practice these disciplines every day.
by martin bissett
winning your first client
you may be thinking right now, “well, very good, martin, but we have finite time. we’re very, very busy people and we need to get business in the door, and therefore creation of opportunity becomes the issue.”
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regardless of whether we’ve got 20 opportunities on our plate today or none, when the next one comes along we can’t afford to be anything other than confident, comfortable, assured relationship builders who have tremendous value to offer. because people will see that body language, those voice tones and hear those words and it will be attractive. they will want to get to know more – they’ll want to be able to look at options. they’ll want to know what you’ll charge, and they’ll want to know what they’ll get for what you charge.
as the accounting profession increasingly goes toward a scenario where partners need to employ professional selling skills, then the more understanding we have as to why people choose us other than being recommended, the more competitive advantage we will have. so here are three everyday disciplines to start your proactive efforts to grow the practice with the right kind of work at the right kind of fee without spending huge amounts of money and time on either.
- let’s close the first sale to ourselves every single day, before we even get started. let’s prepare for our meetings having won the first client and knowing what value we can offer.
- let’s always allow in our diary, wherever possible, two slots for every appointment we need to make with each business in case they can’t make the first one we offer. there’s always an alternative, so that when they can’t do that first date we don’t lose control of the opportunity – we simply give them an alternative.
- let’s schedule all followups that have to be done. whether it’s debriefing our marketing team after a meeting, actually scheduling the next meeting in the diary, or preparing and rehearsing how we will present a proposal document to them, let’s make sure that we never leave those initial meetings with prospective clients without having our second meeting in the diary – or our third meeting or our fourth meeting, whatever it may be. let’s make sure all appointments are scheduled and we allow time to prepare for them, to debrief after them and to attend them. otherwise we’re rushing and we’re just diminishing our own chances of conversion.