Sunday, September 16, 2012

An Unconventional Way To Retain a Client

I have always thought that honest goes a long way.   This approach to life may be interpreted as naive, but I do believe that becoming trustworthy will often work out for your best interests in the long run.   Trustworthiness is beneficial both in your personal and work life.

Charles Green has been an advocate of trustworthiness for a long time, and stresses the importance of using trust as a competitive advantage.  However, becoming easy to be trusted by others often implies taking counter intuitive actions and significant risks.  In one of his books, he has an an excellent example of how an auditing firm approached a situation with an unsatisfied client that was thinking of changing supplier.  New auditing companies were called to present proposals for the required services, and this auditing firm did the following:

"Instead of using their 90-minute time slot to do a conventional presentation, four of their partners acted out a skit for the four client executives. They role-played those very execs having that decisive meeting"

The company took a risk, talked about their current decline in their performance, and how they would improve it.  The result:  they were awarded the business again.

At the end, honesty's all we've got.

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