To a Land Where You Are Not Known

Forty years ago, a young man sat in a small rural classroom located 193 kilometers east of Vancouver on the Trans-Canada highway and hung on his teacher's every word.

The teacher who inspired me most was Miss Stubson from my high school in Sardis. She was phenomenal because she raised everyone's aspirations. She used to drive in from Vancouver, from the ‘big city’ to teach in this school no one had heard of. She'd say: “you can do a lot in the world—go for it!” At thirteen or fourteen, she opened my horizons. And she was pushy about it. She started up a debating society, which the school had never had, and then entered us for the regional championships, then the provincial, then the national. She said: “You need to do more than just school work. Debating is going to develop you. And anyhow, I've already entered you—you're going!”

The young man in Miss Stubson's class took these words to heart, graduating from the University of British Columbia with honors and then winning a Rhodes scholarship to Brasenose College at Oxford University. After a stint working as a currency analyst for Rothschild, he took a position in the Toronto office of a consulting firm.

I figured I'd come for two years and get as much experience as I could, then go back to the academic world. The more I worked in the firm, however, the more curious I grew. You're always learning. Just as soon as you get comfortable with something, you go to the next level, and I love that.

The years passed. He enjoyed his work, was climbing the consulting ladder, enjoyed the respect of his colleagues, and was comfortable, increasingly ensconced in the Toronto business community. That's when the Toronto office nominated him to join the international partnership, but after interviewing, he failed to make the cut. It was devastating for someone who was so used to succeeding.

It took me three times before I was elected a partner. It was a very painful process.…I hadn't experienced a lot of failure. I had worked hard, and you know, if you work hard, you do well. Here I was. I was working hard and I was rejected.

The interviews were tough. “One of them was very painful. [The reviewer said,] ‘we're not sure about your problem-solving skills.’ That's like telling an astronomer they can't do math. It was a bit of a slap in the head.”

When an opportunity to work for the firm in Korea came up, he jumped even though everyone around him advised him not to go. “You're going to kill you career,” they said, but it didn't deter him. He said to himself, “I am going to go. I'm going to be tested like I've never been tested. I'll learn some things. And if it doesn't work out, I can live with that. But I know I'm going to grow.”

When I moved to Korea, I had nothing. I didn't know the language, [and] I didn't know the culture. I didn't know any people. I had nothing. And that is kind of why I wanted to go because I wanted to try and figure it out.

And Dominic Barton did figure it out. He built a robust banking practice for McKinsey & Co. in South Korea, and even became friends with the president. Then, on the strength of that success, he was asked by McKinsey to lead the firm's Asia practice based in Shanghai. He became known for his vision, drive, intelligence, and strong commitment to the values of the firm. In 2009, his fellow senior partners from around the world elected him to be the firm's eleventh global managing director. He was forty-six years old.

Introducing Yourself

When Dominic first landed in South Korea, he knew he needed to introduce himself to the business community. He carried with him the halo of the McKinsey brand, to be sure, but that didn't take away from the fact that he was an outsider to the clubby world of Seoul banking.

I asked people for help. I wrote ten letters to banking CEOs. I didn't say, “Look, I'm Dominic Barton from McKinsey. I'm here to help.” It was, “I've moved here, I want to help play a small role in building the financial system, but I don't know anyone. All I have is my experience from x, y, and z. Can I get some advice from you? Would you help me?” Some of my colleagues were a bit shocked that I would write a cold letter because that's not sort of done, but nine out of the ten CEOs wrote me back. ‘Sure, come and talk,’ they said. But I wasn't writing to do work. I was writing to ask for help. That is how I established a network. People would refer me to other people. I got to know people. I didn't have any other natural linkage.

Interviewing for information in this way is enormously effective. Think about the advice you might give your younger self if you had recently graduated from college and were looking for a job.

“I love fishing and hiking, and I'd like to work in the outdoor products industry.”

You might ponder your younger self and say, “You can troll websites for job openings, or you can send a cold letter requesting employment, but it would be better to network in the industry. Many jobs are created for individuals or are not widely advertised.”

“How do I network?”

“You use introductions and politely written inquiries to ask people's advice, both on your job hunt and to get their perspective on where the industry is headed. At the end of each interview, ask if there are others with whom you should be talking and if the person minds if you use their name when reaching out to others.”

This is job hunting 101. It is no different in consulting and professional services.

Note a few lessons from Dominic's experience:

1. Intentions matter. Dominic did not do sales-like things, like leave a white paper or talk about a new service offering, because he knew he was not selling; he was learning. To his mind, it would be impossible to be of service to an industry or geography without understanding the context into which he was walking. His desire to introduce himself to the financial services industry in Seoul was genuine, but so was his desire to hear the perspective of those who most wanted to serve.
2. Values matter. Marvin Bower created a firm in which the value of service was higher than the value of growth or firm profit. It's not that those things are not important; it's that the value of impartial advice given to clients was more important than commercial success. That means that at the margin, you always make the call in favor of the client and truth and away from self-interest. There's a kind of belief in karmic business going on here: Do the right thing and it will return to you in ways you cannot predict.
3. Time matters. Dominic did not seek to sell right as he landed at Incheon International Airport. His highest priority was to serve. From that came a desire to introduce himself and to learn. Consulting is service, and service begins with knowing those you hope to serve. In aggregate, this becomes your network. Russell Davis at BCG reports that the advice given to new hires is “do good work and build your network.” That's because networks are people sitting in various institutions and with various titles who have overlapping interests and who bring different skills to the table. Work—in the sense of consulting and professional services engagements—are handshakes between nodes in that network agreeing to join their complementary skills and experiences together on projects. This engagement rarely happens after a first meeting. Instead trust and reputation are built up over time, like clouds thickening over the ocean. One day there will be an opportunity to collaborate, but wishing the rain would come sooner does not make it so.

A second approach that Dominic took was to write and give speeches.

I had a weekly column in a kind of business newspaper. I would also agree to give speeches to anyone who wanted me to speak, but I had a rule that I had to meet the CEO before the speech and afterwards to understand the context of what was going on and to follow up.

Again, Dominic takes the view that his job is to participate in and support the conversation going on in his industry. It is a long view that says, “Give value first, build and support the network, and the rest will follow.”

The Awareness Trap

For most of us, when we think about building awareness for our firms and our practices, we grow queasy, thinking, “Our firm has just fifty consultants. There's no way we can put billboards in the airport like Deloitte or Accenture.”

And, of course, this is true. You can't spend millions to build your name recognition, but it's a trap to think this is the only way to build awareness or that such scale would even be helpful. Too often, we equate awareness with mass advertising and in so doing falsely liken the kind of awareness appropriate to a consulting or professional services practice to the kind of awareness appropriate to consumer products.

The business models serving consumer products and expert services are very different, and what works for one, is wholly inappropriate for the other. In consumer products, advertising is the only way to reach customers efficiently because you need so many of them. With profits on soap measured in pennies, millions of customers are needed. But just as you would never think about sitting down with a customer one-on-one if you were a Colgate-Palmolive executive trying to sell more Irish Spring, if you are a sole proprietor, it makes no sense to broadcast advertise.

I think reputational advertising and branding, the traditional branding, where you spend a lot of money and create an image, is much less effective in this space, because at the end of the day, that may create name awareness but it doesn't create preference or even understanding of what you do, until you actually sit down face-to-face with folks and talk about what people you might bring to them and how those people might solve their particular problems. So, while it creates a general awareness of who we are, compared to selling a product, I can't do very much with advertising to create an image, or create differentiation that makes people want to buy Navigant the same way they might want to buy an iPhone 7.

—Ed Keller, Chief Marketing Officer, Navigant Consulting

This is just to say that in thinking about how a potential client becomes aware of us, it pays to remember that there are approaches, like picking up the phone or shooting someone an email, that are likely to be more cost-effective, and simply more effective, than hanging a banner in Times Square.

200 People You Need to Know

The question then becomes, how do you build your brand awareness?

More specifically, how do you:

• Figure out with whom you should be speaking?
• Find the time the introduce yourself to all of them?

The good news is the number of people who might potentially engage with you is smaller than you think. Our view is that there are roughly two hundred people who make all the difference in your world. If you offer economic analysis for law firms, there are two hundred litigators who, if they knew who you were and used you on their cases, would keep you busy for the rest of your life. If you are an architect at a large New York firm that builds skyscrapers around the world, there are two hundred developers who need to know your name.

Two hundred might not be the right number for your business, but it's not five million.

Dominic's number is five hundred.

I think there's a number of ways you can stay in touch with people without it being obtrusive. One way I do it is that I sort of feel I'm reading for about five hundred people. When I read something in the media, or I read a book, or I come across an interesting conversation, I go out in my mind's eye to these five hundred people. I'm making up the number, but it's that order of magnitude. They are people I've known. Then if I see something, I'll just get it to my assistant and say, “Can you please send a copy of this to.…” I also think that these five hundred or so people, they are reading for me, that they will send me something when they see it and think of me.

Once you wrap your head around this notion of narrowcasting, building awareness becomes much more straightforward and decidedly less expensive.

Tactics—What Works

Here is how to build awareness for your service offering:

• Ask for advice. We've learned that simply asking for advice on your practice can be monstrously successful at getting your name out. Let go of this idea that you have to be the smartest person in the room.
• Publish your point of view. Whether you blog, podcast, write articles, white papers, or books, writing and podcasts announce to the world your interest in a domain. A few rules: Stick to your segment. Focus is your friend. You want to be known as a dominant and consistent voice in your industry. Have a practice doing audits for large agricultural cooperatives? Stay away from commenting on the rise of low-cost steel flooding U.S. markets. Second, do not feel you need to be the expert. This is hard to swallow for people who make their living selling expertise. Here's the truth, though: You get as much credit by bringing together those who are inventing the answers in various companies as you do by being a would-be font of knowledge. Third, learn how content can be published (in a trade journal) and then republished (via a Twitter feed or broken up into LinkedIn posts).
• Speak. Increasingly, speaking berths at industry conferences are awarded to those who sponsor the conferences. This pay-to-play reality seems a vaguely wrong way for conference providers to act. You'd think they would be mostly interested in “publishing” the best content, not just the featured articles of those who are paying the freight, but that's the world we live in. Exceptions are made for keynotes and authors. There's nothing better than a speech in front of exactly the right target audience to at least give you the opportunity to shine and impress. We say, “at least,” because not everyone is a speaker, and it is best not to pretend you are if you are not.
• Host summits. All large consulting and professional services firms sponsor summits of various sorts. This can be a dinner in Manhattan or a three-day affair in Amsterdam. The standard format is to invite clients and would-be clients to travel to the event, which might feature panel discussions, notable industry speakers, and one-on-ones with partners offsite. These events are very effective at husbanding hard-won relationships. A caveat, though. Our experience is that summits are not very good at attracting people you do not already know. It all starts out innocently enough. Your marketing director says, “You have a growing education practice. Let's throw an event where we invite college and university chief administrative officers. We can do it in Orlando.” Suddenly the budget is $200,000, which might make sense if you got 200 potential clients to attend, but then the responses to the “Save-the-Date” you sent out come back, and the numbers look soft, with most of registrants already being clients.
• Attend conferences. Go to an industry conference and meet people you don't now know. In an effort to maximize exposure, some firms sponsor dinners (again, the danger is you are taking out your existing clients, which is not bad, but not the same as getting your name out there), underwrite substantive panels (how much is that placard worth on the dais?), attend cocktail events (make sure you don't hang out with your friends), or host tradeshow booths (Johnson and Smith—Accountants to the Gaming Industry!) along with offering collateral materials and free giveaways. A better practice is to ignore much of the conference and set up coffees beforehand with the fifteen people you want to get to know or to sponsor a best-practices roundtable offsite for invited guests. Remember the point is not to have everyone at the conference know your name. Stay focused on your list of two hundred. A single coffee with the CFO of a target company is worth five thousand refrigerator magnets with your name on it handed out at a booth.
• Write emails. Writing emails to specific people with specific, well-researched requests for time yields results. The key is follow-up.
• Host best practice roundtables. Tom's company, PIE, builds groups of potential clients on behalf of consulting and professional services firms. The executives talk about best practices, and the client firms get to make new friends in a substantive environment as hosts of the calls. Because what is asked of executives is low (one-hour phone call with peers, not a webinar), participation is high and the method has proven to be an effective way for expert service providers to make new friends.
• Write newsletters. For many years, Walt Shill, the former head of North American consulting for Accenture, wrote Friday Thoughts, a simple email where he told a story or two and tried to add value by reflecting on them. He had a wonderful style of writing, and his mailing list quickly grew into the thousands. Many of us looked forward to reading what was essentially a proto-blog using the one-to-many technology of an email list, and it certainly kept him on the top of people's minds and served as a calling card to the many who received forwarded copies of individual pieces. Twitter and Medium would have made his life easier, but the effect would have been largely the same.

In the end, there's not one right or best approach; there are only approaches executed with heart. “I think everyone has their own model of how they do it. I think you have to figure out the approach you are most comfortable with,” says Dominic.

The difficulty is not choosing the right tactic; it's having the discipline to stick with an approach that is appropriate to who you are over time. We have all seen professionals among us dart about chasing the latest marketing fads. Doug calls this approach the Unicorn Quest. One month they're all about upgrading their website; after that it's search engine optimization. Then they try an email newsletter and after that run some ads in a trade journal. Someone says podcasting is the future, so they give that a try, and then the next month they're off to the latest trade show. Before long, they're on a mission to land a speaking gig.

This Unicorn Quest can work, at least some of the time. We all get lucky occasionally and stumble into a client. A better approach, though, to building awareness is to find the two or three of these tactics that fit your personal style and stick with them over a long period of time. You don't need to use all of the tactics, just a few. None of these are get-rich-quick schemes but are instead proven ways to underwrite a community and its conversation over time in a way that positions you to be of help if it is needed.