As Management Consultant, Theodore Levitt, says, "It is reasonable for clients who have been promised the moon to expect it to be delivered." So, don't ask clients to have faith in your professionalism. Give them evidence of it!

While service is a client-focused activity, there's a lot in it for you, too.

Developing and maintaining healthy client relationships means that you can expect repeat business and increased persistency. It can also spin off endless chains of well-qualified, on-profile referrals and introductions. Building on your client base increases profitability, since it cuts front-end marketing time and may dramatically lower acquisition costs.

Client Relationships — Mutual Expectations

You might think that building and managing client relationships would be easy enough for most salespeople. After all, isn't getting the sale the hard part? As difficult as it might be to convince people to do business with you, keeping their business and expanding it can be surprisingly complicated. Actually, most producers don't lose client relationships; they simply don't develop them in the first place.

The mechanics of client building are easy (we'll look at a variety of client building and service techniques shortly), but understanding the dynamics of client relationships, and how to manage them, is more difficult.