Trust - Part 2

Ok, so what can you impact straight away?

Client focus is always a great place to start, and can easily be achieved. This component is really all about being in the moment, about listening to your client. Not the distracted listening where you’re busy considering your next appointment, but the attentive type, where you really are engaged, making notes, asking questions, clarifying understanding.

Its not hard to make a client feel like they are the most important person in your world at that moment in time - which, let’s face it, they should be.

What is even easier though is to make a client feel that they are simply a task on a job sheet, a tick in a box or just another appointment. You may have met with seven or eight other clients that week and you may well feel fatigued, but this may be the most important meeting the client has had diaries all month.

So, simply put, client focus is all about making the client feel special.

Intimacy is also quite easy to develop, although this works better when its a two-way process.

Intimacy isn’t about cuddling up on the clients comfy chairs and sharing chocolates. It’s about finding common ground outside the the ‘work focus’ and sharing this information. It’s about understanding that you have things in common, or just sharing personal information that shows that you are human.

There are rules however.

For instance, culture plays a big part. In some middle eastern countries, talking about family with a client is an essential part of the relationship and has to be done before any ‘real business’ can commence. Americans are less comfortable doing this, and prefer to do ‘small talk’ when the deals done.
On a micro scale, the culture within an organisation can also dictate the necessity and scope for the requirement for ‘sharing’. And it should be sharing. Ok, you may find that you ‘expose’ yourself more than the client, maybe 60/40, but never gush! Your client doesn’t want to spend the majority of the allocated hour talking about your new car, recent holiday or children’s progress at school.

It really is a game of push and pull, exposing parts of yourself in conversation, listening to what you get back, looking for invitation signals to discuss further, or shutters showing a lack of interest. Also remember, this is not about fishing for information to build a knowledge base of your client, although that does have a value.

It’s about building intimacy, creating a long term relationship.


Part 3 to follow