Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 59

We've earned credibility when a client knows and respects our work. A client might say, “Joe was on my team when I was at AT&T. He's on his own now, but no one knows revenue recovery better.” If you're Joe, this is the kind of experience-based recommendation that leads to new work. Hopefully, once we are engaged with the client, our work is shining on its own, lighting the way to new engagements. When we first pitched the client, we were at a disadvantage, having to talk about our work. Expert services work, however, is better demonstrated than described. When we work next to someone in the trenches, we may come to believe he or she is tenacious, insightful, highly capable, and possessed of sound judgment. Once we are working on a project inside a client, the credibility bar is much lower than when we were on the outside peeking in. They have seen first-hand that we can do the work.

This is harder, though, when we try and do work for new buyers within a client who don't know us, or when we try to tell current buyers that we're capable of different kinds of services.

Hurdle 4: Our client knows the quality of our work, but we struggle to get others in the organization to see that quality. Or, we do good work and offer to perform a new service only to find our clients think of us as a one-trick pony. Our credibility is hard to scale – across services and across relationships.