hint: be successful in life first.
by martin bissett
winning your first client
you know the identity of your first client, and if you buy into you, then there’s a good chance of potential clients being prepared to do so, too.
more: why believing in yourself matters | what partners don’t tell you | don’t wait for business to come to you | your first sale is to yourself
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this is what we must remember about the purchasing of professional services such as accounting. if your prospective client is a grade a or b style opportunity for your firm, then they are not buying the services you provide per se. the services are the vehicles of delivery; the means to the end.
the client is buying the relationship, and they are asking themselves:
• do i like this person?
• can i get on with this person?
• do i want this person to advise my business? and
• do i believe they can help me to advance my business more than my current accountant can?
how do we determine whether we are the kind of person that someone else would buy from?
i’ve put together a general overview of key factors in a successful person’s life. this may or may not be an appropriate measure for you, but hopefully, you will see how successful business developers put their own personal “house” in order first before presenting themselves to the general public.
if i were to ask you the following questions today, how would you answer them?
1. do you like how you’ve treated your family members recently?
because this will play on your mind until it is resolved.
2. have you been striving to hit any personal goals that you’ve made for yourself?
in january, of course, there are always new years’ resolutions that generally involve losing weight or earning more money or changing jobs or something like that, and the goal is usually gone by march (or the second week in january). so if you are striving to hit personal
goals that you’ve set yourself, regardless of whether you’re hitting them or not, making that effort will instill a sense of pride within yourself. you can say, “yeah, i’m working hard to improve something about myself,” or “yeah, i’m being the kind of person i want to be.”
that translates into the enthusiasm and the assuredness with which you present yourself to a prospective client.
3. how have you dealt with your employees and clients recently?
if it were shown back to you on a video, would you be happy with what you saw? what did you include on the timesheet when no one could see you – how does that reflect on your personal level of integrity? your professional conduct, believe it or not, intangible as it might be, translates into how you are perceived by potential clients; and their perception is their reality, so it’s the only thing you need to worry about.
4. are you happy with the way you present yourself visually?
are you a shirt and tie kind of person? are you a little bit more casual than that, do you shave, do you not shave? how do you look? if you were meeting yourself for the first time, what would be your first impression of the person who walks through the door?
5. are you happy with how you present yourself verbally?
do you mutter, do you slur your speech for whatever reason? do you enunciate very clearly, do you gesticulate? are you very animated?
6. are you happy with the quality of work you and your team produce?
when you tell potential clients you can solve their problems, are you saying that because you think it’s what they want to hear, or are you just giving it as a statement of fact because you know you have a library of case studies that show you’ve done tremendous work for your clients?
7. do you like yourself to the extent that if you met you, you’d be impressed?
yes or no? if no, what needs to be done to make it a yes?
8. do you like how much preparation you’ve invested in each meeting?
do you know only what is claimed on the prospect’s website, or has your interest in their business allowed you to carry out some more impressive fact-finding?
believe it or not, the above are all factors in how we’re perceived by our clients and prospects, and they are very rarely talked about in discussions about business development. people buy relationships, and people buy the outcomes produced by those relationships.
all these things go into the general mix of how we perceive ourselves and therefore how our clients perceive us.