Speaker 1: As a consultant you spend a lot of time in interviews with clients. So you sit together with clients in meetings, ask them questions and pretty much want to extract information from them. The same is of course true for corporate professionals. You will often sit together with colleagues, ask them questions, potentially from other departments, try to learn from their role and try to get information that is relevant to your job. And this is exactly the topic of today. So welcome to another coffee break here on my channel, firm learning. My name is Heinrich, I'm a former McKinsey consultant and project lead and in this video I'm going to share my top five tips of how to conduct great and professional interviews based on my own experience in consulting. So without further ado let's get started with the five tips and tip number one is to strategically think about who is scheduling the meeting. So as a young consultant maybe you're a bit naive as for sure I was so you might just think okay I want to have an interview with this guy let me just hit him up and send him an invite. And while this might work perfectly fine in many cases what might happen to you is that you're facing some kind of political situation where then the client if he just sees an invite from a junior consultant maybe tells you ah no you know this week my schedule is so busy maybe next week we can find a spot maybe 30 minutes end of next week but this can often be quite difficult for you because one week can be a very long amount of time in the context of a project where maybe the whole project only goes six seven eight weeks. So my advice again would be to think about who sends the invite, who is asking for the meeting. Does this really need to be you? Or is there maybe a way that the supervisor of the person you want to talk to asks for the meeting, invites the person? Because of course this often puts the meeting much higher on the agenda. The importance is often much more significant if this is the way the meeting is scheduled than if you are the one asking for it. Tip number two, before you walk into such a meeting or such an interview situation, ask yourself what would success mean? So after the meeting what would you know now? What would you have received from the client for the meeting to be a success for you? The worst thing that can happen in these situations is that you walk into a meeting unprepared, maybe just have a broad topic in your mind that you want to talk about, but the meeting pretty much lacks a lot of structure and afterwards all types of questions come to your mind that you would have liked to ask but somehow forgot to ask in the moment. In addition to that of course coming unprepared to such a meeting can also seem unprofessional. And in a political situation where you may be facing a hostile client, he might also call you out for that. And then maybe afterwards he walks across the organization and talks to his colleagues, maybe his team leader, maybe even a board member that the consultants from this and this consulting firm are unprofessional, were unprepared when conducting the interview with him. Of course this is an impression that you will always want to avoid. This will make you look bad as an associate but will also make a whole consulting firm look bad. Make sure that you're well prepared to write down the questions that you want to ask. Think about a structure for the interview that you want to conduct. And if you want to learn more about this, I recently made also a video about note taking, how to write down these insights that you get from the interview. If you want to learn more about it, check out the video. I will link it somewhere above here. Tip number three is to be empathetic with your client and focus on listening and not talking. Many young consultants seem to tend towards talk a lot in these meetings. You want to prove that you know what you're talking about. You want to prove that you're competent. So when you observe rather unexperienced people often you see that they try to talk a lot. They try to get a lot of air time in these settings. What is much better though and one thing that is emphasized in many many onboarding training programs of these consulting firms is to focus on letting the client speak and see yourself rather in a listening role. In the end you want information from the client. This is what in most cases will really help you in the project. As a rule of thumb for these interviews, try to restrict your speaking share to 20 percent. So you talk 20 percent, the client talks 80 percent. Focus on listening. But when you listen, don't just sit there and try to put on a poker face, but try to engage in active listening. So whenever the client says something, try to occasionally say, okay, yes, understood, understood, thank you, okay. Give him the impression that you're actively listening, that you're actively processing what he is saying. This will often encourage him to give you even more information, to talk more. And of course these are the ingredients of a successful interview. And of course highly related to that is the importance of being empathetic. Try to really reach your client. If he is telling you something, if he is saying something to you, what are his feelings? Is he comfortable? Is he uncomfortable with the situation? Is he starting to become defensive? Is this a topic he's super enthusiastic about? He might even want to share I'll be more with you on reading the room in this way is really crucial to get a feeling for also all the political situations, which are always so important in corporate contexts. There's pretty much no thing that is as important as empathy when interacting with clients. And this is also something you can learn. It's a skill that you can develop. So focus on that, start to become sensitive for these kinds of topics. Now, tip number four, and this is a little tactic that you can do in the middle of an interview. And this is what I learned from a project lead. I worked together with, we were both sitting in an interview with a client and we were asking the client a couple of things and he then said something, gave us a short and brief answer, but it was clear that we needed much more from him. And he apparently wasn't really willing to just give it all out, just give it all away. So what I observed my project lead doing is that after we got a little bit of information, he didn't just ask one question after the other, trying to ask for it, trying to fish for all the other things that he wanted to hear, but he was just pretty much looking at the client and saying nothing. And he was doing that for quite a long time up to the moment when it really felt uncomfortable. And this is really a tactic that you can employ for your conversations as well. People often feel very uncomfortable in moments of silence. People will have the urge to break the silence, to say something, to provide you with additional information. So of course it's important to be a bit careful with this, don't overdo it, but try this out occasionally and in the right moments, this can be a little technique that really makes the difference and can suddenly open up a client who wasn't really willing and open to share information with you in the beginning. So make use of this power of silence and also leave me a comment if you've done something similar in the past, let me know how this worked out. My fifth tip is to always write a follow-up, always read meeting minutes after these conversations. Often in these meetings, in the end, you agree on a couple of things, maybe to do's that you are doing or the client is doing or some other types of next steps. But then what I have really frequently seeing is that then maybe if you do not put this in writing, then a week passes, maybe a week later, nothing has happened. And then if you talk to the client and confront him on something that he wanted to do, then you will often see that he did not do that. You might also frame it then as a misunderstanding that maybe it wasn't really clear to him that this is really something that you expected him to do. So just make it a habit of yours that pretty much always after these meetings, after these interviews, you just write a very short email, just make it bullet point format. Just write down what you agreed on, what you discussed, what the results were, and especially also specific to-dos if either you or the client agreed to something. You will quickly see that this is a habit that makes your whole client relationship much more reliable. This is also a technique that you can use to build trust with your client. There is a very helpful framework that is often taught in executive education and also consulting onboarding programs. And this is called the trust formula. And I don't want to go into too much detail now because it will be a topic for a future video. But pretty much what it comes down to is the creating these moments where you agree on something and the client agrees on something and then both of you deliver against these promises. These are often great opportunities to create trust. This is how trust is formed and created. This is how you can build and sustain and deepen your client relationship. I hope you found these tips helpful and applicable to your work reality as well, independent whether you work in consulting, industry, or banking. If you have any more questions you'd like to ask me, feel free to leave me a comment below in the comment section. I will do my very best to answer every single comment. And of course, on top of that, if you leave a comment, you also help me with the YouTube system so every comment is much appreciated. In addition, if you took any value out of this video at all, please hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm and also subscribe to my channel to stay up to date on all my content. I release new videos every single Saturday. If you want to see even more from me also follow me on my Instagram. My handle is firmlearning. Also I have an email newsletter. 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