Characteristics Of A Trusted Advisor

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A trusted advisor is either a corporation or an individual who has been given a place at the table with the customer. You’re no longer just another vendor or potential vendor. Instead, you’re viewed as a strategic partner who can help customers achieve their objectives.

Because clients are frequently apprehensive and oftentimes uncertain, they seek someone who can reassure them, ease their anxieties, and inspire confidence. This is the point where a trusted advisor comes in. This person typically bears the responsibility of ensuring that everyone is on the same page. With this in mind, below we’re sharing the characteristics of a trusted advisor.

Qualities Of A Good Advisor:

Competence

Competence is one of the most important characteristics of a trusted advisor because it indicates to your customer that you are skilled at what you do. If you aren’t regarded as a competent resource, you are not going to seem reliable enough to guide your customers’ decision-making. It is critical for a company to know its customers’ business inside and out.

Salespeople who aspire to be trusted advisors must expand their thinking beyond their services and/or grasp the bigger picture in which their customers operate. The greater their expertise, the greater the credibility with customers, and the more likely you are to be considered a trustworthy counsel.

Character

Most people understand that companies must make sales to survive, but to be viewed as a trusted advisor, clients want to ensure that a company is not putting their own interests before that of the customers. That’s what makes your character a must in terms of the qualities of a good advisor. When it seems the salesperson only cares about closing deals, any advice given will be seen as self-serving. If you instead assist a customer in making a decision by objectively discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the numerous options before them, then you are seen as a person of character.

Connected

Trusted advisors recognize the importance of attempting to establish an actual connection with their customers. The ability to form a real relationship is therefore non-negotiable in terms of the characteristics of a trusted advisor. Building rapport can mean sharing personal stories, giving valuable examples, providing visual aids, or even adding light comedy to your interactions. Simple actions like this make the client feel the advisor is connected to them and their businesses. In other words, acting personable allows the customer to feel more at home when relating to you.

Dependable

Trusted advisors must always keep their word. A client wants to know they can rely on you. They will trust that whenever they need you, you will always be up the task. That is why it is imperative that you deliver on even the most trivial promises. The more they can depend on you, the more at ease and relaxed they will be about things like buying decisions.