Your Job is NOT to Make Your Clients Happy – It’s to Get Results

Sparring, Coaching, and Comfort

One of the primary ways that boxers improve their skills is by sparring. Strapping on the gloves and the headgear and going toe-to-toe with an actual opponent.

This is how you spot weaknesses in your defense, errors in your footwork, and master patterns that could mean the difference between success and failure in the ring.

Imagine you’re a boxer. You go to your coach and you say, “I want to be the greatest boxer who ever lived, and I want you to train me all the way there. Only one thing – I don’t want to do ANY sparring.”

If they’re a coach worth their salt, they’d slap you upside your head and tell you, “I don’t care what you want. The greatest boxers in history didn’t get that way without sparring, and neither will you.”

Why? Because if they didn’t, they’d knowingly be enabling your future failure in the ring by not pushing you out of your comfort zone.

If you’re a coach or consultant, and you serve clients, you need to understand the point of the example above.

Your job is NOT to make your clients happy. In fact, properly serving them will (at times) require that you make them extremely uncomfortable… and even UNhappy.

What Does Success Look Like?

Part of your onboarding process when you take on a new client should include asking some variation of this question:

“What would unqualified success inside of this program look like for you?”

This accomplishes two things:

First, you get an extremely clear picture of the new clients’ expectations of you and your team. This is a massive deal for your client services process. If that client starts to disengage later, or express dissatisfaction with your program or services, the team can often get a good look at why simply by referring to how they answered this question.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you get an essential “tie down” – an objective measure of success defined BY THE CLIENT, which you can refer to later to help hold them accountable and keep them on track when they start to drift or lose interest in the process.

It’s not uncommon when we have support calls with struggling clients for say something like this, “During onboarding, you mentioned that you wanted XYZ. Is that still true?”

• If the answer is “no,” then you know that you need to reset expectations.
• If the answer is “yes,” then you have an opportunity to push the client outside of their comfort zone, foster trust in the process, and embrace discomfort as part of long-term growth.

Every once in a while, clients will get dead-set on making a specific hire, or launching a product, or changing a process that fundamentally clashes with their end goals. As their coach, the responsibility falls to you to navigate the nuances, spot the discrepancy between what they say they want and their plan for getting it, and hold their feet to the fire.

This won’t be comfortable for you or for them. But, remember this – they don’t pay you to make them comfortable. They pay you to get them results.

Some Will, Some Won’t, SO WHAT

This may all sound like common sense to you. “Yeah, that’s why they pay me. I get them results. Big deal.”

You would be shocked how often you will come across clients who clash with your style, disagree with your approach, don’t trust your process, or don’t want to heed your warnings.

And taking a hardline approach of, “I’m not here to be your friend, I’m here to help you up the mountain,” will not make you popular.

Some clients will choose to trust you and stay. Some clients won’t (and they’ll probably leave).

SO WHAT?

The key to this entire equation is to have a structured, reliable, repeatable process for getting clients the results that you say you can get them. If they don’t follow that process, and they ultimately don’t get their results, that is not on you. It merely reveals that they weren’t ideal clients for what you do in the first place.