What I'm Listening For In Every Client Conversation
In almost every client conversation, there’s a moment that most people would miss and not even realize it.
It doesn’t make a grand enterence or come with a drumroll and a sudden energy shift.
But when I hear it, I know exactly where we are.
I know we’ve stopped digging through the acceptable answers and hit something worth examining a little closer. And everything that comes after that moment is different—the copy, the messaging, the way she talks about her work.
Everything.
I’m listening for it in every word that follows “Hello.”
What Most People Think I Want to Hear
Before working together for the first time, most people fall into one of two categories.
Category A: You’ve done some type of client avatar work.
Category B: This is the first time you’ve even thought about it.
Either way, you want to feel prepared, so you approach it the same way you would a strategy session.
You think about your ideal client. And you try to have answers ready for the questions you assume I’m going to ask. Questions about your offer, niche, what your marketing looks like, and goals for the next quarter.
Like you’ve done your homework, and you’re looking for a gold star. Which actually tells me a lot about you. More on that in a bit.
And because I’m not one to let good work go to waste, I let you show or tell me what you’ve prepared.
The thing about prepared answers is that they always have a particular quality. They sound like the right answer because they’ve been optimized to sound that way. Dare I say, a little rehearsed.
They’re what I call ‘Rolodex answers’. And we all have them. They’re the answers you’ve cycled through before you choose one, hoping it’s the “correct answer”. They’re carefully constructed to be acceptable. Acceptable and wrong.
I’m Listening For a Specific Moment
When a client runs out of Rolodex answers, there’s a nervous quiet that follows. It’s the moment you start to hesitate, or internally panic, or both. You know you’re supposed to say something but you’re not sure what that something is.
It doesn’t always happen in the first conversation. Sometimes it takes two or three before you notice the words are canned before they’ve have even left your mouth. And when it happens, I know we’re getting close to the truth.
The sentence even starts differently. There’s no warm-up, no framing, no setup. It just comes out—unpolished, sometimes uncomfortable, and occasionally preceded by a small apology as if you’re warning me that what you’re about to say might offend me. But it’s never me you need to worry about.
I grew up with six sisters and seven brothers. There’s very little I take offense to.
But that apology is almost always the signal.
You never apologize for answers you’re confident in. You apologize for the ones that feel too real, too specific, too much like something you weren’t supposed to say out loud in a professional context.
That’s the one I’ve been waiting for so I can hand you the shovel and tell you to start digging.
Kendra’s Confession
Kendra, an estate planning attorney, needed help with her welcome emails.
We’d already rewritten her website and she was looking for a way to nurture the leads who visited her website. She knew the process and wasn’t new to the idea that her marketing needed to sound more like her and less like a legal textbook, and she’d seen what was possible when the copy came from the right place.
She told me she wanted to take a crack at writing the emails herself.
What came back read like ChatGPT with stage fright. Procedural. Precise. And technically correct in the way that an instruction manual is technically correct—also nothing you could connect to.
Just the facts, ma’am, delivered in a voice that was missing everything that made Kendra, Kendra.
When we got on a call to talk through it, she said, “I’m not good at writing. I default to my teacher voice,” like she was confessing something she’d been hoping wouldn’t come up.
She said it apologetically, as if I might think it was a character flaw.
Here’s what Kendra’s confession actually told me.
It told me she knew, on some level, that her “teacher voice” didn’t belong to Kendra, the estate planning attorney. The one that shows up when she’s sitting across from a young woman whose parents died without a will. The “teacher voice” was the professional performance she’d default to when she tried too hard to sound like a lawyer.
Once she named it, I knew we could work with what was underneath it.
Not her Ruler/Sage brand archetype who explains legal concepts with precision and authority—though that’s genuinely part of who she is. The version of Kendra who went into estate planning because she’d been that young woman, and who wanted her welcome emails to feel like sitting down with someone who already understood why you were scared.
That version of Kendra had been in the room the whole time. She just hadn’t been invited into the writing yet.
The welcome emails she wrote after that conversation were like night and day. Because she started writing with the empathy of someone who already knew what her clients were carrying when they walked through the door.
That’s what changes when the right voice finally shows up. Not because of a better strategy or offer, but because she was saying what her clients needed to hear, in her own voice.
Does This Mean I Have a Teacher Voice?
Short answer, yes. You might not call it that. Maybe you call it your professional voice, your expert voice, or your “I want to be taken seriously” voice that shows up when you’re not sure how much of yourself is appropriate to bring into the room.
You probably don’t hear it as a performance because somehow it still sounds a little like you.
You can’t hear the difference between your professional voice and your real one when you’ve been using both interchangeably for years.
You become invisible by default. It wasn’t your intention, but it was the result.
If any of this sounds familiar, the Brand Snapshot is a free outsider’s look at where your real voice is and what’s been keeping it from reaching the right people.
Show Me Where I’m Going Wrong →
Sara Kotila is the founder of Quirk & Quill Creative. She works with women business owners who are genuinely excellent at what they do and can’t figure out why their marketing isn’t landing. The answer is almost never what they think it is.