Changes in Attitude…Needing to be Needed by Clients

By Andrew Sobel

Being "needed" by clients can become a drug. I have seen many professionals exhibit these and other symptoms of excessive neediness and insecurity: · You check voice mail and e-mail far more frequently than is necessary. I have one friend who probably checks for e-mail messages twenty times a day, and he's not that unusual.

• You begin thinking excessively about other services you can sell your client, quite independently of an examination of what he really needs and wants.
  
  
• You feel insecure when a couple of days go by and you get few or no calls from clients. Never mind that you're busy and your clients are happy with your work – you still feel badly.
  
  
• You leave a message for a client and you don't hear from him for a few days or a week – and become absolutely convinced you have fallen out of favour.
  
  
• A client begins to make, on her own, decisions that she used to get your counsel on. It makes you feel like you're no longer part of her inner circle and that she doesn't really need you anymore.
  
  
• You believe, deep down, that at any time your leadstream could completely dry up, leaving you and/or your firm with no clients and no business.
  

The current economy makes these tendencies worse. Many service industries, from banking to consulting to public relations, have been experiencing difficult times for the last year and a half. You're not alone in this regard.

The antidote? First, remember that there may be an asymmetry to your relationship – your client's business may represent 20% of your daily life in the office, whereas for your client the equivalent figure might be 3% (he's probably got ten other projects going on besides the one you're focused on). Secondly, get a life and realize that you exist as a separate entity from your clients. I sincerely doubt if any business professional, on his or her deathbed, has murmured these dying words: "My clients needed me so much, I should have spent more time with them." If you're aware of such a story, I'd like to hear about it.

Andrew Sobel is the leading authority on client relationships and the skills and strategies required to earn enduring client and customer loyalty. He is coauthor of Clients for Life: How Great Professionals Development Breakthrough Relationships (Simon & Schuster). He can be reached at (505) 982-0211 or by e-mail at andrew@andrewsobel.com www.andrewsobel.com

Published in Networking Today, October 2002.