Frustration

As quickly as projects can develop if the timing is right, when the timing is wrong, like a country song about whisky, lost love, and a broken truck, nothing is sadder. It's frustrating to have a great conversation with someone whom you think your expertise can help, only to hear that familiar phrase, “the timing isn't right.” For reasons beyond his control, he tells you, he can't move forward. He wants to engage, he assures you, but just isn't ready. Institutional imperatives like budget cycles, stock price, and changes in leadership have conspired, he reports, to create an environment in which progress cannot be made.

This reminds us of a story about Tony Campenella. Tony is a management consultant who lives by the marina in San Francisco. We've changed his name for the purposes of this story because, as you will see, the story doesn't end well.

He said to us, “My goal is to make partner by the time I'm thirty-five. I know the path. It's well-worn. Break gravel in the mines. Do grunt work for a couple of years out of B-school, cranking out spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides. Then lead project teams. Then if I demonstrate good people skills, I'll become more client-facing, making presentations and attending to the care and feeding of customers. But that will only take me so far. If I want to be partner, I have to sell.”

“How?” we asked him.

“I spoke with a senior partner to find out what had worked for him. He said, ‘Make friends with the smartest people your age and stay in touch. Take them out to dinner every time you're in town. As they rise up through the ranks, they'll begin to give you more and more business.’”

“Seems like solid advice,” we said.

Let's eavesdrop on an experience Tony had trying to sell his expertise.

“I pinged this woman with whom I went to business school. She was really smart and had done well in Redmond and was in charge of a product development group there. I asked her if we might catch up by phone. We did, and she explained to me that her team was trying to figure out what effect big data might have on their efforts. I asked her if it would ever make sense to have our team come in from the outside and give her an assessment. She said it might but warned me that she wouldn't be able to pull the trigger on a contract until later in the year.”

“The words, ‘Never leave the scene of the crime without setting the next meeting’ rang in my mind. So, I asked her if I might pull together a team, fly out, and sit down with her people to get a sense of the issues they were facing so that when they were ready, we might be better prepared to engage.”

“I was pleasantly surprised. She was really excited. I was pumped. Partner. It was going to happen. I scheduled the face-to-face for ninety minutes. Our team brainstormed before the meeting. I was very clear with everyone. We were going to demonstrate domain expertise by simply asking really intelligent questions. Maybe we would share a client story or two but there'd be no ‘ask.’ This was going to be the softest of sells. ‘We're just there to be helpful,’ I said.”

“The day came; we jumped on the 6:25 Horizon flight up to Seattle, and were in their offices by 11:00. It went better than anyone could have expected. Really collegial. They were smart in their way, and we were smart in a little different way. The two teams complemented each other. You could see how together we were going to do good work.”

“The last thing my friend said was ‘Thank you. This was awesome. I've got some thinking to do on my end, but I'd be excited to work with you guys on this. Just give me a little time. There is a re-org going on right now, and we are deep in to the budget planning cycle, so it will be few more months.’”

“I was in seventh heaven. My first real foray into business development, and I was already winning. Better to be lucky than good, I thought.”

“But it didn't work out that way. Six months later, two weeks before I'd posted a reminder to myself to check in, I read in the industry rag that our biggest competitor had engaged with her team to lead a digital transformation. I was devastated.”

“It took me three weeks before I pinged my friend again. Thirty seconds after I hit send, she rang my cell. ‘I meant to call, Tony. We really liked your guys, but the other team was just in here a month ago. We have a new group president and he really thought they were sharp.’ I was devastated.”

Engagement with a would-be client is the coming together of two parties. For the match to work, the timing has to be right for both sides. Tony was ready to engage with his business school friend but missed the window by a few months. If he had been walking through the door when the new boss was thinking about new directions, he might have made the sale.

Just because you are in a hurry to engage with a client doesn't mean they are ready. The marketing guru Seth Godin referred to this outdated model as “interruption marketing.” In a 1988 article in Fast Company, Seth offered this point of view:

Marketing is a contest for people's attention. Thirty years ago, people gave you their attention if you simply asked for it. You'd interrupt their TV program, and they'd listen to what you had to say. You'd put a billboard on the highway, and they'd look at it. That's not true anymore.

 The interruption model is extremely effective when there's not an overflow of interruptions. If you tap someone on the shoulder at church, you're going to get that person's attention. But there's too much going on in our lives for us to enjoy being interrupted anymore. So, our natural response is to ignore the interruptions.…

 Interruption marketing is giving way to a new model that I call permission marketing. The challenge for companies is to persuade consumers to raise their hands—to volunteer their attention. You tell consumers a little something about your company and its products, they tell you a little something about themselves, you tell them a little more, they tell you a little more—and over time, you create a mutually beneficial learning relationship. Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

While Godin was taking aim at consumer products companies, his point is relevant to your efforts to connect with those you feel you could most serve. Your outreach is happening at a time that is convenient for you, by definition. “I think I'll send out that white paper on audit reform in Europe when the kids leave for camp. I'll have time then.” Inevitably, though, when the email hits your potential client's inbox, they are busy doing the moral equivalent of eating dinner. They're about to walk into a marketing meeting in Prague, attend their son's graduation from Davidson, review their departments' board presentations, or finally have that pedunculated polyp removed from their stomach lining.

As the partners at the RAIN Group, a professional services marketing firm, say:

As much as you might like to shorten the sales cycle, buying complex, important, trust-based services takes time. The initial lead will culminate only if the buyer, when she has a need that floats to the top of her to-do list (the elusive time of need), thinks of you.

—Mike Schultz, John E. Doerr, and Lee W. Frederiksen,
Professional Services Marketing

Bumps in the Road

We want our first interaction with a potential client to speed along like an Audi R8 on the track, but more often, it bounces along uncertainly like a 1999 Ford half ton on an uneven dirt road. Common bumps in the road include:

• Personnel changes:
  1. “I wanted to call and let you know that I will be leaving the company.”
  2. “We just got a new CEO and are on hold until we find out which direction he intends to take us.”
  3. “I'm currently trying to hire a pro on this very subject. I am going to want to get that done, consult with her or him before moving forward with you.”
• Reorganization:
  1. “I'm not sure if you've heard, but we are moving from a network of offices around-the-world model to more of a global-business-unit model.”
  2. “I'd want the acquisition to shake out before we move forward.”
  3. “We're in the midst of a big merger. I am not actually sure of my role going forward.”
• Business imperatives:
  1. “Our stock price got clobbered after that pharma pricing scandal. No one wants to do anything before we see the fallout around that….”
  2. “Our CFO just ordered 10 percent cuts across the board. None of us want to lay people off. It means there is no money for outside consultants.”
  3. “We aren't going to be making any big moves until we figure out whether or not tax reform is going to happen.”
• Priorities:
  1. “I love this idea, but we need to finish our global industry review first.”
  2. “We always try to make a big effort at the ACM/IEEE supercomputing conference. Let's chat after the dust settles on that.”
  3. “I've a bunch of international travel coming up. I'm frankly not sure I have the bandwidth to focus on this until the fall.”
• Substitutes:
  1. “We're speaking with a number of other firms about this….”
  2. “I've heard that Bluestream does something similar, only they survey customers as part of their methodology.”
  3. “The money for this would have to come from our advertising budget and right now we are making a big push to support the rebranding.”
• Silent killers:
  1. “I can't really talk about it now, but there're some power struggles going on around here.”
  2. “We'll need to get buy-in from the head of research, and he generally has a bias against outsourcing.”
  3. “We had a breach with a vendor. The CFO's nixing most consultants.”
• In-housing:
  1. “This is central to our business model, and I think we should be doing this kind of work ourselves.”
  2. “I recognize you would be arms and legs on this project, but I think I can round up some internal resources to work on this.”
  3. “I'd like to give our team here a shot at this first before bringing in reinforcements.”
• Price:
  1. “That might be a bridge too far for us….”
  2. “Is there some way we could do a pilot?”
  3. “We could never make that kind of commitment. Do you ever do some kind of gain share arrangement…?”

And finally,

• Loss of momentum:
  1. “Ms. Arden needs to cancel the follow-up call, as she will be traveling then.”
  2. “Looks like they're no-shows. Did they accept the invite?”
  3. “Can we revisit this in Q3?”

Tactics—What Works

You are well acquainted with each of these bumps. They have all happened to you in your business development efforts. The job of corralling people and resources to create value is not easy.

1. Be patient. As a consultant or professional service provider who dominates a niche, your job is to build and underwrite a conversation among experts and those who can benefit from that know-how. This is a life's work. Keep saying to yourself, “life is long,” because it is, and you have no idea when the stars will align and the opportunity to collaborate will rise like Jupiter in the night sky.
2. Continue to serve. Remind yourself that you're not selling to would-be clients; you are helping others succeed. The money will get straightened out in time. If someone tells you they are not ready to engage, they are telling you:
   • I'm aware of you.
   • I understand what you do.
   • I am interested in speaking with you because you are relevant to my priorities.
   • I know you to be capable.
   • I trust you to watch my back.
   • I have the ability to act.
   • It is just that the timing of what you suggest is not quite right.

So, don't sweat it. You are most of the way there. Just keep adding value, sending articles and links, offering to introduce them to people who could be helpful to them, including them in dinners and best practice roundtables you sponsor, and visiting them when you are in town.

1. Stay proximate. If you do not stay in touch, awareness of who you are fades. You gave that great presentation at AUTEX about textile reuse, but that was four years ago, and out of sight, out of mind. Count on the fact that dozens of new bright shiny objects have floated in and out of your would-be client's field of view. You have to stay in touch, whether that is through a note, drinks, or a forwarded blogpost, to stay on the top of their mind.

   When a prospect doesn't hire you early, he is not rejecting you. People have different circumstances and different timetables for making decisions.

   —Troy Waugh, 101 Marketing Strategies for Accounting, Law, Consulting, and Professional Services

   Herman Ebbinghaus, the early twentieth century psychologist, devoted much of his life to trying to understand memory and forgetting. He was the first person to coin the phrase “learning curve.” He found that learning is most pronounced after the first exposure to a topic and diminishes over time, with each additional exposure contributing less and less to total retention. Ebbinghaus described what we all know, namely that the first day of work is the hardest because we are being flooded with new information, which is pushing our limits to absorb it. In bad news for consultants and professional services pros everywhere, he also described the “forgetting curve,” finding there is an exponential drop-off in retention over time. The worst is the first twenty minutes, though there is pronounced drop-off an hour after exposure and throughout the day.

   “What was the name of that guy I met yesterday?”

   Worst still was Ebbinghaus' description of what he called the serial position effect. Human beings have both a primacy and recency bias, fancy words for saying that we remember the first person we met on a topic and the last one. The women and men in the middle who penned the whitepapers, spoke at conferences, took them out to dinner, and wrote thoughtful follow-up notes are forgotten. Again, first is good, and, remembering Tony, last might be best.

2. Look for the moment. Often in consulting and professional services, you're selling to a large organization, with its own idiosyncratic biorhythms, including planning, budget cycles, and the Byzantine politics of who's on the rise and who's not. Stay attuned to timing, and never write off a potential client. Never forget what might be called “the first precept of expert services”:

No one ever needs a consultant until they do.

Clients need advisers when they encounter an unforeseen crisis or opportunity. The key word here is “unforeseen.” They won't see a need to engage with you when you first meet them because they have no idea what is about to hit them. When the storm does roll in, however, they will be looking for an umbrella. It's the professional who has invested in a relationship and who is most proximate to the opportunity who wins the day. Stay in touch.

One of the enduring challenges of running a consulting or professional services firm is projecting revenues. It doesn't matter if leadership charges the account planning teams with 10 percent growth; knowing with certainty when a client is going to ripen into a new engagement is an exercise in seeing around corners. One friend of ours who is a senior partner at Bain and who consults large companies on strategy said, “This is a feast-or-famine business. On a good day, you have visibility over the next six months. Nothing more. It's why layoffs are endemic to the industry.”

In the face of ambiguity in the marketplace, there is only one defense. Do good work, make new friends, build your network, and have faith that companies have an embedded desire for value over time. In fact, they are hungry for it. They may not be ready to embrace that value right now, when you are out stopping by and saying, “Hi,” but in the long run, the kind of true value you bring with your expertise and experience is magnetic. It just might take a while because, as the country song says, “timing is everything.”