For those of us old enough to remember – or for those of us with TVLand – it was Season 1, Episode 8 when Fonzie uttered these pearls of wisdom:
Bull makes the world go round.
Today, too many years later, this very interesting read – thanks to Chris Brogan for pointing it out.
Do client buyers lie? Yes, and mainly it’s the services firms’ fault. The trick is to get to that place of mutual admission that there’s something each can bring to the party.
It’s all about trust – and it takes time to get there. Sometimes, unfortunately, you don’t have the time so you try to do the best you can.
In professional services, it is the clients/buyers who often hold more power, yet don’t know it; so they also act from fear—with a result that is often harmful to both parties. The advertising industry may be an extreme example lately.
I can relate, having spent part of my early career on the agency side and forcing prospective clients to sit through pointless capability presentations (“Here’s a campaign we did for a company and product you aren’t familiar with, for strategic reasons we won’t share, that produced results that we never learned…hire us!”)
Today, as I build my business, I ask open ended questions about the client and their business. I shut up. I listen. I ask more questions. And, when appropriate, I offer free advice in order to show that I would like to develop the relationship and am willing to invest my time (product, revenue potential).
