Never Say Sell

CHAPTER 10Know Thy Client

Every rainmaker we interviewed shared a common, strongly held belief: that it is important to study your client to understand their strategic intent. Only by knowing our clients as we know ourselves can we best identify where our breadth of expertise matches their breadth of challenges and needs. Here is how Will Williams of KPMG puts it:

You've got to be a deep, deep student of the client and understand the business challenges that they face and the strategic imperative that they are trying to execute against. You want to have a culture where you are always saying, “Hey, if we want be an all-star player, a world-class professional, we need to never stop being a student of our clients.” You never want to put yourself in a box where you're just delivering your one piece of expertise. You want to try to bring the whole power of your firm and help in as many ways as you can.

So, let's sharpen our pencils and head back to school. How do we become A+ students of our clients?

Leverage Your “Insider” Status

First, let's acknowledge that we're being graded on a curve. When we interviewed a number of experts, they reported three advantages to already being on the “inside” when we're working to better know your client, compared to those trying to win the same client as a new logo:

1. Implied Trust: If we are in the building, we have gotten past security; we are not an outsider. Large companies, in particular, have hordes of would-be experts trying to scale ...