Our Workshops provide a thought-provoking and engaging environment for your team to learn and practice the core principles of creating stronger trust-based, professional relationships. These in-person sessions mix solid principles with exercises tailored to attendees’ personal business issues and needs. Participants gain in-depth knowledge and actionable tools that can immediately be applied across client relationships and business development, as well as with peers and colleagues.
We help you build trust from the inside out
Through a variety of methods - workshops, webinars, keynotes, and coaching - we help you tackle common mindset and behavioral challenges to advise, sell and lead with trust.
Where do you need to grow?
Being a Trusted Advisor
Do your customers trust your firm? Do your employees trust your leaders? Key questions. Yet many studies are showing that the long-term trends for answers to both questions are increasingly ‘no.’
We have a clear point of view on this issue: you increase corporate trust from the inside out – not from the outside in. The answer lies not in better corporate communications, branding, or even values statements. Instead, it lies in creating an organization in which employees trust and are trusted by each other and by all their stakeholders.
How to do that? In a world that is increasingly horizontal and networked, the old vertical skills of command-and-control leadership are becoming less relevant. Leaders must learn the skills of influencing people over whom they have no direct control – through creating trust.
Trust-based leaders, like trust-based organizations, are those who trust and are trusted in all their relationships.
We teach this approach to organizational and leadership trust.
Trust-based Selling and Business Development
You don’t often find ‘trust’ and ‘selling’ in the same sentence – and that’s a shame. Because a truly trusted relationship between buyer and seller transforms the relationship and the business development process itself:
- From an us-them, zero-sum game approach to a win-win collaboration
- From a transactional mindset and model to a long-term strategic relationship
- From sales results based on tactics to better results based on trust – affecting all key sales metrics
By looking at business development from a trust perspective, we show you how to make sales presentations more effective; how to improve cross-selling and referrals; how to integrate cutting edge expertise with relationships; how to handle formerly difficult issues like objection-handling and price dissuasions. All in ways that improve your client and customer relationships. Because trust is win-win.
Trust-based Leadership and Organizations
Does your client seek out – and actually take – your advice? When they face tough issues, are you their safe haven to call on? Will they hear the unvarnished truth from you – and in turn, tell it to you?
Those are just a few indicators of a trusted advisor relationship – one which is not only based on business, but on a human connection as well. If you’re in an advisory role in a complex business (consulting, accounting, legal, HR, finance, technology, external or internal) then you know the value of this pinnacle form of relationship.
We teach your people how to be trusted advisors to their clients. And it is teachable. We “wrote the book” on the subject – literally – the iconic The Trusted Advisor. You may already be familiar with the Trust Equation, a key part of our approach since writing about it back in 2000. But that’s only the beginning.
In our signature workshop attendees learn and practice the tools required for building trustworthiness, as well as the complementary skills of creating trust. Key takeaways include:
- Deep understanding of the key components of trustworthiness
- Extremely practical tips for creating trust in a variety of common business situations
- Practice in applying tools and techniques to individual-user-specific situations
- Greater self-confidence, ease and ability to transform risky situations into trust-creating opportunities
What we offer
We tailor our programs to your specific challenges, blending classroom and remote learning with hands-on—sometimes messy—real world training.
Workshops
Immersion Programs
Intended for deeper exploration and adoption of trust behaviors, immersion programs are an excellent choice for high-leverage client-facing roles like business development and account management, or for organizations looking to create lasting change. With an emphasis on tracking results over time, participants master trust skills through multi-modal learning, sustained guided application and coaching, and peer accountability—all through a dynamic curriculum that spans multiple weeks or months.
Keynotes
Keynotes are perfect for any new or existing program or event geared towards sales professionals, frontline managers, senior leaders, or whole organizations. Any time you want to reach a large audience, whether the opportunity is a leadership retreat, a sales meeting or your association’s regular gathering, a Trusted Advisor keynote can help you challenge people to think differently, motivate new habits, and build a platform for change.
Coaching
Our coaching takes many forms – from one-on-one, on-demand sessions to ongoing, long-term programs and group coaching. Our coaches are business practitioners first, and coaches second. We have a point of view on how to build trust, bringing years of business experience to bear on your particular business issues.
Webinars
Webinars can help you reach large audiences to challenge people to think differently, promote a common vocabulary, and share or reinforce your case for change. Our webinars are interactive as well as informative, tailored to suit your business and your needs. Webinars offer an alternative learning approach or can be thoughtfully positioned to support a larger initiative, sustain a workshop investment, or support your change agents.
Self-led Learning
Ideal for individuals, or for groups looking to sustain a workshop investment or share key learnings, Trusted Advisor 24×7: The Video Series is an online learning program that lets your organization build trust-based relationships at its own pace. Each lesson comes with its own self-study guide and self-assessments, and a Leader’s Guide is available for corporate accounts who want to implement a more structured engagement.
What to expect
First, we talk.
We are as curious as you are. We want to know more about you, your business, and the challenges you are facing right now.
Based on these intial conversations, we connect you with associates on our team who have expertise in your subject area.
Together, we’ll design a program tailored to your specific needs.
Only when everyone is satisfied do we propose a contract. And rest assured, your satisfaction for the duration of our work with you is 100% guaranteed.
A few of the clients that trust us
Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do
Meet the faces behind Trusted Advisor and experience what sets us apart