While preparing for a recent class at The Tenacity Center at the Cole's College for Business at Kennesaw State University, John and I had extensive preparatory conversations with the company’s EVP to ensure our teaching was tailored to their needs. Interestingly, one of their biggest concerns was managing the Expectations Paradox with their clients. We don’t hear that a lot.

Expectations are immensely powerful. The provider’s ability to consistently meet and exceed the expectations that the client brings to the new relationship is the key driver of value. Committing to a process driven methodology of eliciting these expectations, refining them to specific and measurable terms, then prioritizing them into a single set of time sensitive corporate expectations is critical to both a successful start-up and to a successful long-term relationship.

Occasionally we’re asked: “Tell me about Clients for Life®”? One answer would be to say that, Clients for Life is a formal process of client retention. At its heart, however, Clients for Life is an expectations-based, value creation model. We teach firms to create sustainable value, by understanding and meeting their client’s corporate expectations in a way that is specific, measurable and prioritized.

Expectations are highly important to the successful management of client relationships. They are the key drivers of value. Did you know that there is a psychology of expectations and how they are formed?

Expectations come from two sources, communications and experience.

Your firm is positioned right where you want it to be. You’re leaving a wonderfully successful Expectations Meeting with an important client. All members of the Web of Influence®, on both sides, were in attendance. You had very good news to present about the prior year and your performance against the key expectations you had elicited 12 months ago. Importantly, the new set of expectations is very compatible with your capabilities. They are specific and measurable and the clients easily prioritized them, while agreeing that their successful achievement would create meaningful value for them. Life is good!

We know that clients judge us not on what we do, but on what we do relative to what they expect us to do. Understanding client expectations is really important. Yet, once we know what their expectations are, we still haven’t obtained all the information we need to succeed…unless we insist that the clients prioritize them.

PostMortem Audits (PMA’s) are one of our least favorite things to do at Tenacity, yet they are arguably the most valuable service we provide to our clients. The PMA involves a Tenacity interviewer meeting individually and face-to face with the key client personnel who were involved in the decision to terminate our client’s contract.

It can be gut wrenching — dissecting a failed relationship. In a divorce you might say the love is gone, the commitment broken, the magic lost. In a business relationship, usually the value has gone, the trust compromised, the enthusiasm waned.

Ultimately, value is the key word and the primary driver of retention. Value doesn’t have to be complicated – in fact it’s a pretty straightforward equation: V = Q ¸ C (Value is equal to Quality divided by Cost).

Most of us can think of a question – or perhaps several questions – we’d prefer never be asked of us. That can be true in our client relationships too.

Picture, if you will, an account we’ve served for years. Like most clients, financial pressures intensify from time to time. They are thinking critically about their costs, staffing, overhead and general productivity. They take seriously their obligation to be productive managers and prudent buyers of goods and services. Everything is on the table.

Do you ever wonder if your son or daughter thinks you are a sage and wise as you thought your own father or mother was? I hope so but I do wonder. By the way, does it make you proud to come to the realization that your own son or daughter is wiser in many ways than you have ever been? Here's wishing you that experience, which I am blessed to have regularly.

We often hear from our clients that they feel a need to penetrate higher up in their client’s Web of Influence® i.e., to have better access and stronger relationships with the more senior decision makers in their client’s organizations. We agree, having observed this shortcoming / opportunity many hundreds of times in FreshEyes® Reviews and PostMortem Audits.

We often find that the problem is not so much with the clients, but instead with the service providers. Possibly, because a service or function is outsourced to begin with, our clients may feel it is “non-core” and less important to executives in the overall scheme of things. Often they are a reluctant to ask senior executives for the time and attention necessary to optimize the relationship and facilitate vital communication. They’re too often and too easily intimidated.

“People don’t care how much you know about them – if – they know how much you care about them.” I don’t remember who actually said that, in order to attribute the quote – maybe Harvey MacKay, but at Tenacity, we believe this is largely true.

Haven’t you ever been flattered by someone you know, but maybe not terribly well, when they remember something about you that you find surprising? That’s happened to me more often than I’d like to admit, particularly if I have very little recollection of comparable details about them. Surely we had a conversation some time ago and shared this kind of personal information with one another – our kids, our work, our interests. But they remembered and I didn’t – or maybe I was just too self absorbed to have asked in the first place. That’s definitely possible too. Nonetheless, I’m really flattered because they’ve made me feel as though I’m important to them. It’s nice to feel valued. It’s really nice to make other people feel valued.