Years ago I was put in charge of a practice that was losing pitch after pitch to one competitor.  We turned it around and, in time, were winning more than we lost.

One contributor to the fix was Matthew.  Matthew was the CEO of an insurance company who had hired our competitor, fired them and hired us to finish the job.  He was willing to compare his experiences with the two firms, and we used him as a reference again and again.

Your competitor isn’t always the one who refers the client to the bad reference.  I once helped a client hire a real estate brokerage firm.  Three firms presented their qualifications and two stood out as better qualified.  I asked each for three references and called them all.  One was critical of the service he had received. “They seemed to be over committed.  They were slow to return phone calls and in getting things done.  I wouldn’t work with them again,” he said.  The client went with the other firm.

Never ignore a bad reference. It can undermine everything else you do, Here are some ways to deal with one.

Don’t use them: 
If you have the slightest suspicion that someone may be giving you a bad reference, don’t use them. When you pick a reference, you don’t want someone who will hurt you or who will be even-handed; you want an advocate.  If you think that a competitor may be referring prospective clients to a bad reference, check it out.  Have a close friend hire you for a modest amount and have her check the reference.

Send a fresh face:
Have someone from the firm, preferably someone senior whom the bad reference hasn’t met before, call and say that she has heard the reference is unhappy with the firm and wants to meet to hear what happened.  A nonparticipant in the former work will get better information, because people often feel inhibited talking directly to someone about his shortcomings. The fresh face will remind the client simply by her presence that he is hurting people who have done him no harm when he lambasts your firm.  A high-level person calling the client will show the issue’s importance to the firm.

Let him vent: 
At this meeting, your colleague should let the client vent any frustration he feels.  This requires listening without defending the firm or its staff.  If your colleague can express empathy without agreement with what the client says, she should do so.  (“I can see this whole affair has left you highly frustrated.”  “If I believed someone had done that to me, I’d be pretty upset, too.”)  Venting will sometimes relieve the client’s need to be heard on the issue.  Once he gets that behind him, he may not badmouth as frequently or as strongly as in the past.

Confirm that the client has been heard:
Your colleague should concisely restate what the client has said, so he will know he has been heard.(“Let me repeat what I have heard, so I can be sure I got it right.”)

Respond when it is appropriate to do so: 
The colleague should thank the client for his time and for sharing his concerns.  If she is able to respond then and there, fine.  More typically she promises to look into the accusation and get back to him by a specific date.  If pressured, she should reiterate that the situation obviously needs looking into and make amends.  This is especially true if there might be legal implications as a result of acknowledging fault.

Explain any misunderstandings:
Do so without blaming the client. (“Actually, Peter was right in not giving you the information you asked for.  Doing so would have broken the law.  Unfortunately, that was never made clear to you.”)

Allow the client to save face, if he was in error: 
Bend over backwards to be understanding towards a client’s mistake.  His pride will often be salvaged by words like, ”Well, I guess this wasn’t the finest hour of either of our organizations.”

Consider apologizing when your firm was in error:
Consult a lawyer before doing so.  Most people appreciate an apology and will think better of you for making one, if you were at fault.  It can go a long way to healing a wound.  If you are at fault, you may not be able to better the situation without one.

Do something nice: 
If the client seems amenable to making up, consider sending flowers or a gift certificate to a nice restaurant, as a way to compensate him for personal aggravation.  Before doing so, make sure that there is no policy at the client’s company that would make accepting such a gift improper.

Allow time to pass: 
Over time we all tend to lose our anger over trespasses committed against us in our lives.  With the perspective that time gives, we often see that we weren’t entirely without blame, ourselves.  This is true of clients, too.  Go out of your way to be friendly and helpful to an unhappy client and eventually you will win him over.  You may even win him back.

Does LinkedIn offer any value when it comes to selling professional services? In his blog Contrarian Consulting Million Dollar Consulting author Alan Weiss writes “This is a mild diversion with limited utility for serious entrepreneurs and consultants in a world where time is a non-renewable resource. Worse, it has created a cultish behavior among many of its adherents who see the leaf and not the tree or the forest.”

As you can imagine, it’s been a controversial post, generating lots of comments.

I responded to Alan that the biggest problem with social networks is that trust, necessary for a good relationship, doesn’t travel well over the Ethernet. A number of my clients have found LinkedIn quite helpful by overcoming this limitation under certain conditions.

Many have found signing people up a good way to rekindle old relationships. By agreeing to link the contact implies openness to a networking relationship. Here trust was established before any linkage through LinkedIn.

Some, who have local markets, use LinkedIn to identify people they want to know and then seek introductions through a mutual contact identified by the system. These people then meet the new contact for breakfast or lunch, broken bread being a superior medium for developing trust.

These are but two examples. In all cases, those who get a lot out of LinkedIn put a lot into it. No surprise there.

I do believe that “there is a pony in there somewhere,” if you know the old joke. If enough people work at it, some will find ways to make use of what is a phenomenal data base of relationships. But it’s not for everyone.

Alan didn’t agree.

How about you, has LinkedIn helped you network? Do you put much time or effort into it?

(Read Alan’s post Weak Link and all its comments here.)

Yesterday, an executive recruiter and I wrestled with how he could break the lock a competitor has on a client he wants.  I suspect that others may be interested in this subject, too.

My first reaction to this question is, why bother?  Breaking a competitor’s lock is time consuming and risky.  In other words, it’s expensive and there is a fair chance you won’t succeed for a long time.

Entrenched competitors sometimes make huge profits off accounts that hire them exclusively and will go to great lengths to protect their position.

On three occasions strategy consulting clients of our firm have developed opportunities at accounts that employ a world-famous strategy consulting firm to do most of their work.  They found buyers in the companies not wedded to the competitor, won their trust, and identified and developed an opportunity. In the eleventh hour, the competitor became aware of the opportunities and won the work by offering to do the projects for free.  For free.  Just to keep a competitor from gaining a toehold.

(If I were the CEO of one of the companies receiving such a gift, I would wonder where the money came from to pay the costs of these “free” projects.)

Instead of attacking such a fortified castle, it’s often wiser to go after a client more open to hiring you.  But sometimes there are extenuating circumstances.  The account may be strategically important.  It might be a local account, offering work close to home, if you can win it.  Whatever the reason for going after it, here are some things you can try:

Niching strategies:
There are several hit-it-where-they-ain’t approaches.

• Find a service niche:  In their classic book, Strategic Selling (available in a revised edition called The New Strategic Selling by Heiman and Sanchez), Miller and Heiman recommend breaking into an account dominated by a competitor by pursuing a niche that the competitor doesn’t serve or doesn’t serve well.  This is good advice, if there is a niche service that a) you serve, b) the competitor doesn’t, and c) the clients wants.  If the competitor is much larger than you are, there may be no such niche.

• Find a disenchanted buyer:  If the competitors have been working the account for a long time, there is a good chance they have made enemies.  Seek out and sell to someone who wants to give work to someone other than the entrenched competitor.

• Find a location:  Focus your initial approach on a geographic area where you have an office, but the competitor doesn’t.   Demonstrate as often as you can the responsiveness that your greater proximity permits.  If there is a cultural or linguistic difference that creates barriers for your competitor, so much the better.

Wait for the competitor to make a mistake:
You want to be at the front of the line should the client become disenchanted with the firm it is using.  You get there by finding ways to meet the buyers at the client, staying in front of them by being helpful, reminding them of your interest . . .and waiting.

Wait for a change in the players:
The relationship the client has with the competitor may be largely with one person in the competing firm.  If that is so, it will be greatly weakened should that person leave the firm.  Similarly, a senior executive joining the company from outside may feel no loyalty to the competitor and give you a shot at the work.  Companies are notoriously loyal to their actuarial advisors.   A rainmaker I know at such a firm focuses primarily on migrating executives to win work at new clients and is one of the most effective client-getters at the firm.

Lose now to win later:
Clients will sometimes solicit bids on projects to ensure they get a fair price from the firm they expect to hire anyway.  Losing a couple of projects this way puts you in a position to meet with a senior person at the company and say,

We have lost three projects we have competed on, all of which you awarded to XYZ.  You have a long history with XYZ and they are a good firm.  We can understand why you might feel loyal to them.  At the same time, it is expensive for us to go after projects like the ones you asked us to bid on.  We accept that as a cost of business, if we really have a chance to win, but we can’t afford to go after work repeatedly at a company that has no intent to actually hire us.  So, I am here to ask you if we really have a shot at working for this company and what we have to do to win that we aren’t currently doing. 

Some clients will spread work around as a matter of fairness, when approached in such a forthright manner.  If you don’t like the answer you get, reduce the time and effort you spend pursuing this account.

Do something nice:
Do something that will capture the client’s attention. One accounting firm started to win work at a company after it invited the CFO to share a podium with them at an industry event.  They spent a day with the client, split between preparing and playing golf.  Soon afterwards, they were awarded a project.  That was about five years ago.  Today, it is a major account.