The hardest part for me was presenting!

🔥

I have to state this in advance, I have taken my fair share of customer service training courses over the years.

I am also a certified customer service trainer and I have given many engineers classes around customer experience, customer expectations, linguistics, behavior and multimodal communication, particularly around how these things affect trust building and relationships.

I’m hoping I might be able to help anyone who is at the cross roads of built and shipped, anyone who is not familiar or comfortable with one of the harder and less talked about sides of building and providing services… “sales” or customer service. I believe they are the same thing in the end.

I wanted to possible give a little insight here, when working with clients my goal is to always gain advisor-ship status, which is a point in our professional relationship in which they know they can come to me and they can count on me.

I don’t know if it’s my AuDHD brain seeing patterns in things that may not be there, but all the relationships in my life that flourish are the ones built on trust.

Trust is built through thoughtful execution, intention, planning, domain alignment and stewardship (I have always tried to live by the 7 Ps! Prior, Proper, Planning, Prevents, Piss, Poor, Performance 😅)

🤝 When I work with my clients, what I find makes me most successful is not in what I say or only in the knowledge I bring to the table. It’s in what I hear.

Building any system or solutions even in AI, starts with listening. Really listening, the listening to understand kind of listening. 👂

Before I ever bring anything to Claude, or any AI, before a single line of code is written, I sit down with a client and ask:

What does your day actually look like?
Where does your workflow flow, and where does it stall out.
What’s working that we should build around, not over?
Do you have data? Where does it live? How does it work for you?

Then I do my homework. Do I have gaps in knowledge? 😱 what did people do before they just knew? We learned!

📚 I research their industry, common pain points, known bottlenecks, local or global competitors, you know, I stalk them! lol 😂

J/K it’s called research and I do it so when I speak with my clients, I’m showing up as a collaborator, not a vendor.

💡Tip you will never be 100% ready, but you can be 100% prepared (results may vary!)

Some tasks are human. Some are AI. Knowing the difference is the whole game. When working with customers, you become the strongest tool in the room! You just have to listen to what they are telling you when you ask good questions.

Practice Makes Perfect

Face to Face or Video conferencing communication is natural, in familiar situations.

Tip to show up as a professional, think about what you are offering, take the time to think about how it is best presented to your potential clients? Presentation, slide deck, demo? Take the time to prepare and to present your service/solution/product in a way that your client can understand, visualize, or interact with, from their seat, from their view, from their perspective.

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The hardest part for me was presenting!