How to Master Talking with Clients
By Levina Kusumadjaja
Relationships are built with conversations. Conversations start with questions.
- Jon Acuff
Have you ever felt stuck in a conversation with a client? You don’t know what to say in a sales call and you don’t know how you can dig deep and uncover more things from your client in the process. Perhaps the thought of having a strategy workshop or discovery session scares you because you’re wondering: "How can I keep a conversation going for the whole day?" Or maybe you’re not even stuck, but you have been delaying meeting your potential clients because you have been feeling anxious about talking to them.
Let’s take a deep breath right now, pat yourself on the back, and relax. You are not alone. Many brand strategists are feeling what you’re feeling; they don’t know how to sell strategy and dive deep with their clients. How can this be so scary? The thing is, often times brand strategists forget that the goal in talking with clients (or potential clients) isn’t to prove their worth or seek for validation. You are talking to your potential clients not to sell them your service, but to connect with them.
The purpose of your conversation isn’t to sell something, the purpose is to build a relationship.
Building a connection and a relationship can begin with one thing: a common ground. This is something that you will have with any client or potential client. First and foremost, your common ground is that you are humans—people, citizens of the world. This means that you have the capacity to understand them, to engage with them, and to build that emotional connection with them. This also means that if you get better at conversing with the people closest to you, like your family and friends, you will also get better at conversing with your clients.
In an interview with Chris Do, Wesley Little suggested this: practice asking follow up questions in every conversation. If you want to get better at talking with clients, learn to be curious. Learn to be empathetic and to care about what’s going on in other people’s lives. If you want to bring something valuable to someone’s life, you have to first know what they consider as valuable. If you want to solve a certain problem in your client’s life, you have to first know the problems they are facing.
Talking to clients is scary when the focus is for you to perform, to impress, or to leave getting something from them. But when the focus is to understand, to see from your client’s point of view, and to give something valuable, there’s no pressure on you to be this certain expert in the conversation. You just need to be present, genuine and curious-and this is something that everyone can do. You don’t need a certain set of skills to be someone that cares about the other person in the conversation. You don’t need to be an expert to start talking to your clients. What you need to do is to simply start talking to them.
Cheers!
Levina
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About the author:
Levina is a writer based in Indonesia. Because of Melinda Livsey, she recognized the power of brand strategy for every creative. She is sharing about her learnings as she goes to help creatives have fun in their growth and journey of building brands. Connect with her on LinkedIn and say hi!