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ISCOVER
Vanessa Bennett, CEO of Inside 80 Performance in Australia, notes that high performance is as much about communication with your clients as with your staff.
In my article last month, we discussed the concept of natural pace and how helping your staff to work more closely to their natural pace will mean they perform their work more efficiently as well as be more likely to stay with you.
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A quick recap – if you have a relatively short attention span and like to jump around between tasks, you are ‘fast paced’; whereas if you like to focus on one task for longer periods, then you are more ‘slow paced’.
These behavioural concepts can also be used to help you better communicate with your clients – potentially leading to a greater chance of generating referrals from these clients.
You can more than likely think about some clients who come across as though they have shorter attention spans. They will tend to want the executive summary in a verbal sense quite quickly and probably just want you to point to where they need to sign.
And then you can probably think of other clients where they were happy for you to take your time in the meeting and explain things in a little more detail before they signed the documents.
Let’s face it, when it comes to business and building relationships with people, it’s less about “treat others how you want to be treated” and more about “treat others how they want to be treated”.
As such, it is important to be able to adapt your communication style to the way that makes the client feel most comfortable.
If you feel that you are dealing with a fast-paced client, it’s best to get to the point quickly and then answer questions as they probe you for further information. Let them be the guide on when to go into more detail.
For a slow-paced person, it is best to take them on the journey with some more detail before leading up to the main point of the conversation.
Adapting to your client’s behavioural style will increase your ability to communicate with them more eff ectively, and inevitably increase your chance of securing repeat business and in turn new referrals.
