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“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.
What the world needs, what the better clients are willing to 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.
is expertise and expertise alone that will set us apart i...
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When the alternatives to hiring us are many, the client will dictate price.
Positioning is the foundation of business development success, and of business success.
Positioning is an exercise in relativity.
Positioning is strategy articulated and then proven.
We must choose a focus Then articulate that focus via a consistent claim of expertise And finally, we must work to add the missing skills, capabilities and processes necessary to support our new claim.
avoidance of The Difficult Business Decision remains the root cause of most business development problems.
We can measure the success of our positioning by gauging our ability to command two things simultaneously: a sales advantage and a price premium.
We are hired for our expertise and not our service.
It is a mistake to believe that the service sector mantra of “The customer is always right” applies to us.
Like any engagement of expertise, we often enter into ours with the client not truly knowing what he needs, let alone re...
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as business owners we need to accept that loving our craft is no substitute for making intelligent business decisions.
Who among us, when faced with the question, “Would you choose to be weak or strong?” would choose to be weak?
It will indulge our desires to do something different every day, and to make every engagement different from the previous ones.
When we make this choice, however, we invite all kinds of undifferentiated competition as well as some highly differentiated, specialized competition.
if we are to drastically reduce our competition and benefit from the resulting power shift, we must pick one door, walk through it and never look back.
Our personal desire for variety is suddenly placed at odds with the fundamental need of our business to focus.
there is no fun like making money,
The path to financial strength begins with facing The Difficult Business Decision.
Presentation, like pitch, is a word that we will leave behind as we seek conversation and collaboration in their place.
We must move away from the place where the client sits with arms crossed in the role of judge,
when prospective clients ask us to bridge massive communication gaps by presenting to them instead of talking with them, it is only natural for us to agree.
This creates a challenge: how to invite him in without allowing him to drive?
our work does not get presented without our involvement.
the benefits we bring to our clients is the advantage of an outside perspective,
While we dislike routine, the client – and ultimately, any consistency of success – demands it.
“How would we conduct ourselves in the meeting if we were not allowed to present?”
Presenting is a tool of swaying, while conversing is a tool of weighing.
The tone of a conversation, in which both parties endeavor to make an honest assessment of the fit between one’s need and the other’s expertise, is entirely different from the tone of a presentation, in which one party tries to convince the other to hire her. Presentations build buying resistance; conversations lower
Our mission is to position ourselves as the expert practitioner in the mind of the prospective client.
convincing has no place in selling.
It is not our objective to sell, convince or persuade. It is simply to determine if there exists a fit suitable enough to merit a next step.
We must never allow ourselves to be placed in this presenter/complier role where the terms and next steps of the relationship are dictated to us. If we assume this lowly role that is offered to us early, we will never be able to exchange it for the loftier expert practitioner role that is required for us to do our best work.
There are four phases in our client engagements: Diagnose the problem/opportunity Prescribe a therapy Apply the therapy Reapply the therapy as necessary
How many times has the client come to us stating, “I need X,” only for us to discover that he needed Y?
“You may be correct, but let’s find out for sure.”
One of the advantages the outside expert brings is perspective.
We cannot be effective, responsible designers if we allow the client to impose his process, or truncate or otherwise marginalize ours.
we must map out and formalize our own diagnostic process.
consistency of our outcomes is rooted in the strength of our process, therefore we must be allowed to employ it.
“The Frog and the Scorpion,”
Possessing our own formalized diagnostic methods, whether they are proprietary to us or not, goes a long way to our positioning in this matter.
A good client will begin to relinquish control once he has the confidence that the expert practitioner knows more than he does, or has the tools to learn more. Formalized diagnostic processes are such tools.
we will view the act of prescription without diagnosis for what it is: malpractice.
We will embrace sales as a basic business function that cannot be avoided and so we will learn to do it properly, as respectful facilitators.
No matter how good we are there will be times when we are required to sell.
