Tom McMakin - Never Say Sell

The most straightforward way to grow within a client is to capitalize on previous good work with a buyer to do more of that same work for the same buyer. We call this MORE work. It falls at the bottom of our diamond and is the easiest avenue to being more helpful. Same work for the same buyer. Just more of it.

Maybe you recruited diversity and inclusion (D&I) machinist candidates for a client's Seattle manufacturing facility. Your client won a big defense department contract, and you suggested you do more D&I machinist recruiting for them.

Maybe you were asked to do quality of earnings (Q-of-E) calls on behalf of a private equity firm partner in the course of their due diligence around an acquisition. Soon, you were doing Q-of-E calls on all this partner's deals, excited to be doing more of this work for which you are qualified.

With Thomson Reuters, PIE began the engagement by convening a group of Am Law 100 CIOs quarterly for our buyer. Due to the success of the engagement, Susie was able to help her buyer with MORE of this work, by expanding the contract to also convene CFOs from the same companies at the same cadence.

The Diamond of Opportunity in Action

MORE. Susie has grown the contract to include more of the same work for the same buyer (virtual peer exchange facilitation).

The second opportunity to grow our footprint in a client is to focus on doing different sorts of jobs – ones we have experience doing for other clients – with the same buyer. We call this EXPAND work. Our buyer already knows us, trusts us, and knows the quality of our work. It is natural to do additional work that is not exactly what we have done for them before, but that is adjacent to that work. We're asking our buyer to let us be helpful to them in an additional way.

Maybe you write whitepapers for a utilities practice in a large consulting firm. You also have speechwriting experience, so you decide to ask the partner you work with if you might write a draft of a speech he is scheduled to make at the SEPA Utilities Conference in Las Vegas next year. He says yes.

Maybe you perform outsourced revenue recognition analysis for second-tier telecommunications services (TELCOs). You decide to pitch your clients, who are heads of revenue recognition, on projects that will ready them for the changes they will need to put in place around the management of their collections lists once the California Commerce Act (and its new privacy requirements) is up and running. Your team has already done this for a few firms in different industries. They said they didn't know you did that work, but quickly agree.

With Thomson Reuters, Susie has been able to EXPAND the relationship by introducing live events to the scope of work. Susie explains, “After we'd been convening these networks of CIOs and CFOs on their behalf for a few years, the timing was right to discuss how we could make the peer network even more deeply engaged by bringing the executives together in person – incorporating both facilitated discussion and a social event.”

Although our work with Thomson Reuters up to this point had been exclusively virtual events, this was a natural progression, and Susie was able to speak to dozens of case studies that demonstrated how PIE had successfully convened in-person events for other clients.

The Diamond of Opportunity in Action

MORE. Susie has grown the contract to include more of the same work for the same buyer (virtual peer exchange facilitation).

EXPAND. Susie expanded this relationship by offering an adjacent service (facilitated live events) to her same buyer.

The third opportunity identified by successful experts to grow key accounts is to do more of what we have already proven we can do for that client, but to do it with new buyers within the client. In a way, this often feels like marching across a client's various verticals or business units to see whether they might also benefit from our help. We call this EXTEND work: helping other buyers – often parallel to our current buyer – in the same way we're helping our current buyer.

Maybe you run a boutique intellectual property (IP) practice that works for the general counsel of an ad firm, and this firm is part of a large public holding company. You ask the general counsel if she'd make a warm introduction to her sister companies. No reason why you can't help with the same type of IP work for them as well.

Maybe you lead a team that stands up a large consulting firm's customer experience summit every year. Over drinks after the last event, you ask the marketing director you work with if you can write up your experience with the summit and pass it around to her marketing event colleagues in the firm's other practices. You're interested in helping make all of their events equally successful.

With Thomson Reuters, Susie knows her current client has a specific target audience: Am Law 100 CIOs and CFOs. However, she also knows that her buyer has peers in his organization whose target audiences are slightly different but are equally focused on deepening relationships with current and potential clients. Susie finds out through conversations with her current buyer that he has a peer in the organization whose mandate is to build the same kind of relationships in the media and telecommunications space. She asks him to put her in touch with the woman who leads this practice and Susie is able to help develop the exact same kind of programs for this new buyer. She's already demonstrated PIE can deliver this work successfully for Thomson Reuters and can now expand to other practice areas.

The Diamond of Opportunity in Action

MORE. Susie has grown the contract to include more of the same work for the same buyer (virtual peer exchange facilitation).

EXPAND. Susie expanded this relationship by offering an adjacent service (facilitated live events) to her same buyer.

EXTEND. Susie extended this relationship by offering the same work to a new buyer (building a new virtual peer exchange group in the media and telecommunications space for a new buyer).

Our fourth opportunity for helping clients is what we call REACH work: offering work to a different buyer in the organization that is one of our existing service lines but is different from work we've done for this client before. We may have strong case studies for this work with other clients, but no one internally can speak to our work in this specific area – and we're trying to deliver this service to someone we've never worked with before. In this instance, we're required to work extra hard to earn both trust and credibility, because we're starting with neither right out of the gate.