Never Say Sell

No matter what euphemisms we use to describe the process of connecting with those we wish to serve—business development, client development, or sales and marketing—there remains the truth that we need clients in order to be able to practice our professions.

While many professionals shy away from the use of the word selling, it is clear that they work hard to win client work. We know we don't want to be selling, but we know doing nothing is not an option either. In her biography of Marvin Bower, Elizabeth Haas Edersheim reports,

[He] worked hard at building the firm's reputation throughout his time at McKinsey. In 1939, he wrote several articles addressing organizational and financial issues with which U.S. companies were struggling at the time. He also made a dozen speeches at professional organizations, played countless rounds of golf with prospective clients, lunched with executives at every opportunity, and encouraged everyone at McKinsey to do the same.

This may not be selling in the traditional sense, but Bower certainly wasn't sitting in his office waiting for the telephone to ring. How can we understand this in relation to selling and our aversion to all it represents? We need a new framework that can make sense of the work we must do to cultivate a network of clients to whom we can be helpful. The new discipline of design thinking can help.

Design Thinking Meets Business Development

Over the past two decades, there has been a renewed interest in the field of design. This renaissance was triggered in large part by the success of Apple's elegantly simple products designed by Jony Ive and brilliantly promoted by Steve Jobs. Herbert A. Simon, in his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, first explored the notion of design as a “way of thinking” in the sciences. Since then, the term design thinking has become popular as a way to describe the mindset of a designer.

According to the cofounder of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), the Danish design think tank:

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It's extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown by understanding the human needs involved and re-framing the problem in human-centric ways.

—Rikki Dam, cofounder, IDF

For several decades, design thinking remained within the world of design. Beginning in the early 1990s, others in the field of design observed that the approach could be useful for problem solving in a broader context. David Kelley, in particular, was highly influential in bringing the design thinking philosophy to the challenges of solving business problems.

Kelley is as close as it gets to being a rock star in the world of design; he's both the cofounder of IDEO (the international design and consulting firm based in Palo Alto, California) and Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (known as the d.school). David earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, but he later admitted that “it didn't feel quite right.” Fortunately for us, his early work at Boeing sparked an interest in the study of design, and in the mid-1970s, he returned to school and earned a master's degree from Stanford University's product design program.

David says, “The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for.”

The principles of design thinking are now being used in corporations beyond the traditional scope of product design. According to Jon Kolko in the article, “Design Thinking Comes of Age,” in the September 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review:

There's a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn't about aesthetics. It's about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

Simply put, design theory implores us to examine a customer's (or client's or user's) experience and reverse engineer how to make that experience better. This may sound obvious, but what Kelley and others saw when they looked at product design was that much of design started from the needs of the designers or the constraints of manufacturing instead of the end user.

That rang a bell for us. Traditional sales training emphasizes what the salesperson should do—generate leads, prequalify them and then meet, persuade, and close clients. But maybe that is all wrong. Maybe we should not all be asking, “what should salespeople do?” but rather, “how do clients buy?”

Using a design-thinking mindset, we started asking ourselves questions that focused on exploring the client's experience.

• How do prospective clients think when hiring us?
• What are a client's buying criteria?
• How do clients choose between alternative service providers?
• How do others in the organization influence the decision-making process?
• How does a client decide that the timing is right to hire us?
• How does a client evaluate our performance?
• How does a client decide if they will hire us again in the future?
• Are there similarities in the way clients think about the various professional services?

Answering these questions helped us identify seven elements that provide a pragmatic framework for better understanding how clients buy. These seven elements represent the steps that a prospective client moves through when deciding to hire you.

The seven elements of the client's journey are:

1. I am aware of you and/or your company.
2. I understand what you do and how you and your firm are unique.
3. I have an interest in what you do because it is relevant and potentially of value to me.
4. I respect your professional expertise and believe that you can help me.
5. I trust that you are honest. I believe you have my best interest at heart, and I feel comfortable working with you.
6. I have the funds and organizational support and have the ability to buy from you.
7. This is a priority for me, and I am ready to engage.

These steps may occur sequentially, but they don't have to. Prospective customers can be aware of you and understand exactly what you do. They can respect you and trust you. But until there is a genuine need, organizational support, and funding, they aren't interested, able, or ready. Some services are triggered by specific events. Until that time comes, your help isn't required. For example, the need for the services of an estate or tax attorney may be triggered by the death of a loved one. Or the services of an architect may be required when a couple becomes “empty nesters” and decides to build a smaller home.

David Kelley's brother and general manager of IDEO, Tom Kelley, tells a wonderful story about a project IDEO took on. Oral-B sold electronic toothbrushes and for a while owned the market. Then, as competitors came in, they began to lose market share. They hired IDEO to help design the next generation of children's toothbrushes. IDEO started by looking at kids brushing their teeth. What they found fairly quickly was that kids lacked the kind of basic dexterity needed to hold and manipulate a normal toothbrush. The handle was too thin. IDEO began to experiment with fat-handled toothbrushes. Kids loved them, and a new product was born: the Squish Gripper.

Let's do the same thing. We think it will help change the way we think about selling.