More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain
If we are not seen as more expert than our competition then we will be viewed as one in a sea of many, and we will have little power in our relationships with our clients and prospects.
pay for, and what our people want to develop and deliver, is deep expertise. Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition. Not personality. Not process. Not price.
and how much of our advice we need to part with, for free, in order to decide if he will choose to work with us. It is first through positioning our firm that we begin to shift the power in the buy-sell relationship and change the way our services are bought and sold. Positioning is the foundation of business development success, and of business success. If we fail on this front we face a long, costly uphill journey as owners of creative businesses.
Choosing the focus for our firm remains The Difficult Business Decision. Too often, we decide to not decide and so, in our minds, leave open the possibility that we may continue to do all things for all types of clients. In creative firms the world over – firms populated and run by curious problem solvers – the avoidance of The Difficult Business Decision remains the root cause of most business development problems.
Winning while charging more is the ultimate benefit and key indicator of effective positioning, for price elasticity is tied to the availability of substitutes. The more alternatives to our firm, the less power we have to command a premium over our competition.
we often enter into ours with the client not truly knowing what he needs, let alone recognizing the route to a solution. For us to do our best work we need to leverage our outside perspective. We need to be allowed to lead the engagement. We need to take control.
In business, weakness is often a symptom of not making The Difficult Business Decision.
We were kindred spirits all with the same passion for our craft. We celebrated our wins together and commiserated over the losses together. In those early days the studio was more college dorm room or rock ‘n’ roll tour bus than place of commercial enterprise.
We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe We will take seriously our professional obligation to begin at the beginning, and we will never put our clients or ourselves in the position where we are prescribing solutions without first fully diagnosing the client’s challenge.
Diagnose the problem/opportunity Prescribe a therapy Apply the therapy Reapply the therapy as necessary
But let us not place all the blame on the client. Doctors face self-diagnosed patients as often as we do, but we are far more likely to proceed with such a flawed approach than any medical practitioner. We let the client dictate and drive the diagnostic process, usually because we have not bothered to understand, formalize and explain our own. We have not taken control on this issue. We have not correlated our likelihood of high-quality outcomes to working from a defined and meaningful diagnostic process.
The lesson is that the most successful clients, whether owners or executives, have achieved their success in part because of their ability to take control – their ability to rise above and orchestrate others. This is their strength; and even though it is not always in their best interest, it is in their nature.
The first salesperson had it right: selling is about determining a fit between the buyer’s need and the seller’s supply (our very objective) and then facilitating a next step. Sometimes the proper next step is to part ways, sending the client on to another provider who is better able to serve him.
To sell is to: Help the unaware Inspire the interested Reassure those who have formed intent The first thing we must understand if we are to approach selling properly and respectfully is that the client’s motivation, and by necessity, our role as salesperson, evolves as he progresses through the buying cycle. He moves from unaware of his problem or opportunity, to being interested in considering the opportunity, and finally, to intent on acting on it.
If we are pomegranates then we will resist being pushed into a process designed to compare apples to apples.
Doctors charge for MRIs. Accountants charge for audits. Lawyers charge for discovery. And we charge for our diagnostic work as well, whether it is a brand audit or discovery session that we conduct ourselves, or outside research that we commission.
The optimal engagement length will differ from firm to firm and from client to client, but we must embrace the idea that turnover is healthy, and the subsequent idea that our business development goal is to manage such turnover. If it is our desire to grow our practice, then we accomplish this by ensuring that the new clients we take in represent increased opportunity over that of those departing.
Instead of waiting to hear, “You seem expensive,” we might say, “I’m a little concerned about the ability an organization of your size has to afford us.” In this manner we want to learn to lean into potential objections. If the objection is going to kill the deal, then let’s kill it early.
When we put our flag in the ground, heads turn. The competition, seemingly oblivious to us before, suddenly takes notice. Those that do not claim meaningful territory are rarely attacked. What is there to defend, after all? This is one of the indulgences of the generalist: it is an easier life. It is not as lucrative. It is not as fulfilling. It is, however, easier. Nobody attacks the unthreatening generalist.
The truth about the average human being is that, regardless of what he claims to want, he will avoid the difficult decisions and the undesirable tasks, even if they represent the path to the outcome or future he desires.
The Requirement to Write Writing gets us found. Writing helps to cement our position as experts. Most important of all, writing about what we do is the fastest way to deepen our knowledge.
If we have no meaningfully defined processes, then there is not much to train our people on.
When we choose to follow the twelve proclamations and make the transition from order-taker to expert, we commit to the idea that perpetual learning and continuous improvement are mandatory.
This is the simplest of business tests, one for which there is no longer any excuse to fail: for all new clients, we will be paid in advance.
“Before I say no, let me ask you a few questions.” This keeps the minimum in play and lets us continue to gather information to make an assessment of the fit.
We must dispossess ourselves of the notion that we can operate on thin profit margins at the beginning of a new client relationship and then work to increase those margins over time. We know that profit margin, like power, only diminishes with time.
In our enterprise there will be no loss leaders. As experts, we will not discount with new clients today for the opportunity to make money tomorrow. We will save the use of discounts for our best and longest serving clients at times when they need our support.
We Leave it to Last → First, we will ensure that cutting price is the last thing we do. We will search for and address all other objections before we agree to discount. In one final sweep before we agree to accept less we will ask, “If we were to agree to this price, is there anything else to stop us from deciding to work together right now?” If no objections or next steps remain, then we can cut our price and take the engagement. If there remain steps to be taken or objections to address, then we will do so before we discount.
Second, we must ensure that such discounts are clearly identified in all written documentation, including contracts, estimates and invoices, in order to remind the client of the true value of our services. Our failure to abide by this rule will almost certainly cost us in the future as the client “forgets” this proper value and references only what he previously paid. By recording our discount in all price documentation in this way, we ensure that such a discount does not set a precedent for new pricing moving forward.
In boldly charging more than our competitors, we advertise to our prospective clients that we have confidence in our ability to deliver high quality outcomes.
In this way, our most profitable clients get our best service. It does not happen the other way around. Superior service does not improve profit; profit improves service.
We sell our thinking but we do ourselves a gross disservice in selling it by the hour. The surest way to commoditize our own thinking is to sell it in units of doing: time. Later in the engagement, when the strategy work has been done and we are deep into implementation work, the client buys our time.
The defining characteristic of a commodity is an inability to support any price premium. If we cannot win while charging more, then we must face the reality that we are selling a commodity.
The strength of our strategic processes, rooted in our deep experience and systematic thinking, is what ensures our high likelihood of a high-quality outcome. This is the basis of the premium we command, therefore we should not be charging for it in units of time.
The larger client pays more to ensure his commitment to solving his problem and to ensure his commitment to working with us – and he pays more because we are delivering a service that has a greater dollar value to him.
Of all the investment opportunities we will face in our lives, few will yield returns greater than those opportunities to invest in ourselves. Price premiums give us the profit to reinvest in our people, our enterprise and ourselves.
Technology and oversupply are combining to rapidly widen the gulf between the commoditized tacticians who now bid their services against each other online, and the expert practitioners who command significant fees for leading their clients to novel solutions to meaningful business challenges. The middle is disappearing. The need to choose a path is being forced upon us. If we continue to choose not to choose, the decision will be made for us, and we will be pushed down the commodity road where we will reside with thousands of other order-taker suppliers who will never be free of the pitch.
