Never Say Sell

How the World's Best Consulting and Professional Services Firms Expand Client Relationships

Tom McMakin, Jacob Parks

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119683780
• eBook ISBN: 9781119683803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Learn the secrets of how recurring revenue is driven at expert firms like BCG, KPMG, EY, and more

Never Say Sell: How the World's Best Consulting and Professional Services Firms Expand Client Relationships explains how to scale individual engagements into long-term business relationships. Cowritten by Tom McMakin, the coauthor of How Clients Buy and expert in account development, and colleague Jacob Parks, this book provides insights from key rainmakers at firms like Accenture, IBM, and more into how they drive growth from existing relationships.

Never Say Sell is a business development guide for professional service providers like consultants, accountants, and lawyers, whether they are sole proprietors or members of account teams tasked with expanding key accounts.

Doing good work with existing clients is not enough to have them come back to you again and again. You must do more. This book explores the techniques and methods that leading professional service providers use to add value, cross sell, and drive recurring revenue from existing engagements.

Never Say Sell will help you turn one-and-done clients into some of your most exciting and lucrative relationships. It is a must-have for any professional who benefits from repeat business.

How We Can Help

In 1995 Dr. Angus Wallace boarded a flight and expected a routine trip, consuming peanuts and perusing the SkyMall magazine. Midway through the flight, a call came across the loudspeaker: “Is there a doctor on board?”

Dr. Wallace did what any doctor would do: He offered to help in any way that he could. A 39-year-old woman had fallen off her motorcycle on the way to the airport and developed a potentially lethal condition. Chest percussion and auscultation were rendered ineffective because of the noise from the plane's engines. Dr. Wallace and a junior resident on board, Dr. Tom Wang, sprang into action.

A scalpel and a 14-gauge catheter were available in the aircraft medical kit. (Wallace) created a chest drain with these items along with a coat hanger (made into a trocar for the catheter), a bottle of Evian water (with two holes punched in the cap for an underwater seal drain), oxygen tubing (to attach the catheter to the drain), and Sellotape (to seal the catheter to the drain). Xylocard (100 mg of lignocaine in 10 mL) was the local anesthetic, and the disinfectant for the introducer was a bottle of five-star brandy! As soon as the drain was connected, the patient was operated upon in her seat. Air was released from the pleural cavity, and within 5 minutes she had almost fully recovered. She settled down to enjoy her meal and the in-flight entertainment.

There is no better analogy for the way we should think about business development in the context of expert services.

It would seem arrogant and unnecessary for Dr. Wallace to step on board the plane, grab the PA from the flight attendant, and let everybody know that he is a doctor and available for consultations should any be required. Similarly, it would be downright unethical (and likely illegal) for a doctor to jump on the plane and start passing out prescriptions (“You look a skosh anxious to me, have a little Xanax!” “You look like you need to get some sleep, here's an Ambien …”).

So too with expert services practitioners looking to develop new work. There is a balance to strike between overt self-promotion on subways or billboards and sitting in your office assuming everyone will just start calling you to put your considerable consulting prowess to work. Diagnosing a problem, and making yourself available to help are key in any professional context. In the same way that a dermatologist has a moral obligation to tell you that you have a cancerous spot on your neck, an expert services provider should feel an obligation to solve challenges on behalf of clients. Strong business developers know how to listen for opportunities to create value.

We can take this one step further as we zero in on developing more work with existing clients. If we are the doctor, then our clients are the passengers sitting nearest us. If one of our clients is choking on a peanut one row up and two seats over – we should know, and we should jump into action. We should be ready and available to help before the flight attendant even picks up the PA to ask.

Section 4: Farming for Knowledge

CHAPTER 9
Know Thyself

In the 2003 Christmas blockbuster Elf, Will Ferrell played a character named Buddy the Elf. Buddy has more Christmas spirit than anyone, the greatest enthusiasm for toy making, and lives rule number 1 of the Elf Code to the fullest extent possible: Treat every day like it's Christmas. What's abundantly clear to the viewer – but not to Buddy – is that he is not like the other elves, being two feet taller than the rest of the North Pole population. Also, he doesn't possess the rapid-arm-movement capacity of the other elves that is required for efficient toy creation. His production numbers are pathetic: He creates 85 Etch A Sketches in a day, leaving him 915 off the average. He's useful when a light bulb needs to be changed, but that is not the core skillset they hire for at the North Pole.

Buddy the Elf apparently is not a Marcus Buckingham “Know your Strengths” kind of guy. However, Buddy's not alone. Too many expert services providers make the same error as Buddy: They bring an 85 Etch A Sketch capacity to a marketplace that already produces 1,000 units per day, instead of going to market with their light-bulb-changing service. The light-bulb-changing service may seem like a smaller or less appealing market, but it's one in which they have the right to win.

We see this often in nascent consulting organizations where there is a lack of definition around the product or service being brought to market. This isn't surprising: The majority of new consulting organizations are spinouts of much larger firms; alumni of large firms create their own independent consultancies to solve client challenges with greater autonomy and to enjoy a larger proportion of the profits. Unfortunately, one vestige of the large consulting mindset is often brought with them: They have experience solving a multitude of client problems across various geographies and industries. Now leading a smaller firm, they lack the resources, case studies, and credentials to fully serve their former clients.

Like Buddy, they need to focus their offering.

When looking at the Diamond of Opportunity one of the first questions we should ask ourselves is, “Where do we have a right to succeed?” Because if we don't have a right to succeed – we have never done the work before or are playing in a wholly unfamiliar industry or geography – and a competitor does have the right to succeed in that space, we will lose every time.

Indeed, there is a raft of questions, which, if honestly answered, will steer us away from the longshot points on the diamond and toward our best opportunities to expand with clients.

Size

Are we a big firm with offices across the globe or a small firm with limited reach and resources? Do we strive to be a big firm, or do we like being a well-regarded niche player?

Take, for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which is currently investing in robotic process automation (RPA)- and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tax preparation tools. They can do that because their revenues are a little north of $42 billion. The kind of investment they can make in future technologies, which may take years before they can monetize them, is beyond the ability of a boutique tax preparation firm. In the language of the Diamond, PwC has the scale to INNOVATE, developing solutions they do not now offer to buyers that they may not have yet met. In this case size is destiny.

Boutique Firm Opportunities

Boutique firms tend to be known for a narrow band of expertise. They should focus on opportunities to do MORE, to EXTEND, and to EXPAND but stay away from EVOLVE and INNOVATE, which are not adjacent to the work they currently perform. They could enter a new line of work, but in many ways, it would be like starting a whole new firm just when they are finally getting traction on their current line. Doing MORE of what they already do for their current buyer, EXTENDing their offerings to others in the client company, and EXPANDing the offerings to adjacent service lines is what they should be doing. They have a right to succeed in winning this work. When we talk to small firm owners, they tell us that a single successful project at a client company tends to beget other similar assignments.

Interestingly boutique firms have a right to win REACH and EVOLVE work – assignments that involve them doing jobs they have never done before if they are hyperaware of opportunities as they arise. Their size and nimbleness earn them the right to take on small assignments often with short timelines, slightly outside of their core competency, but close enough that they can quickly pivot, repurposing their skillsets.

Boutique firms have distinct advantages that uniquely enable them to grow their work:

Culture

• There's truth to the old adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Small firms have strong cultures and can adapt to change. In many small firms, it feels like everybody is engaged in the fight. The trappings of hierarchy, HR processes, and other big-company governance do not eat at their power to innovate and deliver. In a smaller firm, ideas are less likely to be squashed while making their way through the kind of long approval and implementation processes that stymie innovation in larger companies. In a small company, you might scooter down the hall and ask the CEO if you can implement a new program management system. A simple yes green-lights your idea. In a larger company, that same ask might take months, by which time the luster on your idea has begun to rust.

Agility

• Small organizations are agile. Large organizations invest considerable resources into agile business strategies to try to achieve a percentage of what small firms come by without effort. Big firms may have to run the traps on exploring an adjacency before they can even bid on it. The questions of “Have we run this through the pricing and proposal committee?” “Have you completed the conflict check?” and “Who else on the account team needs to be notified?” may mitigate risk, but they also stifle. The small firm, by contrast, has limited bureaucracy and can act quickly in responding to client challenges.

Storytelling

• Stories sell. When we first started PIE, the stories of the firm seemed to belong to every employee. We all had lived and died every new client gain and loss. As small firms grow, however, the stories become diffused across the organization. Indeed, you see small firms create structures to feed their cultures to ensure their ability to keep telling stories.

Big Firm Opportunities

Nothing should be beyond the reach of a big firm. They have experts in every industry, every service line, and in every geography. But this breadth can hobble them at the same time. When you are known for everything, are you known for anything? Big firms often have a hard time growing clients ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Why We Never Say Sell
• How We Can Help
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement