Becoming a Trusted Advisor
Professional relationships built on trust are fundamental to Customer Success. But there’s a challenge in determining the level of trust you’ve built as a partner to your client and having a practical way to increase your trustworthiness.
If you reflect on your engagement with clients would you say that you’ve completely earned their trust?
Trusted Advisors all have a few things in common:
- They build enough relationship equity to have the conversations with their clients that they really need to have.
- They make it a top priority to become a ‘safe pair of hands’.
- They utilise the first two points and their experience to steer their clients toward operational decisions that will help them achieve their desired outcomes.
You’ll notice that Trusted advisors don’t…
…just say ‘yes’ to keep the customer happy
…focus only on quickly closing out support tickets
…concentrate on the short-term
…lead with product-level conversations.
Having established all of that, let’s really pull apart this idea of trust. We’ll visit what it really takes to be an ‘advisor’ in another post.
Trust
The idea of trust is deceivingly simple. We all understand it but it’s a relatively abstract idea.
We don’t sit at our desk on a Tuesday afternoon thinking “I need to build more trust with Lauren at Acme Inc, how do I go about that?”. So it’s no surprise very few people have a considered approach to proactively build trust.
The good news is, someone has. And they’ve already done the heavy lifting for you.
Research from former Harvard Business School professor, David Maister, suggests a rather elegant (and surprisingly practical) equation to truly think about trustworthiness.
Trust = Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self Interest
If you want to read up more about the theory you can read about it here. My preference in this article is to take the core concepts and make them as actionable as possible.
Rather than regurgitate everything that’s already written about the first three elements, I’m just going to pull them straight into the Customer Success domain with suggestions on how to build each one.
But first, addressing Self Interest. As a profession we do this well—most teams are even structured and compensated in such a way that diminishes the value of acting in a selfish manner. What is worth noting is that for every bit of increase in Self Interest it takes a marginally greater increase in investment of the ‘nominators’.
Again, much to be read at the resource linked above.
With all of that said, here are some simple, practical ways to up your credibility, reliability and intimacy.
Credibility: Know your stuff
- Learn more about your product than any of your peers. Importantly, understand the product in context of how it solves problems not just at a feature level.
- Join any of your company’s Chatter, Yammer, Slack Channels etc, concerning product updates, feature enhancements, or bugs.
- Do some research on your client’s competitors.
- Research and document your client’s industry, major trends, structural changes. Learn the language.
- Record yourself presenting, demoing, introducing your product and its features and benefits. Now refine, and do it again.
Reliability: Do what you say will
- Only make commitments you can keep.
- Don’t suggest an earlier time if it marerially lowers the chance you can deliver on the promise. If anything, add an hour day/week/month and deliver early.
- Put some things on auto-pilot: Create recurring tasks in your favourite to-do app for customer updates, product learning, industry research, QBR prep, etc.
An important note if you can’t deliver or meet a deadline: Own it. No excuses. Just call it, do what’s necessary to remedy, and then keep moving.
Intimacy: Know the details
- Save your stakeholders in LinkedIn Sales Navigator (Yes, that’s a plug. But you really should use it.)
- Subscribe to client newsletters/email lists. Setup a smart-folder to funnel all of these into one place.
- Set Google Alerts for your client and their competitors.
- Read your client’s Annual Reports (10-K in the US).
- Make it a point to really discover internal priorities. What’s actually going on in the company? Ask good open-ended questions about current strategy, big shifts, employee sentiment and more.
- Taking a more personal approach: Get to know your stakeholders. Your mutual interest in Tennis, or the fact that their boss “likes to have a pre-read before a meeting”.
In Summary
According to leading PR firm, Edelman, global trust in institutions remain low, but what clients want in a partner is a team (or person) who will put their interests first.
This is an opportunity for great Customer Success Managers (and advisors, consultants…) to show up each day and earn the kind of trust that creates long-term value and partnership.
My hope is that you can put some of these into practice and build the relationship equity necessary to help your clients reached their desired outcomes.
The suggestions above are in no way an exhaustive list!
?What are your tips, tricks, approaches? How do you increase credibility, reliability and intimacy?