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Always Be Charismatic – The Key To Consulting Sales

By crooky | December 21, 2007

ABC usually stands for “always be closing” – a great line from the David Mamet film Glengarry Glen Ross. If you haven’t seen this movie – see it. It’s brilliant. This week, I learned that in a business like consulting where personality and professionalism make every sale, ABC should stand for “always be charismatic”. December is a nasty time of year for me. Between having a hard time generating billable hours around all the networking and pro bono work that comes up this time of year, potential clients unwilling to commit to new projects late in the fiscal year and a few unfortunate circumstances that saw me fall significantly short of my sales target for the year – I’ve had a rotten December. The resulting funk I’ve been in came back to bite me in the ass on Monday when I met a new potential client.

This client approached me through a marketing website that I belong to – Vancouver Consultants. I have a pretty high success rate with leads that find me. This client was also highly aligned with past work that I’ve done and work that my partner firm – Rocket Builders – has done. Before our meeting, I put him in touch with an appropriate person at NRC IRAP so that he could apply for a Market Assessment of Research & Technology (MART) grant to help subsidize the work he needed me to do. However, three things contributed to me flubbing the sale:

1. Based on the above, I thought I had the sale in the bag before I even walked into that meeting.

2. He hadn’t sent me any information on his product prior to the meeting so I didn’t have time to digest and prepare my pitch before sitting down with him.

3. I was totally burnt out, wasn’t actually sure that I had the bandwidth to take him on as a client in the new year without hiring extra help and I had a cold.

I met him, listened to what he had to say about his product and told him roughly what we could do for him and a rough estimate on cost. There was one curveball that he threw me that I missed. He said “do you think this product is going to be a success?” I said “I don’t know. That’s something that we would make sure happened during this project but can I make a judgment call on what you’ve shown me today? No.” I thought that was a good answer. Previous clients have appreciated that level of honesty and realize that part of what they’re paying me for is not to be a yes-man but to be a “Doubting Thomas”. At the end of the meeting, the potential client thanked me for my time and asked me if I could put together a formal proposal for the work for sometime after Christmas.

I walked home from the meeting, told my wife that I had “nailed” the contract and fixed myself some coffee. A couple of days later, I got an e-mail from the potential client saying that he’d decided to go with a firm that was “a better fit” for his needs. I was flabbergasted. I know for a fact that there aren’t any firms in the lower mainland better positioned to take an IT company to market than Rocket Builders. I wrote him back immediately with an inquiry about why he chose another vendor. His response:

I actually went with “Firm X”. Mainly because they were very down to earth and realistic about what needs to be done, and how to achieve that. They also seem to be very pro-active, excited and passionate about this project, which is one of the main elements in determining the success of an IT startup. Plus they’ve proven to have a good knowledge of the online tech industry, and appear to have a lot of empathy, so they’re capable of putting themselves in other people’s shoes very well, which again, is a crucial aspect.

I knew for a fact that “Firm X” doesn’t have a fraction of the experience in this market that myself and Rocket Builders has. So essentially what this guy was telling me what that he didn’t feel that I was down to earth, pro-active, excited about working with him and that I wasn’t empathetic about his situation. I’ll cop to a couple of those things but I was down to earth and I prepared for the meeting as best as I could with the information he gave me.

Here’s what he told me prior to our meeting:

1. He’s young. Mid-20s.
2. He’s already built and sold a company.
3. He has no money.
4. He’s spent 100s of hours developing a “software infrastructure product”.
5. He’s been out of the country for two years.

That’s literally everything I knew so I take issue with the fact that he was faulting me for not being “pro-active”. However, I could have been more bubbly and cheerful about the whole endeavor and I think that’s what he was mostly commenting on.

That’s the take-home message – even if you’re trying to be Shelley from Glengarry Glen Ross and not be the guy that gets canned at the end of the sales competition – you need to be charismatic, confident and super-prepared. Personality counts for a lot. What I should have done was postponed the meeting until the New Year when I know I’ll be feeling more like a human being and asked for a copy of his business plan or something about his product before the meeting. Learn from my mistake and don’t go into a meeting if you feel under-prepared and/or like 20lbs of shit in a 10lb bag.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Business of Consulting |

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