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Why You Need To Keep Showing Up
Why do some clients engage your competition without telling you they had a project?
It's because you weren't in their consideration set at the time they were thinking about who to use.
Just because you might have done some work for a client before doesn't mean you will be automatically considered in the future. A client's consideration set can be a dynamic thing - and the best way to maintain a place in it is to have a consistent and regular approach to contacting your clients.
This lesson will help you understand why recent and meaningful contact with clients is important and provide some strategies to help with the process.
Duration: 3 minutes
Prerequisites: None
Imperfect Decision-Making
Why do people say one thing and do something else?
It turns out that people don't know what they will do. Not only that, but they also can't tell you after the fact why they did something.
Behavioural economics is the psychology of why people buy and the rules of the brain that help us predict what people will do instead of what we think they should do. We like to think that decisions are made according to a complex, logical process. They aren't.
This lesson will help you understand how the brain drives decision-making and why you need to start pitching differently.
Duration: 3 minutes
Prerequisites: None
What You Say Is Not More Important Than How You Say It
When pitching for prospective new clients, it is good to set yourself apart from the competition.
The sub-conscious decision-making process of the prospect makes it important for you to “frame” a distinctive position.
This lesson shows you how to apply subtle tweaks to your messaging to overcome existing biases and present yourself in the best light.
Duration: 4 minutes
Prerequisites: Imperfect Decision-making
Prioritising Your BD Resources
It can be difficult to decide how much BD time and cost should be invested in each of your clients.
Often this can be quite a subjective process, dependent upon any number of personal agendas and professional opinions.
This lesson sets out a simple model that provides a process for you and your team to follow which removes bias and introduces objectivity into your decision making and account planning. It also guides you in understanding the sorts of BD activities that will deliver the best return on investment for each client.
Duration: 3 minutes
Prerequisites: None
Where To Spend Your Time
Time is a finite resource – for you and your clients and prospects.
So, you need to make sure that you are spending your time with those prospects where you have the best chance of success, and on activities that are likely to yield the best results.
This lesson will help you to understand the types of activities that will provide greater “bang for your buck”.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Warming The Call
Nobody likes to cold call. Nobody.
But if you find yourself in the situation where you need to reach out to a completely new prospect, it would be good if you didn’t have to go in completely cold.
This lesson provides techniques you can use to do some preliminary qualification of prospects so that any initial request for a meeting has a better chance of success.
Duration: 4 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
The Real Reasons Clients Buy
Clients are generally driven by rational motivators, or emotional motivators.
As professionals, we spend a lot of time in the rational realm. However, 80% of all decisions are made from an emotional standpoint.
This lesson will give you some ideas for meeting your clients and prospects at a more emotional level.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success, Building Rapport, Building Trust
Spreading Your Word
In professional services, it’s important that you have a profile as a thought leader and can demonstrate your expertise and experience to prospects.
Seminars are a good way to do this.
But seminars have limited reach (unless you are presenting in many locations), limitations in terms of the time of day you can present them, and unless you record them you can’t maintain a historical record.
Webinars provide a great way to solve these problems and make sure you are spreading your word in a way that works better with your prospect’s availability.
In this strategy, you’ll learn what webinars are, how they work, why they work, and how to create your own campaigns.
Duration: 60 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success, Getting Leads From LinkedIn
Stop Using Capability Statements
Too many professionals actually believe that prospects are impressed by their broad credentials and the span of their service capability.
Just because you have “extensive experience” (in your words), doesn’t mean that the prospect is convinced. Capability statements are too often used as a crutch, and they are lazy business development.
This lesson will give you alternatives that make a greater difference for your prospects and demonstrate that you respect your prospect.
Duration: 4 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Solid Starts To Presentations
The opening 60 to 90 seconds of a presentation are the most critical. If you lose your audience here, it is extremely difficult to retrieve their attention.
This lesson gives you seven different options for creating an impactful opening to your presentation that will set it up for success.
Duration: 5 minutes
Prerequisites: None
Post-Meeting Next Steps
It’s important to make sure that you have agreed, concrete steps to follow at the conclusion of a business development meeting or call.
There are any number of reasons why your business development campaign can lose momentum. The best way to maintain some form of control over the process is to have a map of the future to follow – and to make sure it has the prospect’s agreement.
This lesson will help you to understand what causes a loss of momentum and it provides some simple methods for keeping the business development process on track.
Duration: 5 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Points Of Difference
It’s important to be different. But you need to be different in a way that is valuable to your client or prospect.
Digital technologies and social media in particular provide the opportunity for us to build our authority and to be more highly targeted in our marketing efforts than ever before.
With so many practitioners who are all excellent at technical service delivery, your important points of differentiation need to be found in non-technical areas and in ways that give you a closer alignment with the client and therefore build trust.
This lesson will help you to understand some of the ways you can build a meaningful point of difference and how you can communicate it to your prospects.
Duration: 3 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Overcoming Reluctance
Reluctance can manifest itself in many different ways in a business development scenario.
Nobody likes rejection – but you often only get one opportunity to ask a prospect for some important piece of information, or to take a particular action. And unfortunately we often overestimate the risks involved in asking for something.
This lesson will help you to understand some of the sources behind your reluctance, some of the self-limiting beliefs that hold you back, and give you a way to think about these situations so that they become less frightening and more fulfilling.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Motivating The Client
You need to ensure that the client is motivated in two ways:
This lesson will help you to understand how you might identify if the client has one or both of these motivators.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Getting Leads From LinkedIn
The world has gone digital, and it’s not coming back!
Digital technologies and social media in particular provide the opportunity for us to build our authority and to be more highly targeted in our marketing efforts than ever before.
And the analytics provided allow us to more accurately assess the returns from our marketing investments.
For professionals, LinkedIn is the digital tool of choice for building a platform of authority and campaigning to generate new leads.
This lesson takes you through specific steps to build LinkedIn campaigns that will generate new leads and establish you as an expert in your target niche.
Duration: 60 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
How To Write An Article (That Gets Read!)
As professionals, we are trained to be technical experts. And unfortunately when we set about writing a piece of thought leadership, we stay in “technical expert” mode.
The output often looks like it was written for our colleagues rather than our clients.
This lesson will show you how to structure your articles to give them the best chance of actually being read – and enjoyed – by your audience.
Duration: 3 minutes
Prerequisites: None
Getting Client Commitment
Once you are sure that the client understands your solutions, there will come a point when you will need to clarify whether or not the client is serious about engaging you. It may not be necessary or even appropriate for the client to instruct you there and then, particularly if the solution is relatively complex and/or the client is not the only decision maker.
This lesson gives you a 3 step process for understanding if the client wants your solution ahead of the alternatives. It also provides an effective test that can be applied anytime the client wants to negotiate.
Duration: 5 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Generating Referrals From Non-Clients
When thinking about referrals, many professionals don’t think beyond their clients as referral sources.
The reality is that there are rich referral sources amongst other parts of your network.
This lesson provides some strategies to help secure referrals from your key contacts who are not actual clients.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: None
A Process For Client Meetings
When you find yourself in a face-to-face meeting with a client and you are hoping to motivate the client towards buying your solution or service, it helps to have a model that you can use to make sure you cover the key areas that support motivation to act.
This lesson sets out a simple model that provides a logical process for a sequence of questions that will help you uncover the level of need arousal and will help you to develop your client’s motivation to buy.
Duration: 1 minutes
Prerequisites: None
Generating Referrals From Clients
Not surprisingly, many professionals find that their best source of business comes from existing clients. Particularly from those clients who have a high level of trust in the provider.
However, few professionals understand how to leverage these client relationships to generate referrals that lead to instructions from new clients.
This lesson takes you through the right way to approach your clients for referrals and also, importantly, what NOT to do.
Duration: 3 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success
Client Styles
Clients like to work with people who are like them. A large part of developing connections with prospects is being able to communicate on their wavelength – which means you need to understand their preferred thinking style and adapt to it.
And in a meeting situation, or on a phone call, you don’t have a lot of time to do this.
This lesson introduces the four different focuses that prospects bring to their consideration of solutions; how you can quickly identify them; and what you can do to align yourself.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success; Building Rapport
Building Trust
People are more likely to be influenced by someone they perceive as credible, expert and trustworthy.
So you need to be demonstrating these qualities to your prospects and clients.
This lesson will take you through five different approaches for building trust – through a credible demeanour, relevant expertise, understanding of the client, candour and professionalism.
Duration: 4 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success (Tactic)
Building Rapport
People buy from people they know, like and trust. It’s important to try and build some rapport – or chemistry – with prospects so that you can develop “like-ability”. But you have a very limited window of opportunity to do it.
This tactic sheet will provide techniques for building rapport, and for understanding different communication styles so that you can adapt and align to the prospect’s preferred style.
Duration: 2 minutes
Prerequisites: Framework For Success (Tactic)
Framework For Success
Success is a function of discipline, practice and persistence. It’s also helpful to have a simple model to help focus your efforts.
This lesson provides a simple, yet effective, model that can be used to make sure you are focused on the most important business development activities; and to help maintain the discipline required for success.
Duration: 6 minutes
Prerequisites: None