This is the master version of a training curriculum aimed at building a global marketing consulting capability, and at creating a common culture, language and approach to how client relationships are developed.
Its organizing claim is that business growth comes from two sources, winning new relationships and growing existing ones, and that both are everyone’s responsibility and a matter of daily action.
Key findings
- Trust is expressed as a formula: credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, divided by self-orientation.
- Impact gets a parallel formula: insight plus resourcefulness plus accountability, divided by fear.
- Relationships are plotted on two axes, depth of business issues and breadth of relationship, running from service provider through valued resource and trusted advisor to partner, and from transacting through negotiating and counseling to co-creating.
- The listening guidance is quantitative: you should be 30 percent of the conversation, one question at a time, with no interrupting and no answering your own questions.
- The core insight about scoping is that the situation a client presents is not always the real problem, which makes problem definition and prioritization the key step.
Trust, impact and what corrodes them
Each term in the trust formula gets a question. Credibility asks how well you understand the client’s business and how strong a presence you have as their peer. Reliability asks whether the client believes you will deliver what you commit to. Intimacy asks how well you know them and how much they believe you care. Self-orientation asks to what degree the client believes you serve them rather than selling yourself.
Self-orientation is made concrete through behaviors rather than attitudes: relating the other person’s stories to yourself, finishing their sentences, filling silences, speaking to appear clever, an unwillingness to say you do not know, reciting your qualifications, and putting forward hypotheses before hearing theirs.
Fear gets the same treatment on the impact side: avoiding potential conflict, not asking questions you do not know the answer to, viewing the client’s situation only through your own expertise, holding back intuitions, competing with clients, shutting down, and reluctance to say anything that would create more work.
The attitude section leans on published work about first impressions, arguing that before people decide what they think of your message they decide what they think of you, and that most of the variance in the impressions we form comes from warmth and strength. All strength reads as envy, all warmth as pity.
Mapping the client, and yourself
The client side is mapped by role: decision makers who weigh the options and decide, decision owners accountable for the results, influencers whose no means no but whose yes does not necessarily mean yes, and implementers who have to make the decision real.
Stakeholders are then plotted on influence against alignment, producing four labels: nemesis, opponent, supporter and champion, with the budget holders annotated and internal talent matched to them for fit.
The consultant’s own side gets five roles, each with its own activities and metrics: the pathfinder who opens contacts, the backbone who runs delivery, the specialist who holds sector knowledge, the promoter who builds visibility, and the organizer who keeps information straight. The rule attached is that you can play two, but not all, with one client.
Listening as a skill with levels
Listening is broken into three levels. Internal listening puts the spotlight on yourself and what things mean to you. Focused listening attends to the other person’s words. Holistic listening attends to their energy, using all your senses and intuition.
The common causes of ineffective listening are listed plainly: evaluation, jumping to conclusions, a closed mind, wanting to interrupt, thinking you know all the answers, lack of attention, excessive talking and lack of humility. The line that closes it is that questioning is worthless unless the answers are listened to.
Curiosity is structured as a question sequence: what, covering the situation and stated need, why, covering root cause and history, what if, challenging assumptions, what next, covering the client’s actions, and how, co-creating the solution. Listening is paired with asserting, which has its own four steps: decide, have presence, express and confirm, held together by empathy and courage.
Getting to the central question
The scoping method widens and narrows the problem deliberately: asking why they want to solve it and why it matters to move broader, and asking what is stopping them and what else to move narrower. The output is a clear gap statement between the client’s present state and their desired state.
The central question is discovered across six dimensions: strategic context, stakeholders, scope, barriers to action, success measures and leading indicators. Scope is defined by three questions: what can be done, what must be done, and what is not to be done.
Barriers are categorized as a leadership gap, political opposition, a capability gap, or a lack of facts and analysis. Success measures span financial returns, reduced risk, other hard targets and qualitative ones. Stakeholders are narrowed to the three or four players who need to be influenced, and how.
The selling philosophy behind all of this is stated in one line: successful selling is more pull than push, and selling is a by-product of interesting conversations with clients. Finding the opportunity is described as requiring a move from the comfort zone to the courage zone.
Scope and limitations
This is a master training document rather than a finished course, and parts of it are explicitly unfinished, marked as work in progress or still to be finalized.
Source
This page summarises THE ROAD TO GROWTH: Skill & capability building for personal & professional success, by Kantar Vermeer, 2017-10-10.