When Your Client Gets In Your Face
What do you do when your client gets angry at you, upset with you, in your face?
In truth, most clients don’t actually yell at you. But of course you can tell when they’re upset. Maybe we even project a little bit, and imagine the horrors of what they might actually be thinking, regardless of what they actually say.
It all feels pretty horrific.
Well, there’s a simple two-part way to deal with that situation.
- Recognize it’s about them, not about you, and
- Ask to talk about it.
Here’s how that plays out.
It’s About Them
When someone’s angry at you, even yelling in your face, about something you may or may not have done, it’s critical to see what’s happening.
- What you think is happening is, “he’s angry at me.”
- What you need to see is happening is, “he’s angry.”
If the “someone” is your three-year old child, we have no problem doing this. We think, “Oh, he’s tired,” and we have patience. What we don’t do is take seriously for a moment whatever horrible things the three-year old is saying about us.
But let’s say your child is 15; suddenly, it’s all personal, and we become offended and lash back at them. We feel attacked, and return anger for anger.
And when clients do it, it’s infinitely worse.
But – it’s still your choice. You can react as you do to a three-year old – with calmness and understanding about what’s going on with them – or with anger, getting sucked into a downward spiral.
Guess which response is right. Always remember: when someone’s angry at you, the key observation to make is that he or she is angry. It’s an emotional state in them.
The fact that they’re angry at you is relatively unimportant. You may feel hurt for a hot moment, because pain is inevitable – but suffering is a choice. Your choice.
Ask to Talk About It.
People get angry because they feel afraid about something, and are trying to be heard.
So – hear them.
Find the words to acknowledge their anger. In fact, to go further than that, and ask them to tell you more about it.
Them: I can’t believe this whole thing happened, and it’s your fault. It’s costing me money, and time, and I’m now behind schedule, and I want to know what you intend to do about it! Right now!
You: Whoah, wow. I’m not sure I appreciated how important this obviously is to you. And I get it, you’re upset – at us, and at me in particular. I, uh, think I really need to take some time and hear you out on this.
Them: I’ve been talking to you guys; I want to know what you intend to do about it.
You: Fair enough. You deserve that. At the same time, I don’t want to hip-shoot some solution without really understanding fully your context. And obviously we haven’t done that yet. So – give me 5 minutes to really understand your perspective; I promise to listen, and to talk about action steps – in 5 minutes. Now please – talk to me.
Or words to that effect. Nobody can script for you exactly what to say – that’s a function of who you are, and who your client is. But the point is to acknowledge the anger, and commit to listening.
And by the way, this doesn’t mean you need to be all passive and apologetic. You can, and should, push back on the insistence on immediate action. It can wait 5 more minutes, and the truth is until you really have listened to your client’s outbursts, he or she is not going to listen to your solutions.
Remember: It’s not about you. And until you talk about it, they’re not going to accept your solutions.
Trust-based Networking and the Paradox of “Collateral Benefit”
A (seemingly) simple question: What is the goal of business networking?
- The goal of most business networking is to make new connections in order to get more business.
- The goal of trust-based networking is to help others develop their businesses. The “collateral benefit” of trust-based networking is that others then help you.
When it comes to networking, injecting trust into the picture creates a sort of paradox. It’s exactly the same paradox that arises when we think about injecting trust into selling, or advice-giving, or getting people to review your books.
That paradox was expressed well by Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, and a host of others: basically, the best way to get what you want is to help others get what they want.
It’s easy to forget how radical that proposition is; and how infrequently people actually do it.
Current Networking Practice
Ask yourself: when you go to a meet-up, start looking through LinkedIn, or scan a rough lead list – how do you proceed? Here’s what usually happens:
- You search and scan in advance for those you’ve profiled as most likely to be prospects – focusing and prioritizing to narrow down a wide list of leads
- You focus on honing your elevator pitch
- During interaction, you focus on finding pain points (waiting to offer solutions at a later time).
If that roughly resembles what you do, then please take note: all three of those benign-sounding activities share one trait – they’re all about you. They are not activities that put Dale Carnegie’s insight into practice.
Trust-based Networking
What if you were to try something entirely different? For example:
- You search and scan for pairs of people both of whom you know, but who don’t know each other – and who could each benefit from the introduction
- You focus not on your elevator pitch, but on a really great question you’d like to know the answer to (better yet, ask the question in the form of a Risky Gift)
- You focus not on pain points, but on being genuinely curious and seeking perspectives.
Those are very different activities: they’re not self-focused, they’re other-focused. And, they are more likely to result in relationships and in interesting conversations. It is those relationships and conversations that result in true connections of interest – and before very long, in leads and business development conversations.
The “collateral benefit” of behaving this way is – leads and sales. In fact, more leads and more sales than if you go in with the usual self-centered approach of trying to get leads and sales directly.
But the paradox must be respected: if you engage in these other-focused activities as mere fig-leaf cover for your true goal of getting more sales – it won’t work. We all see through such base motives. You actually have to commit to the alternative goal – that of helping others.
A good test of whether you’re really committed is your choice of metrics: do you measure the result of networking by how many entries you generate for your CRM system? Or instead – by tracking how you’ve been able to benefit your new acquaintances. (Hint: what would Dale Carnegie say?)
Learn more about this strategy by viewing our Trust Matters webinar: Network Like a Trusted Advisor: Take the Work (and Stress) Out of It, delivered by our partner and co-author of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, Andrea Howe, together with Stewart Hirsch, our head of business development and leadership coaching (and CEO of his firm Strategic Relationships). You also might want to check out our eBook The Do’s and Don’ts of Trust-based Networking.
The Disconnect Between Short-term Behaviors and Short-term Results
One of the most frequent trust questions I get is typically phrased as a dilemma: how can we establish trust-based long-term relationships in a culture that values short-term performance?
But rarely have I had the question posed so clearly and sharply as in a recent discussion with an investment banker. Paraphrasing, he said:
“Listen, I make no apologies for being 100% money-motivated. That’s why I’m in the business I’m in. If the firm changed our incentives tomorrow to a weekly basis, I’d be there in a heartbeat – doing what I have to do, week to week. So when you talk about long-term trust, I frankly glaze over. My timeframe is what maximizes my income – period.”
You can trust investment bankers to cut to the chase. It’s their job, and they’re very good at it.
But here’s what he missed.
There’s an unspoken assumption in his stark phrasing of the issue. That unspoken assumption is:
The best way to maximize short-term income is through short-term behaviors.
And that assumption is dead wrong. Here’s why.
The Disconnect Between Behavior and Results
The point is obvious if you think about strategy. Which approach to corporate strategy is likely to be more successful over the next five years?
- Company A, which revamps its entire corporate strategy every quarter, or
- Company B, which sets its corporate strategy over a five-year timeframe, and occasionally tunes it
Pretty clearly, changing a long-term strategy on a quarterly basis is the recipe for long-term bad results. But notice – long-term bad results happen a quarter at a time. Five years of bad performance shows up in 20 bad quarters.
The basis for strong short-term results (quarterly in this case) is long-term behavior – not short-term behavior.
What’s true for strategy is true for relationships as well. If you manage your client relationships by viewing them through the prism of quarterly (or monthly, or weekly) sales and income reports, those clients are bound to notice.
Few things destroy client relationships like a lame, semi-apologetic request like, “Could you maybe move that sale up a few weeks so I can get credit this quarter?” Clients are not stupid, and there’s no way to dress up such a self-serving request for monetization of the relationship so as to disguise what it really is. Such a request will backfire on you.
So will any such behavior that betrays your true objective – if your true objective is to treat your clients like transactional piggy banks, rather than as the long-term relationships we claim to aspire to.
Long-term Greedy
Former Goldman Sachs senior partner Gus Levy is credited with coining the phrase “long-term greedy.” In typical Wall Street fashion, the phrasing was perhaps calculated to sound offensive – but in fact, it expresses something completely commonsensical, and highly consistent with trust. I endorse it myself.
What Levy meant was that the best way to do well in the long-run – and, by implication, in each quarter on the way to the long run – is to behave in a long-term manner. That means: keeping your word, taking care of clients, acting with integrity, putting clients’ needs first – all the time.
If you behave that way – in the long-term, as a matter of habit and principle – then you will actually do far better in the long run (and by extension, in the accumulation of short-terms on the way there) than someone who is constantly seeking to optimize only the next quarter.
Note this does not necessarily have anything to do with ethics. You can be, as my investment banking friend claimed to be, 100% motivated by money, and still act in ways that are largely indistinguishable from someone whose trustworthy behavior is ethics-based. You just have to not be stupid. And Gus Levy was assuredly not stupid.
The next time you hear someone say. “I can’t do that trust stuff because all the incentives around here are short-term,” explain to them why there’s nothing wrong per se with short-term incentives. The problem is stupidly believing that short-term behavior is the best way to get there.
The best short-term results come about from operating on long-term principles – and reaping the benefits every quarter along the way.