The most important skills for building client relationships
What are the most important skills to think about when it comes to building relationships with clients?
I did a quick straw poll with a half dozen business leaders at professional services organizations. The responses came in three buckets: Get Good at Relationship Management; Identify Skill Gaps; Find Complementary Skills.
1. Get Good at Relationship Management
Most people started by talking about common relationship management skills:
Communications
Active Listening
Expectation Management
Solution Sales
Relationship Management
Relationship Management is a good relationship management skill.
It seemed worth tapping on a couple of these, as they are rather high level. I asked three people what they meant by Communication. I used the best practice of inviting them to describe the component skills that make up the more general skill.
2. Identify the Skills Gaps
A different approach, one that requires better customer knowledge, is to look for skills gaps between the consultant and the client. This is often what drives the first sale to a client. The client needs something done and lacks the skills to get it done himself. “Lacks the skills” actually has several different meanings. There may be an absolute lack. In cutting edge areas, top consulting firms can have skills that their clients completely lack. For companies like BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman, now part of Raytheon) this is a strategy. They specialize in extremely difficult problems that almost no one else has the skills to solve (like building the Internet or inventing e-mail). But this is an extreme case, and most consulting firms are not made up of geniuses like BBN.
In most cases the skill gap is relative, the consultant knows more about a certain area than the client, often because the consultant has worked across several industries and companies. Consultants are great cross-pollinators. In fact, this is generally a better situation for consultant and client. You want your client to have a basic understanding of and appreciation for what you are doing.
Sometimes the client sees consulting as a form of arbitrage, they have the necessary skills but want to deploy them elsewhere, or they want to get access to skills they already have at a lower cost base. This is generally not an ideal situation for the consultant, and tends to lead to downward pressure on prices (which erodes the quality of service). This is what drives the business process outsourcing sector.
Identifying skills gaps is a way to win work, but it is not the best way to build a relationship that will generate repeat work.
3. Find Your Complementary Skills
The secret to building strong client relationships is to find complementary skills. Not just skill gaps that you can fill, but actual complementary skills. Complementary skills are those that really reinforce each other, like the classic food and wine pairings (say stilton and a good port) or the violin and piano in Beethoven’s “Spring Sonata” Op. 24.
On the business side, there are many common sets of complementary skills.
Technical
Data Scientist and Data Visualization Expert
User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)
(these are very different skillsets)Front End Developer and Backend Developer
Business
Door Opener and Closer (these are often different people)
Idea Generator and Execution Expert
Product Marketer and Product Manager
Of course, all of the above are general skills, and to really understand them you need to drill down to the component skills.
A Little Exercise …
Write down your top five skills
Have a colleague, one you work with often, do the same
Circle your shared skills
Draw a line between your complementary skills
Generally you want to have a few shared skills as these improve communication and let you allocate work better. But complementary skills are the building blocks of great teams.
Now do the same thing for a few of your top consulting relationships. You should find strong pairs of complementary relationships and be able to state the value that this skills dyad brings to each side of the relationship.
TeamFit helps you to understand the patterns of skills found in individuals, teams and companies.