This partner meeting works on the relationship between a consultant and a client. It uses the trusted advisor model, in which a relationship deepens from subject-matter expert through valued resource to peer and counsellor as the breadth of business issues widens.
The second half turns to content, introducing Marketing2020 and Insights2020 and the PulseCheck diagnostic built from them.
Key findings
- Trust is presented as a formula: credibility, reliability and intimacy added together and divided by self-orientation, so that focusing on your own agenda reduces trust no matter how strong the other three are.
- Each term is defined in a specific register: credibility in words, reliability in actions, intimacy in emotions, and self-orientation in motives.
- Impact has a parallel formula: insight, resourcefulness and accountability divided by fear, where fear is the degree to which someone is immobilized from acting when they know they should.
- Accountability is defined as acting as if the client’s situation were your own, and resourcefulness as knowing what is needed and how to find it in a constrained world.
The behaviors that give you away
The self-oriented behaviors listed are mostly attempts to look competent: relating the other person’s stories to yourself, answering too quickly, finishing sentences, filling silences, and reciting qualifications.
Others are about avoidance: an inability to answer a direct question directly, an unwillingness to say you do not know, and putting your own hypothesis forward before hearing the client’s.
The fear-driven behaviors follow a similar pattern: avoiding potential conflict, not asking questions you do not know the answer to, holding back personal intuitions, competing with clients, and doing the minimum needed to survive.
Practicing listening by removing it
The listening exercise teaches by deprivation. One person talks for 90 seconds about something they care about while the other looks at them and gives no response at all.
The second round makes it worse on purpose. After 60 seconds the listener becomes visibly disengaged, checking a phone or looking out of the window.
The positive model is stated in four steps: suspend your agenda, be fully present, discover, and verify, using open questions.
Feedback in the role plays follows a fixed structure: observation, impact, pause, suggestion.
The content the conversation rests on
The T-shape frames the discovery problem: your own area of expertise and your area of comfort against the full breadth of what is on a CMO’s mind.
Insights2020 is organized around customer-centric growth built on three pillars: customer obsession, an insights engine, and total experience.
Its measures contrast leaders with the rest across purpose-led positioning, data-driven customization and touch point consistency, and again across whether customer centricity is embraced by all functions, is a leadership priority, and involves embracing risk and experimentation.
The insights function itself is measured on leading the business, linking data sources to distil insights, and hiring whole-brain people.
The diagnostic, and the questions in it
The PulseCheck focus areas run across big insights, purposeful positioning, total experience, connect, inspire, focus, organize and build.
The ten killer questions cover whether the customer is considered in all key business decisions, how growth opportunities are identified, whether employees are engaged around brand purpose, and whether brand consistency survives the move to digital.
Others go to organization and capability: whether geographical and functional teams collaborate, whether marketing’s return on investment is understood, whether the organization is agile enough to respond to market changes, and whether people have the tools to do the job.
The full question set adds sharper items, including where and at what level insights and analytics reports into the organization, and whether incentives are based on specific customer related measures.
What partners were asked to decide
The session closes with four questions to the partners: whether important areas are missing from the question list, where deep dives should be offered, what each person needs to be equipped for client conversations, and how many PulseChecks should close in the first half of the year.
Scope and limitations
The trust and impact frameworks are taken from an external source rather than developed here, and the session is internal partner material rather than published research.
Source
This page summarises Beyond trusted advisor, by Kantar Vermeer, Feb 2-4 2016.