Socially awkward bankers that moved up the ranks to VP+....how did you start winning clients?
I'm sure there are others here that can relate, but I'll be a VP in about a year or two and am feeling very nervous about moving to the more client-facing roles. For those that are similar, how did you start breaking out of your comfort zone and moving into the idea generation / book building phase? Any tips? Aside from the social aspect, I'm already so overwhelmed with execution on multiple projects every day. Like I'm already balancing between so many projects and people and other administrative stuff at my boutique. It feels like an impossible task to also be laser focused on market developments, trends, etc. to generate ideas, let alone present. How did you strike that balance at the start?
As someone in similar spot, like everything in this job (and in life) confidence in those situations just comes from having reps. The first couple times speaking to content with clients can be challenging / feel like they require a lot of extra time to prep that does not exist on your calendar. But if you are already in the weeds guiding broader narrative and doing the work, then you intuitively know what to say and it becomes easier to speak to it over time as those moments arise. Ideally you will also have Directors / MDs who let you own a piece of the deck or client relationship rather than the whole thing. Like taking a section of presentation or asking you to own relationship w/ head of corp dev (or one level below that) rather than the CFO. So it ends up being a very natural progression, and then all of a sudden you realize you can spin 90% accurate, sharp sounding perspectives off the top of your head. The keys there are i) it never needs to be 100%, especially not if it requires insane amount of prep time and ii) stakes are lower than you think they are for nearly everything you could say.
Hey man, thanks so much for the reply. Just to clarify, I actually do get quite a lot of chances to present to clients and I'm actually very confident in my ability to present entire decks.
Where I haven't had as much experience is in "owning a piece of the client relationship." I present perfectly fine in formal settings, but outside of those settings, I'm at a loss for what to do in order to "get to the next level" in the relationship.
Like I can pass along interesting tidbits about competitor earnings, recent M&A, etc., but I mostly just get a "thanks, very helpful." email, and then I'm not sure what to do from there. How do I get to the level where the client CEO is calling me 1-on-1 for advice? How do I get to the level where I can come up with a real idea for an engagement with a new prospective client? Most importantly, how do I even find the time to do these things?
Get social interactions outside of the office. Be a human being and it’ll come naturally. Just need reps in the real world. It’s all about your ability to converse outside of the topics of business. Ignore my title- anonymous
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