Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 27

John Nord, a managing director at PIE, grew up in the small Minnesota town of Owatonna, where his father sold hogs and worked at the grain elevator and his mother was an office manager.

I played hockey day and night. In the winter, my dad and I would flood our machine shed that we had at our place and set up lights and a warming hut. You learn pretty quickly that hockey is a low percentage sport and goals are hard to come by. Scores are often 2 to 1 or even 0 to 0 and that's after an hour of hard play. The trick is to take high percentage shots. Shooting a slapshot from halfway down the rink isn't going to work. Even if you can get one on net, the chances of scoring a goal are slim.

Another way to think about business development in expert services companies is like hockey. It's a low percentage sport marked by long sell cycles. At PIE, if we bring on eight juicy new contracts a year, that can drive double-digit revenue growth. In that environment, it's important to pick our shots. For us, as with other expert services firms, that means working to expand our client mandates – the much higher percentage shots. Also, while winning a new client can take more than a year in some instances, add-on projects with existing clients can often get underway in a matter of weeks.