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Wayne O’Neill & Associates coaches service providers on building sustainable accounts with
complex clients connecting as a team to aggregate essential client intelligence.
It’s all connected… |
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Our Process
The numbers game has stopped working. Filling out endless qualifications submittals and proposals and hoping your “turn” comes up is exhausting and beyond ineffective. Wayne O’Neill & Associates believes that there are three key elements to successful and sustainable business development: client intelligence, teamwork, and connecting.
When you leverage these three elements, you’ll learn how to bring in new clients – the ones you want to work with, not the ones you settle for. You’ll learn how to increase profits while chasing less work. You’ll learn how to pursue new clients more successfully by involving your whole team. Ultimately, you’ll learn how to stop spending sixty hours a week on cold calls and proposal writing and how to start loving your profession again.
Connection
The key to gathering useful client intelligence is to build connections with your coworkers, strategic partners, and potential clients. Connecting = velocity and effectiveness. If owners are “connected” to you, then they can build trust in you. If they trust you, then your firm can build a sustainable account.
That doesn’t mean schmoozing: Minimize sports outings, minimize golf games. Just because someone likes you doesn’t translate necessarily to trusting you professionally. Would you rather have a dentist that makes you smile? Or, one that can actually fix your smile while also accommodating your fear of needles?
You have to get creative to make connections. Use the power of six degrees of separation with everyone on your team to initiate multiple paths to intimacy with a target client. Attend industry events to learn about the latest issues affecting the sector, instead of just handing out business cards. Host simple owners’ forums that allow industry leaders to express the obstacles within their sector so that your team can understand the “issues behind the issues” and seek creative, respectful solutions to those same issues.
Making connections helps you gather client intelligence. By talking to and building trust with a diverse range of people, you can learn more about your clients’ concerns. When you take the time to listen and learn about the real issues affecting their decisions, you are sending a loud message to your potential clients.
Client Intelligence
The only way to differentiate yourself and your company from the competition is to gather as much significant and prioritized information (“client intelligence”) about your prospective clients as possible. In particular, you need to search for the business and political issues that affect your clients’ decisions. What keeps them up at night? What is their project or scope really about?
When your client decides to build a new dormitory on campus, is he or she looking for the quickest and cheapest building that houses the most students? Or, does your client want a dorm filled with the latest technology to attract more engineering students? Or, is your client looking for a dorm with more spacious, apartment-like units to draw older graduate students?
Wayne O’Neill & Associates coaches your firm on what kind of client intelligence to look for and how to find it. We coach teams to gather client intelligence from a variety of sources, both internal and external. Once that information has been aggregated, your team can interpret that intelligence and brainstorm ways to differentiate your company through specific responses to your client’s business and political issues. Anyone can sell, but when you really understand your potential clients, you can offer them solutions, not just transactions.
Teamwork
A lot of people seem to think that bonding equals teamwork. To us, bonding exercises seem beneath most people’s understanding of true, effective teamwork. Do you honestly believe that untangling a human chain will help you work better as a group to pursue client accounts? Neither do we.
It’s time for less bonding and more whiteboard sessions. The real key to connecting as a team is for everyone to feel that they are making a specific and clear contribution towards a common goal. Good teamwork is the most efficient way to gather client intelligence. And by delegating and making each person on the team accountable for a specific task, you can complete the client intelligence search more effectively.
You have to look outside the traditional concept of a sales team and find out who’s hungry for new opportunities. Include people from the marketing and operations departments as well as sales. Bring in outside help from vendors, suppliers, and subcontractors. You’d be surprised what others know and what they’re willing to share once you stop trading leads and start working together strategically. This is the power of broad based collaboration: It’s the Wikipedia effect.
It all goes back to you don’t know what you don’t know. If a construction firm is building a library for a client in the education sector, how are they going to know how much space is needed for storing books or classrooms and lounge areas without the help of a library planner? How are they going to know how many floors and chutes are needed for conveyor belts assisting the library’s book return system if they don’t consult a material handling equipment vendor? How are they going to ensure that their proposal includes all the hard wiring and electrical support necessary for security and self check-out systems if they don’t seek advice from a technology consultant? And how are they going to know that they even need help from these strategic partners if they don’t use their team to gather client intelligence?
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