Protect Your Clients from Harm

I am sitting in Portland, Maine, preparing to speak, single-handedly drinking a pot of coffee, and thinking about what we do as value creators. I wrote something for my newsletter yesterday, but I decided not to send it. This idea is more important (maybe among the most important I have written).

• What if your job was to protect your clients and your dream clients?
• What if instead of thinking that there was an adversarial component to your relationship, you were instead supposed to keep them from harm?
• What if that included the harm that they sometimes cause themselves?

Right now you have clients who are making mistakes. They are making decisions that are moving them further away from the results they need. They are doing things the way they’ve always done them, and by doing so, they are leaving money on the table or losing their competitive advantage.

You have prospective clients, what I call dream clients, that are in this very same position.

The challenge with pitching your product or your service to these clients and prospects is because they don’t yet believe deeply enough that they need to change what they are doing. If they do believe they need to change, they don’t have a vision as to how that change is possible for them. Or how they could afford to give that change the time, the money, and the energy necessary to bring it to fruition.

The bigger challenge in pitching your product or service to your clients and prospects who don’t yet believe they need to change or that they can is that they fear making that change. No matter how much better you can make things, it is still a step into the unknown. They know the problems they have now, and they have learned to live with them. If they aren’t screaming for change, they haven’t yet reached threshold, that place where change becomes necessary.

• How do you help your clients and prospects?
• What do you do if you believe your job is to serve them here, to protect them from harm?
• What should be your intentions to help your clients and prospects when they are struggling with change? How are you going to change your approach?

If you have ever seen someone saved from drowning, you may have seen the person drowning resist the person saving them. They are not being adversarial. They are struggling against themselves. They are afraid.

Who do you have to be to protect your clients? What do you have to know?