How much do you want to be liked by your client?
Ask yourself some questions about dealing with people
Do you enjoy interacting with people? Do people respond positively to you? Do you find people enjoy conversing with you and seek you out for a natter? Would you consider yourself ‘popular’?
Making people feel great in your company is a trait of a good leader
If you answered yes to all of these questions, the likelihood is you have a natural ability to communicate with people and genuinely enjoy the interaction. This bodes well for your future success as client-facing account manager.
Try as people might to convince you otherwise, good people skills and an ability to make people feel great in your company are traits of a great leader and someone people will naturally want to be around. This means that you can often influence your way through your career and if you’re ambitious, it can take you far.
“How to make friends and influence people” was an international best seller
So if you fancy yourself as a leader, ask yourself this question. Having met you, do you think people walk away feeling better or worse for having had the interaction?
This was something Dale Carnegie analysed in ‘How to win friends and influence people’ a book he wrote in 1936. It has sold 15 million copies worldwide and was one of the first best selling self-help books ever published.
Carnegie’s famously said:
“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important. Many people who go insane find in insanity a feeling of importance that they were unable to achieve in reality. They have found in a dream world of their own creation the feeling of importance which they so deeply desired. If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracles we can achieve by giving people honest appreciation”
Carnegie provided guidelines to make you more popular
Carnegie took these principles of human behaviour and provided some guidelines for those who wanted to make themselves more popular with others and help them have more influence.
Here they are:
1. Become genuinely interested in other people
2. Smile
3. Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interest
6. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely
Take a look at the points above. How many do you actively practice? Do you think you could implement any of these strategies? How do you think that would effect the outcome of dealing with your client?
Can you think of anyone you could try this out on?
