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Making Rain: The Secrets of
Building
Lifelong Client Loyalty
By Andrew Sobel
John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2003
Hardcover, 238 pages, $27.95
Reviewed by David M. Freedman
In
Making Rain, Andrew Sobel's follow-up to his first book Clients
for Life (Simon & Schuster), he identifies three keys to earning lifelong client loyalty:
(1)
Give them great advice.
(2) Exceed their expectations.
(3) Build
trust.
The first chapter of Making Rain is a confusing introduction
to those three key ideas, with hazy, overlapping definitions. For example, one
important element of the first key, giving great advice, is going "beyond
the agreed-upon value" and adding "surprise value." This sounds very
much like the second key, exceeding expectations.
Most of
the book is an elaboration on the three keys to earning client loyalty.
Sobel uses anecdotes from his consulting experience and from his varied
knowledge of world history to try to illuminate his theme. Some of the
anecdotes are right on point, some are far wide of the point; some are
illuminating but most are superficial. In fact, Sobel
wouldn't have been too far off if he had named his book 101
Superficial Anecdotes About Building Client Loyalty.
In
general, there is not much here that is fresh, nothing at all that could
be considered breakthrough. Still, some chapters are useful for reviewing
fundamentals that you've already been exposed to in many other books,
seminars, and training courses. Chapter 7, for example, sets forth "six
major factors that influence whether and to what extent [a prospective
client might like you] at a first meeting." They are: similarity,
familiarity, positive association, praising what's good, openness, and
rapport. Each of the six factors is supported by research and anecdotes.
Chapter 8,
titled "The Myth of Meeting Client Expectations," offers four useful
"principles that provide you with the broadest possible palette for
adding value to your clients." The first principle goes like
this:
Clients always have hidden or unarticulated expectations that have nothing
to do with quantitative business objectives. [Great advisors] have the
sensitivity to recognize them even when the client cannot or will not
express them.
Chapter 15
is useful too: Titled "How to Identify Client Needs," it presents "seven
strategies that can help you get in touch with your clients' needs." In a
review of this book that was published in Business Law Today,
reviewer Richard Perez points out:
Sobel
places special emphasis on the need for the...adviser to re-cast the
problems faced by its client. For example, one successful...adviser was
able to establish a long-term and multi-million-dollar business
relationship by re-casting a client's issue in broad terms (fundamental
management failures) instead of focusing on the narrow issue that the
client initially asked the adviser to address (compensation issues leading
to attrition).*
*
Business Law Today, January/February 2004, page 43, ABA (Chicago).
Perez is of counsel at Akerman Senterfitt in Miami.
Sobel
offers several methods of identifying clients' unarticulated needs,
including these four:
-
Conduct industry research.
-
Invest extra time to get to know your client.
-
Talk to your client's customers.
-
Use comparative benchmarks.
Again,
none of these strategies is seminal or ground-breaking, but they
enunciate sound fundamentals. Chapter 18
is one of the most valuable: "Five Ways to Grow Your Client
Relationships." Most notable are the following three:
-
Migrate to new issues where your expertise is valuable.
-
Migrate to working for other executives in the same company.
-
Help your client with implementation [after you give them great advice].
Because
the book is loosely organized – disjointed, actually – you can jump around to chapters that pique
your curiosity, maybe learn a few new tricks, and brush up on
fundamentals.
What was
he thinking?
A not-so-minor quibble:
The book's title is emblematic of its disjointed nature. "Making rain" is not the same thing as
"building
lifetime client loyalty," as far as I know. Making rain is about
bringing in new clients or new business. Sobel himself says, "A rainmaker'snags the big clients and closes the big deals." Building
loyalty, on the other hand, is about nurturing existing clients, growing
existing business. They're two different things. Why are they treated as
equivalent in the title? Maybe "making rain" is one of those buzz phrases
that is guaranteed to sell books these days.
The theme of the book is, however, building client loyalty.
About the
author
Andrew Sobel has spent 23 years as a business strategy consultant to
senior executives in over 30 countries. His clients range from large
public companies like Citigroup and Cox Communications to professional
service firms including Hewitt Associates and Fulbright & Jaworski.
Before starting his own consultancy, he spent 15 years at Gemini
Consulting (now Cap Gemini Ernst & Young). Many of Sobel's published
articles are posted on his website: www.andrewsobel.com.
About the reviewer
David M. Freedman (www.freedman-chicago.com) is a Chicago-based writer and
media relations consultant, specializing in the
fields of law and finance. He won a Your
Honor Award in 2001 from the Legal Marketing Association for excellence in
public relations. |
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