Never Say Sell. Tom McMakin

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      We've earned credibility when a client knows and respects our work. A client might say, “Joe was on my team when I was at AT&T. He's on his own now, but no one knows revenue recovery better.” If you're Joe, this is the kind of experience-based recommendation that leads to new work. Hopefully, once we are engaged with the client, our work is shining on its own, lighting the way to new engagements. When we first pitched the client, we were at a disadvantage, having to talk about our work. Expert services work, however, is better demonstrated than described. When we work next to someone in the trenches, we may come to believe he or she is tenacious, insightful, highly capable, and possessed of sound judgment. Once we are working on a project inside a client, the credibility bar is much lower than when we were on the outside peeking in. They have seen first-hand that we can do the work.

      This is harder, though, when we try and do work for new buyers within a client who don't know us, or when we try to tell current buyers that we're capable of different kinds of services.

      Hurdle 4: Our client knows the quality of our work, but we struggle to get others in the organization to see that quality. Or, we do good work and offer to perform a new service only to find our clients think of us as a one-trick pony. Our credibility is hard to scale – across services and across relationships.

      Trust

      When we work with clients, we have the opportunity to do the right thing when their backs are turned, and we can demonstrate that we can be trusted with caring for their interests.

      We are sometimes given a choice between leaning in the direction of our client – prioritizing transparency and investing in the relationship – or leaning in the direction of ourselves and our interests. Say, for example, you're in a meeting with your buyer and her boss, presenting to the boss on the results of a project you've just completed. Her boss is giving you high praise for the work your firm has done. You notice your buyer looks frustrated for the lack of acknowledgment she's getting (even though you did in fact do 90% of the work). One option is to accept that praise fully and take this as an opportunity to try to win more work from the boss. Instead, you use this as an opportunity to praise your buyer in front of her boss – underscoring the team effort of the project and how great she was to work with. This is how trust is created – one act at a time. You're investing in the long game.

      Once we are working with a client, we no longer need to say, “You can trust me!” We have been afforded the opportunity to show our clients we have their best interests at heart.

      But, like credibility, trust doesn't transfer quite as easily as we might like to other potential buyers in the client company. The more degrees of separation from our buyer, the less you can lean on your hard-earned trust. Client organizations can be big – perhaps hundreds of potential buyers – and the further away from our buyer we get, the harder we have to work to rebuild trust with others. Additionally, we often run into competing circles of trust – where incumbent relationships may box us out from even being able to prove our integrity.

      Rob Benson, chief sales officer for Kele Inc., explains,

      If you're in there doing something really well, you may want to offer another service that your company provides. If the customer has an incumbent in there doing those services already and they're doing a really good job, it can be hard to win that business, especially if that incumbent is doing a good job and the customer does not see a need to make a change. It's a risky situation because if you're saying, “Oh, just give us a shot. Give us a try,” that's risky as that could cause the customer to consider other options for your existing services. It can be tough to break through that incumbent relationship.

When trying to walk across a client company, we need to remember that our credibility – our reputation for doing work – often travels more easily than our ability to prove our trustworthiness.

      Hurdle 5: Our client trusts us implicitly, but our reputation for being trustworthy doesn't always travel as quickly or as broadly as we'd like. Just because our buyer trusts us, does not mean that the buyer's counterpart in Johannesburg will trust us automatically. There may also be competing circles of trust that hinder our ability to even prove our integrity to other potential buyers in the organization.

      Ability and Readiness

      Almost by definition, if we have engaged with a client, the client must have been ready and had the ability to pull the trigger on a contract with us. The company was prosperous enough to enable an engagement and, importantly, the project lead inside the client company was personally ready to tackle a new initiative and had the support of his or her boss.

      It's a mistake, however, to think just because the ability and readiness stars aligned in one division of the company, they similarly align in other divisions – even if we are trying to engage with someone who is the functional equivalent of our current buyer. Likewise, we can never assume that just because a client was ready and able to engage with us around one of our service lines that the client is equally ready and able to engage with us around other service lines.

      Hurdle 6: Clients need to have the resources and bandwidth to take on new projects. That they are ready and able to engage with us on one project doesn't mean that they are able to engage with us on a second, related project or that their peers in other parts of a client organization are similarly ready and able to engage.

The First Challenge

      The first challenge to expanding our relationship with a client is that the language we learned as hunters doesn't serve us well in the world of farming. Both hunting and farming bring in new revenues, but this fact masks other, more profound differences. The seven elements describe how clients come to know us, understand what we do, and ultimately engage our services. That description, however, is not helpful as we think about how to expand our mandates with current clients. It is not enough that, as professionals, we weren't trained in business development; now we learn that what we know about landing new clients bears little resemblance to the skillset needed to grow that client.

Note

      1 * Close readers will note that in How Clients Buy, the word respect was used here instead of credibility. Upon further study and reflection, the authors think credibility – or respect for one's work – is the best term to characterize this element.

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