11 Three factors When Evaluating the Mentor
There are three main factors that our customer is subconsciously seeking out when they evaluate various options for solving their problem.
From the perspective of our work here, these can be broken down into three main categories. Experience, Understanding and a Plan.
The first one is experience… the customer wants to know the person who is helping them is competent… and they subconsciously seek this out.
We subconsciously seek out competence in the people who we interact with and that’s exactly what this first category is all about. we want to know that the person that we’re working with is competent that their experience that they have the knowledge and the know how and the skill to solve the problem that we’re facing.
But that’s not enough… because if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s appointment where the physician was very very experienced, but they had a horrible bedside manner you probably didn’t have as good of an experience. Your experience might be improved if the doctor could have added in the next component.
The next component of what we’re looking for when we evaluate an organization is understanding: We want to make sure the people helping us understand what our fears and concerns and aspirations are from our perspective.
This is important for a variety of reasons. Somebody can be an expert and that’s great. But without the ability to put themselves beside us and understand where we’re coming from they can come off kind of as a know it all. And that’s not good, because it erodes rapport. Know-it-alls may be able to solve problems for themself, but they create a certain doubt in our customer. That doubt manifests in the following way with the customer thinking “that might work for you because you’re an expert but it will never work for me.”
Adding that understanding or bringing in that empathy allows the customer to be at ease with the feeling that the person they are working with knows what they’re talking about. Adding understanding or empathy to the mix makes it clear that this person also understands where it is that the customer is coming from.
Finally, we need to add in a third component… and that third component is a plan. Someone who has empathy and who also has an understanding of where we’re coming from and also who has experience means that they can do it for themselves and they can understand what it feels like for us to be in a position of lacking… But it still doesn’t demonstrate that they have a method to get us from where we are to where we want to be, and that’s where the third component comes in.
What sort of demonstrable plan do they have to get the customer from point A to Point B. The transition to the transformation of where they started to where they wanted to be.
These three elements form a triangle of sorts. And if you break any leg of the triangle then it really reduces the amount of impact that that individual is going to have in terms of connecting with customers to convince them they know what they’re talking about. These are the three elements. And this is what you want to pay attention to as you describe the perfect person or organization that can enable that transformation that the customer is looking for. Hopefully, as you fill these out they’ve described either the person or the organization that you’re going to be capturing this testimonial for.
