You all serve clients regardless of your respective professional disciplines. So it follows that when you serve those clients, your focus primarily is helping clients prioritize their own needs. That focus is truly noble.
However, as you work with those clients, at what point do you shift your focus towards meeting your own needs first? Crossing that barrier, or interface, is where theory meets practical reality. And chances are, all of you have leapt across that interface before.
Regardless of your in-person, hybridized, or virtual environments, you have sales quotas and key performance indicators to meet. Also, you have some version of team mates or higher-ups to please, including your board of directors. When meeting your client’s priorities collides with a variety of your internal clients’ own priorities, things can go sideways if not south. So much for those prioritized, optimal, True North solutions, plans, and projects you created to meet external client priorities.
If you continuously engage in damage control occurring towards the middle of the sale, project, or hiring process, it’s time to take a step back. Let’s recalibrate how and when you help clients prioritize their own needs before you dive in head first, once again.
Consider your ingrained pre-project and pre-sale discovery process. What outcomes are possible when you simultaneously identify how both internal and external clients prioritize their own needs. Think you are in a time crunch at the beginning of a sales or project? It’s much less time-consuming and costly to do you homework (and yeah, duke things out) ahead of surging forward. Otherwise, you once again become stuck spinning your wheels in costly, time-consuming, emotionally-exhausting mid-cycle drama. Again. Unless, that is, you thrive on constantly dealing with unnecessary damage control.
As long as you learned to work in virtually or hybridized environments, why not learn to be more flexible in how you help clients prioritize their needs? Once you leap across that conceptual interface, you simultaneously prioritize not only your clients’ needs, but your own, as well: from the start. (Plus, it is a wonderful way to develop client relationships resulting in loyalty and customer retention.) Make sense? 😉
I catalyze cross-functional, collaborative, profitable, and sustainable solutions across value silos. | Professional Innovation | Cross Functional Leadership | Complex Problem Solving | Speaker, Consultant, Coach |
- Need to stop spinning your wheels professionally? Searching for a speaker focused on doing the smallest things with the biggest impact to get you towards what is new and next? Then engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. She is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). Babette is a member of SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available in soft cover and digital formats on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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