Never Say Sell. Tom McMakin

as easily as we might like to other potential buyers in the client company. The more degrees of separation from our buyer, the less you can lean on your hard-earned trust. Client organizations can be big – perhaps hundreds of potential buyers – and the further away from our buyer we get, the harder we have to work to rebuild trust with others. Additionally, we often run into competing circles of trust – where incumbent relationships may box us out from even being able to prove our integrity.

      Rob Benson, chief sales officer for Kele Inc., explains,

      If you're in there doing something really well, you may want to offer another service that your company provides. If the customer has an incumbent in there doing those services already and they're doing a really good job, it can be hard to win that business, especially if that incumbent is doing a good job and the customer does not see a need to make a change. It's a risky situation because if you're saying, “Oh, just give us a shot. Give us a try,” that's risky as that could cause the customer to consider other options for your existing services. It can be tough to break through that incumbent relationship.

When trying to walk across a client company, we need to remember that our credibility – our reputation for doing work – often travels more easily than our ability to prove our trustworthiness.

      Hurdle 5: Our client trusts us implicitly, but our reputation for being trustworthy doesn't always travel as quickly or as broadly as we'd like. Just because our buyer trusts us, does not mean that the buyer's counterpart in Johannesburg will trust us automatically. There may also be competing circles of trust that hinder our ability to even prove our integrity to other potential buyers in the organization.

      Ability and Readiness

      Almost by definition, if we have engaged with a client, the client must have been ready and had the ability to pull the trigger on a contract with us. The company was prosperous enough to enable an engagement and, importantly, the project lead inside the client company was personally ready to tackle a new initiative and had the support of his or her boss.

      It's a mistake, however, to think just because the ability and readiness stars aligned in one division of the company, they similarly align in other divisions – even if we are trying to engage with someone who is the functional equivalent of our current buyer. Likewise, we can never assume that just because a client was ready and able to engage with us around one of our service lines that the client is equally ready and able to engage with us around other service lines.

      Hurdle 6: Clients need to have the resources and bandwidth to take on new projects. That they are ready and able to engage with us on one project doesn't mean that they are able to engage with us on a second, related project or that their peers in other parts of a client organization are similarly ready and able to engage.

The First Challenge

      The first challenge to expanding our relationship with a client is that the language we learned as hunters doesn't serve us well in the world of farming. Both hunting and farming bring in new revenues, but this fact masks other, more profound differences. The seven elements describe how clients come to know us, understand what we do, and ultimately engage our services. That description, however, is not helpful as we think about how to expand our mandates with current clients. It is not enough that, as professionals, we weren't trained in business development; now we learn that what we know about landing new clients bears little resemblance to the skillset needed to grow that client.

Note

      1 * Close readers will note that in How Clients Buy, the word respect was used here instead of credibility. Upon further study and reflection, the authors think credibility – or respect for one's work – is the best term to characterize this element.