How Clients Buy

This is a book on the client’s buying decision journey.

Your expertise deserves to find an audience - the exact right audience where what you know and what you’ve seen will find a home where it can create value, not just for you, but more importantly, for the people whom you most want to serve.

Being smart is not enough. You have to know how to engage with potential clients, understand their unique challenges, and scope business. You have to figure out a way to build a bridge from your expertise to those it can most help.

The Buyer’s Journey

1. Prospective clients become aware of your existence. This might be from an introduction from a friend, an article you wrote, or because they met you at a conference.
2. They come to understand what you do and how you are unique. They can articulate what you do clearly to others.
3. They develop an interest in you and your firm. They have goals, set by themselves or others, and they can see how what you do might be useful in their efforts to realize those goals. What you do is relevant.
4. They respect your work and are filled with confidence that you can help. They look to your track record, to their peers, and to a variety of social clues to determine if you are credible and likely to move the needle on their goals.
5. They trust you, confident you will have their best interests at heart.
6. They have the ability to pull the trigger, meaning they are in a position to corral the money and organizational support needed to buy from you.
7. They are ready to do something. The timing is right inside their organizations, and they have the headspace to manage you.

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Why selling services is hard (in contrast to products)?

Customers often cannot determine the extent of the service that was needed and how much was actually performed.

When someone uses a service, the service provider is the expert, who is both defining the problem and making a recommendation. It’s a helpless feeling for the purchaser. They have to trust us before they buy from us.

All expert service providers sell services under circumstances in which the client has to trust them implicitly.

Client has to believe:

1. The expert will diagnose the problem correctly.
2. The expert will prescribe an effective solution.
3. The expert can and will do the work in a way that will achieve the outcome they want.
4. The expert will fairly price the service based on work actually done.

Trust is transmitted in three ways:

1. Relationships: You already know the client
2. Referral: Someone you know refers the client to you
3. Reputation: The client already knows your reputation

Clients hire people they know, respect and trust, or who come recommended by the people they know, respect, and trust.

Clients have problems and we need to discover, understand, and tackle them. The way you do that is you build relationships and you demonstrate the capability to solve problems. Once people realize you help them solve problems, then they will come back.

Bad Advice in Traditional Sales

Most sales reps learn that sales is like a funnel, where prospects enter at the top and proceed through the funnel to become customers. The goal is to increase the conversion rates from one step to the next.

Search for “Closing Techniques“ in the notes. Most of the time of sales reps is spent thinking about and practicing these clever tactics and coming up with a clever pitch.

This line of thinking goes: if you could only prospect better, pitch better, negotiate better, and close better, you would win more business. But that's not the typical way consulting and professional services are sold. Being a master negotiator just isn't that relevant to earning trust and respect necessary to “close” a consulting or professional services assignment and might even be counterproductive.

Great client relationships are built over time on foundations of trust and are not, by definition, transactional.

Having an attractive, charming, positive personality is also not a crucial factor (though it helps) in getting clients. Being likeable isn’t a bad thing. However, respect trumps charm when it comes to most buying decisions for services.

Consulting and professional services are bought on reputation, referral, and relationships.

When selling consulting or professional services, the goal is not to identify prospects and process them like corn flakes; it is to identify a community and position yourself to serve it over time.

Stay in touch. Make friends. The people you get to know earlier will grow up and be the decision makers.

Stage 1: I am aware of you

If a prospective client doesn’t know you exist, they can’t buy from you. One of the first jobs of marketing is to let others know who you are.

Ask for advice. Publish your point of view. Stick to your niche at the beginning. Focus. You want to be known as a helpful, useful, and consistent voice in your industry.

Stage 2: I understand what you do

In order for clients to buy from you, not only do they have to be aware you exist, but they also have to have a good sense of what you do. If they don't, they can't build a bridge from you to the problem they have now or might face in the future.

Consulting and professional service providers who are well known to the world they want to impress do two simple things:

• They niche themselves and become known for that niche.
• They articulate what they do, who they serve, and how they're unique in a short, pithy sentence—the so-called “elevator pitch.”

Do these two things well, and people will not only understand what you do, but they will remember you later when they need help or when someone asks them for a recommendation on who is the expert in a field.

You succeed by being good with people, but you also succeed by being an expert in something. Generalists do not succeed in the long run. Eventually you have to figure out where you're going to become deeply knowledgeable, and you have to be able to show people that you have that knowledge. It's really hard for young people to figure what they want to specialize in early in their career, but the road to success, at least in our firm, comes from becoming a subject matter expert.

You have to go deep.