Tom McMakin - Never Say Sell

Maybe you do real estate strategy consulting for large retailers, and recently you finished helping a buyer, who is responsible for customer experience, with a location strategy and footprint for their new stores in New York. During a round of on-site visits, you meet the chief human resources officer who mentions that they're thinking of moving to an open-concept office plan for their New York headquarters, and you share some examples of how your firm has helped other major offices in the city make the switch. You'd be happy to help her.

Maybe you did the design work for a print ad campaign for a large athletic-apparel company. The advertising director you worked for passes your name to their head of sponsorships because she likes the work you did and is looking for some similar-themed event graphics at an upcoming race they're sponsoring. She's in luck, as this is right in your wheelhouse.

In the course of Susie's discussions with her buyer at Thomson Reuters, she might ask about the initiatives underway in their research department. Susie has ample experience leading research projects at PIE, she just hasn't done this work yet with Thomson Reuters. After checking in about this every so often over the past couple years, her client responds one day by saying he heard earlier that week from a colleague on the research team about a current project that made him think of PIE. They were looking to interview 50 Am Law 100 HR directors to understand buying decision factors for HRIS solutions, and it sounded like the team might need some help. Susie's ears perk up immediately at this – recruiting executives to participate in studies, interviewing them, and synthesizing those interviews into a whitepaper is exactly in line with how PIE has helped other clients before. Susie's client gives her the name of his colleague leading the research effort so she can follow up and offer to help. This is how we REACH with our clients – helping a different buyer with different work they haven't previously hired us for, but which we have strong experience completing.

We can lean on a little bit of extended trust (they know our current buyer, who is also from Thomson Reuters, trusts us) and a little bit of credibility (we've done this kind of work successfully for other clients) – but both of these are far more tenuous than if we have done this kind of work for this same person.

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).

REACH. Susie reached to help a new buyer in Thomson Reuters with a research project, a service with which she has strong experience but has never performed for Thomson Reuters.

The fifth opportunity for growth within a client is to EVOLVE – or, do work for our current buyer that is work we and our firm have never done before. With this opportunity, we are presented the new challenge of trying to win work for which we have no case studies showing our success – neither inside nor outside of that client. Of course, we know we are capable of doing this new work based on our team's competencies, but we haven't done this specific kind of work before. This requires maximum trust from our client, and enough earned credibility that they believe we're capable of doing the work, even if we've never done it before.

Maybe you've been working with the marketing director of a statewide bank for the last five years to produce their local TV advertisements. Now she's thinking about integrating some longer-form video content into their website (such as interviews with employees and customers), and wonders whether you'd be up for the task. You welcome the opportunity. You haven't produced this type of content before, but you know their tone and branding like the back of your hand and you're confident you're the right one for the job.

Maybe you do Salesforce implementation work for small companies in the Midwest. You've been working closely with the IT director at one organization, who is not only a client but also a classmate from college. You've known each other for decades and he trusts you, so you're not surprised when he asks you to come in and do a full Salesforce training for multiple teams within his company. You haven't done this before, but after a successful training session you start to think this is something you should begin offering to other clients.

With Thomson Reuters, Susie might come up with a creative new way to evolve the work she is doing for her current buyer. Perhaps her client mentions in passing that some internal visual collateral to help his team get to know these CIOs a bit better would be effective. Susie and her client brainstorm together and decide to produce a series of “getting to know you” video interviews with various member CIOs for Thomson Reuters to share internally and among the group members. Although Susie and her team haven't contracted with clients for this specific type of work before, her demonstrated skills with interviewing executives and the trust she has developed with this client have earned her the ability to help her client in this new way – to EVOLVE the relationship.

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).

REACH. Susie reached to help a new buyer in Thomson Reuters with a research project, a service with which she has strong experience but has never performed for Thomson Reuters.

EVOLVE. Susie evolved her relationship with Thomson Reuters, leveraging the trust she's built with her client and the skillsets she and her team have developed to find a way to help her current client with something new, something that PIE has not previously done.

The sixth opportunity for growth within a client is what we call INNOVATE work: work we've never done before with a buyer who has never worked with us. This is the double black diamond run. It's the hardest kind of work to win, as the bars for credibility and trust are highest for us to prove our ability to help. Sometimes it comes from opportunistically listening for where our skillsets can be helpful in different ways across different parts of the organization. Firms looking to reinvent themselves might also be particularly focused on these types of opportunities.