The surprising truth about maximizing client satisfaction

Aspiring management consultants often think maximizing client satisfaction is all about doing whatever the client wants to make them happy.

Those people are wrong.

The most important thing to you, as a consultant, is maintaining your credibility. The way you do that is by being brutally honest with your clients.

Being brutally honest doesn’t mean you don’t have tact.

Brutally honest means saying the unpopular thing but doing it in the right way, because just like in most relationships, delivery is key.

Honesty really is the best policy

You ever see those people who as soon as something goes wrong they say, “I knew that was going to happen.” or “I thought that might happen.”? Annoying, to say the least, but it gets worse than that.

If you find yourself saying those words but didn’t voice your concern up front, you should assume you just lost all your credibility.

Did you say that idea you really hated was great? That makes you a liar, and nobody wants to work with a liar.

Good advisors weigh in on the good and bad…especially the bad.

The rationale is simple – clients don’t need help making an obviously good decision.

They need help on decisions that have risks – decisions that look different depending on your vantage point.

Your clients need you to put yourself in other people’s shoes to influence a more informed decision.

That’s how you deliver client satisfaction.

If your clients wanted to just hear their own opinions played back, they could invest in a dictaphone 5000 and save themselves a whole lot of money.

Limitations of Groupthink

When you surround yourself with a bunch of people who see the world exactly like you, you can’t grow. If you want to be successful, you need to grow. See the problem there?

Being around people different than you literally makes you smarter and makes teams perform better. It’s science…seriously.

This is the last post in the series on the 12 habits of highly successful consultants.