What if your client relationships need innovating?

Photo by Gaurav Kumar

There are clients where the collaboration just works. Year after year. You know each other, you know what's expected, you deliver what you promise. And yet sometimes you get the feeling that the conversation never goes beyond the work itself, even though there's clearly more there.

One of our clients had been feeling this for a while. Years of working together with their largest client, mutual trust, deep operational knowledge on both sides. The work was solid. But the relationship had barely evolved over all that time. They'd both gotten so good at what they'd always done together that neither could see how to do something different.

What followed was a redesign of the relationship itself. New people came to the table. Conversations shifted from operational to strategic. Questions that had gone unasked for years could suddenly be asked. And what had started as a stuck collaboration grew into a strategic partnership.

What it takes looks different every time. Sometimes it's different people in the room. Sometimes it's a conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. Sometimes it's just the space to think out loud together about something that doesn't have an answer yet. What almost always comes back: it takes a move outward, in how you work together, and a move inward, in how you see the relationship. And it rarely happens on its own. Even when the foundation has been there for years.

Most organizations have service innovation on their agenda. Innovating their client relationships far less often. While the relationship is often what determines what's actually possible. How far you can go together, and what you're capable of building.

Which of your client relationships have been deliberately developed, and which ones just kind of happened?