Customer Experience
The first ninety seconds of a client meeting
Trust is mostly allocated before you get to your agenda. What experienced practitioners do differently at the start of a conversation.
Watch enough client meetings and a pattern emerges: the outcome is often shaped in the opening minute and a half, well before anyone reaches the substance.
Stop performing readiness
The instinct is to demonstrate preparation immediately — to show you have done the work. It reads as anxiety. The practitioners who land best do the opposite: they open with a question that proves they have understood the client's situation, then stop talking.
Let the silence sit
The pause after a good question feels much longer to the person who asked it than to the person answering. Filling it is the single most common way people undercut their own opening.
This is trainable, and it is one of the fastest-moving behaviours we work on — most people improve measurably within a single session, because the fix is subtraction rather than addition.
