Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 23

“(At Deloitte), we were encouraged to do good work,” reports Charlie, “to build great relationships with clients, and to be there when a client has problems so we could offer to help.”

Bill Burch is an accomplished expert services rainmaker, currently driving revenues at ECFx from his home base in Leesburg, Virginia. He says:

There is a totally different way to sell to an existing customer than there is to a new customer. The person who brings in a new account is a sales hunter. They will be highly skilled. They'll know the competition and know how to compete against the competition. Someone who focuses on add-on sales to current clients has a different skillset. In the sales vernacular, they're called farmers.

Peter Bryant of Clareo agrees. “Farmers bring home world-class project delivery and are very good at developing relationships inside the client. It is the reason they get the follow-on work.”

Deloitte knew reaching outside of a client to lasso a new logo is really hard, particularly for more junior people, but they also knew that harvesting add-on opportunities with an existing client is a much higher percentage activity. This is why Deloitte focused Charlie on farming first, urging him “to be there when a client has problems so we could help.”

Our friend who said 80% of his firm's business comes from 20% of his clients described what statisticians call a power-law relationship or the phenomenon of two data sets relating to each other in predictable ways regardless of how the set grows or contracts. Power laws – in this case the inverse relationship between client numbers and revenues – emerge when there is reinforcing feedback. In expert services, that feedback is the hard-to-accumulate, easy-to-destroy twin propellers of trust and credibility. When both are pulling strongly through the wind, we gain institutional momentum: Good work begets more good work and the gigs roll in exponentially.

This book is about how to farm. Farming current clients for new business is attractive for a number of reasons.