For 20 years I have heard the complaint that cross selling, the selling of multiple services to the same client, doesn’t work.  There are a number of reasons why cross selling doesn’t live up to expectations.  A principal cause was pointed out by David Maister in his book, True Professionalism: people try to do it when there is no apparent extra value to the client from using the same firm for two services.  Clients are usually good at figuring this out.

Here I focus on another reason: people treat cross markets as if they are an easier channel to sell through than others.  They aren’t.

This false expectation manifests itself in several ways.  First, people who don’t know how to sell externally think that, for some reason, they should be able to cross sell.  They are the ones who look for an easy way to get business.  They may be able to close a deal if a client comes to them, but they don’t know how to go out in the market place and find one.  Account teams made up of such people meet monthly to talk about how they will cross sell to a specific client.  They then do little to further the cause, meeting again a month later to talk some more.

The misconception that cross selling is easy is also manifested in how people talk about it.  Poor cross sellers are quick to tell others what they should be doing, as in “You should be able to get me in there.”  They overestimate what colleagues are able to do, as in “You control the client; you should be able to get me an introduction.”

Good cross sellers are good sellers.  A good cross seller treats the cross market like any other market.  She works hard to service the colleagues she hopes will introduce her to a client.  She talks with them often, building trust over time, helping them learn what words to use when introducing her and her service.  She finds ways to help them sell their own services, too.  She patiently earns their trust and respect.  Of all the people she can sell through, she picks out those who know how to sell and are willing to introduce her, not wasting time on those who can’t or won’t.  She leaves out should statements, relying on firm and practice management to create an environment that she can cross sell in.  In short, she treats the cross market pretty much like she treats any other.

One of the best cross sellers I know, Peter Blatman, who is now with Deloitte Consulting, won over the sales force of the firm he was with at the time.  First, he first demonstrated the power of cross selling by bringing in a huge engagement that required many of the firm’s services.  He then encouraged his consulting team to earn the respect and interest of the sales force.  He got agreement from his team to respond to all calls from members of sales force within 24 hours.  Over three years, revenues of his practice from work originating with the sales force shot up from almost nothing to 70 percent.  In other words, he put as much effort into the cross market as he would any other he hoped to get business from.  And it paid of.

In that respect, cross markets are not so different from any other market.

Recently, I helped one client sharpen his elevator speech and another to spruce up a letter with which she planned to introduce herself before she called a prospective client to ask for a meeting.  Both were making a common mistake by pouring too much content into these tiny vessels.  They did this becaue they forgot their objectives.

An elevator speech, so called because it is what you would say to a prospective client you ran into during a thirty second elevator ride, tells a busy client who you are and what you do in words that are easily undestood and memorable.  In thirty seconds you can’t do much more than that.  An introductory letter may spark enough curiosity for a client to take your call and talk to you for a few minutes.  After all, you have about three short paragraphs, because a busy client who doesn’t know you won’t read an epistle.  If the client grasps what you do or takes your phone call, you have achieved a lot for a small investment of time.

If you try to accomplish more than these bare objectives, you may not achieve even them.  Niether the elevator speech of the introductory letter can differentiate you from your competitors or explain the full range of your services.  They certainly can’t persuade the client to hire you.  Trying to achieve these things is analogous to trying to fit three gallons of water into a one-gallon bucket; it makes a mess of the job.  In every contact with a client, remember what you objective is and you will have a better chance of accomplishing it.

And now I must stop before I try to get too much content from a small, if important, point.

We have all learned something the hard way, and those lessons tend to be well learned.  Those of us with little gray hair can use these experiences, the way rainmakers do, to persuade the client that we know better than to make such mistakes again.  Though we might not want to point out a mistake we made this week, stories about mistakes earlier in our careers can be compelling.

Bob Hillier, an architect who knows how to bring in business, showed how powerful the sadder-but-wiser anecdote can be, when a prospective client said to him, “I’ve had some bad experiences with architects. How can I be sure you’re going to bring this project in on budget.”  Everyone in the room knew that the engagement hung on the answer to this question.  I looked at Bob.  He responded with the following story:

When I had only been in business a short time, I won a project to help renovate a classroom building at a local university.  Our design substantially exceeded the client’s budget, but I thought it was so beautiful that I could talk them into spending the money. When I met with the facilities manager, he looked at my design and immediately asked what it would cost. I told him, and he handed me back my drawings and told me the engagement was over. I said I would redo the work to fit his budget, but he said no, he couldn’t work with someone who didn’t listen to him. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

With that story, so much more effective than promises or statistics, he won the engagement.

This story is powerful on several dimensions.  We all can identify the young architect trying to build a firm.  We can feel his devastation on being fired.  We all know that this lesson was well learned.  The listener was a facilities manager.  He could identify with the client in the story and feel the satisfaction of dealing abruptly with an architect who doesn’t listen.  He had probably wanted to fire several architects over the years but didn’t want to incur the costs of starting the projects anew.  The anecdote also shows that Bob is not just another posturing professional; he has enough humility to reference his own mistakes.

Here is a story that I heard an attorney tell to an accountant he was hoping to get referrals from:
When I was a young lawyer, I was trying a case in front of the judge with a reputation for being hard-nosed. I found myself getting so wrapped up in my client’s case at one point that I stopped and apologized. The judge got mad at me right there in front of my client. “How dare you apologize,” he said. “If you don’t feel emotional about your client’s case, why should I?”  Ever since then, I have never felt embarrassed about being emotionally committed to my clients’ cases.

This story is far more persuasive than a statement like, “I will really fight for any client you refer to me.”
So, think back to mistakes you made early in your career.  Is there grist in them for a good story that will make clients want to hire you?  Would you care to share your story?  If so, please post it on this site.

When my rainmaker-in-training clients talk about how hard it is to make time for business development, they often complain about the quantity of emails they get. Just throwing most of them away unopened takes time.

During one such discussion, a client named Steve posed the question: how many of the emails that we send out get tossed unopened, especially bulk, direct marketing mailings of whitepapers, newsletters and announcements. The answer: a lot. Just like us, busy clients faced with dozens of emails every day make blink-of-an-eye decisions about what to open and what not with a bias towards not. The busiest people, the c-suite executives we most want to remind of our services, don’t even make this decision themselves. A secretary is likely to trash anything that looks like a bulk mailing, before the boss even sees the notice of its arrival in her inbox.

As Steve noted in answering his own question, it’s important to see the problem from the client’s perspective. That isn’t too hard, because we all receive so much spam and bulk mail everyday. So, why do you open some of this mail and not others? Experience suggests that we are more likely to open emails when the subject line is personalized and provocative.

Our knowledge of many of the people we send emails to gives us an advantage over the spammers. We can often address the recipient by her first name in the subject line, something spammers try, but often lack the knowledge to do. If the recipient’s name is Katherine, and we know that she goes by Kay, rather than Kathy or Kate, we can differentiate our mailing from the spam by using her name in the subject line. As one executive secretary told me, “Everyone likes the sound of his own name.” Personalization also requires that Kay be the only person listed in the address column of your email In some cases we can further personalize the mailing by citing why the material in the mailing is relevant to a specific issue of importance to her. (“Kay, Relevant to Your Richmond Facility?”). If you can’t do that, you can at least make it provocative. (“Kay, Are New Trends in Exec Comp Causing Turnover?”)

I heard today that Steve has used this approach and found that his response rates have improved substantially

Too much success could lead you to using these techniques too often or to use them manipulatively. Two cautions.

1. Beware of deceptions. If you know a prospective client is called “Johnnie” by those who have known him for a long time and “John” by everyone else use the latter in your email. “Johnnie” would imply an intimacy that you don’t have, and a deception, no matter how small, is no way to attract the attention of someone you want to know.
   

Last week my contact management software reminded me to call Lois. She is the logical point of contact at a firm where I would like to do business. I have known Lois for five years and her boss for six. Over those years I have made 25 calls to one or the other of them, and exactly five have been returned. The last time I spoke with Lois, she informed me that they were working with a competitor. That was almost three years ago. Since then all efforts to contact Lois and her boss by phone have gone into a void. A few e-mails lobbed in for variety have also received no response.

What should I do? What would you do?

The answer, of course, depends on the reason my calls have gone unreturned. A little voice inside me says that Lois and her boss want nothing to do with me. But I have learned through many years of experience that it is the voice of my own insecurities. More probably, they find us too expensive and are uncomfortable saying so. Or they realize that my calls are not urgent and treat them as such. Or they are just busy. Still, three years is a long time. Whatever the reason, I have little enthusiasm for making the call. Another little voice inside me says that this is a waste of time, that nothing will ever come of calling these people. Once again, experience responds, cautioning me that one more call will cost me little, to which the first little voice says that a time comes to give up and refocus one’s energies elsewhere.

My deliberations were interrupted, and I put off deciding what to do.
This is a true story about a client I have been pursuing, except Lois’s name came up on my tickler file a couple of months ago, not last week. I did call and this time Lois called me back to invite me to pitch on some work. There was only one competitor and our chances of winning were good. Today she called to give us the go ahead.

I have many such stories after 30 years of business development. Over the years I have learned that an unreturned phone call means that someone did not return my call and little more. Others reinforce this belief. Christy Williams, a friend of mine, ran into a contact she had been trying to reach for months, leaving many messages. All her calls went unreturned. When she met the man at a conference, he greeted her enthusiastically saying that he had recently referred her to a prospective client. She thanked him and said, “Let’s stay in touch.” “What do you mean?” he responded, “We’ve been in touch.” He equated her unreturned phone calls with their being in touch.

A big part of rain making is persistence. Still, several times a week a name comes up on my tickler system of someone who has not responded to previous calls. And still, after all these years, the little voice inside me says to give up, that it is not worth the effort, that the person doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to talk with me. It is by learning to override that voice that I have become successful.