Staying Connected With Clients

As a consultant, your relationships with your clients are invaluable. Learn a few strategies for maintaining your client relationships. 

Client relationships are the lifeblood of your business. Be deliberate about maintaining them. Regular contact will keep you top of mind. Beware of excessive contact; they’re going to ignore you or block you if you’re in their inbox too much. Find excuses to reach out to them like, “Hey I read an article and I thought of you,” or “I heard about a cool new technology and I thought you might be interested in it.” Send these notes and leave it at that. Don’t try and sell during these interactions. They know you eventually want to sell them something. Just focus on being helpful and good things are going to come.

I have one client who has had a great relationship with me over the years. Every once in a while, I’ll see something that I think would be interesting to him and I drop him a note. He always writes back and says, “Not that you’re trying to sell me something.” He and I both know the deal here. I’m trying to be helpful and stay top of mind so that anytime he has a need that my firm can fill, he’s going to call me first.

Some reasons you might want to reach out to connect with your clients and prospects include things like having a new service offering that they might be interested in, knowing a candidate who might be a great fit for their organization, or maybe you read an article about a topic they’re interested in.

I tend to stay away from personal topics when reaching out. Things like anniversaries or kids’ birthdays can get a bit tricky. It can get very awkward if you congratulate somebody on their anniversary only to find out that they were divorced recently. Try to keep your outreach focused on professional topics. Articles about topics they might find interesting, new technologies, and new books you’ve read are all perfect excuses to reach out to a client and reestablish that relationship.

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