Let’s try on the idea of you being as ruthlessly discerning with your prospective clients, if a little kinder in your language. What are the questions you would like to know in advance of working with a client to determine if this relationship is going to work?
Some firms don’t take project work at all, while for others project revenue vastly outstrips the income from their few ongoing clients. What’s the proper role of project work in your firm, and what’s the proper approach to pursuing or vetting it? In this article I lay out some specific guidelines on projects as a part of your overall client mix, and the rules of pursuing and accepting project work.
A couple of years ago I wrote an article titled, ‘I Wish I’d Said That: Seven sentences to get you out of sticky situations.’ Just as there are words you can employ to helpful means, there are also words that you should avoid to keep you out of trouble and in control of the buy-sell
Years of insisting that business development people generate leads instead of just follow up on those generated by other means has forced creative firms to prefer sales-based skill sets of cold calling and networking over others. In this article I explain why those skill sets are less valuable today and what is replacing them in
I spent the early part of my consulting practice advising you on using classic selling techniques to help overcome objections raised by the prospect in the buy-sell cycle. Over time it became clear that rather than trying to overcome these objections, you should be raising them for the prospect to overcome.
For years now I have preached to you about narrowing the focus of your firm in order to eliminate competition and shift the power in the buy-sell relationship to you, the seller. A narrow positioning is one of the foundational Win Without Pitching principles that allows you to take control of the buying process, lower
In my counsel to agency principals and business development personnel I spend too much time on the subject of how to overcome objections. If you find yourself constantly dealing with or dreading objections late in the buying cycle then there’s something you’re not doing early in the buying cycle: you’re not creating objections. You should
To understand selling is to understand that in the pursuit of profitable new clients you have no business trying to convince anyone of anything, ever. To the question, if my job is not to convince, what then, I respond: It is to help the unaware, to inspire the interested and to reassure the intent. This
Have you ever been close to securing a lucrative engagement only to be thrown off your game, and possibly out of contention, by an unforeseen late question from the client? While there’s no way to prepare for every objection that might arise there are a few common ones that seem to create that deer-in-the-headlights response.
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