How Do the Seven Elements Apply?
Using the seven elements as our guide, engaging more deeply with an existing client should be easy.
1 Clients are already aware of our firm.
2 Clients understand what our firm does.
3 Clients have an interest in us because we're already helping them on a project.
4 Clients respect our work, meaning we've earned credibility as they know we'll get the job done.
5 Clients trust us because in ways large and small, we have demonstrated we have their back.
You should only have to wait until:
They have budget and are able to pull the trigger on new projects.
They have support organizationally and are ready to pull the trigger.
Sadly, it's not that easy. You pole-vaulted over the high bar once to win the work, but now you're running 1,000-meter hurdles.
Awareness
If you work for a client, they know who you are. That's self-evident. Maybe you have been working shoulder-to-shoulder with them for the past 36 months, building a hiring, training, and retention model that will support their growing workforce needs. They know you. You've gone out to Ruth Chris's for fancy steaks that cost more than an upgrade on United. You've eaten mushroom and sausage pizza late at night as you worked to get a project phase done before your client had a status presentation due. You've visited them in their shop, and they have visited you. You've swapped Netflix suggestions. You know each other.
But, do your buyer's colleagues know you? The answer, probably, is no. We all run into this. Our buyer's colleagues might have heard of our firm, but, just as possible, they have a vague impression that our buyer is simply “doing good work on that initiative” on his own. Although we may feel like ‘insiders,’ we may still be completely unknown to others in the company.
Hurdle 1: We are not known outside a small cadre of people with whom we are collaborating on a specific project. We lack broad awareness within the client organization.
Understanding
When we work with a client, they know what we do.
Maybe you offered to audit their marketing mix and how efficiently their spending was generating traffic. When you show up in their offices, they know you to be the “marketing analytics team.” They definitely know what you do and your capabilities, because when they first engaged with you, they called references and asked questions like, “Did you feel like the quality of their marketing analytics work stood up to firm-wide scrutiny?” You know they understand what you do because when they have a problem making sense of marketing data given to them by online sites or media buyers, they turn the data over to you and ask you to make sense of it for them.
But perhaps they've come to think that your firm only specializes in marketing analytics. Do they know your firm also does media buying, graphic design, and copywriting? Or do they just think of you as the data folks?
Hurdle 2: The full range of our capabilities is not known – even to clients who know us well – because they have come to define us in terms of the capabilities we offer them now. They lack a complete understanding of all the services we are equally capable of offering them.
Interest
Our clients would not have engaged with us if we had not been responding to a felt need on their part. All business objectives lace their way through an analysis of causes and a strategy on their way to a statement of a problem to be solved. For example, a client may want to raise revenues and decides that its poorly trained sales force is the reason it is not selling as much as benchmark companies. The chief sales officer of a company asks her head of training to throw out a net to people they know to identify great sales trainers. Your name is given to the head of training by a satisfied client who was asked for suggestions, and you get the gig. Perfect. In short order you're invited to solve precisely the kind of problem you have decades of experience addressing.
But, once you're in and doing your thing, there's no guarantee you'll get a shot at the next problem you are qualified to solve. Maybe you do some sales trainings that go well. But you quickly see that the client also needs to do a better job of recruiting experienced salespeople and updating their compensation system to better align with the goals they are trying to achieve. However, your project lead inside the company, the head of sales training, has a single task he or she has been assigned – to beef up sales training – and has no interest in your other ideas or services. You don't have access to the chief sales officer who decided the secret to more sales is better sales training, leaving you unable to get either the chief sales officer or the head of sales training interested in your additional services.
Hurdle 3: Our client has identified a nail and we were hired as a hammer. Sometimes, however, we see a problem where a Phillips-head screwdriver is a better solution, but the buyer with whom we are working has no interest.
Credibility
We've earned credibility when a client knows and respects our work. A client might say, “Joe was on my team when I was at AT&T. He's on his own now, but no one knows revenue recovery better.” If you're Joe, this is the kind of experience-based recommendation that leads to new work. Hopefully, once we are engaged with the client, our work is shining on its own, lighting the way to new engagements. When we first pitched the client, we were at a disadvantage, having to talk about our work. Expert services work, however, is better demonstrated than described. When we work next to someone in the trenches, we may come to believe he or she is tenacious, insightful, highly capable, and possessed of sound judgment. Once we are working on a project inside a client, the credibility bar is much lower than when we were on the outside peeking in. They have seen first-hand that we can do the work.
This is harder, though, when we try and do work for new buyers within a client who don't know us, or when we try to tell current buyers that we're capable of different kinds of services.
Hurdle 4: Our client knows the quality of our work, but we struggle to get others in the organization to see that quality. Or, we do good work and offer to perform a new service only to find our clients think of us as a one-trick pony. Our credibility is hard to scale – across services and across relationships.
Trust
When we work with clients, we have the opportunity to do the right thing when their backs are turned, and we can demonstrate that we can be trusted with caring for their interests.
We are sometimes given a choice between leaning in the direction of our client – prioritizing transparency and investing in the relationship – or leaning in the direction of ourselves and our interests. Say, for example, you're in a meeting with your buyer and her boss, presenting to the boss on the results of a project you've just completed. Her boss is giving you high praise for the work your firm has done. You notice your buyer looks frustrated for the lack of acknowledgment she's getting (even though you did in fact do 90% of the work). One option is to accept that praise fully and take this as an opportunity to try to win more work from the boss. Instead, you use this as an opportunity to praise your buyer in front of her boss – underscoring the team effort of the project and how great she was to work with. This is how trust is created – one act at a time. You're investing in the long game.
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