Elite Sales Strategies

11Being One-Up Helps Your Clients Change

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

—Vern Law

My main contact called me while I was in New York City. He was frantic, talking so fast that I could barely understand him at first. It was the middle of his company's peak season, and they had just won four new, very large clients. They were having trouble staffing their business, so the senior leadership team was flying in to deal with the problem. My client said the COO had asked for me to come and meet with their team. I told him to slot me in at 11:00 a.m. so I could take the next flight out from JFK.

The client's problem had started years before this phone call. For four years, I had been warning the local leadership and their senior leaders that the way they were operating would cause them to fail. While I am no Nostradamus, it was easy to deduce that their failure would come in the fourth quarter, a time of year when labor in their industry was scarce. The company repeatedly made two mistakes certain to harm their business. First, they kept their pay rates so low that they fell behind the market. Second, they were terrible to the people we provided them. In one exit interview, an employee described their facility as a cross between a daycare center and a maximum-security prison, a statement not designed to be a compliment. My sister coined the phrase “You can treat people like shit, or you can pay them like shit, but you can't do ...