The definition, purpose, skills, and improved results of client-centricity. Includes a self-awareness assessment of your current client-centric skills.

To make room for new learning, you’ll be unlearning conventional selling and client-service approaches, because clients say such skill don’t differentiate you from their other choices of outside help.  You’ll step away from looking alike, sounding alike, and using very similar materials. 

Includes a self-awareness assessment of your current client and results-centric skills using our tool which will be emailed out three days before this first session. 

The Perfect Fit: Targeted Prospect Criteria:  For business developers: You’ll look at your best prospects and identify up to 8 criteria that make them your best. You’ll learn how to score prospects from 0-24 where each criterion is worth 0-3 points and establish a threshold of 18 to determine which ones are likely to be a very productive match for you. This is a discipline of choosing prospects well at the beginning that focuses your business development time, reduces your cost of courting, and increases win rates. When most of your clients meet your criteria, you need fewer of them to fulfill your annual Milliman revenue promise. 

New Business Math: This skill is creating your mathematical path to fulfilling your annual Milliman revenue promise. You’ll learn how much math is needed and how to “be on your math” for 12 straight months. People who create and execute their math consistently outperform themselves, colleagues, and their competitors.

This is putting your agenda fully aside and being 100% present to show interest and curiosity to uniquely understand the client in a way that sets you apart from the client’s other choices.  You’ll learn about layered listening and discover that there is so much more to hear and learn from a client than you thought before. All this listening leads to making more relevant offers which are then accepted at a higher rate than before. 

When your advancing listening is working well, the prospect or client is helping
you define what to offer them.  This reduces guessing and increases win rates to as much as 90%+. Some have reached 100% on one year. The discipline you’ll learn is to only make an offer when you
are 90% confident of acceptance. Good news: American clients want it how they want it and are
willing to tell you exactly how they want it.

When you propose, you’re asking prospects and clients to judge you. Judging separates people. In contrast, co-designing with a prospect or client to achieve their results, is an invitation to create the future together. Psychology: people support what they help create. You both get what you want – and you arrive there mutually vs. “closing” them.

We all impose four kinds of cost on others: We take their money, time, energy, and attention. Prospects are monitoring how costly you will be if they hire you. Your value must exceed your cost according to the prospect or they will choose someone else with the same or better value and lower four-dimensional cost.

People with results promises outperform people with goals.  You’ll learn how to establish your annual revenue promise based on your Perfect Fit Prospect Selection Criteria and New Business Math (see the July 2025 session below); fulfill your promises as promised; and recover your promises when they go off track. The #1 reason promises fail is because they were poorly crafted from the beginning. 
You’ll learn how to craft complete and credible promises with your prospects and clients and get complete agreement by all parties including their conditions of satisfaction before the work begins. This skill shortens the time needed to win a new client or secure a renewal.

Part Two: Advanced skill to fulfill your promise, as promised: This is easier said than done.
Hence the word “Management” in the skill Promise Management which is about navigating all the twists and turns that you will encounter and to come out the other end with trust and the promise fulfilled, as promised. There are more challenges and breakdowns in promise fulfillment now than at any previous time in history. Few people have the advanced skill to navigate them and gain trust.

Part Three: Advanced skill to recover your promise when the wheels come off:
When you recover your promise during a breakdown, you can also recover lost trust.  You’ll learn advanced skills to communicate a breakdown to the client before it’s broken, own it, apologize in a way few people do, offer a recovery plan, and provide grounding that it won’t happen again.

Part Four: Clients make promises, too. Big ones. Advanced listening is drawing out the promises or commitments your prospects and clients have made to their management and making them an offer or co-designing an offer that will help them fulfill their commitments. This is listened to very differently than a description of how you can add value.

In short, are clients trusting you with their most important results promises of the year?