Consulting Skills
In today’s article in our blog series on Consulting Skills, we will introduce you to the first skill; the right way to build customer relationships. This will help you to build a good foundation in order to prove yourself in your business environment.
1. Relationship Building
The first essential step in laying a foundation is to build customer relationships.
What do we mean by building customer relationships?
Building customer relationships goes hand in hand with the skill from being a “Trusted Advisor”, as well as trust. Therefore, this is one of our 6 values, what we stand for as a team and what we live by. Trust is essential to build a long-term and stable customer relationship.
How can you become a Trusted Advisor?
The Trust Quotient (according to Charles Green) can be very valuable for you to analyze and improve your current trust quotient.
Trust = (credibility + reliability + integrity) / customer orientation
To drive the individual elements of the formula forward, we have summarized our best practices for you below:
- Credibility: Enhance your credibility through accuracy and reliability.
- Reliability: Stand by your words and deliver what you promise.
- Integrity: Strengthen your already gained trust through discretion.
- Customer orientation: Put yourself in the position of your customers in order to better understand their problems / challenges.
In order to maintain the trust of your client, you should also understand the different personality styles. This helps you to make the right approach and communication in order to avoid possible misunderstandings.
Which 4 personality types are there?
Different personality types can be divided into 4 different colours (red, yellow, green, blue). In the following we have listed some characteristics that can be equated with the respective colours.
How can this input be implemented?
We also asked us how can this be implemented in a in a goal-oriented way so that you can build customer relationships for yourself and others?
There are 2 important approaches for successful implementation – understanding and training.
Understand:
- Create your own training for Trusted Advisors
- Create your own training for the social styles, e.g. supported with CrystalKnows
- If needed, use an external coach to execute frequent external trainings
Train:
A: Individual training
- Ask every account owner to define social style for clients
- Ask every account owner to define current trust level with client (e.g. in CRM)
B: Group reflection
- Install a frequent platform (e.g. lunch or breakfast) where account owners read “a holiday postcard” to their clients in order to internalize the different addresses of different personality types
- On the front of the postcard, the account owner is drawing the “Trust Grid”
If you want to get to know more about us or about what we do and what we offer or if you have any questions on this topic or on our insights, please don’t hesitate to contact us at any time.
Furthermore, you can watch the video from our Community Call here: Video of the call. Moreover we have provided the slides of the call for you here.
Next week we will continue with the second part of the Consulting Skills: Consulting Mindset
Your Amaze Growth / Accelerate Coach Team
