 Welcome, everyone, to Simple Secrets to Great Client Relationships. It's such a joy, bigger thrill than I expected to be with you all in person again here in Portland. I'm Lily Berman, and I'm here with a consultancy called Palantir.net. I want to start by presencing how we'll spend the next 50 minutes together. First, we'll briefly have an introduction. You may be wondering who are you to tell me about client relationships, so I'll answer that question. And then the question, why are we here? Which is a bit re-presencing some of the things you might have seen on the conference website that encouraged you to come to this session, but just some kind of grounding truths that I think we all share about the work that we do. And then I'll speak briefly about how the rest of the time will be spent together. We'll spend most of the time digging into Simple Secrets to Great Client Relationships, as promised, when you're starting a relationship throughout the relationship, and especially when things get tough in that relationship. And then we'll close with what's next and save a little time for your questions. So hello, I'm Lily. I spent five years working in nonprofit marketing and fundraising before moving into the Drupal community about six years ago. I spent that time focused on account and project management, which is where I learned a lot of these secrets that I'm about to share with you, but I'm really excited to have just switched paths into being a senior UX and content strategist like I mentioned at Palantir.net. Outside of work, I'm a storyteller and connection builder. That means a lot of things. It's just, I feel like building connection is my purpose in life. And so outside of work as well, this is something that I'm really passionate about developing these skills. So just a little about me. So why are we here? You may think you're alone in these things, you're not. We all share, I think, these three fundamental truths about the work that we do. The first is, it's difficult to work on technical projects with non-technical clients, especially if you're a developer, but even if you're someone like me in the less technical realm of things, we understand a lot more about what's going on than the people that we work with. But they're the ones that have to make these important decisions about how the work is done. They're the ones that get to decide whether our work is good or bad. It's just hard to do. It's not a fault of you or where you work. It's just a truth about our work. I think the second piece is that our work doesn't live in best-case scenarios. We're not bakers who have a recipe for a perfect cake that always looks the same and then there's the cake and it looks the same and it was on time and on budget, especially if you're particularly agile in your organization. Things are changing all the time. What is done even look like. All of that is really hard to wrap our brains around and it's just prime for those difficult conversations of mismanaged expectations and misunderstandings. Then I think the third fundamental truth over our work is that building trust and affinity, which I think are two things that are foundational to great client relationships, are not always built into our process and they're not taught to us. We don't have a class in school about, we may have a class in school easily about writing code or managing projects, but we don't have a class about how you build connections with people and those kind of softer skills, which is part of why I wanted to build this whole session around that idea of teaching those skills. How is this going to work? I'm not going to tell you build affinity and trust by. I want this to be really valuable use of your time. This session won't be all about concrete observations, real stories and examples that you can then apply to your situation because you have a ton of different backgrounds and roles and experience and I don't want this to be valuable for one of you. I want it to be valuable for everyone and then practical and actionable advice. We'll have a series of these kind of secrets or themes and hopefully some of them will resonate with you and you can dig into those and bring that guidance into your work life after this session. Let's get into the meat of it. How do we build great client relationships? First, I recommend that you greet late night. When we are warm to people, we'll often find that they are warm back to us. I recommend that you greet your client like you already know and like them and then leave space for them to shape the conversation. We often find, I don't know if you feel this way, that I'm kind of watching the world like it's a movie, but we aren't. I can see you. You can see me. We're reacting to one another. When we open that space right at the beginning for that affinity to exist, then it will. I have a few examples from Jimmy Fallon and I was really intrigued by him at the start of the pandemic because he was at home zooming to other people who were at home, which is not that different from what I do at work. I was studying him. How does he do this? I'm going to play a few just the introductions and just look at what he's doing when he's saying hello. Maybe this works with the streaming and stuff. Oh, goodness. Yes, we can Google streaming. Okay. Well, other ones at least and see if we can get something going. You know it always works when you're doing the practice, right? Okay. Well, because this isn't working, I'm going to, I'm going to do it for you. So he says, Demi Lovato, hey pal, and she says hi. And he says, this is my only embarrassing, okay, he says Kate Hudson, I love you, it's been forever. How are you? And she's screening him warmly back and Kim Kardashian, same thing, he calls her pal. And he says, where are you? And she wants to talk about how Kylie's done her makeup and they want to talk about makeup. And then he talks to Taraji P. Henson about just sort of same thing, hello. And then she says, he says, you look great in red because her hair is red and he's wearing red and they're talking about red. And for me, it really stood out because they were, he was greeting everyone, like he knew them so well and like he was so excited to talk to them. And person after person after person that he was interviewing on that time, he spoke to them all the same. And I thought, either Jimmy Fallon is friends with every famous person that's ever existed or he just assumes that they're pals and greets them that way and lets them return back to that. And whatever they want to talk about next, he's there. He's there about the red colored hair. He's here about whatever people want to say. So how do you develop this skill? I recommend scheduling a quick happiness boost before a client meeting. I had a particularly challenging client to work with, so I got my team in the conference room five minutes before our call was going to begin so that we could watch 90s music videos. And so we started with Pump Up the Jam. I defy you to be unhappy on a call after watching that music video. It's delightful. And so you can do those little things to really authentically be grounded in what brings you joy so that you are being joyful authentically with that client. You can practice greeting people in the mirror. You may be moving your face in a weird way or doing something about like when you're greeting people. So just look at what you look like or take an opportunity like we are at right now at a conference to just greet different people different ways and see how they react to you. We're supposed to be networking anyway, so that's a great opportunity for that. So we're here to watch talk show interviews on YouTube. People like Jimmy Fallon are extremely practiced at this type of thing and also the fourth thing have a lot of improv training. So even taking an improv class, I think they're fun. Just do that kind of thing where you can practice being ready to adapt to whatever they bring to you next. And these slides will be here later so you can actually watch Jimmy Fallon do it himself instead of me pretend to be him. So the next piece is set and honor boundaries. that we are naturally attuned to do. I think that we think if we're always available, that's how we can build and create these great client relationships. But I think we build better bonds by setting and honoring boundaries that work for us. And I was lucky enough to be taught this secret by a friend who had been consulting for a long time before I even got into this world. He got an email from a client and he said, oh, I'll respond to that tomorrow. And I thought, tomorrow, like you saw it. Why won't you just show them that you care by responding this right away? And he said, if I respond right away, they're going to expect me to respond right away later. And I'm not someone who's always available and I don't want to show them that they can expect that from me all the time. And it just blew my mind because it's like, that's right. If you create that expectation that you're gonna respond to emails every 30 minutes at eight o'clock at night, that one time you don't could damage that client relationship when it wouldn't have if you didn't set that expectation in the first place. So I recommend making clients aware of your collaboration boundaries. This can be as easy as I live in Denver, so I could say, I like to work from 8.30 to five, mountain time, what time do you work in your time zone and open up a space for them to share their boundaries as well and create just sort of a mutual, we have a balance between our work life and our life outside of work that you both get to exist within. I also recommend scheduling non-emergency communication during your work hours. There's lots of great tools, Slack and Gmail, both do that now, and extra bonus, schedule it during their work hours. I live in the middle of the country, people work before me and after me in different places, so if my emails always land in their inbox during their work hours, that's an extra special bonus for them. And I got really into boundaries after I read this book, Essentialism by Greg McEwen. This is really like a side step from this session, it's a digression, but if you're interested in that world, I recommend that book. So now you've sort of set things up, what are you gonna do throughout the relationship? I recommend, I hope this video works because this one's really good, I recommend being their tour guide to their world, to our world rather. So for many clients, the world of Drupal projects is unfamiliar. Consider yourself their Drupal guide and make it your job to keep welcoming and orienting them to our world. I was thinking, oh, how can I show a really great example of a tour guide with this kind of analogy of orienting someone to a Drupal project? And I found this really great college campus tour and the first minute of it in particular, ah, look at this, it's working, okay. The first minute of it, I'm like so excited, okay. The first minute of it in particular is really good. Imagine that these two people are you and the person that they're talking to are your client and then we'll dig into the analogy more on the next slide. International Relations major. And I'm Erica Berry and I'm a senior economics major. Welcome to this tour, Pomona College. We're starting right here in Marston Quad, the beautiful green space at the heart of campus. It's the perfect place to show off our sunny Southern California weather. On warm sunny days, most days that is, you'll see a lot of students out here standing under all of the trees. Sometimes in fact, you'll see an entire class out here on the lawn. And since we're right at the center of campus, it's a great place to get oriented. Just at the edge of the Quad, you'll find Bridges Auditorium. That's where lots of big named speakers and entertainers Performers like Dave Matthews, Larry Wilmore and Taylor Swift. And on the other side of the Quad, we have our Carnegie building, one of many academic buildings in this part of campus. Look north and you'll find Smith Campus Center, the center of a lot of our social life. Beyond that lies North Campus where a lot of juniors and seniors live and past that lies the rest of the Paramount undergraduate colleges. So what did they do? That was so great. Let's dig into it a little further. Unless you know otherwise, assume your client is doing everything for the first time. So they're not saying, welcome back to the Quad. You know, they're assuming it's your first time on that campus. Maybe you don't even know what the weather is there. They're really welcoming you at the beginning. And even if your client has done Drupal projects before and they're such an expert, it's not something that they do every day. So their version of expert is probably different than ours. And there's also probably someone on their team that appreciates that more entry-level basic orientation. Then what they did really well was starting with what's immediately applicable and then zooming out. So that Quad is like, here we are in the kickoff meeting, right? And look around, these are the discovery things. And then as they zoom out, they're just telling you like over there that side of campus is where these types of things happen. And so that helps it not be too disorienting and overwhelming if you don't have, tell all the details about the QA phase, right? When you're at the start of the project. They use visuals really well. So I think that's really, I'm a visual learner myself. So when you're explaining something, that's such a great opportunity to show those diagrams and show orient people to where they are. Always translate jargon. I actually gave a whole conference session about that. I can link to you, but there's so much jargon that people in our industry don't even know is jargon. Like field was my big example. I had no idea what that was when I first started working in Drupal. And so even the, that what we consider the basics are really fresh and new to these people who aren't familiar. In-person tour guides of YouTube tour guide is different, but in-person, you'll find a tour guide leaves you space to ask questions. They're gonna show you this room and then they're gonna say any questions about this room before they move you to the next room. And if you've ever been on a tour and just had this question you had to ask, it's going to distract you and take you away from the tour. So do the same thing. Tell people, here's this first piece and give them space to think and ask questions. And to develop this skill and also because it's really fun, take a tour or watch a few online and think about what they're doing and how you can apply that to your work of being a Drupal tour guide. The next piece is be curious about their world. So maybe not such a secret, but something to really keep in mind as you're building that trust and affinity that your client inhabits a world that's unfamiliar to you and your interest in their world will help you build trust and a better project outcome. You're gonna start to see some slack screenshots because I wanted to give you some real examples to look at and this was the most tangible way for me to do it. So I had a client who has been anonymized who was having a baby and she thought, she was thinking, I asked her, what names are you thinking? And she said, we're thinking about Max. And so I brought it back up a few weeks later, did you settle on Max or are you still pondering? And she chose Max and there's a custom Giffy which are so fun to make of this little otter and how cute Max is. And she put a heart emoji. So not only did I ask her what her baby name was, I remembered it and I brought it back up again which is not news for building trust and affinity in the world but something I think we could remember more in our work lives to build trust and affinity with our clients. So ask your client questions and remember details. If you're not someone who remembers details easily, keep a note stock. You can say client A, person A, person B, person C and when they say, you say, how was your weekend? Oh, we went on a walk with our dog. Person A has a dog, that kind of thing. It's just really easy to keep those details top of mind when you return to the next conversation with them and use that doc or your memory to follow up on what you learn. It's the same way, you know, if you have seen someone, if you see someone here at DrupalCon and they say, oh, are you still at X agency or whatever, they remember things about you and that feels good to all of us. Notice when things change, it can be as simple as, oh, it looks like you got a haircut or what I like is if someone's frantically arriving three minutes late to a meeting, you could just say, it seems like you've had a chaotic day. Do you wanna take a minute? And you're just sort of in their world curious about what's going on with them. And then these kind of quick wins to understand what's going on with their work life is setting up a Google alert if they work at a larger organization. If they're smaller, you could subscribe to their newsletter. For the, during the pandemic, I was working with a lot of nonprofits that were hosting virtual fundraisers. So I attended those and I talked to them about what I learned. So there's a lot you can do about being, getting into their world. The next piece is tangential but related. Let them be the expert. It's so easy for us to fall into this. I'm the Drupal expert. I know about your website, teacher and expert role and lose the ability to keep finding opportunities to learn from your client. And when they share their knowledge with you, make sure that you're honoring it with the respect it deserves. This is a random picture from Unsplash, but just a reminder for me to tell you this story that when I first started in Drupal, I started as a project coordinator. And this woman was hired to join my team and she was going to be the senior project manager and I was going to be supporting her on her projects. And so I immediately fell into this role of you're the teacher, you're the expert, I'm here to support you, I'm here to learn from you. And almost at the very first day, she said to me, I've never worked in Drupal before. How do you do this? How do you log into the site? How do you queue these tickets? And it immediately gave me this opportunity to learn from her, or her to learn from me. And I thought that that was an accident, but when we got to know each other and become closer friend colleagues, she said that was absolutely intentional and that whenever she mentors someone, she finds as quick as possible of an opportunity to learn from them so that it can become this mutual relationship. And I think this is so true for our clients as well. So whenever they put you in that role of I'm here to learn from you, I'm here to learn from you, you're just as much there to learn from them. They know so much more about their organization, for instance, than you do. So how do you develop this skill? I think one thing is to speak in your client's language. So if they call their communications team, their comms team, call it their comms team. If they call their North Office, no off or whatever, then call it no off. Just sort of come into their world and use their jargon as much as you can. When they share insights, be openly interested. And sort of how do you communicate interest? Active listening so you can say, oh, you said that you are out for a conference next week. What is your conference about? What are you learning? Have you been before? Just ask them those ask questions and speak that back to them. And then if it's not something that you, I guess, feel versed or comfortable in doing, take time on your own. Just brainstorm for five minutes. What would be something interesting to learn from your client? It could be what kind of industry are they in? What city do they live in? Or something like that. And just have that list for yourself and plan those occasions to keep learning from them. This doesn't have to take a ton of time, but having that mutual relationship, I can tell you from personal experience, makes it a lot more comfortable to be with that expert and let them guide you along their path. The next piece is, the next secret is to connect beyond your role. When I first became kind of this work at a nine to five sort of professional type person, I thought that I had to be this neutral automaton of someone who was just always poised and always on topic and always efficient. And I think that that's a delusion. And I think people care, people build connections with people, not with sort of this perfect professional. So I recommend that you share aspects of your life outside of your work with your client. It will give them an opening to share aspects of their life with you. And then the more that you're connected as people, the stronger your relationship will be. So here are some more anonymized slack examples where I told a client that I was visiting family in Atlanta. So they said, are you getting to spend time with your niece? I said I was. I said, do you want to see this cute video of my niece? Cause I'm really proud of her. She is super cute singing to her. And so we had that connection and then that client shared more about their life with me. Or in the second example, I was visiting not far from here, if you're from Portland, the most amazing Airbnb, which is I think like two hours away from here. And the client was in the Northwest as well. So I shared the Airbnb with them. I shared this camping picture from Keep Lookout, which is also really close to here. And just had those real connection moments with them. So how do you develop this skill? Prepare a specific and concise anecdote to share about your weekend or whatever those questions you always get asked. Some teams say, oh, what are you going to do this weekend? What did you do last weekend? Those sort of things are a real opportunity for connection that I think get lost in these, oh, you know, stuff. How about you kind of, I think wasted responses. So if you're not comfortable kind of being open about your life, you can prepare on the side something that you are comfortable about sharing and it feels professional to you. Especially if you work remotely, just tell your client where you are if you're away from home. If your background is different. I live in Denver, which is a high desert. I was in Atlanta, which has really tall trees. And so I just said, hey, I'm in Atlanta visiting my family. That's why my background is different. So again, not crossing a professional boundary, but making you more of a whole round human. If you have the opportunity to meet your client for coffee, you can do so in person or you can also meet up with them in a virtual setting. If you're a developer on a team who works with clients that have a developer on their team, have a 15 minute social call where you talk about things that aren't code so that again, you can build that shared trust and affinity for when you need to work together on the actual project that you're working on. And then that sort of jokingly phrase, but slide into your clients, Slack DMs, there's a lot easier to be authentic and vulnerable one-on-one than it is in a group setting and just occasionally ask them some non-work questions. I put this article in here from the Muse to get you to give you some inspiration. The next piece is to make it fun. This is my personality, so there will be one later that says be authentic, but just know that, and you know this from your life outside of work, that we all gravitate toward people who are fun to be around and you have the opportunity to bring levity and play into your interactions with your client. And again, the anti-automaton professional person, it's a lot people drawn toward and want to spend time with people who are fun. So there's an example of a Slack chain where I said like, uh, I'm in Meeting City, how does Friday look? It's not the way that I would write a formal email, right? But even later on it said, I said that it's always nice to have fun meetings on Fridays, positioning that to them, even though what we were doing is talking about contracts, which is not a fun topic, we can set it up to make it a fun situation. Or that right example is just another small one of where my Google Calendar wasn't talking to their Outlook Calendar and so they had two identical meetings from me, so which one is the real meeting? It was called Client Name and Lily, so I put an exclamation point next to one of them and I said, the one that you keep is Client Name and Lily, exclamation point and so they deleted the other one and then at the end I said, we just need to decide if we're gonna keep our exclamation point and we kept it, cause why not, right? So then from there on, it was Client Name and Lily, exclamation point on our Google Calendars. So how do you develop this skill? Smile and joke when appropriate. I'm someone who loves a bad dad joke pun and so if I think of one, I will say it in a client meeting but when obviously not in a situation where something bad is happening, but day to day, I aim to smile, I aim to be laughing and joking with them because that's a great way to make them want to come to these meetings with you. Within reason, disclaimer, talk to your client like you talk to your friends. So it's, in that previous example, both of those things are something that are true and authentic to me and that's a great way to make it feel less formal with them and then it's really a quick one is to just use emojis or an informal communication style, especially somewhere like Slack. Emojis can show tone where a written word just doesn't have that same. You think that your tone is coming through and it's not so potentially rife with miscommunication. So emojis are great for that as well. Be authentic. We've been coming toward this one but I think it deserves to have its own space. We can all sense when people are being fake and it's one of the fastest ways to damage trust. So make sure to stay genuine in all of your client interactions. I'm gonna keep with the Jimmy Fallon example since we already started talking about him although we didn't get to see him talk but I thought this interview was really interesting commentary on what you would have seen earlier if you were able to see them. He said, I feel like the show is kind of perfect for me because I get to talk and have conversations and meet people. I'm a fan of pop. I love music. I love art. I love movies, TV, all that stuff. So I think, I haven't talked to him directly but he is excited to talk to all those people, right? He is excited to spend time with them and learn about their worlds and so I think that it is authentic what he's sharing. But more so what I wanted, why I wanted to share this example is Doc Shepard who is a podcaster. He has this podcast armchair expert. He's also an actor. But he's really interesting study of authenticity because he for instance relapsed in his substance abuse and had a whole podcast episode about that relapse. So he's sort of like very grounded in the way that he speaks to people in what's authentic to him. So he said, and listen, imagine that you're getting this compliment about the thing that you're really proud of about who you are, how it would feel for someone to say, of all of the comedians I've known, so few literally do it because they just love playing. I see in you this insatiable desire to play at all times which is so lovely by the way. It's why you're such a great performer. I can see that you're having fun and it's contagious. It's a gift and I'm glad you've always embraced it. Like wow, that's what he said back to what Debbie Fallon said. So really interesting models of authenticity. How do we build this? I think we can model authenticity by giving honest answers to again those questions that you're asked all the time like how are you in front of your client? It's so easy to just say I'm good, how are you good? And just waste a couple of words and move on with the conversation. But if you say something like, today's been a little tough but I think it's going to get better or I've had a great day. The sun is shining in Denver. How about you? Those sort of things it can be, it doesn't have to be exactly the whole truth about everything that you're going through but be a little more open and being authentic. I recommend speaking the why behind your actions and your perspectives with your client. So even things like, I think sometimes we just give them this perfect polished outcome but even saying I tried this thing and then I tried this thing and then this is why the solution is going to work best for you. Just sort of behind the scenes sharing, sharing your perspective can be really valuable. And then like Jimmy, like I guess Zach Shepard tell your client when you notice a contribution they've made and be specific about how that's impacted you. So even things like, this feedback was due Friday and you gave it to me Wednesday, thanks. Doesn't land the same way as, you gave that feedback to me two days early which meant that I got to do this, start this next piece sooner and now I feel really good much better about this timeline than I felt about this timeline that was already good and I feel so great about that. Thank you so much for doing that. So it just lands so much deeper when we tell people the why behind it. Then the next piece here is the disclaimer that we also have to adapt. So we have our authentic way of being, we have it all set up the way that really resonates for us and that works for us but the more we'll learn about our client the more that we'll learn about their collaboration style. And if there's a big gap between your styles and theirs it's possible that you need to adapt and meet them closer to where they are. I don't know if these videos will work. These are political examples because these are two people that Jimmy Fallon interviewed in March of 2020 not because of any particular leanings but I wanted to show you, I'm gonna see if this one will work. They're here to talk about kind of a dark subject so think about the difference between, hey pal, thanks so much for coming on the show which was what you would have heard if the other videos worked and... Senator Harris, thank you so much for being on the Tonight Show and coming back to us. I know these are very difficult times and you're very, very busy right now so I really, really appreciate this. Thank you, thank you so much for this. Thank you for coming. So there's no pal, I love ya, like how's the kids? It's very somber because it was appropriate for that moment so again with the Jimmy Fallon example we have our authentic ways of being but sometimes we need to adapt. And how do you know when? Well, I think the first thing is it's really important to avoid making assumptions about your new client before you meet them. You may be working with a law firm and everybody's wearing blazers and they look so put together but that doesn't mean that they don't wanna have fun and they don't want your normal, maybe more informal style if that's the way you work. So I say go in full authentic you and then notice how your client reacts. If there's any friction or negativity with the way they're reacting to your approach that's the time to start considering adapting. And I recommend the way you do that is to notice how they tend to collaborate so you have your ways of being, they have their ways of being. Begin to sort of study and notice that and then brainstorm solutions that work for you that can address any of that friction or negativity and then in that kind of experiment or scientific way try them out one by one and see where you all can meet in the middle. So now what do we do when things get tough? And it could be that you're already in a situation where things are already tough and you say great Lily it would have been great if I knew to be Jimmy Fallon 10 months ago but now we're in a really tricky situation with this client. What do we do? I think that this is valuable whether you have a strong relationship or whether it's potentially already weak or strained. Tell the truth. This is another one that I don't think we do all the time. We want to make things sound better than they are. We want to find a reason that's gonna be really palatable to a client but I think even when it's uncomfortable even when it's not what they want to hear tell your clients the truth and you'll be surprised by how much grace you're given when you can prove that you can be counted on for your honesty. So here's another random unsplash image to prompt another story. I was in a situation where I owned the client relationship and I asked my team do we have enough budget to finish design within the budget? And they said yes. And so I told the client we have enough budget to finish the design and budget. Great news. And then I went back to the team and they said oh, what we meant was we have enough budget to finish the things that we've already started but we can't finish design phase without doing all of this extra work. And it's gonna be thousands and thousands of dollars more for the client. And I was in a really uncomfortable position because I felt like I was being caught in a lie where I told them one thing because that's what I believed to be true but it wasn't true. So I was dreading this conversation and I get with the client and I say I told you that we were gonna be able to finish design and budget and it's not the case. We're gonna need X thousand more dollars to finish. There was a miscommunication within our team and I want you to know that I can be counted on to tell you the truth and that's what I thought to be true at the time. We'll figure this out. I have a couple options for you but I wanna give you some space to tell me how you're feeling. And this was kind of my one-on-one call with them and I was just bracing for the impact. Like they're going to be pissed but their response wasn't so gracious. They said, oh, it's fine, we get it. They were just on my side from the beginning. They found the extra budget, we moved on and the relationship stayed even more solid I think than if we hadn't have hit that bump. So how do you develop the skill? Commit to always telling your client the truth in parentheses but it doesn't have to be the whole truth. So I didn't say, X person on the team told me this and Y person on the team told me that and this is why I didn't get into the behind the scenes of it. I didn't throw anyone under the bus. If something's late because of five reasons you can tell your client one of those five reasons that maybe feels the most palatable but just make yourself someone and I think I would argue in life that just is someone who is telling the truth and people know that the words coming out of your mouth are true. I think it's incredibly more valuable than anything we get from kind of fibbing and stretching. The other thing is I modeled in that story but voice your inner monologue when you're delivering difficult news to your client. So if you don't want to be having a difficult conversation with them, tell them that. If you want to be someone that can be counted on for the truth, tell them that. I think we think a lot of times that people can hear what's in our head, this inner monologue that's in our head and they can't unless you tell them out loud. So that's something I think if you take one thing from the session and if you walk away and you forget everything else, tell the truth is the thing that I would leave you with. But the next piece I think is important too is to stay on your client's side. So it can be so tempting especially when they're not in the room to develop this us versus them mentality. Like this client is so ex. They always do why this, they become this kind of monster in the corner when they're not in the room because they're not there to give their perspective. So if you ever find that happening on your team, I recommend just standing squarely on your client's side. You can even say I'm being the client advocate, that's the role I'm playing. So if they were here, I think they would say something like this but it's so valuable to bring some much needed empathy and perspective to the situation. So how do you practice this? Try saying things to your clients like I can see how given this happened, you might feel this way. You're not saying that they're right. You're not saying that you're gonna give them a bunch of free work or whatever else is going on but it just gives them that empathy of saying, okay, you get my perspective, you're on my side. If you really don't get their perspective, then this next bullet is for you. If you practice seeing things from your client's perspective and if you don't get it, ask them to share more. So they say, I really want this button to be blue and it's like, okay, I get that. Tell me more, I wanna really understand why you want this button to be blue. Oh, well, I went to this other website and it was really great and the button was blue. Oh, okay, that's really interesting. What else do you like about that website? Like, you're just getting in their world and keep asking questions until you understand it. They will feel heard and appreciate and acknowledge that you want to understand their perspective and then you also get to understand their perspective. So it's a bit of a win-win. This one also has a further reading side note book called Nonviolent Communication which is a really interesting world of communication which is tangential to this talk. So that's there for further investigation should you seek to do so. So what's next? We've gone through quite a few different secrets and ideas and examples throughout the lifecycle of a client relationship. I recommend studying connection. So we all have these ways that we're seeing people connect to one another all the time like going on a tour or watching a late night host or listening to a podcast. But if you really look at it and listen to it through the lens of how do I build better relationships with people that I'm working with or people in the world, it will really help you build these skills in ways that work for you. These are just a lot of things that I've noticed by the things that I see in my life but I'm sure there's other examples that will resonate with you as well in your world. And then I recommend practice and then practicing again and then practicing some more and just trying different things until they feel authentic. So it could be that you try one of these examples and it doesn't work for you. Try another one and it doesn't work. Just keep kind of going through and treat it more as a playful experiment than kind of this serious have to get it right the first time. You can also keep in touch and continue the conversation. I put my email address in my LinkedIn. After the session I'll hang out at our booth for a little while and I'm a great person to practice saying hello to if you like no stakes at all. So come by and say hi and continue the conversation but I've also saved some time here for some questions. So thank you so much for your time everyone. I appreciate it. Oh that's so hard. So the question just for the recording is in a bit of a tense situation with clients and the kind of salutation high has been removed from the email chains and it feels like it could be a bit of a dig but maybe it's not. I'm a really transparent person. I would tell them. I would get on a call especially if there's one person in particular or if there's someone on your team who has that role. I would just say hey I noticed that we stopped having salutations in the emails. I'm just curious why you know and just give that an opening. It could be that they are like it could be any number of things. I think I'm the worst too about coming up with all these situations in my head which is why I would just ask because everyone's different you know there's no I think there's no universal rule about how we draft those. But thank you for the question. Anybody else have a question? That's a great question. So just voicing it back around training and building this sort of connection oriented work personality a little more with people who don't necessarily lean that way. I think that practice is sort of a practice rounds the same way that you might practice a session before you give it at DrupalCon. I would recommend practicing difficult conversations with clients or saying hello to clients and sort of being their sounding board and being really generous with your feedback but also honest. So if you do a practice round and they are not coming across as very warm to you I would say that it doesn't feel that warm and what can we do in a way that's authentic to them. So that's what I would do is kind of be that sounding board especially if you are the more kind of naturally extroverted person on the team. Does that answer? Okay. Great. We have a couple of minutes. I tend to talk fast when I'm giving sessions. So thank you. You have a question? That's interesting. So the question was about being more casual with clients and what if you work in a place that's a little more buttoned up. I haven't encountered that situation which is nice but I think too there's sort of like what we do in these formal spaces like in a meeting room where the executives in the room and then there's how we are with people one-on-one and I would lean a little more informal in those spaces even if it was more buttoned up and I think that in my experience it just is so great for the client relationship and for the organization that I wouldn't imagine someone kind of coming at you for that. There's those spaces for informality often when you're speaking and it's not even in writing is a great space for that too. I think I saw a question over here. Yeah. Yeah so the question is about on-site meetings it's sort of we have this ability to connect virtually but is it I guess is it better to connect on-site? Is it still worth it? Was that kind of the question? I think it is one. I think it is at least once. So I think you can really strategically go and meet a client in person at the very beginning of a client relationship and make sure that you're getting some non-work FaceTime with them like go to dinner, those sort of things and in my experience that's held out through a whole relationship. I've never been at an agency where all of our clients were in person or we flew out a bunch of times to see them but even that one time can really solidify that but it's not needed obviously as we found out through the pandemic. Yeah. We have a couple more minutes if anyone else. Okay go ahead. Yeah. So how do you navigate the five minute early meeting? I set a separate meeting. So yeah it's just a meeting for the team and you can even call it like prep for X meeting so if people aren't in the room they don't know that what you're doing is watching a music video together. So yeah you can be sneaky about it. Yeah that's a really great question. So the question is what are some sort of the opposite simple secrets to bad client relationships I guess? Some common mistakes. I mean some of them are referenced in the talk so I think people aim to be professional and polished. They practice a bunch of times. They you know if they're giving a presentation to a client they're writing everything out and they're just reading all what they say so that kind of over-practiced I think is one I think when people I think bend over backwards for clients I think not having any boundaries and you're just sort of this like bending to their whim they don't really feel like they get to know you and you're not doing what works for you and I think kind of that inauthenticity piece that's the other one. So copying what other people are doing. So this is all sort of things that work for me in the way that I work but kind of to your point in question it wouldn't necessarily work for someone who has a different personality type. So if someone says oh Lily has great client relationship she says like hey girl at the start and they say that and it just sounds super inauthentic for their personality I think that's another big one that doesn't work and lying. I mean we think it doesn't feel like it's a big deal like oh this thing is late we're gonna tell them that we had this big emergency and that's why it's late and it doesn't feel like it's something that's you know as Cardinal Sin or whatever is lying but I think that it really does break down that connection whether they ever find out or not. So because we know we know that we lied to them so I think those are probably the big ones and it's not new that's all kind of similar to what I was saying so hopefully that felt like a valuable answer. Yeah sure can you speak to how to say no is the next question. I think I mean I just say no like that's the thing I think when they know that I think we have these ways of sort of making everything shiny and beautiful when it's not shiny and beautiful and if they know that when things are shiny you're gonna tell me they're shiny when they're not shiny you're gonna tell me they're not and when they wanna for instance I'm just gonna say they wanna add a new feature in before launch I'll just say I really wish that we could do that for you but unfortunately we're not going to be able to. We would love to see what works for the next phase or something. So I would give a little bit like voicing you're in a monologue is a good way to say no and I think having an alternative option that is not saying yes to something you can't say yes but also isn't just sort of putting a dot at the end of that sentence and moving on. Yeah, yeah that's great. I wanna summarize that for the recording so really and let me know if I'm inaccurately summarizing but there's this mutual respect that exists in a great client relationship and so sometimes saying no is honoring that respect and creating space for for instance if it's a task your team can't do finding another partner for them to do it or something like that. We have time for one more question is there I wanna honor your question unless there's someone who hasn't asked a question who really wants to. Going once, going twice. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, I love that. I'm just gonna super quick voice that back for the recording and so it's really like sometimes you apologize but then clients don't want to apologize and it's hard to kind of get that mutuality but saying you know today you tomorrow me and just creating this mutual grace with them. Does that honor your comment? Okay, thank you so much everyone. I really appreciate you being here. Have a great rest of day for coming. Thank you.