Do you know how your clients spend their time?  You should.  That information can help you in numerous ways.  First, it will reveal their priorities, and to a large degree, their priorities are yours, too.  You want to work on things that are most important to them.  And knowing how the client spends her time will sometimes reveal opportunities to cross sell other services your firm offers.  A lawyer I know, who was trying to schedule a meeting with a client, learned as a byproduct that the client was planning a trip to Boston.  “What takes you to Boston?” asked the lawyer.  “We’re thinking of acquiring a firm up there,” responded the client.  The Boston office of the lawyer’s firm ended up doing the legal work associated with the purchase.  If the lawyer hadn’t been curious about how the client was spending this time, this never would have happened.

Knowing how a client spend her time can also tell you when your priorities are out of sync with hers.  A management consultant I once worked with couldn’t understand why a client delayed authorizing a project that would save his company over $40 million.  When he finally asked the client what was holding things up, the client replied that he was currently working on two projects that would each save over $100 million.  He would get to the consultant’s project once those efforts were completed and he had more time.  With this knowledge, the consultant was able to shift his own priorities away from making an immediate sale.

The way a client spends her time has implications for how she interacts with us.  A client who spends ten percent of her time meeting with service providers to keep abreast of what is going on in the marketplace will respond differently to your calls and requests for meetings from one who rarely does so.  One who spends all his time in internal meetings will want to interact with you quite differently from one who prepares legal documents, crunches numbers, writes reports or creates drawings under deadlines.

Knowing how a client spends leisure time can also be helpful.  An accountant learned that an executive he wanted to do business with teed up at the golf course at the same time every Saturday morning with three friends.  The accountant, a member of the same golf club, took to hanging around the first tee at the right hour on Saturdays.  Sure enough, one Saturday one of the foursome failed to show, and the executive and his friends invited the accountant to join them.  The executive ultimately became a client.

So how do your clients spend their time?  If you don’t know, you had better find out.

In an earlier post (Seeing Events Through a Rainmaker’s Eyes, Part 1) I described how rainmakers tend to see things differently from the rest of us. In that post I provided examples of two things that we might see as negative that a rainmaker is likely to see more positively. They also tend to see as positive things that we hardly note at all. Here are three examples of that:

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An extra person from a client organization turns up for a meeting about our work.

• How we might see it: A need for an extra set of the documents we provided
• How rainmakers see it: Another person in the client organization for me to know and a potential future client, herself

A client calls, asking for a small amount of additional information.

• How we might see it: A need to provide a small additional service within the scope of our work or another to-do list item
• How rainmakers see it: A possible reason to go see the client and for a conversation that can cover other things I want to hear about, too

A break is called at a meeting attended by many members of the client organization.

• How we might see it: A chance to check email and voicemail
• How rainmakers see it: A chance to meet and advance relationships

As before, it is not that the rainmakers are right and the rest of us are wrong. All of the interpretations listed are reasonable. But rainmakers see opportunities for small advances in developing relationships that may lead to more business. By taking advantage of many such small opportunities, they sometimes get an assignment. We can, too. If we work at it, we can teach ourselves to see these opportunities, too.

John was a young professional assigned to work with a team at a client’s office complex.  Late one Friday afternoon he stopped by the office of Bill, the Vice President in the client organization to whom John and his team reported.  He had a question that needed an answer if he was to keep his team working the following week.

Bill seemed busy, but the question was important enough that he took time to pick it apart with John until they found an answer.  As John turned to leave, Bill said, “Have you got a minute more?  I’d like to ask you a question.  I have my monthly meeting with Tom Monday morning, [Tom was the EVP to whom Bill reported], and I’d like to go over something I plan to say to him.”  For the next hour, John helped his client work through how he would handle some tough issues with his boss the next day.  This was, of course, outside the scope of his assignment.

The following Monday John ran into Bill in the hall and asked him how the meeting had gone.  Bill, obviously happy, gave him a quick summary of what had happened.

This was the first time that John had ever provided career coaching to a client and he liked it.  He realized that his stature had risen in Bill’s eyes.  He also learned things about what was going on within the client organization and about important people who worked there that he might never have known otherwise.  Later in the month, he was able to use some of this information in the way he responded to a question that EVP Tom asked during a meeting.  Without having to disclose that he knew something that was not generally known, the knowledge helped shape his work and the way he spoke with his client.

Bill had told him that he had a monthly meeting with Tom.  Noting that the men had met on the first Monday of the month, John found an excuse to drop by Bill’s office the Friday night before the first Monday of the following month.  Sure enough, Bill asked for John’s reaction to something he planned to say to Tom the next Monday.

The matter that John and his team were working on ended months ago, but they are all still there working on other assignments for the client.  And on the Friday afternoon before the first Monday of every month, John stops by Bill’s office to go over the meeting that Bill will have with Tom.  This has never been formally arranged and it’s outside the scope of any of John’s work.  But both men have come to expect it and both get a lot out of it.

(Two earlier posts, Networking Up, Part 1 and Part 2, described how rainmakers network with executives, who are their seniors in age, authority and income.  Here is another on the subject.)

Few of us can shanty up to a senior executive’s office and just pop our heads in to say hello.  These are busy people and they have little time for casual visits.   Gatekeepers bar entrance to those who might fritter away the executives’ time.  So, even if you meet a senior executive during the course of your work, maintaining contact is hard.  To do so requires knowing more things of substance to share with her than most of us do.  And, if you don’t maintain contact, you will lose the relationship.

Carl whose slow, easy-going manner masked a fast, hard-charging mind, was easy to talk to and even easier to underestimate.  He built relationships with senior execs and so a successful practice, also cross selling many of his firm’s other services.  The execs learned that he was an astute observer of their organizations and so, worth talking to.  He was well briefed on matters that were just beginning to filter up to the executive suite.  His way of coming up with insights into client organizations, like many successful rainmaking techniques, was simple:  He drank a lot of coffee and listened to gossip.

“People want to target the big guys in an organization and not waste time on people in lower levels. They forget that you can’t just buy a senior executive a cup of coffee and have a chat, but you can with someone lower in the organization.  Those people will tell you what is going on and what you need to know to talk with someone higher up,” Carl explained.  “Talk with enough of them and you can learn about anything you want to know.”

Of course, Carl isn’t the first to discoverer of this technique.  In modified ways, it has been used by professionals for a long time.  In some current cases, LinkedIn replaces coffee as the medium through which information is passed.  But the underlying method is the same and forever being rediscovered, because it works so well.

Two years ago I was coaching a young German strategy consultant.  When I asked him to make some calls, he refused, arguing that later in the week he had a meeting with the general manager of a major business unit of his biggest account.  “I need to spend my time figuring out what I am going to say,” he protested.  I asked if he knew people working in the business unit with whom he could gossip a bit.  He did and agreed to call and talk with them.  Half an hour later, he came back beaming; one of the people he had talked to had laid out an agenda for his meeting with the boss.

Coffee and gossip, that’s not a bad way to spend some time each day!

When you lose a sale, it’s an opportunity to learn something about yourself and your firm and also about your competitors. Recently, I spoke with Ken Sawka, Managing Partner of Outward Insights, a competitive intelligence consulting firm, and asked him how a firm could get the most from these opportunities. He had suggestions well worth passing on.

Where I had expected to learn some unusual questioning techniques, he immediately spoke of how the debrief with the client fit into a larger process. Sawka suggests that you seldom learn the most valuable insights from a single debrief. Rather, you learn lots of pieces from a variety of sources that allow you to put together a picture of how to fix a competitive disadvantage. The sources include:

• Debriefs with the partners leading all major pursuits, whether wins or losses.
• Debriefs with clients on both wins and losses.
• Interviews with alumni of firms you compete with.
• Competitors’ and your own marketing materials, such a websites, with specific attention to how changes in them suggest changes in what the competitors view as how best to compete.

All of these sources have their weaknesses and biases, but combined they can give you lots of raw information.

Your own biases complicate the analysis of this information, says Sawka. “If you are convinced that the competitor is beating you on price, you can probably find validation in the data, even if price is only a part of the problem.”

To avoid making this mistake, Sawka recommends developing a number of competitive themes, such as, a) the clients are buying on price, b) Competitor A’s reputation for x is stronger than ours, c) our range of service is a major factor when we win. Then see what information you have supporting or negating each. This usually provides you with a richer and more valuable understanding of your competitive situation.

Ken provided this illustration of his point:  When a large technology consulting firm began to lose projects to competitors who were outsourcing work to India, they tried to compete on price. Though they cut costs as fast as they could, competitors matched and exceeded every price drop, and the firm continued to lose.

Research, encompassing all the sources listed above, showed them that clients didn’t think of the firm as low cost. Rather, they valued its processes and methodologies which increased the chance of success on complicated projects. They didn’t want to risk giving that kind of work to the cost-cutting competitors.

The more they had tried to compete on price, the more they had lost. As soon as they focused on complex, demanding projects, their win rates climbed—and at higher prices.

Ken’s blog can be found at www.outwardinsights.blogspot.com

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.

To what extent can emails be used in place of phone calls and face-to-face meetings when maintaining and developing relationships with clients and other important network contacts?

This question is asked by someone in every group of aspiring rainmakers I work with.  Sometimes the speaker asks hopefully, wishing to avoid phone calls.  At others the speaker is trying to sort out mixed messages he is getting from different clients.  Or she may be wrestling with the perennial juggling of client work with business development and may see emails as a partial solution.

One way or another it is a question that every professional seeking to become a rainmaker must answer.

Nor is it as trivial a question as it might at first appear.  How you answer it affects the effectiveness and cost of your efforts to develop business.  Because the answer will vary from one network contact to another and even with the same contact over time, it is a question you must answer several times a day . . .for the rest of your career. There is good reason, then, for asking the question.

Four bloggers have all agreed to post their answers to the email question simultaneously, each offering a different perspective, with all responses linked.  They are:

• Brian Carroll, author and expert in lead generation on the complex sale.  His post can be found at  blog.startwithalead.com/

• Tom Kane, expert in marketing and selling legal services.  His post can be found at www.legalmarketingblog.com/

• Mark Buckshon, prodigious blogger and expert on the sale of design and construction services. His post can be found at www.constructionmarketingideas.blogspot.com/

• And me.  My post “Email, Call or Go See?” follows:

Email, Call or Go See?

What’s more effective, emails, phone calls or in-person meetings? Each time you contact a client or other member of your network, you are, in effect, assessing the desirability of these alternative forms of communication in terms of practical consideration, your objectives, and your and your contact’s preferences. Usually, this is a split-second decision. At other times, it requires consideration. Here are some guidelines to check you decisions against:

General Guidelines

1. You need to use a mix of communications channels with each person in your network. This means that if you have communicated largely by email over the past year, it’s probably time to get face to face or to talk by phone with her again.

2. A client’s preference for one channel over another should weigh heavily in your choice, but it is not the only consideration. Your needs count, too. For example, if you have largely respected the client’s preference for email over the past year, it may now be time to get face-to-face to warm up the relationship.

3. Telephone calls are the great compromise between the other two channels to your contacts. They provide most of the information obtained face to face, allow give and take and the shifting of subjects to redirect the conversation to subjects that are productive for all parties. But they cost a fraction of what a meeting does in time and money. You need to make lots of phone calls.

Face-to-face meetings are best when:

1. You want to establish relationships. Good relationships are based on trust. Trust travels better through the medium of broken bread than it does through the Ethernet.

2. You want to advance relationships. Relationships are based on frequency of contact, shared values and shared experiences. The last of these is provided most effectively face to face. A mechanical engineer participated in charities that large real estate owners and managers participated in, too. Working with them on these worthy causes greatly strengthened his relationship with them.

3. You want the contact to remember your involvement in a matter. If you introduce two people who are likely to receive high value from knowing each other, it would be wise to host the lunch when they first meet. Otherwise, they are likely to forget your involvement.

4. A client clearly intends to hire you to address a matter, but is always too busy to get around to it. Get in front of him, and, chances are, he will take advantage of the moment to get things started.

5. You can take advantage of trips and association meetings to reduce their cost. Meeting with people is time consuming and expensive, often prohibitively so, if the client is at a distance. If you have a meeting with one person at a client company, use the visit as an excuse to drop by to see other people you know in the building. Or take a late flight home so that you have a chance to meet with another contact in the same city. Use an association meeting to get face to face with dozens of people it would be impractical to go see.

6.You want to gather sensitive information. Phone calls are second best. Neither requires leaving a written record.

The telephone is best when:

1. It’s important to control the costs of maintaining a network and still get the benefit of give-and-take exchanges. A locally based contact from your A List might get three or four calls from you for every time you meet. One from you B List might get between six and eight calls for every meeting.

2. A lot of give-and-take is required. In such cases, phone calls and meetings are usually more efficient.

3. You want to make an indirect probe. If, for example, you want to ask if any progress has been made towards the approval of your proposal, but don’t want to disturb the client yet again for this purpose, you can call to give him information you have come across about a competitor or something else he would be interested in. Then at the end of the conversation, you can say, “By the way, as long as I have you on the phone, has any progress been . . . .”

Email is best when:

1. You want to remind clients of what you do and that you are thinking about them. One goal of frequent contact is to capture mindshare. Sending a client regular emails, as long as they have substance, is a way to that. As one rainmaker expressed it to me, regular mailings of articles and whitepapers demonstrating the firm’s intellectual capital are one way of saying, “PING! I’m still here. PING! I’m thinking about you. PING! This is what I do.” But avoid passing on what might be seen as spam.

2. You need to confirm meetings and to summarize their results. This is good professional practice and gets you two extra PINGs from the meeting.

3. Your message is long and complex. You can plan what you say more carefully and the reader can review your thoughts several times and contemplate on them.

4. When you want to create a record of a contact.

So, before you send an email, look deep into your heart and ask yourself if it is the right thing to do, or if your doing it because you are . . . , well, . . . chicken! And if you are agonizing over the choice between email and phone, get over it! Pick up the phone and dial!

During the first downturn I experienced as a management consultant, I almost took on a project ill-suited to our firm.

Had we taken it, the probability of failure would have been high.  But I was focused on keeping my team employed and had rationalized all problems away.

Fortunately, a boss, more worldly wise than I was, stopped me, saying, “Hunger spoils one’s judgment.  In tough times it’s especially important to remind yourself that the client’s best interests come first.”

Bad times have come again, and this week’s news makes a recovery look further away than ever.  So, I pass the caution on to you.  Don’t let hunger spoil your judgment.  True professionals always put the client’s interests first.

To what extent can you substitute emails for telephone calls and face-to-face meetings when maintaining and developing relationships with clients and other key market contacts?

The answer to this frequently-asked-question affects how you spend your precious business development time and money.  Getting it right will improve your sales effectiveness.  No wonder it’s so frequently asked.  But what is the answer?

On September 22, four bloggers will post their answers simultaneously.  They are:

1)  Brian Carroll, specialist and noted author on generating leads for the complex sale.

2)  Tom Kane, specialist on marketing and selling legal services.

3)  Mark Buckshon, prodigious blogger and special on marketing and selling design and construction services.

4)   Me

We hope this attention to the issue generates conversation on the subject with all of our readers.

Professionals often tell me that clients are too busy to take calls that aren’t made for urgent reasons. They worry that the clients will be annoyed. 

If you ask them why they feel this way, they will say that they would be annoyed if the call came to them.  Then ask them to think of a client they haven’t talked to for a couple of years.  How would they feel if she called them?  They say it would be nice, but different than a call they would initiate, because the client isn’t trying to sell them something. 

The answer to this concern is simple: Don’t try to sell her something. Call her because you like her and would like to know how she is doing.  Call her because you have useful information to share with her.  But . . . the argument drags on and isn’t satisfactory to anyone.

There is a better way to get at these concerns; suggest that the professionals take a client to lunch and ask her how she feels about getting such calls.  Get the straight dope from the horse’s mouth on the level, as it were.  Let the clients speak for themselves.  Here are some things clients have said when asked:
 
1>     Your competitors bring us ideas we find helpful. I always wondered why your people don’t.

2>     When we were doing business together you would call and talk with me regularly.  Now I never hear from you.  Don’t you like me anymore?
 
3>     Would it help you if I introduced you to other people in our firm who could use your services?

4>     I always pick up something from the occasional call.

So, if you have doubts about how a client will feel about your staying in touch, ask her.  If you listen to it, the market is a great teacher.