A vaccine?? Time to bring your human back.
You can feel it, see it, hear it. On the TV, on radio, online. Excitement. The first true rays of light breaking through the clouds of Lockdown and 2020 in general.
We’ve obviously got to temper the excitement until more is known about the potential vaccine that was announced yesterday. But for us it marks the first time that there is a sense of real progress in the fight against Covid, rather than only being able to defend against it. And it feels bloody wonderful.
This post may strike you as too early but we believe that you, our wonderful readers, will already be thinking about the proactive things that need to be done if you are to be ready to get back to ‘normal’ as early as next Spring.
We’re running a seminar with a few hundred people at one of our clients in a couple of weeks, talking about those proactive things that need to be done, with a particular focus on client interaction. Our structure looks like this:
What’s happened outside their business - it’s been tough for everyone, you’re not alone
The unnoticed, subtle changes that have happened in moving from face-to-face to virtual interactions
A poll - we’re going to ask the audience about their own experiences and what’s been tough
The FUTURE - what we think has changed permanently, split into the three influencing factors we’ve identified
How to keep and build client relationships with those changes in mind, using three simple tools
Q&A
Looks like a fairly standard structure, right? But if you look closer, there are a couple of areas there where we’re overtly bringing ourselves as human beings into the discussion. We’ll be doing this throughout the session too.
Why is this important?
Partly because of the reasons outlined in our last blog, but it’s suddenly become even more important now. There’s a chance things could change quickly, with the vaccine potentially becoming available within months. And so client teams need to be ready to handle:
The return to face-to-face conversations with clients
The continuation of virtual conversations in many situations
They need to manage both in proactively different ways, because they are different ways of interacting. But the common theme is that in order to successfully keep and grow those client relationships, they have to bring their own ‘human’ into the conversation. Otherwise the relationships become transactional, undifferentiated and shallow. Something clients aren’t looking for at this time. They’re looking for efficiency absolutely, but there’s room for that AND creating a deeper, memorable and lasting business relationship with them.
The future’s looking up, here’s to your success.
