A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from a friend which got me thinking about this particular topic.

The friend in question is David Lomas, who runs M3 Publishing – but more importantly, is the kind of guy who always has a dozen projects on the boil and has a huge network of connections.

David called me as he was driving home one Friday evening “just to keep in touch”. We spent the next 20 minutes or so just shooting the breeze, exchanging stories and brainstorming a little about a couple of projects we are working on.

Here’s the point: 95% of people – when driving home on a Friday – would be listening to music, thinking about their weekend, or grumbling about the traffic.

But in David’s case, the thing that came most naturally to him was to phone up his contacts to see how they were getting on.

The rest of us either wouldn’t bother, or we’d be thinking “I don’t want to intrude”, “I don’t have a good reason to call” or “Why would he want to speak to me on a Friday afternoon?”.

We talk ourselves out of keeping in touch. Perhaps because we fear that 1 in 10 call where the person really doesn’t want to hear from us. Or perhaps we just don’t enjoy these part social, part business calls.

Now maybe David and others for whom business development seems to come naturally go through the same self-chatter like this. Or maybe they don’t. But either way – it doesn’t stand in their way. When they have a few spare moments they don’t turn inward – they reach out to contacts and clients to stay in touch.

Another example: Steve Head.

Steve is one of the UK’s top professional speakers. He’s got that rare ability to entertain, inform and inspire.

Steve has an unusual business development approach – one I’ve not seen anyone else use: he keeps in touch with clients via text messages.

When I saw him at the Professional Speakers Association in Manchester, he talked about how he checked his phone after an evening away from home before a client seminar and was astounded to see that he’d sent 125 texts to clients the previous evening.

When I quizzed Steve about it he highlighted that every one of those 125 messages was personal and sincere. In other words, it’s his way of keeping in touch with people he cares about – who also happen to be his clients. It’s absolutely not a cold, calculated “what can I get in return” business development methodology. Nor is David’s habit of phoning up his contacts.

Nonetheless, the habit shared by Steve and David is a healthy one from a business development perspective. By keeping in touch, they keep top of mind with clients. And because they both really care about their clients: every interaction they have deepens their relationships.

So do you have a business development habit? A way you keep in touch and deepen client relationships on “autopilot” without having to think, plan and prepare every time.

In reality – most of us don’t do this naturally.

Personally, given a few moments spare, my first thought is to read a book or article – to expand my knowledge. I don’t instantly think of getting in touch with current & prospective clients.

In order to get good at business development I’ve had to create habits which “force” me to do the right things. For example, keeping a list of my priority client and prospective client relationships and reviewing it weekly to brainstorm what I can do to help them this week.

It’s not like I find keeping in touch with clients painful or difficult. It’s simply that, unlike David or Steve, given a few spare moments, it’s not my first thought.

And that’s the thing. The world of the professional isn’t filled with empty hours where we can start from scratch, plan how to keep in touch with clients, and carefully execute the plan. We’re busy. Really, really busy.

We don’t get hours spare at our desks. We get a few minutes here and there. Or we get an hour driving home or on the train.

If we have to think, plan and prepare our keep-in-touch activities, the reality is that they just won’t happen.

So for people like me who aren’t naturals at business development – we need to have already done our homework by the time our free moments arrive. If we’re going to call people up (or even text them) we need to have thought through already who we’re going to call and what we’re going to say. Because if we leave it to our free moments, by the time we’ve figured out what to do the moment will be gone.

Most importantly, we need to get ourselves into the habit of staying in touch. Initially we have to force ourselves to do it with reminders and rituals. Over time, we’ll come to do it automatically without having to force ourselves. We may even come to enjoy it.

And then we’ll be indistinguishable from those natural business developers we all get so envious about.Similar Posts:

• Creating a Marketing Habit in 21 Days
• The Importance of Authenticity
• “Find Your Style” to Transform Your Business Development Success
• How to Turn Old Contacts into New Clients
• Get Your Life Under Control with Zen to Done

Make Business Development a Habit is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

A few months ago I had a bit of a heated email argument with a fairly well-known marketing guru whose newsletter I subscribed to.

I won’t mention names as the point of this post isn’t about criticising others – it’s about something I believe to be vital to succeed in business development: authenticity.

The argument started when I received an email from the guru sent from a hospital waiting room in a few moments he had spare waiting for his wife to give birth. His email said he had to be quick (for obvious reasons) but wanted to make an offer on one of his new products.

Nothing wrong with that, per se. In fact I believe it’s good thing to share insights into your personal life with your community. It deepens your relationships – rather like the way you’d share personal information, ideas and hopes with a close business partner or one of your best clients. Your very best business relationships go beyond purely business.

The problem was that I received the same email 3 times over a 3 month period.

I emailed the guy, and he said he’d had a problem with his email system. OK, fair enough. No one has perfect grasp of their technology. I’m prepared to believe it was a genuine mistake that multiple copies were sent out.

But then I noticed that the emails were actually all a little different. They had slightly different headlines.

In other words, he’d been split testing the headlines.

Now split testing headlines is a good marketing practice in normal circumstances. But when your email is supposed to be something you rattled out quickly when in a hospital waiting room it actually leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouth.

Far from being the spur of the moment message it purported to be, this was a calculated marketing tactic. And it left me feeling manipulated.

Here’s the deal: had this been a normal marketing email then, of course I’d have been perfectly cool with headlines or anything else being tested, optimised or whatever. Why shouldn’t the marketer try to maximise the response they get?

But this was an email that purported to be a spur of the moment outpouring. His email personalised things – brought me into his world. It made me feel closer, as if I was sharing his experience.

For me then to discover that the email had been a calculated construction left me feeling used.

And that’s the thing. The most powerful marketing & sales approaches are the ones that bring us closer to our clients, that deepen our relationships.

But they must be genuine.

Deepening a relationship can’t be one-sided. You can’t pretend to open up to someone, but really put a tight filter on what you say. You can’t encourage a client to be frank and honest with you if you’re not going to be frank and honest with them.

If you do try to manipulate, you’ll be found out. It may not be as obvious as a split-test headline on a supposedly personal message: but people will discover your manipulation.

If you can’t be genuine – then stick to more impersonal forms of business development: advertising, factual messages, value propositions.

But if you want to build deep. long lasting relationships with clients, you must, must be authentic.Similar Posts:

• Becoming a Trusted Advisor
• Rejection – sometimes it really is personal
• Beating your #1 Competitor – the Status Quo
• Make Business Development a Habit
• How to Turn Old Contacts into New Clients

The Importance of Authenticity is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

The latest issue of the Outside In Newsletter for Professional Service Firms focuses on Lead Nurturing: how you progress an initial client relationship over time to a point where you’re actually doing business together.

Lead nurturing is critical for professionals: at the point at which we initially meet clients very few of them need our services right now. But almost all of them will need our type of service in the next few years. To be the one they remember and choose at that point, we need to nurture our relationships with those potential clients over time.

The article gives a number of hints and tips to enable you to do that relationship-building better, and with more clients.

The newsletter also includes a short article on the importance of doing and learning from “win reviews” rather than the traditional “loss reviews”.

If you sign up for the newsletter in the box on the right, then as well as getting a free copy of the guide to getting more referrals for your practice, you’ll also get a copy of this edition of the newsletter delivered to your inbox soon after.Similar Posts:

• What to Do When You Need Sales Fast : Issue 1 of the Outside In Newsletter
• Staying “Front of Mind” with Referral Partners
• Don’t Put Me On Your List
• Book Review: How to Win a Pitch
• Are You Sales Averse? July Issue of
  Outside In Newsletter Published

Lead Nurturing – Latest Issue of Outside In Newsletter Published is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

Yes, in my view.

For many years, consultants, coaches, trainers – and even accountants and lawyers – have been offering “free initial consultations” as a way of encouraging clients to engage with them.

The logic, of course, is that once they work with them for an hour or so, their fears about whether the professional knew their stuff and whether they’d be able to get on with them would be laid to rest.

Some of the more marketing savvy professionals learnt how to focus the initial consultation on identifying the client’s most urgent problems and plotting an outline action plan rather than simply giving away an hour’s free work. In that way the client was taken on a journey where they realised just how big their issues were and were more inclined to buy as a result.

But in my experience, potential clients are becoming less and less likely to take up the offer of free initial consultations.

The change is coming from two angles:

• Firstly, they’ve experienced some professionals using the initial consultation as a blatant opportunity to sell to them. They now view initial consultations as risky – with a high chance they’ll be subjected to a sales pitch and receive little value from the session.
• Secondly, they’ve discovered that they can achieve many of the things they got from an initial consultation in other ways (for free too) without having to engage with a professional. Meeting a consultant, lawyer or other professional can be a daunting prospect. So if they believe they can get similar value from a free e-book or video or seminar recording – then they’ll often prefer to take that option. And they can take this option at their own convenience – without having to travel or wait until the professional is available.

My advice:

Most professionals benefit greatly from having some form of free give-away which gets a client to begin to engage with them. It can demonstrate their expertise, give clues as to what they’re like to work with, and generally reduce the client’s perceived risk.

But the day when free initial consultations worked well for this are gone. If all you have as a freebie is a free consultation you need to think again, and create something else you can offer as an easier to bite option.

It could be that after sampling your free report or teleseminar, the potential client is ready for a free consultation (or they may be ready to buy straight away). But it’s unlikely that today’s time-pressed cynical executives will jump at the chance of a free consultation if nothing has come before it to demonstrate your capabilities and personality.
Similar Posts:

• Becoming a Trusted Advisor
• New Report and Free Trial on RainToday
• Medium is Beautiful
• Getting Past First Base
• How to Get More Referrals Using Offers

Is the Free Initial Consultation Dead? is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

The key to marketing professional services is to demonstrate rather than claim.

And if you’re marketing yourself and your skills then one of the strongest ways to do this is through talks and seminars.

Clients hire professionals who understand their problems, have the expertise to solve them, and who they feel they could work with productively. Few other marketing approaches give the professional such an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of client problems and their expertise, and give a feel for what they would be like to work with. Talks and seminars are in the top tier of effective marketing approaches.

I remember the first time I saw a consultant give a talk on marketing at a networking event many years ago. The talk was pretty bland. Nothing special or new. But the consultant had a queue of people wanting to talk to them at the end. It didn’t take me long to figure out that this could be a great way of engaging with new clients.

So how do you go about getting speaking engagements & seminars?

It’s something I asked myself about a year ago as I was planning my marketing priorities for 2009. I wanted to grow my practice locally (historically, the vast majority of my work has been international, or London based and I wanted to cut down on travel somewhat). Talks and seminars seemed an obvious route to go down.

I followed a simple three point plan which can work for many other professionals too. I’m focusing here on speaking for free in order to market your services, rather than paid speaking engagements.

Step 1: Get Good

An absolute prerequisite to marketing your professional firm through talks & seminars is that you must be very good at presenting your material.

That means both good content, and a good presentation style.

It sounds obvious: but so many professionals overlook it. The number of mediocre and sometimes very bad presentations I’ve been to in the last year is simply staggering. A bad presentation does more harm than good. Yet so many people fail to prepare, fail to practice, fail to get feedback – and so fail to get any new clients.

In my case, I’m a fairly experienced presenter, having done sessions at events from local seminars to global conferences. And I’ve been professionally trained in presentation techniques. But I still felt I needed to make sure I made a great impact, so I decided to make an investment in my capabilities in this area.

Early on, I focused on being able to really “ace” just one talk (on getting more referrals). So I developed it, practiced it, got feedback on it, and did it at multiple events in a variety of formats.

I also joined a local Toastmasters group to work on my presentations skills, and hooked up with my local Professional Speakers Association (in the US, this is the National Speakers Association) to learn from watching really polished performers in action. I also took coaching on developing compelling presentations. And, of course, I read a ton of high quality material on the subject.

Even if you’re an experienced speaker or seminar presenter, you can almost always improve. And at bare minimum, you need to make sure that the presentations and seminars you do showcase you at the top of your game. Make sure you prepare them well (please, no endless stream of bullet-point PowerPoint slides), you practice and rehearse, and that you get honest feedback from experienced presenters.

I thoroughly recommend joining Toastmasters. If you don’t know it already, it’s not about becoming one of those guys who loudly announces the guests at functions – it’s about becoming a great speaker. The most valuable element of Toastmasters is that you get to practice in a safe environment and get constructive feedback. And because you go back regularly rather than it being a one-off training course, you learn via the optimal method for skills training: one thing at a time not a whole bunch of new ideas heaped on you.

Step 2: Get a Plan

I’d wanted to get more involved in speaking & seminars right from when I set up my own practice two years ago. But for a year it just didn’t happen.

The reason: wanting and wishing aren’t the same as planning and doing.

But once I’d set myself a target of 12 presentations/seminars to audiences with at least 10 or more potential clients I was spurred into to action. I broke down the target into months and planned the activities I needed to do to hit that target. I brainstormed potential events & venues, thought through the topics I would focus on that would be likely to lead to potential clients engaging with me, and identified the resources I would need to achieve my goal.

Once I had my plan in place, I became more aware of possibilities for offering my services as a presenter. And by reviewing the plan and progress initially weekly and then monthly, I kept the pressure on myself to hit the target.

And it worked. I’ve already beaten my target 9 months in.

Simple stuff. But I hadn’t done it the year before, because I hadn’t taken the simple step of setting a target and making a plan.

Step 3: Get Booked

For me, there were three key steps which got me the opportunities to speak I needed.

The first step was to clarify with laser focus just what sort of events and audiences I needed to speak in front of.  Obviously I wanted to get in front of potential clients and referrers. But the key was being able to articulate this clearly so that I could identify potential events and forums myself, and that I could explain it to others so that they knew what I was looking for.

Here, it helps to be focused. If you specialise in working with a particular sector or client type, or working on a specific set of issues or functional area then there are often professional associations or groups similarly specialised. And they’re pretty much always on the lookout for good speakers with interesting topics.

If you’re less specialised there are theoretically more potential groups to speak to: networking events, chambers of commerce, etc. But there are also more people offering to speak at those events.

The second step was to have done my preparation. I knew the topic I wanted to speak about, and it was one of great interest to my potential audience. I prepared a clear summary of the topic so that when I spoke to potential event hosts,  they could see I had something of value ready. It’s infinitely more credible than the tactic many people use of “I’d like to speak at your event. Any subject really, just tell me what you want me to talk about.”

And having a lot of publicly available material available on my blog helped. Potential hosts could quickly see I knew what I was talking about.

The third step was to go for an easy win and then leverage it. I managed to get a recommendation from someone who knew me well to an event host they knew well too. It was enough to get started and I made sure I did an excellent job at that first talk. From then on being able to say “I’ve just presented on abc to the xyz group…” gave me much more credibility in getting booked for other events.

Once I had a handful of talks under my belt, I was able to expand the range of subjects  I covered too.

Now it’s Your Turn

My plan worked, and it worked quickly. And I managed it as a sole practitioner without admin support. As a professional in a bigger practice you should certainly be able to harness the skills of your marketing/business development team to help you both with the material and in getting events booked.

You may even be able to host some events yourself. However, I do advise that unless you already have a big, responsive contact list it’s much easier to get a good attendance by presenting or running a seminar at a well established event or forum.

Remember: the key to making it happen was to set a target and build a plan. Everything flowed from there.

Set your own target. Build your own plan. And it will flow for you too.Similar Posts:

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Win New Clients with Talks and Seminars is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

I popped in to the post-office today to post a few parcels off with some “goodies” in them for friends.

At the counter next to me an old lady was showing one of the assistants an old newspaper with a really old photograph showing a scene from about 80 years or so ago. She was telling the assistant about how there were only two people left alive who remembered that event and how she wanted to post a copy to her son to show him.

The assistant listened to her, asked her questions about the scene, and expressed interest about various aspects of the story. They were still going when I left.

You could tell from the discussion that the old lady really appreciated someone just listening and paying attention to her. Amid all the impersonality of modern life, here was someone who was making her feel human and valuable again.

Does this kind of customer service have a payoff? An ROI? Will it increase loyalty or sales?

Quite frankly I don’t know. And I don’t need to know.

Life isn’t all about calculating whether you’ll get a payback from everything you do. We all owe a duty of care to our fellow human beings – especially the elderly. To try to calculate whether those actions will have a payoff is crass in the extreme. Just do them.

Apologies for going a bit off-topic. There’s no great sales or marketing learning in this story. No insights for professional services. But maybe something for us to thing about as human beings.

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• What's Your Backstory?
• Turbo-Charge Your Sales Stories;
• Making it easy for customers to say "yes". How to make cross-selling work.
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Beyond Customer Service is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

Almost all professionals say their main approach to get new clients is Referrals.

But sadly, what they’re often talking about is Passive Referrals. Referrals where they’ve been recommended by a previous client or contact without taking any active action themselves.

While it’s great to get these types of referral it’s not really a sustainable business model. A sustainable business model needs to be influenceable by the professional.

In practice, a great many professionals have a psychological barrier when it comes to asking for referrals. They hesitate – and don’t ask for anywhere near as many as they should.

There are three main reasons for this:

1. They’re not convinced asking for referrals works
2. They’re worried that asking for a referral might damage the relationship they have with a client or contact
3. They’re embarrased asking for referrals: it “feels like begging”

Does Asking for Referrals Work?

In their 2009 Benchmarking Study How Clients Buy, RainToday.com looked at which methods buyers of professional services were most likely to use to initially identify and learn more about providers.

The top 2 methods? Referrals from Colleagues and Referrals from Trusted Service Providers.

Take, for example, the experience of one of my newsletter subscribers who recently emailed me to say:

On a visit to a client, where I had done a good job and over-delivered on client’s expectations; we were waiting on someone returning to his office with a bit of information we needed.

For something to say I asked “Can you think of anyone else who might be able to use my services?”.

He immediately opened his address book and started giving me names and numbers, even ringing a few there and then to warm things up.

I’ve since made contact with most of the nine names he gave, and seven are happy to meet with me.

In future I’m going to make “asking for more” a part of my after sales follow-up!

Does Asking for Referrals Work? Absolutely – if done right.

Will Asking for a Referral Damage your Relationship with a Client?

There’s an element of truth in this – if you do it wrongly.

The best referrals are to people the person doing the referral knows well. After all, we’re far more likely to act on a referral from someone we know and trust than from someone we barely know.

By introducing you to someone they know well, your clients and contacts are putting their relationship and reputation on the line. Before the do this, they will need to be sure you’re going to do a great job for the person they introduce you to – and that you’ll be thinking in their best interests.

So you must wait to ask for a referral until you’ve proven you can do a great job and that you aren’t just being self-centred.

The best way to do this for clients is to ask after you’ve over-delivered on your engagement for them. Or if it’s a long project, after you’ve delighted them during the process of delivery.

And your relationship must have progressed so that they’ve come to trust you and see that you aren’t just in it for yourself – that you always act in your clients’ best interests.

The language you use when asking for a referral can help here too. Don’t just ask if they can refer you to someone. Ask “can you think of other accountancy firms who I might be able to help?” or “I believe my services would be really valuable to Jones & Co., if you were me how would you approach them”.

Is Asking for Referrals Embarrassing? Will it seem like Begging?

Again, the answer to this is that it can be – if you do it wrongly.

Part of this is mindset. If you really are just asking for referrals to help yourself – then clients and contacts often pick up on that.

But if you’ve thought through who it is you can really help, and you truly believe you can do a great job for them: then your sincerity will show through.

Again, the language you use can help. Don’t just ask to be referred. Tell your client or contact why you believe you can do a great job for the person you’re asking for a referral to.

In my blog post of a few months ago: How to Get More Referrals Using Offers I showed how creating tailored offers (free, or entry-level) makes it easier for clients to refer you and feel comfortable they are adding value to their contacts. Having these offers also makes asking for referrals less embarrasing. You’re able to name something specific of value the person you’re being referred to will get – rather than just asking a favour.

There are more tips like this in my Referral Masterclass report and Outside In newsletter which you can get hold of here.

Could You Get More Clients by Asking for More Referrals?

Have a look at the 3 factors. Do they apply to you?

My experience is that we all suffer from at least one or more. Myself included.

We’ve not fully convinced ourselves that asking for referrals really works. Or we’re embarrassed to do it, or worried it might hurt relationships.

Whichever negative belief you have, think about whether that belief is really true.

Think about whether holding that belief is helpful to you.

Then think: if I suspended that belief, just for a week, and asked for more referrals, might that help me?

I bet it would.Similar Posts:

• Staying “Front of Mind” with Referral Partners
• How to Turn Old Contacts into New Clients
• Understand Your Client's Beliefs to Learn How to Sell More
• How to Get More Referrals Using Offers
• In Praise of Passion

Can You Get More Clients by Asking for More Referrals? is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

18 months ago I posted a very popular article on Selling With Stories where I described how stories and anecdotes can be used to great effect by professionals to provide more meaningful, resonant descriptions of what we do and how we work.

Stories are also particularly effective when we’re asked those tricky questions that clients like to throw at us when we’re pitching for business.

Faced with “what would you do if…” and “how would you handle…” questions, there’s a great temptation for professionals to try to demonstrate their expertise by trotting out management, legal, accounting or other theory for how situations should be handled.

But that’s not what clients actually want to hear. They want the confidence that you have handled these situations and that you will be able to deal with them in practice, not in theory.

The best way to handle these questions is with a short story or anecdote about a client situation where you faced such an issue and were able to address it.

When I sold and delivered large consulting change management programmes, I had a series of stories about overcoming resistance, stories about programme management, stories about delivering results and stories about culture change. Each of these gave me credibility when a client asked how we could address the organisational obstacles to change, or how we could make sure they really achieved the benefits they were looking for from the programme, etc.

Some stories are reusable for multiple situations. One of my overcoming resistance stories about a senior executive in a client organisation who had been overlooked for the CEO role and initially wanted to obstruct any initiative launched by the CEO also doubled as a story about how to address executive politics.

Sometimes the story doesn’t even have to be of a great success to be effective. About 5 years ago I won a rather nice multi-million Euro sales process implementation project for the consulting firm I was working for. We’d had a tricky relationship with the client and found out later we were in last place coming up to our final presentation. The turning point came when the senior client executive told us that all previous sales process projects he’d known had failed because the consultants hadn’t engaged with the front-line staff. I was able to tell a story about how I’d learned the hard way in a previous project where we hadn’t involved the key salespeople and first line managers early enough and so had struggled with implementation until we eventually got them on board. It wasn’t a story about a great success we’d had – but it told the executive that I’d been in that situation before and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. We won the project, and in a debrief meeting later the client told us that had been the key moment when they knew we had the right practical experience to work with them.

These “early lessons” stories can be even more effective than success stories as they’re highly believable, don’t come across as pompous or “show offy”, and really send a clear message that because of that hard lesson you’ve known what to do right ever since.

Of course, the “early lesson” type story has to be set a decent distance in the past – it can’t be a mistake you made the previous week!

Most professionals should be able to create a list of tricky questions they often get asked and prepare example stories to address them. They’re best not replayed verbatim as stock answers, but stored away as an easy-to-recall memory to build on.

And using stories to answer tough questions is not only more believable – it’s much more interesting than a dry theoretical answer too.Similar Posts:

• Turbo-Charge Your Sales Stories;
• Positive Navel Gazing: Won Sales Analysis
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• Don’t “tell ‘em what you told ‘em….”
• Selling With Stories – A Powerful Tool for Building Trust and Credibility

Selling With Stories: Answering Tough Questions is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

I love House.

I think we all like to empathise with the outsider, the maverick, the tormented genius.

And in our professional lives, many of us secretly long to be able to play that role – at least sometimes. To be able to just use our huge brains to solve clients’ problems without having to deal with the complex, messy emotional issues. To not have to deal with feelings & relationships. To just get on and do our job. “If only we didn’t have to deal with clients…”

Often we label this emotional side of the job as “politics” – when in reality it’s just dealing with people.

Of course, Gregory House doesn’t put up with all that. He avoids seeing patients – because they all lie about their symptoms anyway. He uses cold, hard facts to make his diagnosis.

And he always gets it right.

It’s a very seductive image. Dangerously so – because the real world just doesn’t work like that.

For accountants, consultants, lawyers and other professionals; how we interact and deal with people has a huge impact on our success – that’s hardly new news.

When we’re selling our services, we#ve always known that at least to some degree, clients decide emotionally and justify rationally.

But often we castigate them for that – how foolish of them not to pick the “right person for the job” just because they didn’t get on with them, or they didn’t have great interpersonal skills.

But the idea that somehow the highly technically competent person with no social skills is the right person and has been unlucky in not being hired is just pure fantasy.

In reality, it takes great social skills to truly succeed in performing professional roles: Dr Kildare’s bedside manner not Dr House’s.

In the world of consultants and others who focus on organisational improvement there’s a phrase that’s as true today as when I first heard it nearly 20 years ago.

A B grade plan with an A grade implementation is infinitely better than an A grade plan with a B grade implementation.

Organisations only change and improve to the degree which their people change and improve. The greatest ideas and plans in the world are no good if you don’t have the people skills to get them implemented.

So in fact, the “foolish client” who based a lot of their hriring decision on which consultant they got on well with and they felt would “connect” with their people actually made a highly rational decision. They hired the person most likely to successfully implement change in their organisation. The technocrat with poor people skills would have had great ideas and produced a great report – but that report would be left on the shelf unimplemented.

Or take an architect. If they can’t connect with their clients, they can’t find out what they’re really looking for. They won’t be able to get behind “I’ll know it when I see it” to a deep understanding of what would really delight their client.

Even lawyers and accountant need their clients to open up to them, to share with them what they’re really looking for. They need to understand how they really feel and to get real feedback on their performance in order to do a great job.

In the real world, it’s Dr Kildare not Dr House who gets the best result.

The learning for business development?

Often, the skills you need to attract and win new clients are actually the skills that will make you a great professional. Don’t view them as two different worlds.Similar Posts:

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Are you Dr House or Dr Kildare? is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog

This month’s edition of the Outside In Newsletter focuses on how to sell professional services in head-to-head competition with other providers.

Most advice and training on selling professional services focuses on how to get more clients by understanding and exploring their needs to develop solutions and proposals that “hit the spot”.

And that’s as it should be. Not only does a needs-based approach allow you to develop better solutions for your client, it also allows you to build better relationships (by really understanding their business) and better persuade clients of the need to take action (by exploring the impact of their problems or challenges).

But there are other important elements to selling that professionals must master to increase their success rate in winning new business. In particular, they must learn how to sell when faced with direct competition. Or as one participant at a recent training course I ran on consultative selling put it: “how do I prove that I’m the best option?”

The newsletter also features a short article on using a focus strategy to get more referrals and features a website for accountants that holds many lessons for business development across the professions.Similar Posts:

• Lead Nurturing – Latest Issue of Outside In Newsletter Published
• Positive Navel Gazing: Won Sales Analysis
• Is the Free Initial Consultation Dead?
• Book Review: Professional Services Marketing
• In Praise of Passion

Competitive Selling for Professional Service Firms – August Issue of Outside In Newsletter Published is a post from: Ian Brodie's Get More Clients Blog