When it comes to enlisting potential clients, soft skills play an important role. In this blog article, you can learn what this means in practice as you discover the soft skills that can help your trust company expand its clientele.
As defined by the Gabler Dictionary of Economics, the term ‘soft skills’ applies to a variety of attributes that include – but are not limited to – personal values, personal characteristics, individual abilities and social competence. In contrast, ‘hard skills’ are described as quantifiable competencies and capabilities. The soft skills shown below are those that are instrumental in the task of developing new clients.
Active listening
“Successful sales professionals must first and foremost have the capacity to be good listeners”: This recognition, which is especially relevant to startups, applies not only to sales personnel as they are traditionally understood but also to trust company employees seeking to build up their client roster. You must listen actively to both existing and potential clients. Active listening consists of providing both verbal and non-verbal feedback to one’s partner in conversations, signalling an understanding of what has been said. This can take the form of a slight nod of the head, a smile, raised eyebrows or verbal confirmation. It can sometimes be useful to respond by formulating a concise summary of what has been said, ensuring that the discussion can proceed in the knowledge that everything has been fully understood.
Communication skills
Many studies have established that good communicators are perceived as more intelligent and competent. Among the skills related to communication is the ability to guide and structure a conversation properly. The Institute for Professional Communication maintains that “the top priority in conducting a professional exchange is awareness of the goals of the talk. Where this is lacking, a conversation can quickly become scattered, achieving nothing”. It is therefore essential that you define the goals of a prospective exchange prior to the start of conversation. The main objective for your trust employees should be to discover the daily challenges facing the prospective client and how the company can be of assistance in meeting these challenges.
Empathy
Despite long-standing controversy over whether empathetic individuals are professionally more successful, they have been shown to produce greater results in client acquisition. The business information platform Management Competencies sees empathy as “the unerring capacity to penetrate other people’s world of thoughts and feelings”. Such aptitude leads to comprehension, forecasting and targeted adjustment. Empathy is therefore at the heart of the aim of expanding a company’s clientele. It demonstrates to potential clients that you understand their problems and can offer them services tailor-made to resolving those problems. Achieving an understanding of your audience is also vital when promoting your services. There is simply no other way to determine the suitable communication channels or develop marketing initiatives. Where will you best be able to connect with your target group? How will you need to structure your messaging to be fully understood by potential clients? Following an initial encounter with them, when is the ideal moment to resume contact? An understanding of your target group requires not only experienced and data-driven assessment of your client acquisition strategies: it also depends on empathy.
Capacity for innovation
A growing number of trust clients have forgone the development of routine processes in favour of creating customised consulting solutions. This explains why blockchain for logistics companies is becoming more attractive to finance technologies as a relevant and innovative option – for example, in the insurance sector, where many businesses are currently conducting trials of crypto-currencies. To meet changing client expectations through digitisation, trust companies must develop the capacity to innovate. It is essential to remain open to new business models, collaborative working arrangements and technologies that may initially appear disruptive. Innovative capacity must not be overlooked as a means for trust companies to stand out from the crowd. Once you can demonstrate to potential clients that your company offers opportunities and options for digitisation and is open to breaking new ground, you will achieve a competitive advantage in client acquisition.
One more tip: at the Accounto transformation workshop on Thursday, 15 June 2023, trust company executives can get to know industry insiders and transformation coaches who will be sharing useful pointers on how to meet the high expectations of tomorrow’s clients.
Client focus
The trust sector is in a state of flux. With the advent of digital transformation, it is more important than ever to be client centred. It is particularly likely that smaller trust companies may no longer be able to serve all client segments effectively and efficiently due to the increasing complexity of trust work. This calls for client segmentation based on business characteristics such as sector, legal status, workforce size or stage of the company’s life cycle. Identify which client segments your trust company can and should service in the coming years. Your company’s strategic narrowing to selected client segments will bring about a clearer client concentration. This means that your existing and potential clients will increasingly come into focus. Among the benefits of client focus is a higher recommendation rate that is exceptionally valuable to the process of client acquisition.
Be sure to devote time to the acquisition and support of new clients
Most of today’s trust companies struggle with excessive workloads brought about in part by persistent worker shortages. Given these conditions, how can you find the time to develop and support a new clientele? The outsourcing of routine tasks to trust software can substantially relieve the burden on company employees, enabling them to devote themselves increasingly to client acquisition.
To achieve more efficient structuring of your day-to-day work routines, trust software must be capable of taking on as many as possible of your – and your team’s – daily tasks. Earlier software solutions were usually limited to converting existing processes to digital format, providing scant relief in those areas and leaving companies with a continuing need to perform tasks manually. Another essential criterion involves the centralised and secure processing, administration and storage of documents on a stable platform that provides the highest digital data protection standards. In addition, user friendliness continues to grow in importance. The trust employee generations of today and tomorrow are simply no longer willing to struggle with partially digitised working solutions.
