Naked and Not Afraid: How to Better Serve Your Customers
Wednesday, Jun 8
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Vision 42/25
Description
In 20 years, I have had the distinct pleasure of working in public education, private education, publicly traded building products, bridge construction and engineering as well as janitorial services, 7 years of consulting and now the last 5 years at Microsoft. The one constant across all those industries is having customers.
No matter what you do in technology, you will have customers and you will spend significant time with them; work all day for them, consider their challenges on the way home from work… wake up in the middle of the night during a nightmare deployment scenario. We care about our customers and want to serve them well, but how can we best do so?
We can only create deep and lasting trust-driven relationships with our customers when we drop our barriers and get vulnerable, honest and humble in an intentional way. With the help of Patrick Lencioni's book Getting Naked as a guide, we will walk through specifics of how as well as what that looks like in practice.
Lencioni states that there are three fears that keep us from creating transformative relationships with our customers. We will address these three fears one at a time:
• Fear #1 - The Fear of Losing the Business - What if you anger your client? What if you tell them things they don't like to hear? What if you aren't a 'closer' when it comes to selling your work?
• Fear #2 - The Fear of Being Embarrassed - What if you look dumb? Heck, what if you are dumb (or at least ignorant)? What do you do when, inevitably, you come across as dumb?
• Fear #3 - The Fear of Feeling Inferior - What if your client puts you in a really tough situation? What if your client makes you look bad? What if your client asks you to clean the toilet (and for the sake of argument, you are not a janitor)?
My hope for this session is that you will: have fun sharing in laughter at my short-comings, be encouraged to serve your customers with full vulnerability and experience the change in perspective that comes from getting naked.
No matter what you do in technology, you will have customers and you will spend significant time with them; work all day for them, consider their challenges on the way home from work… wake up in the middle of the night during a nightmare deployment scenario. We care about our customers and want to serve them well, but how can we best do so?
We can only create deep and lasting trust-driven relationships with our customers when we drop our barriers and get vulnerable, honest and humble in an intentional way. With the help of Patrick Lencioni's book Getting Naked as a guide, we will walk through specifics of how as well as what that looks like in practice.
Lencioni states that there are three fears that keep us from creating transformative relationships with our customers. We will address these three fears one at a time:
• Fear #1 - The Fear of Losing the Business - What if you anger your client? What if you tell them things they don't like to hear? What if you aren't a 'closer' when it comes to selling your work?
• Fear #2 - The Fear of Being Embarrassed - What if you look dumb? Heck, what if you are dumb (or at least ignorant)? What do you do when, inevitably, you come across as dumb?
• Fear #3 - The Fear of Feeling Inferior - What if your client puts you in a really tough situation? What if your client makes you look bad? What if your client asks you to clean the toilet (and for the sake of argument, you are not a janitor)?
My hope for this session is that you will: have fun sharing in laughter at my short-comings, be encouraged to serve your customers with full vulnerability and experience the change in perspective that comes from getting naked.
