Shill, a passionate man, erupted.
“What are you talking about? We are the fucking ambulance! If you don't think we can help people and that we can add value, then you need to look for another job. We have a moral obligation to use our skills to solve their problems.”
Our observation, after a collective 50-plus years in expert services, is that there is a strong correlation between expert services and aversion to what is perceived as selling. Interestingly, it seems to grow stronger as you move into job descriptions that require unique degrees or certifications, such as the legal or accounting professions. A photo on a bus bench might be effective for a realtor, but it would be unimaginable for a top-tier attorney. Somehow, we think if we are good, the world should beat a path to our door. But the truth is that experts should feel a moral obligation to assist clients in need: We should be the ambulance when our clients need help.
CHAPTER 1 From Foothold to Footprint
We're jetting back and forth across the country visiting clients. It's Friday afternoon, and we are looking forward to finally spending a weekend at home. Jacob, the younger of us, is thinking about the prospect of winning Spokane's Hoopfest for the third year in a row with his in-laws. Tom is dreaming about scouting for elk in southwestern Montana in preparation for hunting season.
We are coming off a two-day string of meetings in Manhattan with clients and prospects. It's been a fast-paced and satisfying trip, but as we contemplate our travel home, with the long layover and dozens of follow-up emails from our last two days, we both let out a sigh.
Tom's wearing a blue suit, print tie, and black lace-up shoes. Jacob's sporting a natty charcoal suit, no tie, and brown shoes with green argyle socks. Two businesspeople, each with varying degrees of gray hair, pushing our way through LaGuardia on our way home.
We duck into the bathroom at the east end of the terminal, and change from our suits into jeans, comfortable shoes, and sweaters for flight back home. Tom is headed to Bozeman while Jacob will part ways with him in Salt Lake City and head home to Spokane.
There are certain rules to changing at the airport. Don't pick a stall without a hook, don't take off your socks, and don't put the roller board on the toilet seat or it won't stop flushing.
Like you, we're road warriors, crisscrossing the country in service of our clients. Our particular expertise is helping expert services firms drive business development, but we could equally be accountants, human resources specialists, attorneys, software integrators, engineers, strategy consultants, or cybersecurity wizards.
We all share one thing in common: We are fellow travelers in the land of building trust and credibility in an effort to sell our expertise. We recognize problems in client companies and help them meet those challenges. This work looks different across the spectrum of professional services, but the work all aims to accomplish the same outcome for clients: to innovate, to solve, to create, and to build.
The Economist recently wrote that consultants “scare companies by laying bare where they are failing, then soothe them with counsel on how to improve.” We don't agree with the “scaring” part – that sounds like the kind of sales manipulation we hate – but we do know that expert services providers work to help improve their clients. As experts, we offer our experience, our point of view, our intelligence, our training, and the bitter lessons we have learned from doing what we do for many years.
The Question
This book is a sequel of sorts to a book Tom wrote with Doug Fletcher called How Clients Buy: A Practical Guide to Business Development for Consulting and Professional Services. In that book, we asked the question,
What's the secret to winning new work in professional services?
We interviewed rainmakers at leading legal, consulting, engineering, and financial services firms to learn more about the process of how clients engage with expert services providers. We learned a lot, but the book wasn't out long before many of you wrote us to say: What we're really interested in is expanding our relationships with our current clients. How do we do that?
This feedback isn't surprising. When we ask expert services providers how much of their year-over-year growth in revenues comes from new logos versus expanded assignments, they report new work with existing clients represents an astonishing 80% to 90% of new revenues. We see those same numbers at our company, Profitable Ideas Exchange (PIE™). In the short run, at least, expanding current relationships represents a much larger opportunity than cold calling new prospects.
Sometimes we hear rainmakers talk about how they work to “land and expand” a client. If How Clients Buy gave us landing lessons, Never Say Sell describes how to expand, asking a simple question,
What's the secret to growing your work within clients?
Expert Services Are Different
In How Clients Buy, we learned that expert services are bought differently than, say, a laptop. Tom and his wife, Mary, just bought a new family computer and landed on a Lenovo X1 (on sale at Costco with 16 GB of RAM!). They did the research, comparing processor speed, reliability tests, weight, size, color, storage capacity, and price. They relied on PC Magazine's side-by-side descriptions, building out a matrix that laid out various laptops' key qualities. Then they compared the qualities that were most important to each of them. Mary wanted something light and fast; Tom wanted something that would last for years. Both agreed they would mostly use it for email and the Internet.
Tom and Mary ranked several machines they identified against their priorities, narrowing the choices and easily making the final decision. This approach to buying, call it the “Excel-driven comparative shopping method,” is the way we buy cars, phones, and air travel as we seek to balance features and attributes in the search for a good fit with our needs and budget.
That's not how we buy expert services, however. Expert services are bought on reputation, referral, and relationships, not features and attributes or even price.
As Michael McLaughlin has written, “What sets service providers apart from other sellers is that (we) are first and foremost idea merchants.”
For example, imagine your parents have retired to the coral beaches of Naples, Florida. They are of an age where it doesn't make sense for them to do their taxes (they can't remember where they put their car keys, much less whether their K-1 income qualifies for a 20% deduction this year). They call you one day and say, “Can you help us find someone down here who can do our taxes?”
You don't have any idea whom you should use. There's no PC Magazine that ranks Floridian tax accountants and no online grid that balances services against price and quality. You fly down to see them at Thanksgiving, take a Lyft to the graduated assisted living facility, and spot a billboard on the side of the road that says, “McMakin and Parks: Collier County's Smartest CPAs.” You chuckle because that is a bold and somewhat ridiculous claim.
You pick up a brochure in the lobby of their living facility. It proclaims, “Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe: Paradise Coast's Cheapest CPAs.” You chuckle again. That's not what you are looking for. You want a good tax accountant, not to take the last penny off the table. Indeed, you find yourself wondering if there might be an inverse relationship between the price an expert services provider charges and perceived quality. After all, a $1,500-per-hour San Francisco attorney is thought to be better than one that charges $150 per hour.
In the end, you call a friend from college who works at Ernst & Young out of the Miami office and ask if they could recommend a CPA in Naples?
They say something like,