Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Mark Hordes and featured in the Organizational Excellence Journal. To read the complete article, please click here.

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The month of March is a time that I will long remember. After spending almost four months responding to a client’s request for change management help with a global merger between two chemical plants, I received a phone call from the executive sponsor. He told me that the company had awarded the consulting work to another company.

It’s funny how short conversations are when people deliver bad news. “But wait,” I responded before he hung up, “can you give me some feedback as to why we didn’t win the work?”

“Sure,” he said. “You had the best change management approach, the most experience in our industry, the best economic model and highly experienced change management talent, but we just liked that other group better.”

“What on earth do you mean? How could that be the deciding factor given everything else you mentioned?” I asked.

He said, “We just seem to like them more; they bonded better with our team and had better chemistry with us. We felt they put our best interests first, and we trusted them more.”

At the end of the day, I learned an important lesson about working with clients. It’s all about building trust and always acting like a trusted adviser that make a difference. Having all the expertise, experience and skills aren’t enough.

So how can you make the right impression, build sustainable relationships and connect with current and future customers? Apply these six skills.

[Here’s the first of the six.]

1. Think strategic.

Trusted advisers understand the market forces their customers face and have information about competition and the critical business issues on executives’ minds. They’re also ready to share several best practices and lessons learned from similar engagements.

Every client has an interest in best practices since few have the time and energy to capture this information even after their project successes.

Provide your business development and technical specialist with industry data, best practices and details on how these two factors can be applied in the client’s organization. Want to see a client’s eyes light up? Ask if you can share a few best practices. This builds your credibility, an important factor in establishing a trusting relationship.

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After earning trust…

What would happen if your clients and customers trusted you more? All kinds of great things such as allowing you into their worlds, asking for your advice, sharing what will occur before it happens, asking for help in other parts of their organizations without constantly focusing on price, and treating you like a partner who has great ideas that are accepted and highly valued in their organizations.

Bottom line, creating trust-based relationships with all your clients is a journey worth pursuing. The skills learned in this process will always stand the test of time. It’s all about building trust!

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Mark Hordes is senior vice president and principal with the Sinclair Group. He leads the organizational excellence practice for the firm. For more than a decade, the Sinclair Group has partnered with clients globally to develop and implement critical change management and organizational behavior solutions in support of transformational and process initiatives. For more information on the Sinclair Group’s organizational excellence services and solutions, contact Hordes at mhordes@sinclairgroup.com or call 281-296-7975.