1. Grows, rather than just appears
2. Is both rational and emotional
3. Is a two way relationship
4. Is intrinsically about perceived risk
5. Is different for the client than the advisor
6. Is personal
7. Trust increases as step function
8. Much of business is conducted as if trust was in professional realm, but this is mostly untrue
9. Trust cannot be forced, and is deeply personal
10. Trust entails risk. Many techniques in the book are risky. If you are not taking a risk, you are not likely to create trust.
11. trust relationship is unidirectional, one leads and one follows.
12. If you are not able to trust, you are likely not trustworthy
13. Trust is about relationships, you being in it for the long haul

• Can enter a consultant relationship with anxiety
• An advisor usually reveils problems. That can be seen as creating more problems, if conveyed incorrectly.
• Looking for reassurance, calming fear, sparking confidence.
• Don't like being told what to do, unless advisor shows that they understand and respect them
  • Deep listening, take the time to understand the situation
• Wants to feel in charge
• primarily wants reasons, not instructions
• Advisor shoud explain on eye-level with the client (regarding the skill/experience level in the matter)

• prefer soft over hard phrasing
• turn assertions into questions
• Avoid situations where someone has to confess weakness
  • E.g. "Did everyone understand that? " vs "Have i made myself clear?"
  • "Would you like to stay on this point, or move to the next one?"
• Trusted advisor assumes responsibility for mutual understanding
• Avoid starting with Why?, has a judgemental edge. Strive for curiosity not judgement.
• Rehearse a client conversation to understand how you are perceived
  • Rehease with a friend, colleague
  • Take a video

• Where is the student starting from? For what messages are they ready? What do they believe in?
• A lot of questioning and listening
• Take on a journey of discovery
• Socratic teaching
  • Why do you think we have this problem?
  • What would you do differently?
  • What advantages do the options have?
  • How do you think the relevant players would react?
  • Have you considered the adverse consequences of such an action?
  • Other people have encountered the following dificulties, how do you think we get around it?
  • What benefits do you see?

• Make the client feel like it was their idea
• Avoid taking a stance early
• we are "A guide through the reasoning", show perspectives

A good process for the advisor to follow is

1. Give them their options
2. Give them the education about the options
3. Give them a reccomendation
4. Let them choose
5. Many people are involved
6. Helpful to get all players on board beforehand, when a group decision is made
7. Conflicting agendas and schedules are also the advisors responsibility

• Consulting is a performing art.
• "The essence of advice-giving is the ability to design a process and means of interaction that fits each client situation".
• Understand preferred style of interaction

1. Go first
   • Give a favor to earn a favor
   • Need to take a risk
2. illustrate, don't tell
   • What you claim about yourself will always be perceived sceptically
   • Create opportunities to demonstrate, that you have something to contribute
   • Demonstrate that you
     1. Have listened to what the client has said
     2. have appreciated the importance the client has assigned to what they've been saying
     3. understand the unique aspects of their situation
     4. understand their business
     5. be a comfortable and supportive person to work with
     6. are able to make an unique contribution
     7. can be trusted to keep your word
     8. have experience in dealing with their problem

     Exercise: Pick 3 points that are most important, think about how you demonstrate them.

3. Listen for what's different, not for what's familiar What makes this person different from other clients? "What clients want" is a dangerous phrase, because clients want to be seen as individuals.
4. Be sure your advice is sought
   • provide affirmation, approval, support and appreciation along with your support
5. Earn the right to offer advice Be aware of stages in the relationship Three parts
   1. Understanding the clients situation
   2. Understanding how the client feels about it
   3. Convince the client that that we have achieved the previous two points
6. Keep asking
   • People tend to hint, and not communicate clearly.
   • Ask, and listen can not be emphasised enough
7. Say what you mean
   • Misunderstanding can be a big source of missed trust
8. When you need help, ask for it
   • Don't portray an image of complete mastery
   • Keeping the focus on the clients problem, builds trust
   • Demands are resented, requests for help are met with a positive response
9. Show an interest in the person
   • Keep them talking about themselves, to learn as much as possible how to adjust your communication
   • Invokes the feeling of "this person understands me"
   • Take notes
10. Use compliments, not flattery
    • Specific enough, sincere
11. Show appreciation

Digital age Immitate, facilitate, and recreate the primal sense of being face-to-face with someone. Suggestions to personalize digital communications

1. Guard against defaulting to the lowest emotional bandwith of communication
2. Exploit the capabilities of a given communications technology
3. Compensate for the limitations of the chosen technology
4. Make in-person meetings in the beginning
5. Brake the walls of your technology (e.g. find out the weather in a different locations)
6. Do your digital homework (find information about your communication partners)
7. Humanize yourself (give bits information about yourself)

• Unprofessional not to show an interested in a client on a personal level
• Socializing is not necessary, but being sociable definitely is

• Neither good or bad for trust. The range of tools is just broader for building (but also diminishing) trust.
• A mechanistic view on social media ("networking" by spamming loosely personalized messages) is inherently insincere
• To earn trust, you must bet on the long term benefit of the relationship

Takeaway: Focus on journey instead of destination

• The one dimension of trust most often achieved
• Content expertise + presence
• Be credible, and illustrate (not assert) this
• rational (accuracy, believability) and emotional (honesty, completeness) components

• Clients think you are dependable and behave consistently
• Improves the better you know the person
• Explicit action-orientation (as opposed to credibility)
• Emotional aspect: the extent to which we seem to anticipate the other persons habits, expectations, routines and quirks
• Repeated experiences of expectations fulfilled
• Make promises and deliver on them
• Consistency in terms of the client's preferences
• Aim at client based familiarity (e.g. sending meeting material beforehand, consistently)

Final thoughts

1. make specific commitments around small things
2. send meeting materials in advance
3. meetings should have clear goals, ensure they are met
4. Use clients look and feel around terminology, style, formats, hours etc.
5. Review agendas with your clients
6. Re-confirm scheduled events before they happen, inform of changes on time

• Biggest sources of differentiation in trustworthiness are intimacy and low self-orientation
• Know how to emphasize with someone, but also know how to communicate this
• not afraid to be vulnerable, not afraid to ask tough questions and take on emotional risk
• A safe haven for tough issues
• People can get very personal, intimate and irrational
• Intimacy is about emotional closeness concerning the issue at hand
• Mutually increasing
• More about who we are than other aspects of trust.

Suggestions

1. Be not afraid. Intimacy requires courage for everyone involved.
2. Candor is not necessarily intimacy.
3. Show that you have a different angle, ask questions unheard of from other consultants. Both parties will have fun and learn
4. Test if you are about to cross the line. Ask if the client would even want to discuss an intimate issue with you, by putting yourself in their shoes. Can the client exit the situation while saving face? Is it the correct time, topic and phrasing?
5. Practice phrasing of difficult questions, messages etc.
6. Don't overrate the downside risk. It is often overstated and sometimes, it is actually your personal risk.
7. You have to make the first step.

No greater source of distrust, if we make the impression that we just care about ourselves. Threats to client-focus, and temptations for self-orientation

1. selfishness
2. self-consciousness
3. need to appear on top of things
4. a desire to look intelligent
5. A to-do list on our mind that is a mile long
6. A desire to jump to the solution
7. A desire to win that exceeds the desire to help the client
8. a desire to be right
9. A desire to be seen to be right
10. A desire to be seen as adding value
11. Fears of various kinds

In short: Any kind of preoccupation with our own agenda. The client recognizes this through

1. Tendency to relate a story to yourself
2. Finishing sentences for the other to quickly
3. Need to feel empty spaces in conversations
4. Need to feel witty, intelligent
5. Inability do answer directly to a direct question
6. Unwillingness to say "i don't know"
7. Name-dropping of other clients
8. A recitation of qualifications
9. A tendency to give answers too quickly
10. Tendency to want to have the last word
11. Closed-ended questions early on
12. Putting forward hypothesis before hearing the client's or problem statements
13. Passive listening
14. Watching the client as if they were a computer monitor: A source of data?

How do we represent low self-orientation

1. Letting the client fill in the empty spaces
2. Asking the client what's behind a certain issue
3. Using open ended questions
4. Not giving answers unless you have earned the right to do so
5. Focus on defining the problem, not guessing the solution
6. Reflective listening (e.g. summarizing what we heard)
7. Saying you don't know, when you don't know
8. Acknowledge the feelings of the client with respect
9. Learn how to tell the clients story before we write our own
10. Listening without distractions
11. Resisting with confidence the clients invitation to provide a solution too early on.
12. Trusting the ability to add value after listening.
13. Taking most responsibility of failed communications.

Other:

• Make their concerns your concerns
• Listen 1 to 1
• Be honest with yourself about your level of interest

The trust equation can be used to evaluate a relationship. The cost of building new clients is much higher, because credibility, reliability and intimacy need time to build. The strongest predictor of high trust factors is the intimacy factor.

• Engagement is most affected by the digital revolution (out of the 5 steps)
• It's possible to start engaging digitally
• But it requires better communication skills and sharing critical insights early on

• Do or say things that are still suffinciently new and intriguing
• Build on prior knowledge that you have built

For example, approaches that…

1. demonstrate concern about competetive developments
2. signal an understanding of career challenges facing a particular individual
3. might offer a solution to a specific, managerial issue
4. demonstrate continuity and development

It's about the right topic at the right time. Rules of thumb:

1. introduce the topics in an order that amounts to the time the client has available. e.g. if the time is limited start with the urgent and end with the important. With more time, start with important and leave 5 mins for the urgent
2. Don't hold back in raising a topic.

Find out everything you can

• Do some second level investigations about the people involved, topics you can talk to them about.
• Good and relevant issues/topics that might be a bit risky

Don't make the first interactions transactional, but similar to how you would talk to a new friend.

~30 to 60 seconds attention span Speakers will create a story with background, setup and punchline. Listen to the whole sequence and understand the connections. Listen to stories, not only facts.

Distilling a complex set of issues down to a few, critical variables. We are considerably limited in the number of perspective we can keep in our head at the same time. Use models, draw, visualize, sketch lists etc.

If advisory relationships and conversations can get stuck in emotional backwater, rational framing will not unblock it. If you notice emptional pressure, switch to emotional level and address them immediately. ⚠ we are framing the clients emotions. Naming and claiming Speaking to what before has been unsayable. Characterised by

1. An acknowledgement of the difficulty of raising the issue
2. An acceptance of responsibility for raising it
3. A direct statement of the issue itself

This is about taking risk, and courage. Framing and blaming Most initial framings (often from the clients) are full of blame. Blame truly get's in the way of effectively advising, because it's a waste of energy. The problem statement should ideally be blame-free. Implementing emotional framing An altitue of taking responsibility, instead of looking to blame others. Responsibility taking caveats:

1. It's probably just me, but…
2. I must have been tuned out for a moment, i'm sorry, you were saying?
3. I'm sure you covered this before, but…
4. I'm sorry to interrupt, but i just can't get this out of my head about…
5. You probably thought of this already..
6. I wish i knew, but i just don't know how to handle this concern
7. I realize you have a strong preference about …
8. I'm probably thinking about this all wrong, but
9. I'm not sure if this is on point but it occurs to me that…
10. I may not have understood this right, so bare with me…
11. I don't know exactly how to say this, so i hope you help me, when i wonder..
12. I hope i am not inappropriate by bringing this up, but…
13. I hope you forgive my for not knowing quite how to say this, but…

• It's tempting to switch into action language after framing
• slow down the client if they switch

To explore what will and will not happen is important also as a trust building block To manage expectations well, we must

1. Clearly articulate what we will do, and won't do
2. Clearly articulate what the client will do, and won't do
3. Define the boundary of the analyses we will perform
4. Check with the client about any areas they don't want us to get involved in
5. Identify precise working arrangements
6. Agree on methods and frequency of communicating
7. Decide on who should get which reports
8. Decide how often a report should be delivered
9. Decide how any reports will be used
10. Decide what milestones and progress reviews are needed
11. Decide how success will be measured, both during and after the process.

Additional suggestions

1. Always tell the exact truths about what you can/can't do/deliver
2. Start the project before you've been engaged
3. Show enthusiasm
4. Ask the questions that are troubling you earlier than later

Frequently, this is because the earlier stages have not been adequately dealt with Other reasons are fear and complacency. Fear: Facing it, by acknowledging it. Complacency: Expand on trust capital. Define commitment steps: What, who, when?

Place the issue in context of the other work to be done for the client.

A mistake made more often than any others. Why?

1. The human tendency to focus on ourselves
2. The belief that we are only selling content
3. The desire for tangibility
4. The search for validation

The #1 reason why we don't do this "trust stuff": "Well, i wouldn't do that. It's just too risky." Nearly every techique and concept so far is often perceived as risky and thus infeasible. Often business risk is often, after close examination, personal risk.

The higher the stakes, the harder it is to take the simple small error-correction steps. Ego-fulfilling thoughts overrule the calm, cool reflective state. Self-centered fear is the primary reason for a focus on ourselves. Emotions and desires we must learn to control include

1. Wanting to take credit for an idea
2. Wanting to fill blank airtime with content
3. Playing to our own insecurity by feeling we have to get all our credentials out there
4. Wanting to put a cap on the problem, so we can solve it later, without the pressure
5. wanting to hedge our answers in case we are wrong
6. Wanting too soon to relate our own version of the client's story or problem

1. "Just the facts" Don't be fooled: This is a plea to be understood. Speak in the clients language. Use clarifying and confirming statements.
2. "I'll get back to you" This is typically a client nervous about commitments on the spot, conservative, afraid of being wrong. Make that process easier for them. Legitimize their desire for "soak time".
3. "You're the expert, dummy" They are giving in to their inclination to dominate you. Give back value in the form of a number of hypothesis.
4. "Let me handle that" The language of a client that doesn't trust you. Apply the trust process. It can also be that the client doesn't trust anyone -> Naming and claiming.
5. "Let's go through this again" Frame via alternatives: Clients like this are most comfortable in the detail-oriented realm. This might mask a desire to control things. The goal is to make the situation feel controllable.
6. "You don't understand" Might be a desire to feel special. Don't try to win the battle, acknowledge your differences and ask questions
7. "The enemy's enemy is my friend" These clients love politics. Speak their language. Don't debate the value of what they are saying. Make politics a content issue and talk about it freely.
8. "Just like, you know, come on. Make it happen" Skills not in the verbal area, but often they have balancing strength. Help them, give them voice. Write down, make lists, allow them to rank things etc.
9. "Oh by the way… i probably should have…" Are you consistently missing out? It could be a personal issue, or a label for you. Ask for a private meeting, assume that you have a label. Use naming and claiming, ask to put them in your shoes.

The goal is still to help the client. We must be willing to

• Stop trying to close the deal
• Be transparent and consistent about our pricing
• Be much less attached to the outcome (view sale as a byproduct)
• Be willing to recommend a competitor, if the competitor has a better offering
• Welcome objections as a form of engagement
• Navigate the client's buying system
• Invest extra time in developing a lead
• View client lead streams strategically (quarterly, rather than weekly).
• Digitalisation has driven sales to short-term transactionality. This leads to: Clients are thirsty for interaction with high-trust business developers.

Usually seperated. Demonstrate (don't tell) relevant talent and connections. After all we want to help the client, also by opening relevant business opportunities. An altitude of toleration towards clients harms the sales perspective. Get over negative feelings about selling by making it synonymous with client service.

Why can't our services speak for themselves? Because we need to get hired for work first. Show what it feels like to work together. Use first (interview) time to get to work immediately. Dangerous misconception: Don't share your knowledge until the client pays.

If something bad is happening at a client, it is our obligation to point it out. -> If there's an opportunity for improvement, it is the same. Not pointing out these possibilities would be unprofessional! It comes down to: To be professional, have the best interest of the client at heart.

• Often leads to "canned" pitches for clients that seek specialised services.
• Personalised aspect is lost.
• But it can be used to the advantage, if we find out more information about the client beforehand, to personalise pitches and first impressions

Suggestions from clients:

1. Make an impact on our business. Don't just be visible.
2. Invest your time on preliminary work in new areas.
3. Spend more time helping us think and develop strategies.
4. Lead our thinking.
5. Jump on any new pieces of information we have. Ask for data.
6. Schedule some out-of-office meetings together. Join for brainstorming sessions.
7. Make an extra effort to understand how our business works.
8. Help us see how we compare to others.
9. Tell us why our competitors are doing what they are doing.

1. Expand: New service is offered to a current client individual. "Handing over the business card" scenario is problematic, since it feels like the advisor is asking a favor and setting people up. Extensive trust building and to demonstrate that one has the best interest of all parties at heart, are key in this type.
2. Broaden: Existing service is offered to a new person in the client organization. "I just need an intro" scenario is problematic if it seems like the client is taken for granted. No risk is taken from the advisors side, and not much is said about the client side. -> Share an honest view of how the interests of client and advisor are intertwined. "What's in it for me" question must be answered for the client.
3. Diversify: New service to a new person. Problematic since there are 4 relationships and 4 parties involved. Start by talking to the internal expert. Then talk to the client and further define the problem. The real meeting will be much less problematic if it's clear that
   • all parties invested serious time
   • the problem is well understood
   • the expertise is real and known
   • everyones interest is genuine
   • everyone knows each other

It helps to name and claim unspoken tricky emotions.