How Clients Buy

A Practical Guide to Business Development for Consulting and Professional Services

Tom McMakin, Doug Fletcher

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119434757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Vertrieb

The real-world guide to selling your services and bringing in business

How Clients Buy is the much-needed guide to selling your services. If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the 'product, ' you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job—not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or 'behind' when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do. You'll have to unlearn everything you know about sales, but then you'll learn new skills that will help you make connections, develop rapport, create interest, earn trust, and turn prospects into clients.

Business development is critical to your personal success, and your skills in this area will dictate the course of your career. This invaluable guide gives you a set of real-world best practices that can help you become the rainmaker you want to be.

• Get the word out and make productive connections
• Drop the fear of self-promotion and advertise your accomplishments
• Earn potential clients' trust to build a lasting relationship
• Scrap the sales pitch in favor of honesty, positivity, and value

Working in the consulting and professional services fields comes with difficulties not encountered by those who sell tangible products. Services are often under-valued, and become among the first things to go when budgets get tight. It is now harder than ever to sell professional services, so your game must be on-point if you hope to out-compete the field. How Clients Buy shows you how to level up and start winning the client list of your dreams.

How Clients Buy

Chapter 8
The Secret to Selling
Never Say Sell

I actually don't think you can sell professional services. I think you have to help clients buy them. Clients have problems and they need help in discovering, understanding and tackling them. Once people realize you helped them solve problems, then they will come back.

—Walt Shill, formerly of McKinsey and Accenture

At 8:15 a.m. on Thursday, May 21, 2015, Sylvia Senaldi sent an email to Dr. Peter Tyre:

Pete,

Meet Mac Shields. Mac attended your presentation recently and wanted to see if you would be interested in meeting up for coffee.

Mac is an old friend, a business associate and a smart guy. He has done great work for me in developing our go-to-market business strategy.

I'll let you guys take it from here!

Sylvia

Sent from my iPhone

Mac had heard Pete speak at a business conference the week before. He'd never heard of Pete's laser technology firm, LiDAR (basically radar with light waves instead of radio waves), before and found it fascinating. Also, Pete said something during his presentation that piqued Mac's interest: he was struggling to find a viable commercial opportunity for his firm's technology. Mac genuinely felt there was a real possibility that he could help Pete solve this business problem.

But Mac had never met Pete before. He looked him up on LinkedIn. There he saw that Pete was connected to his friend Sylvia, someone he had known for about twenty years. He asked Sylvia if she'd be willing to introduce them. Graciously, she said yes.

Pete's reply email came a few hours later that same morning:

----Original Message-----

From: Peter Tyre [mailto: [email protected]]

Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2015 10:52 AM

To: Sylvia Senaldi; Mac Shields

Subject: Re: Intro

Thanks for the intro, Sylvia.

Mac, I'd love to meet up with you. I'm traveling until next Tuesday.

Do you have time next week before Friday?

Best regards,

Pete

Dr. Peter Tyre

Chief Executive Officer

Peak Photonics, Inc.

Mac admits that he has never been very good at cold calling. Actually, he hates it. Most people do—up there with fear of heights, spiders, and speaking in public. However, if it is someone he has a genuine interest in getting to know, Mac is happy to reach out. It helps if he has someone or something in common. A connection can make the outreach seem natural, sincere, and genuine; such was his interest in Pete's company and his mutual friend, Sylvia. In such cases, his approach didn't feel like cold calling or superficial networking; it felt more like making new friends.

Sylvia's email introduction was exceptional. Mac couldn't have scripted a better one if he had tried. Glowing client introductions like this one are tough to beat. With a solid introduction, the odds of getting a first meeting with someone are high.

Mac emailed Sylvia and Pete back later that same morning.

-----Original Message-----

From: Mac Shields [mailto: [email protected]]

Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2015 11:11 AM

To: Peter Tyre; Sylvia Senaldi

Subject: Re: Intro

Yes, thanks for the introduction, Sylvia. Moving you to bcc:

Hi, Pete:

I enjoyed hearing you speak at the B2B Luncheon on Monday and learning a bit about Peak Photonics. I had no idea there was such a cluster of photonics companies based here in Austin. I knew there were a few, but nothing to the level that exists today.

I'd like to take you to coffee, introduce myself and learn a bit more about Peak Photonics. Or, if it's more convenient to meet at your office, just let me know. How would next Thursday at 8:30 am work for you?

Thanks,

Mac Shields

Founder, Shields Associates, LLC.

[email protected]

www.linkedin.com/in/macshields

www.shieldsassociates.net

Over the course of the summer of 2015, Mac and Pete developed a professional friendship. They met for coffee about once a month to talk about Peak Photonics, its technology, and the direction of the industry. Their coffee meetings had no real agenda. Mac was sincerely curious about Pete's technology and industry, and Pete, as a PhD physicist, was eager to pick Mac's brain on various business topics. Pete talked openly about the challenges he faced in finding compelling commercial opportunities for his company's technology. Mac shared a few ideas that he thought were relevant. He also sent him several articles and books he felt might be valuable.

After about six months and maybe a half-dozen meetings, Pete asked Mac if he would be willing to assist him with a project. Pete needed help developing a framework for analyzing new market opportunities. This was an area in which Mac had extensive expertise, and the topic also interested him. It felt to him that working with Pete would be a good collaboration. Mac wrote a proposal outlining his approach and the schedule and fees for the project. Pete accepted, and they started working together later that fall. A year after their first project was completed, Mac assisted Peak Photonics in analyzing a second emerging market opportunity.

Wouldn't it be great if more of our business development attempts felt so effortless?

Never Say Sell

No matter what euphemisms we use to describe the process of connecting with those we wish to serve—business development, client development, or sales and marketing—there remains the truth that we need clients in order to be able to practice our professions.

While many professionals shy away from the use of the word selling, it is clear that they work hard to win client work. We know we don't want to be selling, but we know doing nothing is not an option either. In her biography of Marvin Bower, Elizabeth Haas Edersheim reports,

[He] worked hard at building the firm's reputation throughout his time at McKinsey. In 1939, he wrote several articles addressing organizational and financial issues with which U.S. companies were struggling at the time. He also made a dozen speeches at professional organizations, played countless rounds of golf with prospective clients, lunched with executives at every opportunity, and encouraged everyone at McKinsey to do the same.

This may not be selling in the traditional sense, but Bower certainly wasn't sitting in his office waiting for the telephone to ring. How can we understand this in relation to selling and our aversion to all it represents? We need a new framework that can make sense of the work we must do to cultivate a network of clients to whom we can be helpful. The new discipline of design thinking can help.

Design Thinking Meets Business Development

Over the past two decades, there has been a renewed interest in the field of design. This renaissance was triggered in large part by the success of Apple's elegantly simple products designed by Jony Ive and brilliantly promoted by Steve Jobs. Herbert A. Simon, in his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, first explored the notion of design as a “way of thinking” in the sciences. Since then, the term design thinking has become popular as a way to describe the mindset of a designer.

According to the cofounder of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), the Danish design think tank:

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It's extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown by understanding the human needs involved and re-framing the problem in human-centric ways.

—Rikki Dam, cofounder, IDF

For several decades, design thinking remained within the world of design. Beginning in the early 1990s, others in the field of design observed that the approach could be useful for problem solving in a broader context. David Kelley, in particular, was highly influential in bringing the design thinking philosophy to the challenges of solving business problems.

Kelley is as close as it gets to being a rock star in the world of design; he's both the cofounder of IDEO (the international design and consulting firm based in Palo Alto, California) and Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (known as the d.school). David earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, but he later admitted that “it didn't feel quite right.” Fortunately for us, his early work at Boeing sparked an interest in the study of design, and in the mid-1970s, he returned to school and earned a master's degree from Stanford University's product design program.

David says, “The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for.”

The principles of design thinking are now being used in corporations beyond the traditional scope of product design. According to Jon Kolko in the article, “Design Thinking Comes of Age,” in the September 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review:

There's a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn't about aesthetics. It's about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

Simply put, design theory implores us to examine a customer's (or client's or user's) experience and reverse engineer how to make that experience better. This may sound obvious, but what Kelley and others saw when they looked at product design was that much of design started from the nee...