Professionals who work with clients or large accounts can create lifetime relationships based on these well-researched secrets. Based drawing from extensive interviews with client executives, Making Rain offers a series of provocative insights on how to shed the expert-for-hire label and develop long-term advisory relationships. Exploding the popular myth of the «Rainmaker,» a dated and dysfunctional figure that clients no longer welcome, Andrew Sobel argues that any professional can learn to «make rain» on an ongoing basis with existing clients by developing a special set of skills, attitudes, and strategies. These innovative tips and techniques from a recognized leader in the field of professional services will enable any consultant, salesperson, or service professional to create enduring client loyalty.
An arsenal of powerful questions that will transform every conversation Skillfully redefine problems. Make an immediate connection with anyone. Rapidly determine if a client is ready to buy. Access the deepest dreams of others. Power Questions sets out a series of strategic questions that will help you win new business and dramatically deepen your professional and personal relationships. The book showcases thirty-five riveting, real conversations with CEOs, billionaires, clients, colleagues, and friends. Each story illustrates the extraordinary power and impact of a thought-provoking, incisive power question. To help readers navigate a variety of professional challenges, over 200 additional, thought-provoking questions are also summarized at the end of the book. In Power Questions you’ll discover: The question that stopped an angry executive in his tracks The sales question CEOs expect you to ask versus the questions they want you to ask The question that will radically refocus any meeting The penetrating question that can transform a friend or colleague’s life A simple question that helped restore a marriage When you use power questions, you magnify your professional and personal influence, create intimate connections with others, and drive to the true heart of the issue every time.
The Relationship Laws that Drive Success There are powerful but invisible laws that determine whether your relationships —with your clients, colleagues, and friends—will thrive or wither. These relationship laws are ever-present. When you align with them, the results are dramatic. Your network will grow rapidly. You’ll be seen by clients as a trusted partner rather than an expense to be managed. And you’ll find the people around you eager to help you succeed. When you ignore the laws, however, your efforts will falter. Relationship building will seem like very hard work. Power Relationships gives readers a unique, entertaining guide to relationship success at work and in life. Each of the 26 laws is illustrated and explained using a compelling, real-life story that shows how to implement it. The second section of the book presents 16 common relationship challenges with specific solutions. You’ll read about: The top Citigroup executive whose relationship with a CEO was changed forever on a business trip that exploded into chaos, and how you can use the same principle to deepen your own relationships. The philanthropist who, on the verge of being mugged in a dark parking lot, learns how his actions have had an unimaginable ripple effect across several generations How one of the authors flew halfway around the world and used Law 18—“Make them curious”—to turn a make-or-break, five-minute meeting with a top executive into a long-term relationship. The chance encounter on an airplane with a famous actor that revealed a simple but profound truth. It’s Law 25: “Build your network before you need it.” Sobel (author of Clients for Life, All for One, and Power Questions (with Panas)) and Panas (author of Asking and Supremely Successful Selling) have sold over half a million books and are the leading authorities in their field. Power Relationships is a unique, road-tested guide to relationship success.
Corporate clients are demanding more value from their external advisors, and consolidating their business around a smaller number of firms. These trends are forcing a variety of service providers—from consulting firms to large banks—to confront a series of difficult challenges: How do we create an ‘all-for-one, one-for-all’ culture in which the whole is greater than the sum-of-the-parts and we succeed in leveraging our global network to deliver value to clients?" How do we mobilize the right people, resources, and ideas—across a multitude of organizational and geographic boundaries—into each and every client relationship?" How do we evolve from a trusted advisor to a trusted partner and build multi-year, institutional relationships? All for One answers these questions with an innovative and comprehensive model for developing enduring, institutional client relationships—what Andrew Sobel refers to as Level 6 Trusted Client Partnerships. It offers readers ten specific strategies that are thoroughly supported by case studies, best practices from leading firms, and implementation tools. The individual professional is principally responsible for five of these strategies, while the firm—the institution—must support and drive the other five. When you successfully execute against all ten of these building blocks, you develop long-term, professional-client partnerships that provide great value to the client and high levels of personal satisfaction and profitability for the service provider.
Use the power of questions to accelerate your sales process and gain client commitment. Skillfully build rapport. Establish your credibility. Uncover a client’s issues. Determine if your prospect is really ready to buy. Get commitment to a next step. Power Questions to Win the Sale provides specific strategies and techniques to help you successfully manage the most common challenges in sales. For each step in the sales process, it gives you a series of thoughtful questions that will help you rapidly turn a contact into a client. Drawing on the author’s bestselling Power Questions, this short e-book shows you how to: Sequence your agenda and use questions at the right moments in the sales process Establish yourself as an expert through credibility-building questions rather than slide presentations Draw out the client’s agenda of essential priorities and goals Position your proposal to win by meeting eight key preconditions before you submit it Unblock a sale that is stalled Power Questions to Win the Sale is a practical roadmap for balancing advocacy and inquiry during the sales process and winning new business more consistently and confidently.
Use the power of questions to deepen and grow your client relationships The right question can shift a conversation from the analytical to the emotional, from the details to the big picture, and from the past to the future. The result? Deeper client knowledge, more intimate relationships, and a clear understanding of how you can add more value. Power Questions to Build Clients for Life shows how to use strategic questions to implement nine essential clients-for-life strategies. You’ll learn: How to select the right clients to begin with Growth strategies to broaden your relationships Techniques for building personal relationships with your clients Powerful questions to help you connect in the C-Suite Ten questions you must ask your clients every year in order to assess your relationship health Power Questions to Build Clients for Life gives you both the strategies and the key questions to develop trusted partnerships with your most important clients.