Do You Have An Adult, Parent Or Child Relationship With Your Clients?

How do you feel when you go pitch for a new piece of business, are you extremely confident and exude an air of authority, believing your prospect would be mad to pass up the opportunity you're about to present them with or are you slightly more reticent, hoping they'll see the value in what you have to offer but by no means certain?

How you see the relationship between yourself and your customers, from the outset, will determine the success of your relationship with them.

If you're too brazen and authoritative then your customer may well be impressed by your confidence, they may even purchase your product or service but they'll always feel uncomfortable. 

No one likes to be sold to, although everyone likes to buy. The moment your customers feel they've been sold to, even if they actually wanted the product being offered, then emotionally they feel short-changed.

The opposite occurs, when you are not assertive enough. Your customers require assertion that the product or service you are offering them is right for their needs. Logically they may believe the product is what they require but few people actually buy what they need, they, you and I make decisions to purchase based on wants and desires and these fall into 3 categories:

The 3 Buying Motivators

1. Profit - will your service make or save them money?

2. Feel good - will your product enhance their life in any way?

3. Fear - if they don't buy your product, what problem might this leave them with?

 Products Satisfy Desires, Relationships Build Trust

What if your customer buys from you, despite your over or under-assertive sales approach - do they actually trust you?

Let's turn the situation around for a moment. You go pitch your services to a prospect who is ultra-assertive and they demand a discount or make other requests of you on the basis that if you don't acquiesce they won't buy from you. How do you feel, do you trust this prospect, is this someone you're going to enjoy working with over time?

What if your prospect is a push-over and they bought from you without hesitation? The problem is that their passive nature means they find it almost impossible to refuse requests from others and this has consequences, including buyers remorse when they discover they're unable to make use of the service they agreed to purchase from you because they've taken on too many other projects. 

You'll Rarely Have Long-Term Profitable Client Relationships If You're Not Working In Partnership.

Think for a moment about those clients you have the best relationship with. How do you get along? Is the relationship warm, friendly, even assertively challenging at times but usually highly respectful?

When you're with your best clients, does it feel more like you're working in partnership with them, rather than you or they always calling the shots? 

When you begin to see each new customer as a partner and not them as a client and you as their supplier, something magical occurs. You enjoy your work more, you make more money, you acquire more happy customers and most importantly, you attract more respect from your clients.

Are You The 'Parent' Or The 'Child' In This Relationship?

Transactional Analysis was founded by Eric Berne in the 1950's. His famous 'parent adult child' theory is widely used today in organisations, therapy centres, by parents, in fact anywhere where communication, management, personality, relationships and behaviour are important requirements. Berne's theories are still being developed to this day.  

Berne argued that social relationships are centred around verbal communication, especially face to face. When two people meet, one of them will speak to the other. Berne called this the Transaction Stimulus - the response from the other person was the Transaction Response. The person initiating the communication he identified as 'The Agent' and the person who responds he called the 'Respondent'.

Berne was analysing what happens when someone does something to someone and the other person responds back. 

Transactional Analysis identifies that as a human you exist and communicate, at any one moment, in one of 3 states; parent, adult, child.

1) Parent

This is your voice of authority. From when you were young, you have been conditioned to understand the meaning associated with others' communications and how to respond. You learnt from your parents, grandparents, uncles & aunts, teachers and other authority figures, who played back their experiences of life, which your brain in turn recorded and which shaped your behaviours and ideas about the world and in particular how to engage with others.

Your Parent has been created from your brain's many hidden and recorded playbacks during your life. These experiences are interpreted by your brain and it's how you became conditioned, over time, to learn what's right or wrong, such as why it's right or wrong to lie, cheat or steal. All external events and influences, since you were a child, have been recorded and stored by your brain, creating a set of values and 'truths' by which you live your life and communicate with others.

2) Child

Whenever you experience an external event, which causes you to feel angry or feelings of despair begin to take over, then this is your Child reacting. This is how your mind reacts and responds to seeing, hearing and feeling external events. An emotional response means that the Child is in control. 

3) Your 'Adult' is usually where you will function best. The adult has the ability to think and determine action for itself, based on the information it receives. The adult in us begins to form at around ten months old and it's how we keep our Parent and Child under control. 

Why Adult To Adult Will Help you Retain More Happy Customers

If the relationship between you and your customer is one based upon Adult-to-Child then there is a danger that one of you will feel superior to the other, whilst the other feels completely the opposite.

Imagine, for a moment, if your relationship with your client is based on Child-to-Child. A recipe for disaster I would think, as both of you might start 'throwing your teddies out of the cot' at the same time if things aren't going the way either of you want.

Parent-to-child relationships are important sometimes however. Imagine when you were 5 years old if your parents started speaking to you as an adult-what a confused child you would have been. 

Child-to-child relationships are also useful, especially if you and the other person are 5 years old of course. 

Adult-to-Adult is the most useful way to communicate if your relationship with your client is to be based upon mutual trust and respect.

Keeping Your Client Sweet Isn't Always The Best Approach 

For a number of years I was the director of a successful training company. The company's MD, who'd built the business from his kitchen table to a team of several international training consultants, ensured every client understood that when they entered into contract with our company, it was on the understanding that we would work together based upon a relationship of mutual respect and in partnership.

Ultimately our company's focus was to deliver measurable outcomes for our clients, after all they were paying our wages. However, the moment a client would begin to show any level of disrespect for anyone in our business, from our administrators to the MD himself or should the client consider directing the nature of the expertise we were hired to deliver, then invariably a conversation would take place. The client would be left in no doubt that the relationship would cease unless a more considered and collaborative solution was found.

What would you do faced with such a demanding and assertive prospect or customer - would you cave in and agree to their terms, even though though you knew it might compromise the level and quality of the services you would deliver to them? Or would you go the other way and assert your own expectations, potentially damaging the relationship, possibly from the outset? 

I know I have been guilty and recently too, of asserting my expectations on a client, who evidently was not implementing the training I had delivered to his team, despite our initial agreement that this project would help his business achieve an important financial goal.

Whether it's with the best of intentions or not, once either party, client or service provider starts to assert authority over the other - unless such a style of communication has been agreed beforehand - then there is a real risk that any trust built so far could be significantly eroded. When one of the party feels personally undermined or disrespected then that is pretty well game over.

Being passionate about what you are trying to do for your client is fine but telling them what to do, might be just a step too far. A lesson I need to keep reminding myself of on occasions.

Applying A 'We' Approach To Achieving Your Client's Goals

In her excellent book Conversational Intelligence, Judith E. Glaser explains the importance of being able engage those you work with by building trust. She mentions a study which identifies how the hormone oxytocin (the trust hormone) is produced when we are in a collaborative state. This hormone makes us feel happier about the person we are collaborating with and we will more readily trust their advice. 

Of course the opposite applies, whenever we feel challenged in too much of an assertive, 'parent' like manner, our levels of oxytocin diminish and we start to distrust the very person who is supposed to be helping and working with us.

Equally if the communicator is too passive and 'child' like in their approach, then trust is also diminished as we will lack confidence in their weak assertion as to how to approach the goal. 

By taking a more collaborative, 'we' approach when helping your clients achieve their goals, this will ensure that trust, which you may have had to work hard at to establish, is maintained and a successful result is the more likely outcome.

Are Your Existing Client Relationships Adult, Parent Or Child Centred?

How are you engaging with your clients, do you have adult-to-adult conversations when it comes to helping them achieve their goals or does one of you more often take on the parent or child persona? Is it time to re-evaluate these relationships?

Many thanks for viewing my post and would you please share it with anyone you feel would benefit from the advice provided. 

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