Discovering and Working With Customer Concerns
One important aspect of discovering and describing the outcome your consulting customer wants is to identify any concerns or conflicting desires associated with that result.
Your client may not be consciously aware of concerns or conflicts. However, the customer’s body language or the way they speak about what they want may tip you off. Unless concerns or conflicts are identified and their impact minimized, you may find that the client holds back during the consultancy, making achievement of their stated result much more difficult.
Bringing Concerns to Light
You are not expected to be a psychoanalyst when uncovering these concerns. Rather, you can ask your consulting customer: “How will achieving the result you want impact (or affect) you, the team you lead, others in the organization, customers, your family, or the community?” Follow up with questions that enable the customer to be specific.
The customer may respond with additional benefits. This will help both of you understand the importance of achieving the customer’s desired outcome, and can increase motivation to succeed.
If you still sense hesitance or incongruity, be patient. To surface any concerns or other desires which may conflict with the stated result, you may need to ask the question in different ways over the course of one or more conversations. Your question can be as simple as: “Now that I understand the benefits you can achieve from this result, I would like to know if you see any downside to getting or having it.”
Using Concerns to Sharpen the Outcome
Make sure that, if and when you identify any concerns or conflicts, you obtain enough information to be effective in resolving them. Ask about and discuss ways in which issues can be handled as part of achieving the overall outcome desired. You’ll then have the chance to research details during your larger assessment. Addressing client concerns as part of project assessment gives you the opportunity to discover more about related factors and potential resources for resolution. It also gives you the opportunity to present and discuss specific mechanisms for resolving concerns when you finalize specific results, targets, and strategy in a subsequent conversation.
Randy and Susan
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