Mo asks David Burkus: How do you develop relationships with your clients virtually? The future of work is working from anywhere. The truth is that we are not going back to the office. Even before the pandemic, studies were showing that people are more engaged when they are out of the office 40% to 60% of the time. We need greater flexibility, trust, and autonomy with the people that we collaborate with in a remote environment. Communication is actually more important now that it was before. We can't take as many non-verbal cues as we could when we were working together, so we need to be more deliberate and empathetic in our communication. One of the first things we need to be doing with prospective clients is talking about how we are going to be working together. This is now part of the process of closing the deal. One major tip is that eye contact is not eye contact when you're communicating online. You have to look into the camera lens to recreate the experience and connection of eye contact. The other thing to realize is that communication is more asynchronous than ever before. Make sure you have clear writing and thinking in your written communication. You also have to be clear about what each method of communication is meant for. To enroll clients, the easiest way is to have an established communications system within your team already. Create a team-working agreement and then use that to create the framework of client communication. Schedule a meeting to create your team-working agreement, and get answers to all of the questions written down into a shared document. Then get every team member to agree. Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com davidburkus.com