When clients are prioritizing absolutely everything, no crystal clear and actionable target emerges. It’s like the clients go to an all-you-can-eat, no limits buffet. They keep piling stuff onto their plates. Yet they are neither interested in the food nor hungry enough to eat what they choose.
When you allow clients the freedom of prioritizing absolutely everything, you do yourself a great disservice. Because your focus is on pleasing clients, you say yes to whatever they prioritize next. As a result, you do not best serve their long term, strategic needs.
Sometimes focusing on only short term goals will not yield any gains at all: short or long. Rather, client priorities represent indulgences indicative of a shifting set of internal agendas. Consequently, each one of those shifting agendas jerks you and your team all over the place. Do you give your clients permission to undervalue you and your team in this manner?
- When clients are prioritizing absolutely everything, it is tantalizing to sell them everything at once.
- Also, it is tempting to design all the prioritized specs into the same project.
- However, meeting quotas and fulfilling KPIs in this manner often results in programs which are over specified and under delivered.
- When clients prioritize absolutely everything, you set the table for short and long term client dissatisfaction. Read that sentence again.
To repeat, you do yourself and your team a great disservice. You hesitate to push back as clients prioritize too much, too soon. Alternatively, why not ask clients whether prioritizing a constantly growing list of short term gains fits into their long term strategy? Change the context and nature of your relationship from order-taker into innovator.
Initially, you and I train to serve clients by not rocking any boats. Often, you and I continue to work from one-size-fits-all scripted sales and project management templates. However, as we put in our 10,000 hours, mastering the art of our chosen disciplines, we appreciate that mastering our professionalism also grows our confidence and ability to push back on allowing clients to prioritize absolutely everything. Over the short- and long- haul, developing personal and professional mastery sets the client table initially and subsequently. Are you building a trust-based, purpose-driven partnership with clients by focusing on the belief that you will not let clients prioritize absolutely everything?
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. Create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. Babette 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, and 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.
Leave a Reply