reflect my personal experiences in building senior executive relationships during my 28-year career in management consulting.

What exactly is a trusted client partnership? Let’s define this term by first examining two striking but typical examples.

Citigroup and Royal Dutch Shell

Less than 10 years ago, the idea of having Royal Dutch Shell as a major client was little more than a gleam in the eyes of the top executives of Citigroup’s Global Corporate Bank. Today, Shell is one of Citigroup’s largest worldwide clients. Citigroup has built a network of relationships with dozens of Shell executives around the world and is a major partner in helping Shell to achieve its strategic objectives. The way in which this happened is a practical illustration of the power of the All for One strategies and philosophy set out in this book.

In the beginning, two Citigroup investment bankers had some contacts in Shell’s mergers and acquisitions department. Rather than going it alone, they brought in the then-chairman of Citigroup Europe, Sir Win Bischoff, as a senior advisor to the team. Sir Win did not simply push aggressively to be included in an upcoming transaction, as bankers sometimes do, but rather offered to conduct a complete analysis—at no charge—of Shell’s upstream (refining and distribution) business. Working with a division head who would later become the Shell CEO, the Citigroup team spent three months looking at the future of the business. The ideas that emerged from this work, combined with the trust that developed, eventually earned Citigroup the right to participate in three major Shell deals.

Some top executives were replaced the following year; and it turned out that two of the newcomers had worked for other Citigroup clients. The Citigroup team worked hard to successfully transfer those relationships. The new CEO, however, had no relationship with Citigroup. Sir Win called on his extended network and asked a former finance minister to introduce him to the new CEO and to give Citigroup advice on how to build the relationship. Shortly afterward, Citigroup was one of nine banks invited to bid on a major restructuring assignment. The Citigroup team members invested heavily in preparing their proposal. They even took the unusual approach of interviewing Shell’s auditors and lawyers in an attempt to understand every aspect of the restructuring challenge. Through the quality of their proposal and their intimate knowledge of Shell’s business, they won the mandate. Shell not only picked them for the assignment, but they also insisted on paying them for the planning work because they wanted it to be a fair deal and hoped to secure Citigroup’s full commitment to the program.

The relationship expanded over time, and Citigroup began doing brokerage, trading, and cash management for Shell. It would be one-sided to say that the relationship has always been a bed of roses—in fact, there have been ups and downs, as there invariably are between a major investment bank and a large corporate client. There have been times, for example, when each side had to say no to a request by the other party. Equally, there have been moments when deposits of trust were made—such as when Citigroup helped Shell out by liquidating a particular bond position.

Successful long-termrelationships are based ona combination of the individualand the company. In order forthere to be continuity, you reallymust have a relationship at thefirm level. This is why havingthe right culture is essential. It’swhere teamwork comes in, it’sabout how people are measuredand evaluated, and even abouthow information flows—thesethings are extremely important.The individual actuallydelivers the relationship, but thefirm backs it up. If the culturedoesn’t support the individual’sefforts, then it will fail.

—Sir Win Bischoff, Chairman, Citigroup

Citigroup employed a number of All for One strategies in fostering the Shell relationship. Some were explicit —for example, carefully leveraging firm-wide networks, coordinating between product units, putting a senior advisor on the team, and investing heavily to build intimate client knowledge. Others, however, were more hidden in the fabric of the institution, and included things like a sophisticated, multilevel relationship management structure and a performance evaluation system that balances achieving short-term financial goals with commitment to cultural values such as collaboration and client focus.

Booz Allen Hamilton and the U.S. Navy

A second example of an extraordinary trusted client partnership is Booz Allen Hamilton’s relationship with the U.S. Navy. Talk about a “client for life”—the U.S. Navy has used this consulting firm for nearly 70 years, a period of time equal to about three professional lifetimes. In 1940—as the Axis powers tightened their grip on Europe and Asia—the U.S. Navy found itself grossly underequipped, with no permanent headquarters and less than half the ships it needed to conduct the war. The two founders of Booz Allen Hamilton—Ed Booz and Jim Allen—personally took on the assignment to help the Navy expand and modernize. They assisted the Navy to create a more effective management structure and cut red tape, and then worked side by side with Navy personnel to implement a series of recommendations designed to speed up decision making and accelerate manufacturing processes. Good work is always the foundation of a trusted client partnership; and indeed, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox—who had hired Booz Allen Hamilton—was later quoted by Fortune magazine as saying that in using the firm, he had never spent the government’s money more effectively. Since that initial engagement, Booz Allen Hamilton has worked with the U.S. Navy on a continuous series of projects, helping it confront an array of strategic, operational, and technology issues through the Cold War and beyond. The firm helped the Navy launch the Polaris missile program in the 1950s, and develop shipboard communications and computer technologies in the 1970s. Today, a dedicated group of partners lead Booz Allen Hamilton’s work with the Navy across multiple locations around the world.

Like Citigroup’s Corporate Bank, Booz Allen Hamilton employs a variety of organizational practices, processes, and systems that enable it to develop, grow, and sustain trusted partnerships with its clients. These include an ability to work with and support—rather than disdain—the procurement managers who evaluate new proposals; an authentic talent for aligning with their client’s agenda (“your mission is our mission” is a commonly used phrase at the firm); a set of well-developed best practices for institutionalizing and building many-to-many relationships with the client’s organization; a skilled cadre of project managers (principals) and client service officers (vice presidents) who are empowered to lead major engagements; and rigorous quality control processes.

Booz Allen Hamilton’s relationship with the Navy is the rule for them, not the exception. Over the past decade, the firm’s now $3 billion public sector consulting business has grown at the remarkable pace of 20 percent per year. Its success cannot simply be ascribed to a rapidly growing market for government contracts. In fact, it faces intense—even brutal—competition. For some bids (and over 80 percent of Booz Allen Hamilton’s government work is won through formal, competitive procurement processes) there can be 10 or even 20 large competitors such as Boeing, IBM, Accenture, and other behemoths, who have nonetheless been unable to achieve Booz Allen’s growth rates.

What’s their secret—besides a highly structured approach to building and managing large-scale relationships? One of Booz Allen Hamilton’s senior vice presidents described to me his view of their competitive advantage:

It’s very simple: Collaboration is built into our DNA, and so we always compete as one team. When a large opportunity presents itself, we discuss it as a partner group. We decide together whether or not to commit the resources needed to win the bid. If every head in the room nods, then we go for it. We do whatever it takes, and everyone helps each other out. If I need a particular person who is engaged elsewhere—if they are really critical to help us win and then deliver—my partners will almost always make the sacrifice. The fact is, we are much smaller than almost all of our competitors. But they compete as isolated business units, and we compete as one firm. So even though we are not as large, we do a better job of marshalling the right resources and concentrating them onto the opportunity. We effectively bring to bear the clout of a much larger organization.

Relationships like these are the envy of any large services firm. They don’t happen by accident, however; and they are not the work of a single talented individual. They must be systematically cultivated and grown. As I described in the Introduction, the capacity of a firm to develop these trusted client partnerships rests on an entire system of organizational capabilities. You can become a trusted advisor by developing your own skills and working on your own client relationships, but you need to employ a multiplicity of strategies and a team approach in order to become a trusted partner—it’s not a solo act. The journey is well worth it, however. The rewards, for both service provider and client, are huge.

Underpinnings of Trusted Client Partnerships

To cultivate a relationship of this stature, two key dimensions must be developed: the individual professional’s role, and the firm’s overall relationship. Here’s what has to happen:

• First, the individual professional who is leading the relationship must evolve his role from that of an expert for hire to a trusted client advisor. This is the essential first step.

• Second, the firm’s relationship must develop from a single point of contact and a single service to multiple contacts and a broad range of services.

These two dimensions are shown in Figure 1.1.

FIGURE 1.1The Client Development Matrix

If you reflect on it, you’ll see that this Client Development Matrix—where each quadrant represents a particular positioning with the client—makes intuitive sense. However, to create a complete progression of professional relationships, we need to consider individuals who are not yet clients—people who have not even entered the matrix. Nonclients include what I call contacts and acquaintances. If we add these into the mix, we end up with six levels of professional relationships. My clients have found it extremely useful to think about these as a progression from one to six.

Level 1:Contact

This is the starting point. We meet someone, have a brief conversation, and exchange business cards. We may stay in touch over the years, but there is little interaction. The individual is primarily just a name in our contact database.

Level 2:Acquaintance

Acquaintances are contacts we have gotten to know a bit better or friends we have carried with us through the different stages of our lives. We know something about each other, and may have actually spent a fair amount of time together, but the individual has never become a client. He or she may be important to us for other reasons, however, perhaps as source of friendship, information, and insight about markets and competitors, or as resources that we can introduce to our clients.

Level 3:Expert

At the beginning of your relationships with them, some contacts and acquaintances become clients for whom you are invariably hired in a narrow, expert role. The client has a problem she wants solved, and you have the specific knowledge and experience to deal with it. Almost all relationships begin in this way and, in this quadrant, the trust and mutual understanding that enable a relationship to deepen simply have not developed yet. It’s not a “bad” position to be in, but over time, you’re going to want to move to the right and upward in the matrix.

Level 4:Vendor or Steady Supplier

If you do a good job on the first engagement or transaction, you will probably be asked to do some follow-up work; and you may eventually end up managing a very large, multifaceted set of programs. Don’t kid yourself, however, you’re still in “request-for-proposal territory,” just as you were when you were a solitary expert for hire. At this point, you may be spending a lot of your time with procurement managers or lower-level buyers, without the benefit of having an anchor into senior management. You are by no means part of this client’s inner circle; you’re more like a contractor who is managing many tradesmen or experts.

Level 5:Trusted Advisor

You earn this coveted role—which was the subject of my first book, Clients for Life—by exemplifying a series of essential qualities that set you apart from the expert for hire or vendor. These include things like personal trustworthiness, independence, judgment, big-picture thinking, empathy, and others. The challenge at this point is to move up the other axis and broaden the relationship at a firm level—to grow it from an individual relationship to an institutional one. You don’t always progress linearly from Level 3 through Levels 4 and 5—sometimes you move directly from Expert to Trusted Advisor, skipping the Vendor stage altogether.

Level 6:Trusted Partner

This is the ultimate goal: to be a trusted advisor to your client and to harness the full power of your organization to address a variety of client issues. Finding yourself in this upper-right quadrant means that you have built a true partnership. You are helping to shape your client’s agenda, you’ve developed many-to-many relationships, and you are meeting an array of client needs with different services or products. It’s not an easy task to play this role with a client, but if you succeed, you and your firm will probably have a client for life—and a highly profitable one at that. You’ll also experience great personal satisfaction in the role of a trusted counselor who is having a significant impact on client success.

These six levels, and the way in which a client would describe them, are summarized in Table 1.1.

How Do You Know You’ve Reached Level 6?

In a Level 6 trusted partner relationship, you typically:

• Have developed multiple relationships between your firm and the client’s organization, both horizontally and vertically;

• Have several, Level 5 trusted advisor relationships with the client;

• Have strong relationships with one or more key economic buyers;

• Have broadened the relationship so that you provide the client with a variety of services or products and there is a breadth of revenues; and

• Are doing work that is aligned with the most critical issues on the client’s agenda.

There are no hard-and-fast, scientific criteria to identify a Level 6 trusted client partnership, but these are some of the key factors you need to look for.

We have three foundations that contribute to sustaining our long-term, institutional client relationships: the team; client results; and our approach to creating value. Our competitive spirit is turned toward our client’s competition—not toward each other. Many of our consultants were at the top of their class, but we emphasize our team approach and collaboration every chance we can. When we recruit we look for teamwork skills, and collaboration is reinforced in the performance feedback process and in almost every communication from our managing partner. As a result, we have a culture where individuals don’t try to “outshine” a peer; and the slogan “One Bain partner never lets down another Bain partner” is engrained in our behavior.

—Wendy Miller, Director, Bain & Company

TABLE 1.1The Six Levels of Professional Relationships

Importance of Reaching Level 6

How would you or your firm’s client relationships map against the client development matrix and these different levels of relationships? How many of your clients would fall in each of the quadrants? When I have worked with my clients to position their client base in this matrix, they typically find that between 10 and 20 percent of their relationships fall into the Level 6 trusted partner quadrant. These relationships are in the minority; but as I’ve mentioned, they make an outsize contribution to the growth and prosperity of any firm, and they are often the source of your most innovative intellectual capital.

What if you had just a few more of these Level 6 relationships? What kind of an impact would this have on your organization? I have frequently seen a single Level 6 client transform a career or an office. For example, when I moved to Rome to become Gemini Consulting’s Country Head and Managing Director for Italy, I was able to succeed in growing the practice and adding staff mainly because of two Level 6 relationships that I developed early in my tenure there. And during their early days, Bain & Company based its international expansion strategy on the development of Level 6 relationships. Bain would only open a new office outside the United States when it had developed a “consolidated” client in that geographic location, that is, a major flagship client that would provide ballast and a steady revenue stream to support the hiring of staff and investment in local office infrastructure.

Why It Matters to Clients

I’ve made it clear how important Level 6 relationships are for the service provider. But what about the client? In the hundreds of interviews that I have conducted, client executives cite a variety of benefits to these long-term, institutional relationships, some of which include:

• Impact: Often, it takes a significant concentration of resources from an outside service provider to help clients actually achieve their strategic goals.

• Continuity: The trust and continuity that are part of the fabric of a trusted client partnership increase speed and enable more efficient project completion.

• Value: By developing intimate client and industry knowledge, the service provider can add value in multiple dimensions and create more tailored solutions.

• Ease of use: It can be extremely unwieldy and inefficient for large clients to use dozens—even hundreds—of banks, law firms, or advertising agencies all around the world. By concentrating their business with a smaller number of strategic partners, clients can dramatically decrease the friction of relationship management.

• Cost: All of the factors cited here can combine to reduce overall costs for the client.

Not surprisingly, the investment required to develop Level 6 client relationships is commensurate with their importance and pay-back. Building and sustaining them requires the application of the integrated set of strategies that are summarized in the next chapter.

2

Employing 10 Integrated Strategies

Over the past five years, I have studied, in depth, about 50 Level 6 relationships across a variety of service markets—including consulting, accounting, law, financial services, advertising, public relations, and technology services. I have also reviewed several hundred additional client relationship case studies that have provided supporting data to the 50 detailed reviews. Two things became apparent as I analyzed these relationships. First, a multiplicity of strategies contributed to their development. Second, these strategies were successful because they were able to take root in a culture of collaboration and client focus. Let’s look first at the strategies that were used, which form the core of this book.

There are 10 distinct strategies that contribute to the development of Level 6 trusted partner relationships. They are not all used at once and, depending on the individual client, they may vary somewhat in importance. Five of them tend naturally to be the individual professional’s responsibility, while the other five must be driven more by the institution:

Strategies That Are Mostly the Responsibility of the Individual Professional

1. Become an agenda setter. Evolve from agenda reacting to agenda setting by identifying, aligning with, and helping to shape your client’s most critical issues and priorities.

2. Develop relationship capital. Identify and cultivate a group of critical few relationships, drawn from five key constituencies, and understand how to link these to your clients’ and colleagues’ own networks.

3. Engage new clients. Cross the bridge from contact to client as you develop rapport, identify the other person’s agenda, and build trust in your ability to solve their problems.

4. Institutionalize and grow. Turn individual relationships into institutional ones as you mobilize the right people, ideas, and resources into your client relationship, and build a team behind you.

5. Add multiple layers of value. Deliver tangible and intangible value as well as institutional and personal value, and leverage your firm’s organization and resources to tap into six distinct value levers for your client.

Strategies That Are Mostly the Responsibility of the Firm

6. Target the right clients. Develop a shared view about which clients, issues, and individual executives you want to engage with in the first place.

7. Build a client leadership pipeline. Systematically develop the next generation of client leaders and actively support your current relationship managers.

8. Promote collaboration. Enable firmwide collaboration that allows the right people and ideas to cross organizational and geographic boundaries easily and rewards them for doing so.

9. Engage in systematic client listening. Implement multiple channels of client listening activities to connect with clients at the top, understand their issues, and ensure quality.

10. Create a unique client experience. Develop a truly differentiated client experience in which your client interactions themselves represent significant sources of value, and work with clients to co-create the relationship experience that is most beneficial to them.

You may ask, “What do some of these individual strategies have to do with developing a large-scale, trusted partnership?” They are, in fact, essential ingredients for our recipe. At the molecular level, large-scale relationships are composed of many individual ones. The ability of each professional to build his or her own relationship capital, for example (Chapter 4), and to successfully engage contacts and acquaintances and turn them into clients (Chapter 5) is critical to laying the foundations for a client partnership.

These strategies are additive and mutually reinforcing. You can pursue them individually, and they will certain provide benefit to you. But it’s when you are able to put them all into place together that you create an entire organizational system that allows you to develop and nurture trusted client partnerships on a consistent basis.

FIGURE 2.1Ten Strategies to Build Trusted Client Partnerships

These 10 strategies can be loosely overlaid on the Client Development Matrix that we looked at in Chapter 1 (see Figure 2.1).

Chapters 3 through 12 explain each of these 10 strategies in depth, providing practical examples, best practices, and suggestions for implementing them in your own organization.

Do You Have a Client-Centered, Collaborative Culture?

I was recently in London for a meeting of the Client Leadership Forum, a group of leading service firms that meet regularly to share best practices on how to develop a client-focused organization and build long-term client relationships. I co-founded this Forum with my colleague James Kelly as a means to create peer-to-peer sharing and to drive innovative research on this topic. The meeting was held at the corporate headquarters of one of the Forum participants, Lloyds Banking Group, one of the top 25 banks in the world. Around the table were the leaders from these firms, a mixture of CEOs and managing partners. One of our guests that day was then-chairman of Citigroup Europe—and soon to be chairman of the entire bank—Sir Win Bischoff (see the earlier sidebar on Sir Win). Did this powerful, quintessential banker start off by talking about his approach to relationship management, or the skills he has honed over the years in advising and negotiating with CEOs in dozens of countries around the globe? Hardly. He began by addressing the group and saying:

When I arrived at the reception downstairs, I was struck by how professional, friendly, and inviting the receptionists were. They were expecting me, knew where I was going, addressed me by name, and made me feel immediately at home here in Lloyds TSB’s offices. In truth, the capacity to build great client relationships starts with the culture, and that means being client focused in every part of the organization. You can give relationship managers all the training you want, but unless the culture is aligned with the goal of collaborating to deliver great client service and investing in long-term relationships, it just won’t work. It all starts with the culture.

The very first manifestation of a client-centered organization may well be the reception desk as you walk in. But the process, as we’ll see in Chapter 10, definitely starts at the top. Ed Nusbaum, the chief executive of accounting firm Grant Thornton, puts it this way:

Building a collaborative firm starts with the tone set by leadership and the messages you send out to your people. At every level, in every practice, I try to promote a mindset and culture where our professionals help each other out. You need a matrix to manage the organization, but we’ve really tried not to create silos so that the client remains our main focus. Our metrics, which include client service quality and working as one firm, reflect this.

After I joined Lloyds TSB threeyears ago, the first thing we didto create a more collaborative,client-focused organizationwas to merge our relationshipand product organizations.We created a corporate marketsbusiness centered on our clients,from product developmentthrough to relationshipmanagement. We also alignedour measurement and rewardsystem with our goal of buildingbroad-based relationships,and created a scorecardthat includes financial measuresfor cross-selling as wellas relationship development. Ipersonally try to role model ourvalues—this year, for example,I have personally met with 360of the bank’s clients. When youhave client focus coming fromthe top, it really lifts the gameof your relationship managersthroughout the organization.

—Diana Brightmore-Armour, CEO of CorporateBanking, Lloyds BankingGroup

Most service firms claim to be collaborative and client-focused. But are they really? Is your own organization’s culture truly relationship and client-centric? Are your values shared from the executive suite right through to your receptionist? Without the right culture, as Sir Win tells us, all of the strategies and initiatives and training programs in the world will fall on deaf ears and on barren soil. There is no definitive litmus test for what constitutes a client-centered culture; but there is a series of questions I suggest you ask yourself about your own firm in order to assess its readiness to adopt the All for One strategies described in this book:

Some Questions to Ask

• What fraction of their time do your top executives actually spend with clients? (5 percent? 20 percent? 50 percent?)

• Are clients regularly discussed in executive forums and at the management committee level?

• How much power are relationship managers given in order to act on their clients’ behalf ?

• Is there a gap between senior management’s pronouncements about “client focus” and its actual policies and actions?

• Does the firm do anything to independently verify the success of its relationships (e.g., market research, independent reviews)?

• Does the firm have metrics to assess relationship health (e.g., retention, breadth, relationships with decision makers, number of referrals)?

• Are professionals allowed discretionary time and budget to build networks and relationships that may have little short-term payoff?

• Does an interest in and focus on clients pervade the organization and extend beyond those professionals who are managing client relationships (e.g., to receptionists, administrative and support staff, functional specialists in IT and legal)?

• How easy is it for clients to do business with the firm?

• Is your organization structure client centric? Are single clients and client markets major focal points for the organization?

• What is the sense of balance between working for the firm’s interests (achieving short-term financial return) versus serving the client’s agenda?

• Do your professionals willingly and naturally collaborate around client relationships?

• At the end of the year, how much arguing or conflict is there around getting credit for revenue generation and client relationship success?

Conclusion

Traditionally, we celebrate and hold in awe those individuals who are accomplished rainmakers or trusted counselors to top executives. Reaching Level 6, however—building trusted client partnerships—requires more. All for One is a philosophy that, when operational, allows you to mobilize the right people, ideas, and resources into each and every client relationship. It enables you to deliver the whole firm, all the time, to every client. In good times, these Level 6 relationships will lead your growth; in tough times, they will ensure that if your clients have to cut back, you will be the last one standing among your competition.

TABLE 2.1Do You Have a Level 6 Client Relationship?

A good way to start this journey is to select a current client that has the potential to develop into a Level 6 relationship; or, alternatively, one that you believe is already at this stage but needs more attention and investment. As you go through the chapters, you can then apply the strategies to this specific client. Table 2.1 sets out a series of questions that will help you determine how close you are to Level 6.

PART II

The Five Individual Strategies

3

Strategy One: Becoming an Agenda Setter

Understanding and Shaping Your Client’ sMost Critical Priorities

After six months of unsuccessful attempts, the senior business development team at a large technology services company finally procured a meeting with a high-potential customer: the chief executive of a major telecommunications provider. Four executives from the technology services firm went to the meeting with the CEO. They had prepared carefully—or so they thought—and had developed a well-honed presentation on how they could provide a mission-critical, state-of-the-art system to the CEO’s company. They traveled from three different countries to attend the meeting.

Fifteen minutes into the discussion, however, the CEO appeared unengaged and distracted. His knee rocked from side to side, and he peered at his Blackberry. He finally glanced at his watch, and then abruptly interrupted the presentation. “Look, it’s been very nice meeting you, but I’ve got an urgent appointment and I have to leave.” He thanked his guests and left them, speechless and forlorn, in the meeting room. His assistant led them out.

One of the executives later confessed to me that they had discovered, a few days after the meeting, a video of the CEO on a financial news web site. It had been filmed only a week before their meeting, and in it, the CEO had laid out a new set of strategic priorities for his organization. These focused on things like value-added services, customer retention, and improved responsiveness in their call centers. The technology company’s new system was definitely not part of, nor aligned in any clear way, with the CEO’s new agenda. Given the crushing demands on his daily schedule, the CEO quickly decided that the meeting did not align with his priorities and was not a good use of his scarce time—so he unceremoniously bolted.