If You Want to Motivate Clients, Learn to “Find the Hook”

The following is adapted from The Leadership PIN Code.

It’s a psychologist’s job to get into the mind of their patients. What, for example, drives Patient A toward anorexia? Why is Patient B grieving the death of his sister so many years after the fact? What kinds of social settings make Patient C uncomfortable? 

Understanding those buried motivations is called “finding the hook in the other person.” Psychologists ask questions and then use the patients’ answers to bond, build trust, and eventually, form an action plan. That hook is what makes the patient feel understood and valued. 

Finding the hook is also a useful concept in business. If you want to motivate clients, it’s important to know what drives them. What will bring them to the table? What will get them excited and energized about working with you? What will produce the best results and the most successful collaborations? 

Read on to learn more how you can find the hook—the interest and motivation of the people you work with—in order to create winning business relationships.

Do Research

Leaders often neglect to research the person they are dealing with and focus solely on the business context and task. Some may think this is unethical, but on the contrary, if you were going to interview someone, you would look at their social media profile, read their CV, and speak to people who might have worked with them, maybe even get feedback from informal references. 

You do that research to figure out as much as possible to and see if there’s a good match between them and the role. Likewise, leaders need to know how someone handles themselves under pressure and what their communication style is like.

You then need to manage the insight you’ve learned about your clients. If you’ve learned through speaking to their peers and counterparts that they don’t like your company and they have a particular issue with a colleague of yours, you can prepare to encounter hostility. If the person is your neighbor’s sister and she’s told them personal information about you, that would be helpful for you to know.

Are you willing to take the time to consider what the other person needs from you in the conversation? Are you open to adopting a mindset characterised by being willing, inclusive and inviting? You have a task; perhaps you must deliver a workshop with high expectations or invite others to a discussion about how to reach a challenging goal. You understand the journey, but how do you get there?

The Art of Planning

While it may be obvious in many cases that preparation is important ahead of meetings, presentations, or negotiations, there is an art to planning. What do you need to know about your clients and for what purpose? 

Research and establish your clients’ interests. This may take some very careful investigation, for example, searching on social media, speaking to coworkers, colleagues, common friends, previous employers, etc. Find out what drives this person and what they are interested in when it comes to supporting you in your endeavor. 

What priorities do they have that you can link to? Depending on your context (e.g., addressing a difficult conversation or potential conflict), you might need to know what triggers them or irritates them in order to be prepared for emotional reactions or pushback on your ideas.

Use networking opportunities to build trusting relationships and authentic rapport. This is a skill often overlooked, and many leaders dislike it perhaps because it can be seen as a purely instrumental or transactional focus to relationship building (i.e., we are talking because we might need each other). It can be uncomfortable if leaders find small talk difficult or struggle with initiating conversations with strangers. 

Prepare some icebreaker questions ahead of the meeting or event or have two or three that you can always pull out of the bag if caught off guard. The rule of thumb is to get out of your own head and the worry of how you will be viewed, but instead to be curious about the other party and what they are about.

Map Your Stakeholders

If you’re starting a new job or task, stakeholder-mapping is your best friend. 

Build alliances long before you need them. You never know when they might be helpful further down the line. Don’t only link to people you need now. Also, focus on relationships with key influencers rather than the nearest target or people with impressive titles. 

Map who you need to know now and later. Then build a relationship with them. If you don’t have access to the person you need to influence, such as the decision-maker, then find out who influences the decision-maker. It’s not always obvious who that is. It could be a friend, neighbor, work-related advisor, or personal assistant. Find out and start there.

Once you do that, ask for their help, support, or advice. Be sure to also ask what they need and hook your objective on it. Understand their personal situation so you can be sensitive to it or refer to it the next time you meet. Learn their story and deepen trust, so you can follow up on it and show interest. 

If that sounds manipulative, or instrumental, it’s not. You’re actually shifting into servant leadership, which is operating from the viewpoint of what you need to do to help others do their job properly, rather than doing it for them. The goal here is a trust-based reciprocal relationship. 

In almost all cultures, reciprocity and consistency are key to building relationships. Mutual sharing or exchange of information is important—you both need to know each other—it doesn’t work if it’s a one-way street. Being reliable and consistent are highly valued. People like to know where they have each other and that lies at the heart of trusting relationships. 

The Platinum Rule

What typically gets in the way of leaders’ communication? We all have cultural or personal lenses that affect our assumptions and feelings and create communication blindspots. So, how do we avoid falling into the trap? The most important starting point is with them—not with you. You need to consider their values and interests. Think through why they should listen to you. 

Stay in curious mode and get to know the client to whom you’re speaking as well as you can. You can then determine the hook that will be most effective. Remember the platinum rule: it’s not about how you’d like to deliver the message but how the receiver would like to hear the message.

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For more advice on collaboration, you can find The Leadership PIN Code on Amazon.

Dr. Nashater Deu Solheim brings a new toolkit to leadership development that is backed by decades of integrated experience in the areas of business and psychology. As a former forensic psychologist with clinical research in the neuropsychology of criminal minds, she developed a deep interest in effective learning strategies for lasting success. Now, as an expert negotiator who studied at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Dr. Solheim has combined her experience as an executive leader in international private companies and government ministries to present The Leadership PIN Code, the definitive guide for helping business leaders secure influence and impactful results.