Tom McMakin - Never Say Sell

Almost by definition, if we have engaged with a client, the client must have been ready and had the ability to pull the trigger on a contract with us. The company was prosperous enough to enable an engagement and, importantly, the project lead inside the client company was personally ready to tackle a new initiative and had the support of his or her boss.

It's a mistake, however, to think just because the ability and readiness stars aligned in one division of the company, they similarly align in other divisions – even if we are trying to engage with someone who is the functional equivalent of our current buyer. Likewise, we can never assume that just because a client was ready and able to engage with us around one of our service lines that the client is equally ready and able to engage with us around other service lines.

Hurdle 6: Clients need to have the resources and bandwidth to take on new projects. That they are ready and able to engage with us on one project doesn't mean that they are able to engage with us on a second, related project or that their peers in other parts of a client organization are similarly readyand ableto engage.

The first challenge to expanding our relationship with a client is that the language we learned as hunters doesn't serve us well in the world of farming. Both hunting and farming bring in new revenues, but this fact masks other, more profound differences. The seven elements describe how clients come to know us, understand what we do, and ultimately engage our services. That description, however, is not helpful as we think about how to expand our mandates with current clients. It is not enough that, as professionals, we weren't trained in business development; now we learn that what we know about landing new clients bears little resemblance to the skillset needed to grow that client.

1 *Close readers will note that in How Clients Buy, the word respect was used here instead of credibility. Upon further study and reflection, the authors think credibility – or respect for one's work – is the best term to characterize this element.

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