Bam. You're done. No spreadsheet. No ranking of features or processor speed. Just reputation, referral, and relationship. That's how clients buy expertise.
Growing Your Work: How Hard Can It Be?
Doing more work for a client with whom we have already worked should be easy. Once we have completed a project for a client, opportunities should start pooling at our feet like puddles after a spring shower. We've built credibility by delivering good work and trust in our relationships. We think of credibility – delivering good work – and trust – building strong relationships – as the two bulwarks of a productive consulting relationship and we've now cemented both. Our client has other things they need help with and where our expertise would be useful. The phone should be ringing off the hook.
Maybe, but maybe not.
We'll use PIE as an example. When we joined forces 10 years ago as CEO and COO, the company had a single client that accounted for 95% of revenues. That worried us a lot, so we turned all our attention to winning new clients.
Today, our biggest client represents a fifth of the firm's revenues. The rest comes from the new accounts the team has brought on. Our theory was that if we could establish a meaningful presence in these new accounts – most of which are multibillion-dollar companies – future growth would be easy. In a kind of Ray Kinsella – inspired Field of Dreams strategy, we thought, “if we build it, they will come.”
But that didn't always happen.
Add-on work didn't magically appear. We've had to fight for it. One of our oldest projects, for example – a $140,000 recurring annual program – with a client that is a $14 billion information services firm, failed to grow itself. The client was delighted with our work and asked us back to the dance every year, but not one of their 44,000 employees ever called us up and asked us to do this same work in other parts of the business.
Likewise, PIE has worked for a large IT integration firm for 15 years, aggregating groups of chief financial officers, chief information officers, and chief operating officers. Five years ago, the client pivoted and announced that it was focused on helping chief digital officers navigate disruption and transformation. Did it call PIE and ask us to pull together groups of chief digital officers? No. This, despite the fact they know we do good work, they trust us, and we have a long record of high ROI performance.
We began to suspect there were structural, systemic reasons that expanding one's work within a client is difficult. Our readers from How Clients Buy agreed:
I took an early retirement package from a global energy company and decided to set up a consulting practice. I was one of the leading experts in negotiating sub-Saharan oil field exploration contracts and figured, with everyone I knew in the industry, it would be easy for me to do this work on a consulting basis with Exxon Mobil, BP, and the other big players. Soon I was hiring MBAs to help execute on the various projects I'd secured. Somewhere around 20 people, though, our growth plateaued. We're doing work with all the upstream majors, based largely on my network, but the nut we can't crack is doing more work inside a client company. I've talked to my friends at the big consulting firms, and they say most of their new revenues came from existing clients. What do they know that we don't?
I was excited to take over the cybersecurity practice at my firm, one of the Big Four. We have a great brand name in an exploding space. My boss came in July and said, “I need your next year's revenue estimates. We have a firm-wide goal of 12%.” I think I must have blanched. I'm just not sure I know how to expand our footprint in the client.
Do You Sell Pies?
Every month or two someone walks into our office and asks what types of fresh pie we have and, sadly, we have to turn them away empty-handed. We do in fact sell a service we internally refer to as a PIE, just not the type these buyers are looking for; ours are executive peer groups of our clients' likely buyers, whom we convene for ongoing, targeted discussions – not fresh rhubarb inside a buttery, layered crust.
We land squarely in the world of expert services. We provide our expertise – business development support, primarily via facilitated executive peer exchange – to clients who are also in the expert services business. As Tom's son, Wilson, likes to say, “My dad's a consultant to consultants – he's a meta-consultant.” This typically gets a bit of a laugh from his college friends.
Because of this niche we have carved out for ourselves in assisting expert services firms in business development, we spend our professional and free time thinking not only about how we can grow our own business, but also about how we can help clients grow their businesses. Our collective experience, working on behalf of many of the largest consulting, technology, and accounting firms around the world, gives us a unique perspective. Between us, we have 50-plus years of experience in this industry, providing countless stories and relationships from which to draw.
The Promise of Never Say Sell
The world is full of thorny problems made worse by growing complexity. It can feel overwhelming. The good news, however, is that, increasingly, we are a planet populated by educated, strongly experienced experts able to address these challenges.
The trick is to learn how to connect challenges with those who can best help solve them – to make the world smarter and smaller. When we shrink the world by wiring us all together in collaboration and connection, we make the world stronger, safer, and more stable.
None of that happens, however, unless we speak up and learn not to “hide our light under a bushel,” particularly with clients who already know we are good people and are able to create value. Our job must be to spot opportunities and build on our track record of delivering excellent work to do even more work, time and time again.
This book will unpack the question of how to do this. Our method was simple; we asked leading rainmakers how they deepen engagement with clients and scope more work in order to understand the approaches they used in finding success, assuming, of course, that the client has needs with which they could help. Like Gretel dropping crumbs of bread on the trail, we knew that achievement in business development would leave clues, and that if we followed those clues, we too could grow our clients two-, five-, and tenfold.
A Roadmap for the Book
This book is divided into two parts. In Part I, “Why We Never Say Sell,” we begin with the opportunity and the challenge. We describe the space open to us as expert services providers to grow our footprint within a client and then the five challenges that explain why this kind of new work doesn't come to us more naturally. It is here that we introduce the Diamond of Opportunity, six distinct ways in which rainmakers describe increasing the amount of work they do with clients. We also review the seven elements that must be present before a client is prepared to buy: the elements of awareness, understanding, interest, credibility, trust, ability, and readiness. We explain why these elements apply differently to winning work with a new client versus growing work with an existing client.
In Part II, “How We Can Help,” we dive into account planning and the sorts of questions you should be asking in preparation for making a plan. We also describe the seven disciplines of a master farmer, focusing on the practices as well as the tools for breaking beyond existing work to grow within a client. We break down each of the seven disciplines that underpin successful growth: Do good work, be a good friend, leverage your team, incent good work, listen, tell great stories, and master the art of the ask. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of what we have written