What Does It Mean to Be an Affable Person?
I was talking to a client the other day and came across a discovery about how people choose their doctors, coaches or consultants.
And this is where the 3 A’s come in.
- Affability,
- Availability and
- Ability.
When a doctor is affable, that means he or she is friendly, empathetic and appears genuinely caring.
Availability is about how long the patient will have to wait to get an appointment.
And ability speaks to the patient’s sense of just how good or bad the doctor is at his or her job.
What interested me was that the client I was talking to, was just expecting the social media, funnels and website we had created for them to do all the heavy lifting.
I had to let the client know these 3 A’s are listed according to their importance to the patient.
In other words, patients care most about their doctor being affable, then about their availability, and finally about their ability.
Yes, their ability was listed last.
Of course, this doesn’t mean people don’t care about how good or bad their doctors are. And maybe people place it last in part because it is very hard for us to make a judgement as to how good a doctor might be.
That’s how it works with doctors and patients. And maybe we can learn from this when figuring out what a client is looking for when he or she mulls over whether or not to hire us.
I think many of us coaches, consultants and small business owners assume that clients are most interested in determining our abilities.
- How good are we?
- Are we good enough to do the job?
So as coaches, consultants and small business owners we put a lot of effort into providing proof of our ability, using testimonials, case studies and the like.
I think what we do less well when prospecting for clients is displaying our affability and our availability.
Making it clear that we are available and ready to start work on their project today is easily done. You can simply put an online booking system on your website or social media.
Demonstrating our affability is a little harder, and takes more time.
Let’s look at the topic of affability in this podcast in a little more detail.
Why? Because I suspect it is a lot more important than we think when it comes to securing a client.
