How Can You Build Deep Client Relationships to Accelerate Your Business Growth?

What Are the Best Ways to Use Strategic Giving to Advance Your Career and Win Clients?

Learn how to build strong client relationships and drive long-term business growth. Explore proven strategies from Give to Grow for winning high-value clients.

Read the full article to learn how you can shift your mindset, overcome limiting beliefs, and implement the Give to Grow framework to scale your business and career.

Recommendation

Plenty of technically proficient people fail to grow their businesses because they lack the soft skills required to build relationships and take their careers to the next level. Business development consultant Mo Bunnell offers a framework to help you adopt the habits of top performers, cultivate deep and meaningful client relationships, and become indispensable to your clients and teams. Reader-friendly and high-impact, Bunnell’s book draws on his decades in business development and consulting to offer valuable techniques and insights that support growth and long-term success.

Take-Aways

• Invest in client relationships to unlock growth and drive long-term success.
• Becoming a top performer can have a huge impact on your value to your company.
• Identify potential high-value clients and give to them strategically, without keeping score.
• Root out the false beliefs about yourself that can limit your growth.
• Show clients that you have a genuine desire to understand their problems and help them.
• Demonstrate your expertise, and give potential clients a taste of what working with you would be like.
• Ensure your success by always taking action and “thinking in bets.”
• High performers experience three levels of business growth: growth in your client list, growth in your team, and growth at scale.

Summary

Invest in client relationships to unlock growth and drive long-term success.

If you want to achieve your full performance and growth potential, prioritize relationships — the foundation for building long-term success. Happily, you don’t need natural charisma to build successful client relationships. The Give to Grow framework guides you in the two components of high performance: “Doing the Work” by delivering the outcomes you promise to clients and “Winning the Work” by developing the relationship skills you need to win clients in the first place. When you learn how to woo clients and meet their expectations, you’ll grow your business faster than your competition — even those who might have more technical competence than you — and you’ll deliver more value for everyone involved.

“Give to Grow means strategically and consistently giving so you can exponentially grow your impact over time.”

Doing the Work is vital: You have to deliver on your commitments, keep up with developments in your field, manage your teams, and everything else that lands on your desk on a busy day. But to fulfill your potential, you also need to give attention to the often-neglected key to success: building relationships. Top performers distinguish themselves by their focus on long-term relationships. These relationships generate growth and give you opportunities to do more. That’s why Winning the Work should become your top priority.

Becoming a top performer can have a huge impact on your value to your company.

Every company has one or more high performers whose productivity significantly outshines other team members’. These employees deliver between eight and thirty times the value of the average performer. Research shows that the performance gap between high and average performers tends to be greatest in sales-oriented roles, but significant gaps exist in business development roles, too. In general, the more complex the role, the greater the difference high performance can make. A McKinsey report showed top performers working in “very high complexity” roles deliver nine times as much value as their average counterparts.

“The biggest difference I see between Top Performers and everyone else is that they treat growth strategies and actions as their highest priority.”

If you dismiss top performers as being innately gifted or “born with it,” you’ll miss out on potential insights that could help you unlock higher levels of performance yourself. The key difference is mindset: Top performers don’t focus only on short-term gains; they think about creating opportunities for work years into the future. They conduct extensive research about potential approaches to success, embracing an ethos of continuous improvement. These professionals know how to translate annual goals into weekly priorities, aligned with daily action steps. And there’s nothing random about the way they approach relationship building: Top performers prioritize client conversations at the beginning of every work week and work day, and they reach out to clients even when they’re already busy. After each client meeting, top performers take time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t.

Identify potential high-value clients and give to them strategically, without keeping score.

In his book Give and Take, organizational psychologist Adam Grant identified three types of people: “Takers” selfishly try to find the best possible outcome to satisfy only their own needs, while “Matchers” attempt to negotiate an equal exchange and make the fairest deal possible. But “Givers” are perpetually generous, giving whenever they see an opportunity. According to Grant, the most successful people, in business and in life, are Givers — but only those who give strategically, not indiscriminately. “Strategic Givers” focus on their most important relationships, identifying clients with a higher capacity to deliver potential payoffs, and they give to these clients without overtly demanding something in return. At the same time, they maintain healthy boundaries, such as limiting their availability, to prevent burnout.

“The top reason most professionals fail at learning how to Win the Work is that they keep making the same moves they did Doing the Work and expecting the same outcomes.”

Strategic Giving looks like reaching out to clients frequently, helping them even when they aren’t in a position to buy from you, and doing this consistently so that you become the client’s first call when a need manifests. When you approach a client with the intention of giving something of value, you deliver enjoyable experiences across every touchpoint, strengthening the relationship. Become a Strategic Giver by expanding your idea of growth: Yes, you grow when you make a sale, but you also grow when you enlarge your network and invest in relationships. Even when relationships fail to translate into big sales, the experience of building them helps you refine your development skills, so you keep improving how you Win the Work.

Root out the false beliefs about yourself that can limit your growth.

To reach your highest growth potential, identify when you’re internalizing the following success-blocking lies:

1. “I can’t” — The belief that you’re incapable of growing your business can express itself in various ways.63 For example, you might say, “I’m an introvert — I’m not good at networking,” or “I hate the idea of selling.” This reflects a “fixed” mindset, where you see yourself as incapable of making positive changes. Replace it with a growth mindset: the belief that you can always improve, even if only incrementally.
2. “I don’t know how” — Getting stuck in the idea that you lack knowledge about how to proceed can delay your progress. The cure is to act. If you don’t know what clients want or need from you, try asking them, and search for opportunities to be helpful.
3. “I might do it wrong” — This fear has its roots in perfectionism — the false belief that it’s always better to be self-reliant. Overcome it by asking for help when you feel overwhelmed or uncertain. Even if you’re an expert, you can still ask others for feedback and advice when you need to.
4. “I’m too busy” — Everyone can relate to feeling too busy with today’s tasks to work toward long-term goals. But being busy can create opportunities. For example, when you’re busy, people tend to view your time as more valuable. Consequently, you can demand more for it. Being busy also leads you to look for creative solutions to boost your efficiency, presenting opportunities for growth. Moreover, when you’re working more, you’ll likely have better access to other professionals with power and influence.
5. “I might look bad” — You might fear reaching out to a client because you worry that you’ll seem like a pest, or because you think you might embarrass yourself. To grow, you need to overcome these fears. Get comfortable with discomfort. Your success depends on it.

Show clients that you have a genuine desire to understand their problems and help them.

Give your clients the gift of genuine engagement. Approach them much as you’d approach a friend: Conversations should feel two-sided, enjoyable, and energizing. Keep meetings productive by clearly framing their purpose. Consider setting a tentative schedule, suggesting blocks of time to discuss different topics. Be sure to “read the room” so you can attune to how other participants are feeling. Work to engage your client throughout the meeting, and be prepared to offer different forms of support — both emotional support and more strategic, technical support, which require different mindsets and skills.

Connect with your client by searching for commonalities you share. These could pertain to your history or, even better, where you’d both like to go in the future. Try to reduce stress by interspersing moments of humor where appropriate, and don’t forget to celebrate incremental progress. End meetings at an emotional high point, as people tend to remember most how they felt at the end of a meeting.

“Focus on your client’s engagement so you can interact with the client in a way they love and they’d love to continue. Give them the Gift of Attention.”

Aim to “fall in love” with the client’s problem, as this will give you focus and energy to help solve it. People can sense when you view them as a sale rather than an individual, so work to ensure each of your clients truly feels seen and heard. Give them opportunities to explain their problem in their own words. People enjoy sharing their points of view, especially when they sense you’re genuinely curious about their situation. Before each meeting, take time to reflect on the questions you might ask to better understand the client’s particular situation. Then listen attentively, while validating their experience. Ask meaningful follow-up questions and repeat what the client has told you back to them, paraphrasing it to ensure you’ve understood correctly.

Demonstrate your expertise, and give potential clients a taste of what working with you would be like.

As you develop a relationship with a potential high-value client, stand out from your competition by using a “Give to Get” approach. This might look like giving the potential client a technical analysis of a specific issue, free of charge. Essentially, by giving a gift like this, you’re showing the client what working with you in an official capacity might feel like. When an opportunity arises, this groundwork will position you as the best candidate for the job.

“It’s hard to describe, but we feel different around givers. It includes gratitude and thankfulness, but it also includes an overwhelming sensation to give back to them.”

When you meet with clients, always give them a recommendation regarding their next steps. This helps them make better decisions while placing you in the role of guide and expert. Your recommendations might draw on your authority and expertise (for example, “Based on my experience, I’d recommend we…”), or they might depend on social proof, meaning they reflect what others have done and found to be successful (for instance, “What most of our clients do next is…”). Even if you’re eager to make a sale and steer the client in a particular direction, it’s best to appear “passionately agnostic” — that is, you should believe in your recommendation but simultaneously resist the temptation to put too much pressure on the client. Give them space to choose the next steps for themselves.

Ensure your success by always taking action and “thinking in bets.”

As you grow in your career, remember that you always have the capacity to improve your situation in some way, even when circumstances go against you. In other words, the next move is always yours. Search for opportunities to strengthen relationships, even when you have to deliver bad news — after all, people tend to bond when they’re navigating stress together. Reframe setbacks as opportunities to respond with compassion and generosity. You can always take positive steps to improve your situation, help others, and learn, even when adversity strikes.

“Respond to frustration with generosity. Respond to rejection with generosity. Respond to setbacks with generosity. Respond to everything with generosity. Do this over and over.”

Ensure your success by identifying three high-impact tasks you can do every week and scheduling time for them. Opt for tasks that you have some control over and that align with your vision of long-term growth. Make your short-term actions serve your long-term goals by “thinking in bets” — investing your time and energy in the opportunities that you believe will have the biggest payoff. When you think in bets, you think big; simultaneously, you protect yourself from unnecessary risk by starting small. When you’ve achieved small gains, it’s time to scale up, investing more into projects, ideas, partnerships, or clients that demonstrate a greater possibility of reward.

High performers experience three levels of business growth: growth in your client list, growth in your team, and growth at scale.

In your journey as a top performer, you’ll experience growth in the following stages:

1. “Growing a book of business” — In this first stage, you begin to take your future success into your own hands by making yourself indispensable at work. You do this by bringing in more business than it costs your organization to employ you.
2. “Growing a team” — As you build success, you’ll find yourself needing to build a team to support you for three reasons: First, you’ll bring in more clients than you can serve alone. Second, you’ll start to coach and mentor others, and you’ll need to delegate more in order to free up time. Third, you’ll begin to scale your success in a systematic way throughout your organization.
3. “Growing at scale” — You can scale your success indefinitely, expanding your influence across practice areas, geographic locations, industries, teams, and solutions. At this stage, the only factor limiting your impact is time, so it’s crucial that you invest your time wisely. Embrace the ethos of “Cut to Climb” by periodically assessing the best and worst uses of your time. Say yes only to higher-impact opportunities. As your business scales, you’ll start to view your impact more holistically. You’ll come to understand that your greatest impact will be in helping others succeed.

About the Author

Mo Bunnell is the founder and CEO of Bunnell Idea Group, a consultancy helping organizations unlock high performance and growth, and the host of the Real Relationships Real Revenue podcast. His books include The Snowball System: How to Win More Business and Turn Clients into Raving Fans.