It Starts With Clients : Your 100-Day Plan to Build Lifelong Relationships and Revenue

World-renowned client relationship authority shows you how to dramatically grow your business by mastering fourteen critical client development challenges Andrew Sobel, author of the international bestsellers Clients for Life and Power Questions, offers a proven,100-day plan for conquering 14 tough client development challenges and growing your client base in any market conditions. He's encapsulated 25 years of unique research, including personal interviews with over 8000 top executives and successful rainmakers, into a practical roadmap for winning more new clients and growing your existing relationships. You'll learn specific strategies to move confidently and predictably from a first meeting to a signed contract, and discover the agenda-setting techniques that create a steady stream of sole-source business. You'll master the art of reframing client requests, leading to broader, higher-impact engagements. You'll dramatically sharpen your ability to ask the powerful questions that can transform your client relationships. And, you'll learn to develop advisory relationships with influential C-suite executives. Andrew illustrates each weekly challenge with real-life examples drawn from thousands of executive meetings. He shares success strategies from having grown and led three highly successful professional service businesses. Andrew has taught these strategies to over 50,000 professionals around the world, and they're now available to you in this highly readable, portable masterclass. Whether you are early in your career and need a comprehensive guide to grow your client base from the ground up or are a seasoned practitioner who wants to accelerate your business growth, It Starts With Clients will take you to the next level. "It Starts with Clients is a double entendre (actually "triple"): (1) It's about helping people when they are starting out to build a client base in their careers; (2) It affirms that when you start a business, it's best to start with a potential client/customer already in hand; and (3) All business strategy should start from an understanding of the needs of the client/customer. Over the last 20 years Sobel has developed the single most significant, diverse, and widely-read body of work in the world on how to build enduring client relationships--and more generally, on establishing trusted business relationships. His client base includes many of the leading professional service firms (e.g., McKinsey), banks (e.g., Citibank), and technology firms (e.g., Cognizant, SAP) in the world. It Starts with Clients will be, in a sense, the prequel to his most popular books on the subject. It's a book many of his clients have asked for as the Millennial generation has fully entered the workforce. A typical comment has been, "We love your content, and we've put all our experienced people through it--now, do you have something for our younger professionals in their 20s and 30s who are just starting to work with clients and build their own client base?" It Starts with Clients will set out all of the key strategies and skills required to acquire and grow new clients, and then sustain lifelong relationships with them. It is NOT a "Millennials" book but rather the ultimate guide for anyone who is in their first five years or so of working in a client-facing role in sales, delivery, or service. It is based on the most extensive and wide-ranging research ever done on the ingredients of enduring client relationships. There is actually no book like this on the market--nothing with a similar or even vaguely similar title. The closest would be Alan Weiss's Getting Started in Consulting, which has been quite successful (after 20 years on the market, he's launching a revised edition this spring). But even that is a very different book than It Starts"-- Provided by publisher

World-renowned client relationship authority shows you how to dramatically grow your business by mastering fourteen critical client development challenges

Andrew Sobel, author of the international bestsellers Clients for Life and Power Questions, offers a proven,100-day plan for conquering 14 tough client development challenges and growing your client base in any market conditions. He's encapsulated 25 years of unique research, including personal interviews with over 8000 top executives and successful rainmakers, into a practical roadmap for winning more new clients and growing your existing relationships.

You'll learn specific strategies to move confidently and predictably from a first meeting to a signed contract, and discover the agenda-setting techniques that create a steady stream of sole-source business. You'll master the art of reframing client requests, leading to broader, higher-impact engagements. You'll dramatically sharpen your ability to ask the powerful questions that can transform your client relationships. And, you'll learn to develop advisory relationships with influential C-suite executives. Andrew illustrates each weekly challenge with real-life examples drawn from thousands of executive meetings. He shares success strategies from having grown and led three highly successful professional service businesses.

Andrew has taught these strategies to over 50,000 professionals around the world, and they're now available to you in this highly readable, portable masterclass. Whether you are early in your career and need a comprehensive guide to grow your client base from the ground up or are a seasoned practitioner who wants to accelerate your business growth, It Starts With Clients will take you to the next level.