HOW TO GET, KEEP, AND GROW CLIENTS IN 45 MINUTES

Growing your business can be challenging. So can just holding on to your business. In an era where larger firms than yours start going after your accounts and smaller, more agile, ones start nibbling away at what you always considered your space, it’s not enough to do excellent work to to stay in the game.

If sales is a “relationship game” – how do you start a relationship with a client who doesn’t know you; how do you kick off a relationship before your prospect is a client? Is that even possible? Yes, it is, and I’ve helped it happen over and over again.

Are you ready to try something fundamentally different in your approach to developing, retaining, and expanding your client relationships? Are you ready to try creating lasting relationships on the first sales call?

Now is the time

For more than 25 years I have been helping my clients to achieve Moments of Genius on their way to creating the future they deserved. One of my more successful recurring activities has been to help my clients land accounts they “didn’t deserve” because the lacked one or more critical selection criteria. They were too small for the account. They were too big for the account. They had no experience in the industry. They had no “big rep” of working with big accounts. I did for them and their clients what I did to get my own accounts. I turned most first sales calls into lasting relationships – and it all has to happen in 45 minutes!

I helped my clients land the business. Retain the business. Increase the billings. Best of all, in every case, the clients with whom I worked ended up as a trusted adviser with a seat at the inner circle strategy table. Actually, more often than not, we were at the head of that strategy table.

In one case, I worked with a mid-sized NYC ad agency with billings of $75Million. Within 16 months, their billings were closer to $200Million. Best of all, they had more larger clients than they had ever had in a 25 year existence. Even some of our losses were gratifying if not satisfying. After we pitched General Motors of Canada, their CEO actually apologized for not choosing us as their agency saying: “We have to have an agency with multiple offices all across the country … but tell me, how did a small agency like yours ever come up with this approach to building business. It’s fantastic!”

Without my knowing it, for the past decade, my daughter, the Biology teacher and my coauthor, has been using exactly the same system to advance the cause of intellectual development in 14-year old highschoolers. Both of us saw this process work again and again in our respective disciplines; without really understanding HOW it actually did what it did. So how is it possible for the same system to work equally well with Fortune 50 senior corporate leadership teams, business development teams in a variety of industries, and a classroom full of highschoolers?

About seven years ago, we joined forces to figure out what, exactly was going on with what we were doing. It took a lot of scientific, medical, psychological, and even metaphysical inquiry, but we did get to the answer to that question. We call it Thinking Whole…

Thinking Whole Selling comes in two phases -

HOW TO GET CLIENTS IN 45 MINUTES

The Plan – Differentiate yourself from your competition in the way you ask for a meeting.

The Strategy – Don’t ask for a sales opportunity for you. Offer the prospect something of value to them; a tangible positive outcome they get to keep regardless of the ultimate outcome.

The Execution – Show them what it’s like to have you working for them before you’re working for them by offering a Thinking Out Loud Session to address some area of their concerns and leave them with a solution by the end of the session.

HOW TO KEEP AND GROW CLIENTS IN 45 MINUTES

The Plan – Put yourself in the position to initiate and manage problems and opportunities rather than waiting to respond to their call.

The Strategy – Become the key component of their team intellectualizing to understand, articulate, and address a wide range of issues. Don’t be afraid to help them address issues with your process that may not be directly related to your role as vendor. That’s what being a “business partner” really means.

The Execution – Get into the habit of initiating opportunities by offering an analysis of some situation you know matters to them and conducting a Thinking Out Loud Session to bring it to the edge of actionability.

RESOURCES

It has taken us some 35 years to figure all this out so it’s difficult to meaningfully reduce everything to a paragraph of How To. Instead, we offer the following resources to help you turn theory into positive, productive, action.

VIDEO:

BOOK: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et al

INVITE ME TO A SALES MEETING/CONFERENCE:

45-MINUTE KEYNOTE

MULTI-HOUR WORKSHOP

EXTENDED THINKING WHOLE SALES TRAINING SESSIONS/PROGRAM