Becoming a Trusted Advisor

Throughout this discussion, we’ve used the term salesperson as a convenience to describe who in your company is building customer relationships, but in truth every executive, project manager, service technician, and other employee who interacts with your customers at key touch points should be trying to establish credibility, build trust, and be compatible with the customer’s representatives. The pinnacle of customer relationships is to be viewed as a trusted advisor. Customers who view you as a trusted advisor are more likely to call you when they need help, accept your recommendations and solutions, refer you to others inside or outside their company who could use your help, give you more time share and mind share, and consider you a long-term business associate and friend. When customers have problems or questions and they call you, you have achieved the kind of trust that maximizes mind share. David H. Maister, who has written extensively about professional services firms and coauthored a book entitled The Trusted Advisor, usually associates trusted advising with people in the professions: lawyers, accountants, consultants, and so on. However, whether your business is potash, pizza, parrots, or professional services, you can aspire to be viewed by your customers as a trusted advisor. It’s largely a matter of mind-set and behavior, as the following best practices suggest:

First, think of yourself as an advisor rather than an executive, project manager, account manager, engineer, service technician, or customer service representative. The mind-set is important. If your employees think of themselves as vendors, that’s how they’ll behave. If they think of themselves as advisors, they’ll act like advisors. Of course, they’ll need the skills, too, but it begins with their self-concept and their concept of the company, its mission, and their role relative to the customers you serve.

To mature from subject-matter expert to trusted business advisor, you have to adopt a student mindset. You need a knowledge acquisition strategy that takes you well beyond your core expertise and utilizes multiple methods of learning. Client learning has to be a central focus of your efforts: depth and breadth of knowledge, together with an intimate understanding of your client and his world, form a powerful combination that will fuel your ability to be insightful and consistently add value.—Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel, Clients for Life

Then you have to build the credibility and trust needed for customers to see you as a trusted advisor. Belonging to a trusted firm or company helps, but trust as an advisor must be earned individually and with every customer. As Maister, Green, and Galford note: “The key point is that trust must be earned and deserved. You must do something to give the other people the evidence on which they can base their decision on whether to trust you. You must be willing to give in order to get.”¹⁴

Use a consulting approach with customers—ask more questions, do more listening, and help them find the answers themselves. This is in stark contrast to the typical transactional salesperson who tells, pushes, and tries to close. Be patient, act in customers’ best interests, and don’t do work for customers that you should not be doing or sell them something they don’t need.

Take a broader view of customers’ business, focusing not only on the segments or needs you serve but on their overall business. Search for ways to help them beyond the scope of the work you are doing.

Schedule breakfasts, lunches, dinners, or other away-from-work events to have open dialogues with customers, where you can talk about anything of interest to them regarding the business. Ensure that these discussions are confidential from your standpoint—and don’t treat these as sales calls. Don’t push your own agenda.

Find opportunities to add value, especially as a thought partner, when you have nothing to gain, when your reason for adding value is simply to help the customer.

Continue to think about customers’ problems even when you are not meeting with them or serving them. Call them with ideas when you have something of merit to suggest.

Share your own best practices with your customers. General Electric excels at this. Its customer workouts, which we described in Winning Behavior, are outstanding behavioral differentiators. Very few companies demonstrate GE’s commitment to helping customers improve their businesses.

Clearly, to be viewed as a trusted advisor, you must have something of value to share with customers, some insightful questions to ask or some credible advice to give. Best-in-class companies develop insight deliberately, as part of their corporate strategy, and they invest the time and resources to ensure that it happens. They assign strategic account managers to their key customers—to develop and manage the relationship, to ensure that those customers are well served and their needs are met, and to develop enough understanding of them to provide added value. Some companies analyze their customers’ value chains to understand and increase their value-added contributions and to share their insights into how their customers can improve their businesses. Some companies invest in research and educational initiatives to develop more knowledge about their customers’ businesses and industries. Whatever your particular path to developing insights for your customers, it’s clearly useful to have such insights and use them to educate your employees so they are better able to add value during their customer interactions.

We have devoted considerable time in this chapter to discussing the importance of building zippered networks with customers, increasing your time share and mind share with them, building chemistry, and being thought of as trusted advisors because these are intelligent and competitive ways to build differentiated customer relationships during early middle game. The evidence from most industries would suggest that the majority of companies don’t make the investments in relationship building that we have discussed. Many companies have a far more transactional attitude toward customers. They are driven to make the next quarter’s numbers, so they emphasize the short term. They create incentives for salespeople to close sales, not build long-term relationships. They busy themselves with internal matters and don’t devote the executive time and energy to building customer relationships. Their internal reporting systems place a premium on billable hours; in some companies there are no charge codes for nonbillable “relationship-building hours” with customers. These practices militate against making the kinds of investments in customer relationships that can behaviorally differentiate. Mind you, we’re not condemning these practices. There are sensible reasons for each policy decision that reinforces a transactional attitude toward customers. However, companies have to balance their short-term and long-term perspectives, and most emphasize the short term, which creates a spectacular behavioral differentiation opportunity for those few companies that choose to change the balance.