Client relationship management refers to a company’s interactions with clients, and their approach to building a positive working relationship. Good client relationship management helps to generate ongoing business, client retention and brand reputation.
Table of Contents
- The Client Consultant Relationship and the Assignment
- Managing the Relationship
- The Phases of an Assignment and Relationship
- Phase 0: Setting the Team up
- Phase 1: Identify and catalogue your products, services and potential clients.
- Phase 2: Promotion and Awareness (includes the Initial Contact)
- Phase 3: Identify problems, requirements
- Phase 4: Identify potential solutions, their costs, benefits and risks
- Phase 5 Plan, Monitor and Control the Assignment
- Phase 6 Influence, Propose, Negotiate, Agree and Commit
- Phase 7 Implement the Agreement
- Phase 8 Exploit
- ICECAP in Relationship Management Keeping up to date
- Implementation
- Consolidation
- Expansion
- Communication, Administration and Planning
- Why it often goes horribly wrong
The Client Consultant Relationship and the Assignment
Our approach to almost any assignment and the relationship supporting it follows seven well-defined phases/stages. These are described in more detail in workshop discussions, handouts, case studies, exercises and the notes underpinning your slide copies.
Whilst the phases we show appear sequential, many of the tasks mentioned are common and sometimes the phases can be run in parallel.
We suggest that you adopt this generic approach to something more appropriate to your specific consultancy assignments, however, do make sure that it is directly relevant to your business. You must consider the modifications, organisation, resources, culture, skills, existing processes and methods, inter-dependencies and other critical areas.
Please note that we deliberately use the words client, account and customer interchangeably throughout this section. Similarly, the Consultant is the same as the Account Manager is the same as a Client Manager.
Managing the Relationship
To manage the relationship successfully you need to consider the processes, team, skills and staff on both client and provider side.
- You need to identify potential problems and strategies to resolve them.
- You need to know when to move forward and when to hold back or even retreat.
- You need to communicate and get feedback
This section looks at the phases in the relationship and the ICECAP support process. It also reminds you of some of the softer issues and finishes with some key areas to consider.
The Phases of an Assignment and Relationship
Phase 0: Setting the Team up
Here you define role, responsibilities, processes and tasks for the Consultancy and consider:
- Consultant and Client Relationships
- Assignment Manager or Project Manager
- Life-Cycle
- Strategic Bridging
- Links to Programme, Business, Supply, Demand, Project, Applications, Infrastructure and Service Management
- Skills and roles
- Administrative and planning issues
To maintain the relationship, You must:
- ensure that you and your colleagues have a sufficiently strategic and operational knowledge of Business and IT
- promote yourself as the “agent for change” develop a comprehensive understanding of the business and technical environment in which you work.
- Identify how your organisation operates, and its position policies and direction in relation to the internal and external world.
Phase 1: Identify and catalogue your products, services and potential clients.
Here you:
- Identify the product and service chains. identify and catalogue your (and your clients) products and services
- Identify potential fits and gaps and consider potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
- identify the sales and buying processes for example how a bid will be developed and managed
To maintain the relationship, You must:
- Create an initial marketing promotion plan
- Use ICECAP, strategic product and service position models, service and product catalogues to further your understanding of the potential business fit.
Phase 2: Promotion and Awareness (includes the Initial Contact)
In this stage you:
- Impress the client via personal contact.
- Qualify potential business and disengage if required
- Use techniques such as POCC to help prepare, set objectives, identify needs and get agreement to progress further.
- Identify Marketing, business drivers
- Create Root and Business Definitions using VOCATE
- Produce an initial qualification
To maintain the relationship, You must:
- Provide feedback
Phase 3: Identify problems, requirements
Here you initiate the detailed investigation identify clients business, organisational and personal drivers and use such tools and techniques as:
- Stakeholder Analysis
- Critical success factors/objectives analysis
- MOST
- PESTLE and SWOT
- Boston Consultancy Grid
To maintain the relationship. You must
- Provide feedback
- Agree on the needs, scope the assignment project and build up your assignment portfolio based on:
-
- organisation mapping and process models
- MANDACT
- Differentiation.
- Solution Definitions
You may have many more discussions to exploit the client’s needs and opportunities. You will need to ensure that you seek agreement on problems and opportunities and match your capabilities to the client’s needs as well as yours.
Phase 4: Identify potential solutions, their costs, benefits and risks
Now it is time to be creative and rational:
- You will qualify solutions against business, HR, culture, supplier, technical, Cosi, time and resource fits
- You may need to manage different suppliers and partners and define the roles and responsibilities.
- You will need some Innovative and entrepreneurial thinking
- You and your client will expect some form of Investment Appraisal, Risk, Analysis and Management
- You may also need to help your client evaluate and select different suppliers and solutions.
To maintain the relationship. You must
- Provide feedback
- You might create a proposal or even a business case here
Phase 5 Plan, Monitor and Control the Assignment
You now
- agree the Critical Success Factors/ penalties, quality and acceptance criteria
- the Contractual/IPR and other implications and dependencies
You will focus on
- Payment and Billing methods
- Assignment plans (project, transition, service etc) and show key deliverables
- Creating the Business Case
- Ensuring safe Programme and Project planning and control with agreed deliverables and products
- Managing Quality. Change Control
- Managing the Contract and ensuring appropriates types, clauses and schedules
To maintain the relationship, You must
- Provide feedback
- Business Case
Phase 6 Influence, Propose, Negotiate, Agree and Commit
Now you get toward the agreement and look at the softer side of your relationship. You might need to rebuild a team and consider:
- SDI
- What’s their interests
- Team Styles and Relating Styles, persuasion methods, the negotiation process
- Influencing and Conflict Management
- How to deal with “objections” closure skills
To maintain the relationship. You must
- Provide feedback
- Reach Agreement
Phase 7 Implement the Agreement
You are almost there, so now you:
- Validate change plans, agree on knowledge transfer needs, commit to “Best and Final Offer” sign service agreements and contracts.
- Ensure final compliance against the legislation, ethics, codes of practice etc
- Manage transition and implement recommendations.
- Ensure you have correct priority, benefits, change and skills transfer plans
To maintain the relationship. You must
- Provide feedback
- Plans
Phase 8 Exploit
Here you keep yourself in employment and ensure that you can:
- Measure and improve customer perception and satisfaction levels
- Manage the benefits harvest process
- Audit the Consultancy function;
- Hold regular review meetings;
- Implement, Consolidate, Expand, Communicate, Administer and Plan
To maintain the relationship. You must
- Provide feedback
- Sell on
ICECAP in Relationship Management Keeping up to date
A key aspect of client management success is to know where you are, where you will be and the opportunities and threats facing you. I suggest that you build a client management file which enables you to look after the links, plans and deliverables.
At the very least you must be able to communicate, administer and plan (the CAP tasks of ICECAP)
The following describes the ICECAP concept further:
Whilst there are other Consulting Models and approaches, you should find that the ICECAP model is a useful way to remember the six vital activities which should be underway in all accounts.
These activities consist of:
- Implementation
- Consolidation
- Expansion
- Communication
- Administration
- Planning
They underpin the stages (from identification to exploitation) described earlier.
As a Consultant it is very easy to focus exclusively on one activity at the expense of the other five. For example, with a new client, the first few meetings will be focused on the implementation of the assignment or project. If this remains the focus throughout the engagement then at the end the client may thank you for doing an excellent job and terminates the contract. If you now tell him that there are lots of other areas you can help him with it is probably too late.
Therefore you should review how you are spending your time. You must ensure that all six activities are getting the attention they deserve. The first three activities describe the types of meetings you will hold with a client. It could be the case that within a single meeting with a single person you could hold discussions on:
- an existing project/service that has just started (1) a project that has just been completed or a service that has been used for some time (C) supplier (E)
- a potential area of his business for you to become involved as a Client Management (Processes)
However, more often than not, a single meeting will be heavily centred on any one of these areas. When a meeting is focused on either “l” or “C”, you will be looking for opportunities to move into “E” discussions within the meeting, or to build a desire for an “E” discussion at a later date.
Don’t leave this to chance, plan before the “I” or “C” meeting in such a way that you make sure such discussions take place.
The next 3 activities (CAP) are vital to support the first 3 activities (ICE). They may consume far more time and effort than the ICE activities.
Like an iceberg, the client will often only see the ICE activities, but without the CAP activities, it is unlikely that the full potential of the account will be realised.
Implementation
As the name suggests, implementation activities occur immediately after an agreement has been reached that the client will use your product or service. It could consist of a fifteen-minute meeting to organise the installation of a new version of the software, or it could consist of two hour monthly meetings spread over two years to look at the progress of a major Assignment.
The first of these meetings is critical. First impressions count and this may be the first time that the client has met with you or your colleagues as opposed to the salesperson or the senior manager he has dealt with so far. Therefore as Consultant, you must communicate:
- Professionalism: the client must feel he is in the hands of experts who he can trust to act in a professional manner.
- Co-ordination: the Manager must communicate that he has already got an understanding of the resources he will need to deliver the product/service to the client’s specification.
You must manage the EXPECTATION levels.
Client organisations will often have unrealistic expectation levels. These will have been created by your competitors, the media and of course by their own organisation.
Whilst the senior management within a client organisation may fully understand the level of service they have contracted to buy from your own organisation, they may choose to misrepresent this level to their own staff.
They might do this because a client who has Procurement Managed his suppliers tells users to expect service level improvements, whereas he has negotiated a contract with you to maintain service levels. Whatever and whoever is the cause of this unrealistic expectation level, it is your responsibility to manage this situation. “Managing’ means that you think carefully about how to deal with a situation and take appropriate action. Sometimes you will have to reduce the expectation level of the client on other occasions you may decide the most appropriate action will be to confront this issue “up-front” and “head-on”.
The factors you need to take into account in deciding this are:
- your relationship with contact?
- who created the problem?
- who is Implicated in client organisation?
- who is implicated in your organisation?
- what will be the effect on the project/service?
- will the passage of time improve/worsen situation?
- is it feasible to manage expectations downwards?
The key is to confront this problem.
Most people underestimate the complexity of a project and buyers will often deceive themselves.
By acting professionally in a problem-solving team mode with the client you will gain respect and win more business.
Consolidation
The implementation is over. The project is finished. The systems are up and running. The client has paid his bills. You can now start talking to the client about new projects. Or can you?
What if your perception is different from how the client sees the situation? What if your contact is telling you he’s happy, but telling his senior management they have concerns?
As a good Consultant, you will be planning Consolidation meetings as soon as the Implementation meetings are underway. To build an account to full potential, it is essential that the client accepts that they have received excellent value. Your status as a long-term provider of your specialist products and services must be enhanced.
The key questions
Have the clients expectation levels been satisfied
- Will they be a reference site?
- Are there loose ends we have not tied up?
- Do they think they have had value for money
- Do they like us?
- Do they think we are profession
This ‘consolidation activity should be comprehensive. Relevant senior managers, end-user managers and the client project managers need to be involved so that they gain acceptance of the value of the work undertaken by your organisation
The key issue here is clear and unambiguous communication. Getting a written acceptance that the new system is performing to specification is very unambiguous. Discussing and agreeing on this at a meeting with no written follow-up leaves room for ambiguity and lays the foundation for later recriminations. Consolidation meetings also represent an excellent opportunity for creating a desire to discuss new business opportunities. They also re-enforce your image as a partner committed to delivering major benefits from your products and services.
This can be achieved by reviewing how your products and services are being used, you can then see if improvements can be made that will dramatically enhance the benefit to your client.
Consolidation meetings need to be conducted. The most important of these is the Client Review meeting – this is covered later in this section.
Expansion
From the moment you become the Consultant you should be thinking about and actioning ‘expansion’ activities. Without expansion you are unlikely to realise the full client potential.
Even when you are undertaking an initial project for a new client there is no reason why you should not be visiting other parts of the organisation to sow the seeds for further sales. Within an existing new project, you must seek ways to expand the client’s current use of your services.
For example, who will train the end-users of a new operational or IT system? – would they like some help in this area?
You should be able to imagine all sorts of opportunities. However, be aware of your limitations. Use all appropriate internal resources to exploit these opportunities – e.g. ask your senior management to talk to theirs, use your experts to talk to theirs on specialist topics.
Timing is critical here. Asking a client contact to meet with you to discuss a new business opportunity whilst he/she is in the midst of dealing with the ‘Implementation of a new system or watching England lose against Brazil is likely to meet with a cool response.
Trying to ‘expand from an existing project that the client is not totally satisfied with may also not be very sensible. You must not give the impression that expansion has a higher priority than delivering value.
Expansion involves three critical activities:
- personal selling: ultimately you will need to meet client contacts face-to-face to convince them of the business benefits of your proposed solution. For major opportunities, you may use your Client Director as a resource to help you with this task.
- marketing activities: in large organisations, you cannot possibly meet all of the people who may have an interest in your products or services. You should liaise with the marketing department to ensure that all of these people are kept in touch with your organisation at an appropriate level.
- Client planning: you need to be proactive rather than reactive. See Planning later.
The keys to success here are:
- Getting the ‘Big Picture
- Building good relationships
- Regular Communications
- Creativity
- Determination
Communication, Administration and Planning
These activities underpin all of the activities carried out face-to-face or over the phone with clients.
As a good Client Manager, you will have a very clear set of actions under each heading which will form a major part of his commitment to the client.
Client Planning
Producing a plan does not guarantee successful assignments, one must be careful not to let the planning activities consume vast amounts of time. Much more important than the Client plan itself is the process of review, which supports the plan, and all of the activities surrounding the Assignment. This review process must involve senior management as well as other managers who have an involvement in the account, e.g. Application, Programme, Service and Project Managers.
The plan needs to be a ‘working’ document which is used to direct activities over a given period. As such, it should comprise of the following key components:
- THE ‘BIG PICTURE’– the knowledge you have about the Client should be distilled into a brief summary supported by other documents of a more detailed nature. More importantly, actions should be planned to improve the quality of this picture.
- RISK AND OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT – should be used to highlight areas of risk and areas of opportunity. Action/s with clear timescales should accompany each opportunity risk. Additionally, wherever possible, milestones should be identified which show clear progress in developing opportunities or minimising risks.
- CLIENT CONTACT ANALYSIS – each existing contact should be analysed to determine his attitude towards your organisation. New contacts critical to ‘Risk’ above should be identified. From this, a meeting plan for the period of the plan should be determined. Those planned meetings should comprise between 30 – 50% of the time available from the Account Manager of this account. Other internal staff may be used(e.g., Senior Management) to complement this activity and this should be included in the plan.
- REVENUE/PROFITABILITY FORECAST – a forecast should be made showing revenues/profitability over the period of the plan split between existing and new business.
- DELIVERY/SERVICE/QUALITY MILESTONES – the key deliverables expected by the client in the coming period should be detailed together with critical actions needed to ensure expectation levels are achieved.
- LONG-TERM OBJECTIVES VISION – a statement of the long-term objectives that are being pursued.
Once agreed the plan should be reviewed on a regular basis – at least quarterly. Ideally, the actions detailed in the plan should form part of the regular cycle of monthly reporting within the business.
Why it often goes horribly wrong
When assignments are successful and the recommendations are implemented and the benefits harvested the client benefits. You benefit. Sadly assignment (like projects) often fail to meet expectations. This can be due to many things for example:
- An unmet expectation: The Company in free-fall decline is seldom revived by a consultant and a mobile phone.
- Inadequate scope: The client is terrified about scope creep and overspends. They focus on one area only with no recognition of critical dependencies.
- Wrong people: The Consultant says yes to everything even though the skills are not there. We need revenue numbers about the sales staff, we need it this month.
- Inadequate time to investigate or poor briefing. A relationship needs trust. A trust built on shared knowledge
- No agreement on acceptance criteria. Clear criteria at the start will help ensure that the right solutions are implemented. I find one this one to be the most common – how do we know we are done?
- No feedback. This is crucial for skills transfer between client and consultant. Another one I find consultancies miss out on. Sometimes there is a resource issue which makes it difficult “we have no time for woosy review meetings
- Lack of management commitment
- No stakeholder analysis
- Moving goalposts etc
In the 1999 survey of organisational development and change in Human Resource Management Journal -40 per cent of managers surveyed found external consultants to be useful, 26 per cent were neutral and 35 per cent disagreed that they were useful”
Clearly, as a Consultant, you will be in the winning 40%