Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 22

The partner's imperative takes two forms. You can bring in new work from companies with whom your firm has never worked before or you can increase the amount of work you are doing for a current client. In many ways this latter form of growth is the bigger opportunity even if it is a challenge.

It's a fall day. Crisp as hard cider. Reds, yellows, greens, and chocolate browns paint the oaks and elms. We walk up to the front entrance of one of America's most storied technology and business consulting firms. They put a man on the moon, invented the ATM, and designed an artificial intelligence program that rivals Ken Jennings at Jeopardy! A part of global business life for more than 100 years, no one in corporate America ever got in trouble for hiring them.

We have an appointment with the head of strategy for one of the company's business units.

“What's the secret to driving business development with current clients?” we ask over espressos in the ground floor café. We elaborate, “Your sales force is legendary, and you're known for your quality. Is that the magic combo?”

“You'd think so,” our host says, the wind rustling the tops of the trees out past an expansive lawn, “but here's the thing: We ran an analysis on two of our business units. We found that the lion's share of the revenues and profits in each business came from a concentrated core of customers. It was the Pareto Principle at work. On either side of the house, 80% of our business came from 20% of our clients.”

“We see that in a lot of firms.” We say, “The relationship between client numbers and revenues is inversely related.”

A slight man with a calm intelligence, our host continues,

We're not alone. A lot of firms segment their clients in this way. They'll call their most productive clients “Diamonds” or “Platinum Accounts” or something similar. Here's what's interesting: When we compared the 80/20 list in the two business units, we only found a 10% overlap in our biggest clients. Imagine! We do hundreds of millions of dollars in consulting work with a Silicon Valley software company and sell them no technology while we outfit a global pharmaceutical distribution company with technology but do no services work with them. It's like the practice leads on either side of the house live on different planets.

Our host describes one of the foundational challenges to growing work within a client: the disconnect between different practice areas or realms of expertise within a company – in his case technology services and business consulting services – between themselves and their client.

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.