They hung up on me. Months later they invited us to bid.

How proud I was, having the opportunity for the first time in my career to work on a huge client. The first time I called them, they hung up on me.

It was in my early days in strategic sales and I had inherited a large logistics company where the relationship had broken down before I arrived. I called to introduce myself and got as far as my name and the name of my company before the line went quiet.

Most of us picture a client relationship as something that starts at zero and slowly climbs. This one started well below zero, and it taught me what I still believe most about account management: trust is rarely won in one big moment. It is built up in small deposits, often when nobody is paying attention.

When a client is angry, keep showing up

With an angry client, the instinct is to fix everything in one strong move, with a big apology, a visit from someone senior or a discount. Those can help, but they rarely change the story the client tells about you, because only a pattern of behavior can do that.

Anyone who has adopted a rescue dog will recognize this. You cannot explain to a nervous dog that you are a kind person. What works is being there at feeding time, every day, at the same time, without forcing anything, until one morning it walks over to you on its own.

So I kept showing up. I called, sent emails with nothing to sell in them and stopped by when I happened to be nearby. None of it was clever, but all of it said the same thing: I am not going away, and I want to get this right.

In the meantime I built a stakeholder map of who sits where, who talks to whom and who might still be open to a conversation. A hostile account is rarely hostile everywhere, and there is usually one person who is curious, or fair-minded, or simply wasn't part of the old conflict.

Eventually one person agreed to talk about what was going on in their organization, which gave me something to work with. I could say:

It wasn't a pitch, just something useful put on the table.

The crisis is your audition

Then something broke on their side, and they needed someone to respond fast.

They knew where to find me, and that is the quiet payoff of all those unremarkable calls and emails. When the moment came, I was no longer a stranger but the person who had been around all along.

We fixed the problem, and afterwards I did something that felt small at the time but turned out to matter a great deal: I asked for an evaluation of how it had gone and what we could have done better. That question showed I cared about the outcome rather than the invoice, and it gave me a natural reason for the next conversation. In that conversation I offered a specialist for a problem they had mentioned, which led to another conversation, and then another. Months later they invited us into an RFP to expand the business.

There was no brilliant move between the hang-up and the bid, only a chain of small ones in which each step earned the next.

Deposits and withdrawals

Stephen Covey called this the emotional bank account, and it is still the most useful way I know to think about a client relationship. Every promise you keep is a deposit, and so is checking in when nothing is for sale, remembering that their team had a rough quarter, or asking how things are at home after a hard week. Every missed commitment is a withdrawal, and so is the follow-up that never came or the call in which you only talked about your own targets.

Parents know this balance better than anyone. A child can scream at you in the supermarket on Tuesday and still run to you first when something goes wrong on Wednesday, because the trust was built long before the tantrum and does not disappear after one bad afternoon. Clients with a healthy balance behave in much the same way. They can be furious about a mistake and still stay loyal, as long as you handle it responsibly instead of taking it personally. A client with an empty account, on the other hand, hangs up on whoever calls next.

This is also where AI helps, but only up to a point. A tool can draft your follow-up in seconds or summarize your last ten conversations so you walk in prepared, and you should use it for exactly that. It cannot make the deposit for you, though, because the deposit is that you actually sent the email, actually remembered and actually turned up.

There is a Dutch saying I come back to often:

Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.

Which account in your book is running on an empty balance, and what's the first deposit you could make?

Details changed to protect the people and organizations involved.