Thursday 22 December 2011

Finding Your Advocates in 2012: A Christmas Wish

2012 at its dawn marks a significant shift for PCE. Expect a range of tools for you to utilise in client engagement, a handbook that takes you through engagement step by step and continued thoughts on the process.

Key to success will be using the techniques to find the advocates you have and empowering them to tell your story.

A shift in your own mindset is required.

The facts of your business as they stand do not need to shape your 2012. The past behaviours that you in your businesses exhibited do not need to have relevance in 2012.

The big shift will be turning off your autopilot - the day to day routine that has produced the results in your businesses and what Dr Ellen Langer defines the behaviour such routine is associated with as mindlessness.

As she points out, such a mindset results in holding things still, an inertia against action, that is at odds with human behaviour, as people are not static.

What do you mindlessly accept in your business? What do your clients mindlessly accept is the course of their lives? What limits have you and your clients imposed and imprisoned on your and their lives?

Finding your advocates in 2012 means breaking out from the rules that are imposed on your and your clients worlds. It's about bringing forward dreams, hopes and ambitions no matter how small and being present in the moment to notice how you and your clients are changing.

So in practical terms - PCE - what does this translate to in regard to finding your advocates?

Simple:

1) Be ready to try something different in the way you engage your clients in 2012 - a discovery questionnaire about aspects of your clients life OTHER THAN their finances.

2)Do that analysis on yourself.

3) Select clients that you have been mindful enough to notice that they are changing - that they are ready to break out from the boundaries of their everyday life - that they are ready to grasp a new reality.

4) Engage them and support them as they do it - it may be they will need your financial expertise - but it may also be that they need your empathy - someone who may not share BUT certainly does respect their values.

5) Celebrate the small wins you create in your world - a really enjoyable client meeting - the joy of time with your family.

6) Share the emotion of those wins with your clients and with reciprocity marvel as they share the small wins in their lives.

7) Change your review process and engage your clients with a family tree (the how to do this is described in our earlier posts).

8) Walk the talk and do your own family tree and one page summary of your plan for 2012.

9) Select a passion objective for 2012 - something outside the daily routine - get visual - imagine it, imagine the positive aspects and emotions on it's completion - set a plan in place.

10) Share that with your clients, and encourage them to do the same.


Follow the ten steps above, but bend the rules, don't be bound by the objectives, rather enjoy the process. Sit back reflect, appreciate what you have, focus on the positives, don't complain - re-frame, chew your food, slow down, switch of the crackberry, take a walk after lunch (take lunch) - log into the energy project and follow their tips, celebrate everything that is good in your world, tell the people around you something that you love about them, remind them of who they are when they are at their best.

Be amazed, but not surprised, as the advocates start talking to their worlds about the value you bring to them.

See you in 2012.

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