When you care about key clients with high expectations, they need to know. Keeping their importance as an internal secret is a ticket for trouble.

It’s one thing — and an important one — to understand key client expectations and to work proactively to fulfill them. After all, it’s what you are being paid to do for them. If you don’t do it well, someone else will happily and swiftly take your place. Quality performance is the price of admission to the major leagues.

Service delivery, especially in this day and age, is fraught with challenges. The list begins with hiring, which is more difficult than at a any time in the past 50 years. Yet hire you must, at the same time you get creative with scheduling and operational practices. The work will get done, even if the approach of prior seasons won’t fit this one. Key clients don’t want excuses; they want results. They have their own challenges and, furthermore:

Excuses are not consistent with being Exceptional.

Yet while excuses are not welcome, reasonable explanations are acceptable and a crucial aspect of clients’ need to know is around what you are doing to overcome present challenges.

Of course there are the now ubiquitous “supply chain” issues and rising material costs, on the heels of a global pandemic that won’t quite go away, at the same time that “streaming on demand” and “prime shipping” have become the expected norm in the consumer world. If you build a product, or deliver essential business services, it requires more than the click of a button. Key clients need to know what will happen and when.

There is a phenomenal upside to serving key clients, which can generally be defined as those who value what you do for them, because it enhances their own economic value proposition. That’s what makes you a service partner instead of a vendor and them a client versus a customer. Such clients need to know how you enhance their own value proposition!

Aside from being well-compensated for performing a difficult job, under dynamic circumstances, and somehow making it all happen, there is another huge benefit that’s derived from serving the best of the best. They make you better; yes, their exacting needs force you and your team to continually improve at every level, in order to get the job done well. And your clients also need to know that too.

When you simply must deliver whatever it takes and whenever it’s needed, you are stretching growth muscles that others would rather rest. But rest does not make you stronger; exercising your muscles is what builds strength.

A long-time associate of mine loved this saying:

“If it was easy, anyone could do it.”

It’s not easy. And most can’t, or won’t. But you can and will — and your clients need to know it!

Tempus Maximize!