A Word about Words
Walt Shill is the head of business development for the worldwide environmental and sustainability consulting firm, ERM. Previously, he managed the North American strategy practice for Accenture, and before that was a partner at McKinsey. Early in our process of writing this book, Jacob asked him, “How are expert services sold?” Walt was spending his Saturday afternoon relaxing in his flower garden at his home in Reston, Virginia.
“Jacob,” he said, “never say sell. Consulting isn't sold. We're trusted advisors to our clients.”
Walt explained that, as expert services providers, we're there to be of assistance as our clients work to achieve their business goals.
Scott Wallace, an attorney at Perkins Coie, agrees: “We never talk about sales at the firm. I don't think I have ever heard the words ‘make a sale,’ or ‘sales.’ You do hear the term ‘business development,’ but not ‘sales.’”
Expert service providers don't sell. We work with people to solve problems.
We like words, so one of our first questions was, “Is ‘business development’ a euphemism for ‘sales,’ propagated by white-shoe consultants afraid of being lumped in with car salespeople? Or is it something different?”
We think the two terms are different. The definition of sales, to our mind, is the act of exchanging goods based on an agreed-upon price. Salespeople thrive in the world of transactions. After all, when we purchase a computer, a car, or a house, we are measuring the merits and relative comparisons on fixed attributes. A satisfying transaction can include transparency and civility, but it is not contingent on trust or long-term relationships. “Salespeople” often carry a negative association because they're thought of as those who jump at the chance to take advantage of information asymmetries. The car salesperson knows what they bought the car for and where there are opportunities to upsell you after the sale on extended warranties, low APR loans with high fees, and undercarriage protection. The buyer does not.
By contrast, we think business development is about establishing relationships and listening to clients. It is contingent upon a baseline of trust and credibility, both of which grow as you consistently deliver good work and add value in collaboration.
Economists talk about expert services as being a “credence good.” Credence comes from the Latin word, credere, which means “to give trust to.” A client gives you their trust before they engage with you. Why? Because you know more than they do.
When we hire a cybersecurity firm to protect us from intrusion, their experts know more about cyber-threats and defenses than we ever will. That puts them in a position of power in their relationship with us: They are both diagnosing the problem and making recommendations. Once they peek under the hood of our network, a cyber protection firm might say, we will need to erect a cloud-based firewall monitored by a 24/7 operations desk. Alternatively, they may simply say Windows Defender is fine. We wouldn't know the difference.
That's one of the signal differences concerning goods that are sold on features and attributes like Tom's family's computer and expert services. With goods, we can diagnose the problem. The old laptop is slow, has no battery life left, and weighs more than a three-year-old. When cash loosens up, Tom and Mary decide they need to fix that problem. But with expert services, it's different: We need to trust the provider to tell us the truth about the problem and then right-size a solution.
And so, goods are sold, but expert services are not. With goods, it's helpful to have someone (the salesperson) explain the features and attributes and make comparative claims against the competition. With services, the secret is not in telling but rather in listening. Only by listening do we uncover opportunities where our skills and the trust we have built with clients align and produce mutual opportunity.
To Sell or Not to Sell?
This is why we hate the word upselling in connection to expanding our engagement with a client. Saying “May I supersize that for you, Ma'am?” smacks of manipulation and the power of hidden suggestion.
Cross-selling, too, is a word often found in books written about how to more deeply engage with clients. The problem is we are not sure what cross-selling means, exactly. When we cross-sell, are we offering different capabilities to a client, or are we offering the same capabilities across the client organization to different buyers within that organization?
Rather than borrowing words from the world of product sales that are not a perfect fit with expert services, let's start over and actually describe what we are trying to do.
What if we flipped the questions “How should we upsell?” and “How can we cross-sell?” to the much simpler “How can we help?” Even that simple word change invites a mental shift away from a transaction and toward a relationship that looks more like a friendship, encouraging us to imagine what we would do if our client's well-being was our highest priority, which – returning to Walt – is exactly our job.
A couple of additional thoughts about language: We think about ourselves being part of a profession that includes consultants, accountants, lawyers, engineers, and strategists. Rather than repeat that long string, we will refer to those in our profession as “experts” or “expert services providers.” These will serve as umbrella terms to describe those who, like us, offer services built on trust and credibility.
Finally, in addition to the interviews we conducted for this book, we've decided to tell some of our own stories. These stories reflect our collective experience, and they are based on real people and companies we have worked with over the past 25 years. Some names and identifying details of the individuals and companies involved have been changed.
Enough preamble, though, let's dig in.
CHAPTER 2 Learning to Farm
Charlie Mercer was a Blue Devil from before he could remember:
I grew up in Raleigh, and it was a lifelong dream to go to Duke.
A natural athlete in high school, tall and broad-shouldered, Charlie played first baseman on the baseball team and forward on the basketball squad while getting good grades, being in band, and participating in student government – the picture of the well-rounded student.
“It's unbelievable what young people accomplish these days,” Charlie says from his office in the Research Triangle. “They invent something or distinguish themselves in some big way before they even get to college. That wasn't me. I was good at a lot of things but not exceptional at any one thing.”
At Duke, he served as vice president of his fraternity and played in a band called “The Facebook All Stars” while majoring in public policy.
“There's a common theme here,” he says. “Public policy covered everything from economics and leadership to classes on nonprofits and political science. It was the ability to study all sorts of things that drew me into that major.”
In other words, Charlie was ripe to be picked up by a consulting firm after graduation, where the ability to walk into any setting, see patterns, and make a connection with clients is highly prized, and where the ability to lead a team is an important rung on the career ladder.
His first job was with The Advisory Board, after which he joined Stockamp & Associates, a consulting firm that concentrated on healthcare consulting and, specifically, revenue cycle process improvements. Later, the firm was acquired by Huron Consulting.
His strong work at Stockamp earned him a place at North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler School of Business where he got his MBA, joining Deloitte after graduation.
Commenting