Is clarity needed about who owns the account? Is it the client or the account manager? That should be obvious shouldn’t it? Well in an ideal world, it should be the person responsible, but unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world and I’ve seen this “ideal” challenged numerous times. Such challenges are detrimental to [...]
A few months ago I wrote an article called “The Nine Steps To Take if You Get Fired” It’s tough as we take it personally and often we do not have a plan b or c. So in that article I discussed some ways to deal with the pain and aftermath of being fired.As we [...]
Meetings can be like leeches that suck the very life out of us. How can we ensure we get the most out of our customer meetings and use the opportunity to enhance our relationships?Meetings can be the bane of our lives. When I was in the corporate world, my schedule was stacked with customer meetings [...]
Why having a Customer or Relationship Strategy Plan, based on evaluating our relationships, is critical to our success.We rely on Business Plans to drive our business direction, but why is it we rarely design and complete Business Plans for our customers?I have lost count of the number of Business Plans I have drafted, completed and [...]
Relationships take such a long time to forge by building trust and respect and they can be ruined very quickly by saying something without thinking first and being selfish. But sometimes, because we focus so much on the external relationships with the customer, we forget that internal relationships are just as important.I had a horrendous [...]
Relationships are about trust, respect and building bridges. That is what my experience has taught me. It is NOT about undermining people and trying to catch them out. Don't go looking for a smoking gun.This is something one of my bosses hadn't heard about or chose to ignore. Sandy was old school, but understood people and [...]
So does your team sing to the same tune? Is teamwork working effectively?An essential ingredient of enjoying successful relationships at work is effective teamwork and being accountable. But being accountable seems to be less evident than it used to be.So why has accountability become rare? And so we are clear, by that I mean, when did we stop [...]
How many times have you been in meetings and realized that you may have not told your Boss that little piece of information that would have prevented her from being grilled by her management and peers right now?You watch helplessly as she visibly projects discomfort and desperately searches for reasons to provide why something that [...]
Most of my work and effort is spent helping people build customer relationships, understanding the importance of these and developing a process that enables us to measure and track our effectiveness.During this work, I’m often reminded that we don’t practice what we are doing with our customers, with people in our own company.That thought process [...]
Recently, I had been talking with a number of friends and business contacts and there was a recurring word that kept cropping up during the conversation. The word was strategy. Interestingly, it was not being used in the same vein in these conversations or in the same context, but the word itself was used during [...]