To hire you, a client must trust you.  Yes, she must trust your honesty.  This involves your putting her interest above your own, not engaging in deceptive practices, and the like.  If you want to pursue that subject, I recommend you go to Charlie Green’s blog, Trust Matters.

In addition to your honesty, she must also trust your professional judgment.  Professional judgments are made by applying reasoning, often specialized reasoning called a methodology, and specialized knowledge to a specific problem.  An obvious example is a doctor’s diagnosis and recommendation for treatment.  Professional judgment is what professionals sell.

To win business, you must convince a client of your judgment.  This creates a tension between presenting yourself as a generalist or a specialist and is the source of some tough career decisions.  The more specialized you are, the less qualified you are to make judgments outside your area of expertise.  The more of a generalist you are, the less a client is likely to accept your judgment on the most important and cutting-edge matters she faces.  The broader someone’s knowledge, generally the more shallow it is; the deeper it is, the more narrow.

Age provides a third dimension to this tradeoff.  The less time you have spent in a profession, the narrower and shallower your knowledge is likely to be.  A client can accept that a young professional has gained a reasonable depth of expertise in a specific area.  She will find it much harder to accept him as a generalist able to “do it all,” as some young professionals want to claim.

Experts are more precise in their professional judgments and more likely to be right.  Clients know this: that’s why clients trust them.  So, you need to become an expert for clients to perceive your judgment as more trustworthy than someone more senior, but with less depth in the matter in question.

While doing so, be careful to avoid the kinds of errors in professional judgment that experts are prone to and which can ruin all of your hard work to be perceived as worthy of the client’s trust.  Experts can be:

Þ      Longwinded:  Some people become experts, because they get to learn all about subject and then get to tell people about it.  They forget that clients want to hear their professional judgments, not all their knowledge.  Keep focused on the client’s issues, not on your knowledge.

Þ      Stubborn: Experts are also likely to be adamant that they are right, much more so than the generalist, . . . even when they are wrong.  This is especially true of experts regularly expected to make firm recommendations, rather than explain alternatives.  (This is sufficient reason, by itself, to get a second opinion before undergoing any major surgery.)

Misplaced certainty in your own judgment will destroy a client’s trust, if your error becomes apparent.  I remember vividly several instances when experts challenged a client’s judgment, when the client proved better informed than they were.  This always resulted in a lost sale.  In most cases, when this mistake was brought to the expert’s attention during a debriefing, the expert rejected the client’s knowledge out of hand, in spite of evidence that the client was right.   Yes, experts can be stubborn.

So, as you become an expert, remember to keep your focus on the client.  Before you demonstrate your professional judgment, learn what the client knows already and what she needs to know.  Then, when you speak, your words will be relevant and your advice sound.

And she will trust you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 8:28 AM and is filed under Rain making, Selling Professional Services, Trusted Advisor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.