How to Become a Trusted Advisor

You will often hear people in the professional service space, including lawyers, accountants and consultants of all stripes, as well as people in sales talking about becoming the Trusted Advisor to their clients.

But if you ask them what that means, most people will have trouble describing what it is, let alone explain how to become the Trusted Advisor.

At it's core, there are two critical ingredients needed to create a Trusted Advisor. Ingredient 1 is Trust and ingredient 2 is Advice. That means that you need to have others feel like they trust you AND to believe that you have something to say that's worth paying attention to (this is the ADVICE piece).

Simple? Yes. Easy? No.

So, how do you inspire trust? Well, according to Charles Green, author of The Trusted Advisor, here is the best way to think about it:

Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy)/Self-orientation

Credibility is tied to the level of authority with which you speak about a particular subject.

Reliability is directly related to how dependable you are perceived to be.

Intimacy has to do with how safe and secure others feel when they entrust us with something that could be used to cause them or others harm. It's essentially how comfortable they are in sharing information with you that makes them vulnerable in some way.

Self-orientation is related to how much they perceive you to be focused on your own needs and interests versus theirs.

Of course, with this equation it is easy to see we need to dial up others' perception of our credibility, reliability and intimacy while dialing down our self-orientation. If you can do that successfully then you are effectively raising the level of trust they have in you.

Ok, so what about the Advice piece? This requires two things:

1. A deep level of knowledge based on your research and/or experience in an area that's important to them AND that they have limited knowledge about. For example, they might know that marketing is important for their business but not have the depth of knowledge about effective content marketing that you do.
2. An ability to articulate your knowledge in a way that demonstrates your credibility on the topic without making you sound like a condescending know-it-all.

With a solid understanding these essential building blocks in place, you will have the foundation of what is needed to become a trusted advisor.

The next step is to build on top of this foundation to become a Level 4 consultant/seller, The Essential Trusted Advisor. This is the level at which you are a sought-after guru in your space and people are willing to pay 10x or more what they would pay others just to get access to you.

I'll be sharing more about the different levels and what it takes to get to Level 4 in my next newsletter issue coming out later this week.

Here's a sneak peak:

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