Читать книгу How to Win Client Business When You Don't Know Where to Start - Tom McMakin, Doug Fletcher - Страница 34

Walt Shill is the managing partner and global commercial director of ERM. ERM is a leading global provider of environmental, health, and safety consulting services, employing over 5,000 consultants worldwide. Walt's as close as anyone I've ever met to being a guru in the profession of management consulting.

He has spent over 30 years in the field as a partner at McKinsey & Co., Accenture, and now in his senior leadership role at ERM. If Walt ever gets around to writing a book on lessons learned over his career, I'll be the first in line at his book signing. I met Walt a few years ago when Tom and I were conducting the research for How Clients Buy. One of the most insightful things I learned from Walt was the importance of understanding the risks clients face in choosing to hire us.

One thing I always underestimated – that I now value the most – is that in many cases if you hire a consultant, it's a career risk, and the bigger the prize, the bigger the risk.

Risk is an important component in the client's buying decision journey. So much of what clients are trying to do, consciously or not, is mitigate the risks they face in choosing which expert to hire, or even if they should bring in outside help. Risks are one of the key drivers in why buying our services is so much harder than buying a product.

Here are just a few of the risks clients face:

 Competence risk: Are we really good at what we do?

 Culture risk: Are we a good cultural fit?

 Performance risk: Will we actually follow through on doing what we say we will?

 Integrity risk: Will we do what's best for the client at all times?

 Reputational risk: Will this hurt my firm's reputation if the project ends poorly?

 Financial Risk: Will this impact our firm's financial performance if things don't go well?

 Career risk: Will my career be derailed if this project goes badly?

Going back to our original thought experiment from the book's introduction, I think client risk is one of the key reasons why it's relatively easy to buy a home, but very difficult to choose an architect.

Buying a product, even an expensive item, feels less risky to us. Even if we can't verbalize it, we feel more secure in buying a product. We can touch it, sit in it, or walk through it. It's a real thing, and it's not hard for our brains to imagine what it will feel like in owning it.

Buying services, on the other hand, feels risky to us, even if we can't quite articulate it. This discomfort sits in the pit of our stomach. We can't easily see a person's expertise or the intentions in their heart. We often don't know. So we grasp for straws in an attempt to sort out who the true experts are, the honorable from the scammers, the reliable from the flaky.

Understanding client risk is incredibly important in helping us become more successful at winning client business. We can assist prospective clients by doing specific things that give them more confidence that:

 We are good at what we do.

 We will deliver on what we say we're gonna do.

 We have their best interests at heart.

 And, in the end, they'll have a wonderful experience in working with us.