Never Say Sell. Tom McMakin

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      What Might This Look Like for You?

      Maybe you do real estate strategy consulting for large retailers, and recently you finished helping a buyer, who is responsible for customer experience, with a location strategy and footprint for their new stores in New York. During a round of on-site visits, you meet the chief human resources officer who mentions that they're thinking of moving to an open-concept office plan for their New York headquarters, and you share some examples of how your firm has helped other major offices in the city make the switch. You'd be happy to help her.

      Maybe you did the design work for a print ad campaign for a large athletic-apparel company. The advertising director you worked for passes your name to their head of sponsorships because she likes the work you did and is looking for some similar-themed event graphics at an upcoming race they're sponsoring. She's in luck, as this is right in your wheelhouse.

      What Might This Look Like for Susie?

      In the course of Susie's discussions with her buyer at Thomson Reuters, she might ask about the initiatives underway in their research department. Susie has ample experience leading research projects at PIE, she just hasn't done this work yet with Thomson Reuters. After checking in about this every so often over the past couple years, her client responds one day by saying he heard earlier that week from a colleague on the research team about a current project that made him think of PIE. They were looking to interview 50 Am Law 100 HR directors to understand buying decision factors for HRIS solutions, and it sounded like the team might need some help. Susie's ears perk up immediately at this – recruiting executives to participate in studies, interviewing them, and synthesizing those interviews into a whitepaper is exactly in line with how PIE has helped other clients before. Susie's client gives her the name of his colleague leading the research effort so she can follow up and offer to help. This is how we REACH with our clients – helping a different buyer with different work they haven't previously hired us for, but which we have strong experience completing.

      We can lean on a little bit of extended trust (they know our current buyer, who is also from Thomson Reuters, trusts us) and a little bit of credibility (we've done this kind of work successfully for other clients) – but both of these are far more tenuous than if we have done this kind of work for this same person.

      The Diamond of Opportunity in Action

Opportunity 5: EVOLVE

      The fifth opportunity for growth within a client is to EVOLVE – or, do work for our current buyer that is work we and our firm have never done before. With this opportunity, we are presented the new challenge of trying to win work for which we have no case studies showing our success – neither inside nor outside of that client. Of course, we know we are capable of doing this new work based on our team's competencies, but we haven't done this specific kind of work before. This requires maximum trust from our client, and enough earned credibility that they believe we're capable of doing the work, even if we've never done it before.