How to be credible in front of CEOs and gain their immediate respect

Being a young organisational development consultant, I faced this problem when I first started: How to be credible in front of CEOs and gain their immediate respect? Well, for the matter, if they do not believe me, they probably will not believe in my programmes (unless its top down instructed), and probably that will be end of any engagement with that organisation.

Some of these CEOs are scholars, President Scholars, Overseas Merit Scholars, Local Merit Scholars who received their education in top universities. Most of them had post-graduation education. All of them had at least 15 years of experience in the organisation. Which brings to the question:

Who am I to tell them what to do?

My answer: 3P

Pragmatic, Passionate, Personal...(nah, never political, though its helpful, I acknowledge)

Pragmatic:
This is the no1 rule and the most important rule. Every thing that comes out of a young consultant's mouth should be based on real data, facts, figures, info, in others words, being totally, absolutely, brutally pragmatic. Look up the organisation's website. Read through its coverage in magazines, journals. Conduct survey if you can. Prepare your success stories. To be convincing, you need to have real hard data staring into the face of the CEO or else you will just be firing blanks..No amount of cover-up can compensate if the CEO catches you with an errorous data and you will only end up embaressing yourself.

Passionate:
Being passionate certainly helps in being credible. Passion can be infectious and in a field like organisational development, can arouse the interest of the CEO. The CEO will be very interested in the reasons why a young consultant knew and wish to know so much about his organisation and importantly, to aid the organisation. The conviction will spur the CEO into action. Even if the CEO wasnt totally convinced, at least he will not pour cold water over a hot head- if you are truely passionate.

Personal:
Consulting is a very service-oriented human industry. Customer service is important. The willingness to listen and accomodate is important. Being personal, eg, sending emails directly to the CEO on key issues to tackle, reply fast to emails and ensuring the engagement continues to be lively and interesting is paramount to a successful consulting engagement. I have personally received many testimonials from CEOs because of my speed and boldness in taking actions to help them solve their problems. A personal touch can lend wonders to managing expectations. If you did okay, you may receive a good testimonial because of the strong bond. If, due to unfortunate reasons, you did not particularly succeed in achieving one or more objectives of the engagement, at least being personal will make the CEO forgive you more readily and put you in a position to offer a service recovery.