Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. (Second Edition) [Paperback]

Ross Dawson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2005

Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, Second Edition, shows organizations how to lead their key clients into lasting, profitable, high-value relationships. Building on the powerful, tested principles of knowledge-based client relationships, Ross Dawson provides clear and extremely practical approaches for all professional and knowledge-based firms on how to create unique value for both clients and themselves.
Detailed case studies across a wide variety of professional services industries offer valuable insights into world leading practice in the field.


He examines key client programs, and how to create deeper knowledge-based relationships through these. He discusses in detail the collaborative technologies available today and how they can be used in client relationships, along with managing portfolios of communications channels. He also discusses firm-wide relationship management, leading relationship teams, and value-based pricing for knowledge-based client relationships. This is done by presenting underlying theoretical framework, a variety of tools for structuring relationships and presenting knowledge to clients, and numerous case studies and examples of firms which have implemented these concepts successfully.

*Completely updated and revised to focus on the latest thinking in client relationships and professional services
* Discusses how to make effective use of the new collaborative technologies
* Includes numerous case studies and examples of real professional services firms

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Dawson has pulled off the nigh-impossible: improved on what was already a terrific book. Even more than before, this is essential reading for professional service firms."
-- David Maister, author, Managing the Professional Service Firm, The Trusted Advisor

"Dawson really cuts through with the book, highlighting the essential ingredient for establishing strong client relationships. His perspectives on how knowledge catalises relationships should be read by industry professionals and users alike. It is a penetrating, yet practical guide."
-- Martin L North, General Manager, Strategic Consulting, Fujitsu Australia

"Law, accountancy and other professional firms have long recognised that acquiring, creating and developing knowledge and relationships is critical in providing value. As knowledge and relationships become the only sustainable escape from global commoditisation, Dawson uses a wide range of relevant examples to show how professional firms really work, and urges public and private sector leaders everywhere to adopt the professional firm model. Required reading."
-- Richard Chaplin, Founder & Executive Director, Managing Partners' Forum

"For many professional firms, there is no bigger challenge than deepening their relationships with key clients. In this arena, Ross Dawson is a master and his book, for those prepared to study and change, can provide off-the-shelf competitive advantage."
-- Professor Richard Susskind, OBE, Author of The Future of Law

"The second edition of Dawson's work is packed with even more relevant insights and models aimed at maximizing the value derived from knowledge and relationships. Professional services firms seeking sustainable growth with their clients would do well to absorb and apply its lessons."
James C. Spohrer, IBM Services Research

"Ross Dawson was the first among the world's business thought leaders to pursue the intersection of knowledge and client relationships in professional services. No matter what your business, if you want to know more about your clients or customers, you'll find this book useful."
-- Thomas H. Davenport, Professor and Director of Research, Babson College and Accenture Fellow

"Ross Dawson is the closest student I know of knowledge based client relationships. From his perch in Australia, his frequent fact finding world tours and his wide reading he keeps as close a watch as possible of the pell-mell networking developments in this field and he writes about them in a simple uncluttered way which make it easy to understand what is actually happening and who is involved."
-- Napier Collyns, Co-founder, Global Business Network

"The first time I read Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships, it provided me with an fantastic understanding of the powerful role knowledge and technology play in client relationships. I knew it was a book that was ahead of its time. This second edition of the book brings forth a much further developed vision of knowledge based relationships that really brings into focus all of the potential and promise a knowledge enabled business world would deliver. As we venture forward into the idea and information age, this book provides a valuable guide to what we can hope to expect in the future."
-- Guy Alvarez, Founder, Business Development Institute, LLC

"This fresh new edition of Developing Knowledge-Based Client relationships is simply amazing! Not only has Ross Dawson's revolutionary view of the future been realized, but the practices and methods he laid out so beautifully in the first edition have been expanded, fine tuned, chiseled and polished into a truly masterful guide and tool set. From simple but powerful strategic frameworks to comprehensive principles of knowledge-value creation this book converts the "big ideas" of the knowledge economy into practical assessments, heuristics and processes for making intelligent choices about professional service offerings and strategic relationships. Insightful, practical and beautifully straightforward - this should be essential reading for anyone offering professional or creative services."
-- Verna Allee, author, The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks

Book Description

Completely updated edition of our bestsellering book on client relationships for the professional services and financial services industries.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann; 2 edition (June 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0750678712
• ISBN-13: 978-0750678711
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #294,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Upgrade in the second edition, August 12, 2005

By 

S. William Ives "Portals and KM" (Cambrdige, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. (Second Edition) (Paperback)

Ross Dawson has recently produced the second edition to his successful Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. Opening sentences set the tone: "Knowledge and relationships are where all value resides in today's economy...Moreover, knowledge itself is all about relationships." This resonates well with my experience. In this book, Ross looks at this issue in the context of professional service firms, a market in which I spent over 20 years of service. In this case, a client is not simply purchasing the services of the smart individual assigned to them, but the collective knowledge of the entire firm. That is where the unique value lies. Otherwise a simple placement service at much lower rates would be sufficient.

This is the second edition of a book which first appeared in 2000. One of the major upgrades came from an understanding that if you clients do not recognize the value you create for them through more knowledge-based relationships and services, it does not help you or your clients. This new edition addresses this issue by proving material on how to lead your clients through knowledge based relations and understand the value they bring. Ross provides a useful model for obtaining a deep partnership with your client. The four stages are engaging, aligning, deepening, and partnering. While there are many such models, I have found them useful focal points for activities. For example, we used a somewhat similar model to design our internal marketing efforts at Ryder. It helps to ensure that you are laying the right foundation for a deep relationship and not getting ahead of the process. You do not what to conduct aligning activities until you are engaged, etc. Sounds simple, but this point is often overlooked in practice without a model to check against.

There is a good section on the current and future status of professional service firms and a multi-chapter section on how these firms can add value by promoting knowledge-based relationships with their clients. Being very practical I was especially interested in the final section on implementation. How can you practically do this stuff? As Ross wrote, the real value is making these things happen. I was not disappointed here. He gives a robust framework of the five key domains: strategies, structures, process, skills, and culture. But, more importantly, fills this framework in with specific suggestions.

Next, follows a review of the growing communication channels available to connect with clients and their strengths and limitations. There is a tradeoff between efficiency and relationship strength. But the high payoff activities come from the high relationship initiatives. Ross extends this approach to offer ways to expand client contact beyond the initial relationships that brought you into the firm. This expanded contact requires greater guidance and leadership to ensure consistency and alignment with your objectives for the client and this leadership is the subject of the next chapter. Here he makes use of the four stage model introduced earlier, engaging, aligning, deepening, and partnering, and applies it to a variety of communication channels. I have found that a key to success in most consulting relationships is active involvement by the client. The best initiatives, the ground breaking ones, came from a partnering with some smart client people. The worst were ones were we were forced to do it for them. Ross develops this theme in the next chapter on co-creation with some excellent examples such as the successful London ad agency, Mother.

Ross concludes with an appendix on the nature of mental models drawing on cognitive science. This was my academic field so I read this piece with great interest. He covers the two main types of mental representations, analogical or sensory based like images, and propositional which are abstract in nature and best represented by language and math. These two forms can complement each other but their qualities need to recognized and taken advantage of in communication. The goal of this review of the basic concepts of cognitive science is to provide a grounding in ways to more effectively transfer knowledge. To transfer knowledge we must understand how people acquire this knowledge.

I certainly recommend this book to anyone who wants to develop deeper client relations, create more impactful initiatives and enable their clients to appreciate the significance of this work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written and organized text on knowledge sharing and transfer, March 15, 2010

By 

Erik Gfesser (Lombard, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. (Second Edition) (Paperback)

Well written and organized text on client relationships and the issues of dealing effectively with knowledge sharing and transfer in business. This book is a practitioner's manual that discusses key foundations of this topic, and then later examines some of the primary approaches used, with a majority of the book covering implementation of these ideas. Dawson begins the text by indicating that "even if you are brilliant at engaging in knowledge-based relationships with your clients, that does not help you if your clients do not recognize the value you can create for them through this deeper level of engagement. Professionals must lead their clients into knowledge-based relationships by demonstrating the value of collaboration. On every front, the future success of professional services firms will depend absolutely on the leadership capabilities within the firm." The author furthers this line of thought by discussing recent growth of the U.S. economy, which was driven by information, ideas, services, and knowledge. But while value is in knowledge, the most powerful trend in business right now is commoditization: "Without a relationship you become a commodity. With a relationship, everything is possible. You can create far greater value for your clients than your competitors can, and as a result lock your clients into longstanding, mutually profitable, collaboration."

Dawson discusses the guilds of yesteryear, the predecessors of today's professions, the purpose of which in part was to protect the commercial privileges of those who held valuable skills and knowledge. But this philosophy cannot continue in a world where vast amounts of information flow freely. The author contrasts delivering professional services in such a manner, by which a client receives an outcome, but does not see the process involved, and is not wiser as a result of the engagement, as the "black box" approach. Continued pursuit of such an approach is detrimental to the professional services firm. "These black box services are opaque to the client. Since the only reference point the client has is the result, it is relatively easy for other firms to replicate that result and then compete primarily on price. In other words, they are commoditizing the service." With a knowledge based approach, however, "the outcome is that clients are more knowledgeable, are able to make better decisions, and have enhanced capabilities. In short, the client is different as a result of the engagement. Professional firms and clients are pooling their capabilities to create results they could not achieve individually. This makes it impossible for competitors to replicate these outcomes. The entire engagement is based on rich interaction, meaning there are many opportunities to develop a valuable and lasting relationship."

One of the best segments in this text is entitled "Why should I teach my clients to do what I do?", where the author notes that "the great fear of professionals is that if they make their clients more knowledgeable they are giving away their key productive asset from which they make money. In many cases this is a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge-based relationships. This is often not about teaching your clients to do what you do but making them better at what they do, which is very far from doing yourself out of a job. In other cases, it is true that knowledge-based relationships result in clients becoming more self-sufficient. In some cases, it is true that knowledge-based relationships result in clients becoming more self-sufficient. In some situations it is possible that this means they will rely less on you in the future. More often their increased self-sufficiency will allow you to move to higher value and more profitable types of engagements. Either way, refusing to engage in knowledge-based relationships with clients is an unsustainable position. In professional services, the far greater risk is that competitors will offer more value to your clients than you do, so that you will lose all their business."

Another favorite of this reviewer is the 10-page segment "Models of relationship management", where Dawson explains that different models can be created by using diverse approaches to how the four primary knowledge relationship roles (senior representative, relationship coordinator, knowledge specialist, and knowledge customizer) combine and relate. With the guru model, most of the high-level client contact is concentrated on an individual or small number of individuals. Contact begins to expand beyond this key contact at the professional services firm with the expansion model. The mirror model is a bit different, because people communicate directly with their peers as opposed to through a formal relationship manager. And the integration model is the stage at which the boundaries between the firm and the client blur beyond recognition. As the author notes, these four models coincide with each of the stages of relationship development: the engaging, aligning, deepening, and partnering stages. Quite simply, this 350-page text is well thought out throughout, and is well recommended for independent consultants, consultants in professional services firms, and clients who are engaged or are considering engagement with such entities.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Key to developing a modern PS company, November 29, 2007

By 

Cary A. King (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. (Second Edition) (Paperback)

An excellent treatment of information and knowledge. More importantly, how you can use that structure for improving your client engagements to help them - and you - be more successful.