Jon Huxley
Jon is Director, New Zealand at The Business of Trust
I love working with individuals and teams to help them build trust with their clients.
The title of ‘Trusted Advisor’ or the act of ‘walking in the clients shoes’ is something that many businesses refer to in their plans, strategies and day-to-day actions. What these terms actually mean is a question not everybody can answer or, more importantly, know what the tangible things are that they can do to achieve one or both. The word trust is critical in any relationship, business or personal. Sometimes you start with it and it’s yours to lose and other times you have to fight hard to gain it.
Trust drives new or ongoing business, drives referrals, enables you to recover when you make a mistake and drives down business development costs. Seeing people try new things, shifting their mindset or having those light bulb moments gets me out of bed in the morning.
I’ve spent 20+ years in client facing roles, both as an advisor/coach and also at the coalface, leading teams and working to meet client needs.
Until late 2019 I had a fantastic experience working with Beca Group, New Zealand’s largest professional services organization with offices across NZ, Australia and Asia-Pacific. I have co-designed and delivered programmes that have played their part in helping Beca improve in a number of client-focused areas over the last few years. I’m proud to say in my tenure we achieved multiple AFR Client Choice Awards, lifted win rates and experienced consistent organic growth year-on-year. I am thrilled to continue working with Beca in my role with The Business of Trust.
In addition to Beca, I have worked with PwC, ANZ Bank and Fonterra, experiences that have given me a broad commercial knowledge. Throw in senior sales roles in the UK and what that means for my clients is greater ability to “walk in their shoes!”
I work with my clients to:
- Help them understand what they are trying to achieve before they invest in any kind of improvement initiative.
- Quantify what the priority areas are to achieve true client centricity. Be that about people, process or both.
- Create frameworks and processes so that change sticks.
- Grow client relationships (big or small, new or old) and generate and convert pipeline.
- Be the voice of the client to ensure what we are doing is about client value first and foremost. I’m the guy in the room who says “so what?”
- Develop the skills and processes to ensure client facing teams really do differentiate through everything they do.
- Breakdown the apparent stigma of sales. It’s not a dirty word.
- Most importantly perhaps, I work with my clients to enable their clients to have lots of reasons to keep giving them business!
My happy clients:
Here’s what some of my current and past clients have said about working with me:
We’ve been working with Jon to develop our client relationship skills (and in particular confidence) among our Southern Infrastructure team. I have driven this initiative on the back of my experience of working with Jon (and his engaging style), coupled with the effectiveness of a recent ‘See More’ training exercise. This exercise focused essentially on the basics of relationship building and has been the breakthrough for us. Unlike most BD training courses, it ‘just made sense’ to the team and they’re running with it. The subsequent sessions have yielded impressive feedback – on the combination of the content and Jon’s style. Jon has a special way of tapping into the truth, connecting with the audience and teasing out open conversations among the group. We have reached a point where learned skills are now becoming practice with real results. This is the most effective and meaningful business development training I’ve come across in my 11 years at Beca, and I look forward to continuing the journey with Jon.