To truly succeed in any leadership role, you need to ensure that your advice is trusted, both by your teams and your clients. Here is my approach to becoming a truly trusted adviser.
Establishing a consultative culture – listen more than you speak
To truly be able to offer the best approach for your client – you must really listen and understand what issue you are there to solve. Often, when given a brief by your client, it may be fairly ‘top line’ with requests such as ‘implement a new CRM system’ or ‘help us to sell more products’. While this is a succinct definition of what the client is looking to achieve, it doesn’t tell you the full story.
Seek to mentally prepare some standard questions that will assist you to get to the heart of what issue your product or service will be solving for your client.
Don’t focus on specification or all the bells and whistles, think instead about how what you are offering will positively benefit your client’s day to day role.
Taking the database example – a relevant question would be ‘What manual task takes up a lot of you/your staff’s time’. If your system can then help to automate some of these tasks – you are then solving a problem rather than selling a product.
Get your team involved too! Why not set aside some time to talk about issues that come up in conversations with clients. You are likely to find that there are a few areas that are common to most businesses (let’s be honest – there’s never enough hours in the day for many), and together map out what those themes are and how your service or product can help. Make it visual – put your list up somewhere where everyone can see it – be that in your office – or even as a screensaver on everyone’s computer – it will help to embed your culture of consultative problem solving.
Showing your results
It’s vital that you are able to clearly show the success of your work to your clients and ideally – fast! While long term projects will have long term goals – if you can add value by offering ‘quick wins’ you will also quickly gain trust.
For example when working alongside a franchise operator, we decided to upgrade their point of sale system. Understandably, the franchise workers and owner were nervous of having to learn how to work the new systems, and felt that ‘everything was fine as it was’. However on day one I showed them how much more efficient the new system was and the added benefits to improving the customer experience. I collaborated with the teams to define new processes that made them embrace the new system and actually become excited and motivated to continue to improve their operations with the new system.
Get your team to think about quick wins – and share experience of items that have delighted customers – sometimes we are so familiar with our own products or services that we overlook features that can really make a difference to our customers, so encourage all teams to share in what feedback they receive.
Communicating at all levels
When you start a project or relationship with company – the likelihood is that you will initially speak to someone fairly high up the food chain . You may go in and present to the board, or liaise with the CEO in the first instance. However, as you build your relationship with the company, you are likely to encounter and work alongside people at all levels so again think about how you are offering solutions to everyone, not just your ‘decision maker’.
Here’s an example – At Avis Budget Group, when I came into Franchise Operations, they originally saw me as another corporate person that thinks they know what was right for them. Once they got to know me and understood that I was there to truly help them. They allowed me in to really define and create programs that help them increase profits and run their operations more efficiently. My aim was not to enforce change – but to motivate the teams to embrace the changes I was making as I ‘sold the benefits’.
Without offering all of the above – and gaining their trust, this simply would not have worked.
In fact – it worked so well that I received this feedback:
”Angela brought the rare combination of someone who had the knowledge and expertise to assist in the operation of our business, and the vision to help us grow beyond the standard cookie cutter franchise. She helped bring the resources of a Fortune 200 company to assist a small business, implementing technology solutions that were beyond our company’s limited abilities.
Most of all, Angela always showed the utmost commitment to help and go above and beyond to be supportive and cared about our needs. Extreme competence and empathy is a rare combination, that describes Angela to a “T”.”
Solomon Cramer,President Budget Rent a Car, Harrisburg
So, as always – be authentic, be a problem solver and take the consultative approach.
Angela Barbato is an award-winning Change and Transformation specialist. Having held a range of senior leadership roles at Avis Budget Group, Angela is a foremost expert on the topics of leadership, transformation and customer experience. You can find out more about Angela at http://www.abarbato.com.