Never Say Sell. Tom McMakin

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CHAPTER 3 The Diamond of Opportunity

      Sun gushes through an open window and pools on Susie Krueger's orange desk and lampshades. Susie loves orange; she says it puts her in a good mood. A quiet breeze spills in, rustling the leaves on her Spanish ivy.

      Susie is a director at PIE and an accomplished facilitator. One of her projects is wrangling Am Law 100 chief financial officers (CFOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) for her client, Thomson Reuters, the nearly $6B information services company headquartered in Toronto. She says:

      I'm focused. For 10 years we've been delivering great value to the Thomson Reuters team, helping them create substantive relationships with their most-likely buyers. We know they're happy, because they renew our contract every year and tell us how much they love working with PIE.

      Susie has been able to grow the relationship little by little, but she's keenly aware that PIE hasn't yet been able to open the floodgates to the full breadth of potential work with them. She continues,

      There is so much more we could be doing to help other parts of Thomson Reuters. We've managed to put them in a place where they are talking to CFOs and CIOs of the largest law firms – their exact target. They know our work. They know we do a great job for them.

But when she says, “they know our work,” she understands all too well that this universe of people who know the value PIE delivers is much smaller than it could or should be. “We've added a few projects and expanded our scope here and there over the past 10 years, but we certainly haven't maximized the ways we could be helping them.”

      Susie's problem is one we hear from practice leads throughout the expert services industry. You might be doing excellent work, but the opportunities don't just start flooding in on their own.

There Is No One Thomson Reuters – and No One Opportunity

      Susie's challenge is not proving PIE can do the job. She has the best-case study possible: an internal history of doing the work. As she thinks about all the ways PIE could help different buyers within Thomson Reuters, she understands one of the key complexities of her challenge: Thomson Reuters is not one person and it does not represent a single cross-selling opportunity. Thomson Reuters is a collection of professionals who, together, provide critical just-in-time information to legal, corporate, and business customers, helping them keep track of regulatory, tax, transaction, compliance, and news-driven changes. To anthropomorphize this large and complex group by assuming it acts like a single person who “knows” Susie's work – and presents a single opportunity for cross-selling – would be a mistake.

      At best, a dozen or so people there know what Susie is doing and that she and her team are delivering excellent work. With a headcount of 25,000 people, most employees have never met each other, much less heard of Susie Krueger. Thomson Reuters, of course, is not an anomaly. Most corporations resemble a brand umbrella spread over a spider web of practices, industrial foci, and geographies, cobbled together over many years of organic growth and acquisition.

      So, what are the distinct opportunities for growth within Thomson Reuters that Susie can and should consider? After interviewing rainmakers at accounting, law, engineering, IT, marketing, and consulting firms, both large and small, we've learned that experts who focus on growth of existing clients think about opportunities in six distinct ways. Each of these opportunities carries with it great promise, as well as unique challenges requiring different tactics and skillsets to successfully execute.