The Scariest Question You Will Ever Ask Your Client.(And why asking it is the key to your business success.)As a consultant or coach, you basically make your living talking to clients. You are great at what you do. You are an astute listener. You ask lots of probing questions. But there is one area that most consultants and coaches find very difficult to explore:
The failure of most of us to ask these questions cripples the growth of our business. It makes getting powerful testimonials — the bedrock of any marketing plan — nearly impossible. It promotes fee resistance in both our client's mind and our own. After all, if we can't acknowledge to each other what real value I bring to this relationship, why should any client pay a higher fee? Not knowing the answers to these questions has a profound effect on our own internal fee resistance. It makes us timid about raising fees, or quoting what we know that we really deserve.
If we want to get paid what we are really worth, if we want a business filled with repeat clients, if we want to never have to worry about where the next client is coming from, then we need to find a comfortable and powerful way to have these conversations with our clients about the value we provide. This two-part article will help you begin this process. No, this is not an overnight cure. There is a lot of "conditioning" to overcome. But the promise of this system of talking to your clients is this:
Now that is a lot to promise, but if you withhold judgment for a little while and open your mind to a new way of talking to your customers, you will begin to see the logic of this approach. You will see why it makes perfect sense that it will work for you. You will see why your clients will love it, and even demand that you have this conversation on a regular basis! To understand our present client interactions it is necessary to go back a bit. Well, for some of us, we have to go waaay back. But understand that this pattern of talking to people has evolved over our entire lifetime. It started when we were just kids. This paralyzing fear. Do you remember? Of course you do. It is why you still can't ask this critical question of your best clients. And failing to ask this question stifles your business success. It's like a big iron fist that holds your business hostage. Can't remember the question? Think back a century or so to when you were a young kid. You really liked someone. It could have been a best buddy. Or maybe it was a parent or relative. But you were dying to know what they thought of you. I mean really, truly, deep in their hearts — what did they think of you? Do you remember that feeling of desperately wanting to know how someone felt about you? Were you worthy? Did they like you? Did they want to be with you? So now, you are a grownup with a consulting or coaching practice. Has it changed much? Aren't you still dying to know what your clients really think about you?
Most of us are petrified of the answers to these questions. Then one day some marketing person tells us that we need to have some testimonials to build our business. In fact, they tell us — and we whole-heartedly agree — that without great testimonials from satisfied clients, we will never grow our business beyond the few personal referrals we get. Our business will remain small, and we will struggle. So we go hat in hand to our clients and ask... no... beg for a testimonial. The conversation begins something like this: "Hey Joe, we have done some great work with you over the past few years. We are putting together a new website and really need some testimonials for it. Would you be willing to give us one?" While you are asking your client this question, all those desperate feelings from your youth come rushing back.
But to your pleasant surprise, Joe says, "Yes. Of course I will." You almost jump out of your skin. "Yeah! He does like me!" Joe promises to send you a letter real soon. So you wait. And wait. And wait some more. You finally summon the courage to mention it to him, and he promises he will send it soon. So you wait. And wait. Finally in desperation you ask again and then Joe says: "Hey, why don't you write something up and then I will sign it?" "Uh sure," you say. And you slink back to your office to write. But what can you write about? You know what you think was valuable, but what about Joe? You still don't know what he thinks of you. You want to say something truly incredible, but you don't want to seem "stuck on yourself." (Hmm, that sounds a lot like being in the 6th grade again) So, you finally write something and bravely give it to Joe. More than likely you mailed or emailed it. It would just be too hard to look him in the eye when he read it. But you were general enough, you were modest enough, and you didn't really say anything except you were a good guy, so Joe signed it. You put it in your marketing materials. You pray to God that you won't have to do another one of these soon. Then your marketing person says — "Hey, you can't do just one. You need at least three!" "Argggh! I would rather go back to 9th grade and ask Amy Detwilder if she liked me enough to go to the spring dance with me. I just hate this. There must be a better way!" What does it cost your business, when you can't ask your clients this simple but scary question:
You are not alone! The vast majority of consultants and coaches find it very hard to ask clients this question. After all, we have been taught since childhood that modesty is a great virtue. Work with clients should not be "all about us." And ever since Amy Detwilder turned us down for the dance in 9th grade, we have learned that asking such a vulnerable question can be fraught with emotional danger. But what if you could remove most of the danger? What if you could have a conversation with a client about the value you bring to the relationship that is comfortable for both parties? What if you built this process right into your normal working relationship? What if, your clients were able to recognize that having this conversation was a big benefit to THEM? That is what the concept of "client value conversations" is all about. Many of us think that we are already having these conversations. Of course, you ask your clients about their challenges. But do you get them to put a dollar figure on what that challenge is costing them? Once you get that information, and you help them with a solution, do you go back and dig to see if they got some kind of measurable ROI (return-on-investment)? This may be in hard dollars (money and time) or in "soft-dollars" (self-esteem, less stress, confidence, etc). Most importantly, do you ask specifically how you helped them? Naturally, they may have done much of the work themselves. You might say, "I just pointed out the obvious." Well, it was not obvious until you pointed it out! They did not succeed until you stepped into the fray. Therefore, you really need to dig and find out from them exactly how you helped them make the changes they did. That does require some skill, but it is all something you can learn to do. And you can make the process so valuable to your client that they will want you to do this as a part of your work together. "I hate this part of my business. Can't I just get someone else to ask the questions?" Well, yes, you can get someone else to get testimonials from your clients. Indeed, for the past 20 years, I have been interviewing customers to find out what value they got from the products or services they used. I'm good at it. The testimonials I get are truly to die for.
This failure to communicate with your clients is killing your business. Ask yourself some questions. What kind of business do you want to have? How would you describe it? How do these sound to you?
Asking your client for a typical testimonial, as we did earlier here with Joe, will never create the business described above. Getting a "pro" to get testimonials for you from your clients, will help with your marketing, but will not create the business described above. Learning how to have your own customer value conversations with every client, all the time, from the beginning of your relationship to the very end, will produce the business described above. Best of all, you can do all this by doing what you have always done best — serve your clients. You need not be some marketing wiz. You need not have some great voice to do interviews. You don't have to be good at sales and marketing. You just have to have a conversation with your clients about value. But these conversations are not your typical client conversations. Every consultant or coach talks to his or her clients. But I have never found — not once in 20 years of talking to customers — a client relationship where all of the following were firmly established throughout the engagement.
You can learn to do all of the actions listed above when you learn to master the art of client value conversations. In Part Two of this article, we will explore some of the most basic steps that you can use immediately to start improving your conversations with clients.
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