Latest / Straight To Voicemail / What’s your go-to move for earning client trust early? | Melissa Bryant, Founder, 6 Degrees West
Transcript
- Rachel Elsts Downey (00:00): Rachel Downey Trust doesn't come from big promises. It comes from clear plans and strong execution and high stake moments, like new product launches, market pivots, operational infrastructure changes. Melissa Bryant, she's the one companies call. She helps high growth tech companies untangle what can be chaos and turn it into scale with deep experience and rev ops and go-to-market execution. Melissa is the steady hand guiding teams through those pivots, those launches, and the high pressure moments. So I asked her, what's your go-to move for earning trust with clients early on? Here's what she had to say. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message. Melissa Bryant (00:57): Thanks, Rachel. When I think about building trust, essentially with clients, really is to have a clear and easy way to navigate and have a solid approach to really following through with clients. I think the most important thing is listening and observing. Our approach here at Six Degrees West is to take, really a process, is to come in to diagnose and to review the current market strategy that you have in place today to really get the stakeholders views and visions of what they're trying to achieve. And I believe that with this initial engagement, it'll help chart the overall experience and explore of where they are now, where they would like to go, and what the end goal is of their go market strategy. So once I've mapped through their current and future flight path, I like to call and prescribe their flight plane. A part of the plan that we would be giving them is leveraging and overall automation and intelligent insights to optimize sales, marketing, and operational alignment. (01:58): How we do that is by going in and reviewing their current ERP system, which technically is the heartbeat of every single organization today, and ensuring their CRM system like HubSpot is really following through with the overall checkpoints and ensuring that the general process is there from the start. What I've learned overall from trust is that trust really is the general runway for successful engagement. Without it, no amount of strategy will really get a program or the strategy. Also, Graham, typically, I should say my clients really have brought me in to really under high stakes situations. It could be anything from a new product launch, a new technology launch, a market pivot, or just general operational challenges. So establishing credibility upfront is extremely crucial to our at Six Degrees West good market strategy. After we invest those first two weeks in discovery, a structured consultation where I basically ask the questions, listen and really dig deep into their go-to-market landscape is I want to get away from a lot of the overwhelming jargon and the premature fixes and the quick fixes that happen because really you need, and the A clients will need a clear picture where you are today, what their desired outcome is going to be and what we can do to get the course correction or correcting the overall strategy to be achieved. (03:24): The other pieces is that I believe how you implement trust is delivering confidence through clarity after the discovery all presents a flight plan that really has the prioritized steps, milestones in the way that we measure and the way that the client would technically measure success. Increasingly, that flight plan includes anything from AI powered solutions for pipeline visibility within HubSpot forecasting accuracy, and of course process automation. This will allow their teams to obviously work smarter. It will allow the client to scale faster. Why this process works is it removes the confusion, the chaos. These clients will know that they're not going to get their standard cookie cutter solutions. They're technically getting a custom charter course of what they need to proceed with data-driven AI insights within HubSpot to help them achieve their outcome. This also reinforces the partnership between myself and my clients today. They see me not just as a consultant or a fractional operational leader. It's more or less as a co-pilot really helping them and guiding them through their overall destination. My final takeaway from this in regards to trust is it's not built on promising quick fixes. It's essentially built on giving these clients clear skies and a solid flight plan so they can plan ahead confidently so they know that they're in good hands. Thank you so much for taking the time, and definitely give me a call if you're at that crossroads, if you want to turn chaos into clarity, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon. Rachel Elsts Downey (05:07): Thanks for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast. You can find it@shareyourgenius.com.