|
| Welcome |
 |
Concerns
about the looming US healthcare crisis have prompted
some people to dub healthcare The Cockroach
that Ate Cincinnati—after the 1996
movie. Before your healthcare bills devour more of your
income, be sure to read our interview with former presidential
adviser and healthcare expert, Paul Zane Pilzer.
In
this month’s issue, you’ll also find insights
on how clients select professional service providers,
how to create a compelling and trustworthy sales pitch,
what to do about the rising tide of customer rage, and
much more.
Enjoy
the issue. If you have any comments, please send me
an email.
Mike
McLaughlin
Editor, Management Consulting News
|
| Interview:
Paul Zane Pilzer |
 |
Paul Zane Pilzer wants to challenge the myth that affordable
healthcare is an oxymoron. He argues that by taking
control, you can save big bucks on healthcare every
year—and get the treatment you deserve. We talked
to Pilzer about The
New Health Insurance Solution and
how business owners and individuals can reap the benefits.
|
| Check This before Your Next Sales
Meeting |
 |
Whether
you win or lose, it’s natural to wonder how a
prospective client made a hiring decision. Most often,
consultants guess at the reasons based on assumptions
about the client’s decision process and the positioning
of competitors.
To
help professional service providers sort out how clients
make buying decisions, analysts at RainToday.com
went to 200 clients and asked what factors are the most
important in the decision to choose professional service
firms.
Their
answers were as follows:
- Experience in the specific area where I have needs
- 88%
- Experience in my industry/business - 87%
- Overall costs or fees - 83%
- Reputation of individual consultants - 78%
- Reputation/brand name of provider - 69%
- Written proposal - 68%
- Personalities of individual consultants - 68%
- Variety of services offered by provider - 68%
To
satisfy a client’s top decision factor, consultants
must listen carefully to the client, diagnose the need
accurately, and demonstrate relevant expertise.
As for the issue of price, remember, as the client gets
closer to the buying decision, price becomes more important.
The
full report, How
Clients Buy: The Benchmark Report on Professional Services
Marketing and Selling from the Client Perspective
is available for purchase at RainToday.com.
|
| Should Clients Trust Your Sales Pitch? |
 |
 by
Charles H. Green
Consultants
often destroy client trust in the sales process—and
rarely recover. That’s a shame because those consultants
are squandering their greatest opportunity for creating
client trust.
Sell
the right way, and you start with trust. Sell the wrong
way, and you may get the deal anyway because so few
of your competitors do it any better. But you’ll
start work in a low trust environment that will be difficult
to overcome.
The reason consultants miss this opportunity to build
trust with their clients is simple: most consultants
feel conflicted about selling. We not only look down
on salespeople, but feel vaguely guilty when we have
to sell. We don’t even call it “sales.”
The preferred euphemism is “business development,”
passively voiced, as if to distance ourselves from “developing
business.”
The
truth is that clients want to trust us—to believe
that we care about them and their interests. They want
to believe we are trustworthy.
Unfortunately,
the usual consulting sales practices give us away. Too
often, we succeed in proving that we really are not
trustworthy, but guilty of putting our own interests
ahead of the client’s; that our primary objective
is to close the sale—that we don’t care
about them as much as we care about ourselves. The way
we sell destroys the trust that the client wishes to
place in us.
Fortunately,
it doesn’t have to be that way.
Four
Beliefs that Kill Trust
1.
The objective of selling is to get revenue, right?
No—not
if you want to be trusted. The objective of Trust-based
Selling® is to help the client make the best decision
for the client. If you pursue that objective, clients
will see that your goal is to help them—not just
to get their money. Then they trust you. And then they
buy from you—overwhelmingly.
2.
The goal of the sales process is to close deals—isn’t
it?
Not
if you seek to build trust. The focus of Trust-based
Selling isn’t the transaction, but the relationship.
Relationships yield transactions; but focus on transactions
alone is a zero-sum approach: there are winners and
losers, negotiated pain and gain.
Most
consultants use transactional sales models, which emphasize
the sales closing process. That is not a way to build
trust. In relationship-focused selling, there is true
upside potential for both the client and the consultant.
3.
Clients buy rationally based on expertise, credentials,
qualifications, track record, and reputation—after
all, they say so!
They
may say so, but it’s only true if they can’t
trust the seller, and they usually can’t. Clients
prefer to buy what they have to buy anyway from experts
they trust. A trusted seller trumps all others.
4.
Clients want to hear about your depth of experience
in resolving their issues.
Clients
are people just like us, and everyone’s favorite
subject is themselves. Clients want to hear your take
on their problems, in their company. Don’t talk
about your expertise—demonstrate it by applying
it real-time to the client.
What
is Trust-based Selling?
The
principles of Trust-based Selling are rooted in the
knowledge that if we consistently behave with the best
interests of the client and the relationship, we will
get more than our share of sales because we are fulfilling
the highest desire of a client—to find an expert
who can be trusted.
Selling
based on trust cuts our ongoing cost of sales by increasing
client retention and decreases the average sales costs,
since generating repeat business is far cheaper than
finding new work with new clients. We also improve our
sales rates because clients overwhelmingly prefer to
buy from those they trust.
There
are four principles of Trust-based Selling:
- Client focus for the sake of the client, not the
seller
- A medium-to-long-term perspective
- An ingrained habit of collaboration
- Willingness to be absolutely transparent.
The acid test of trust in selling is this: Would you
recommend your competitor to an important client—if
that would be better for the client? If you are not
willing to do that, then by definition you always put
your best interests ahead of the client’s. And
why should they then trust you?
Key
Practices of Trust-based Selling
Client
focus, collaboration, and transparency are essential
to building a trusting relationship. Here are seven
practices to help build client trust.
- Write your proposals with the client.
- Practice listening as paying attention. Don’t
think about what you’re going to say next while
the client is talking, and don’t focus on behavioral
techniques like mirroring or paraphrasing. Just pay
attention.
- Be willing to think out loud.
- Focus as much on the limits as on the breadth of
your knowledge. If you don’t know, say so.
- Practice “selling by doing, not selling by
telling.” Demonstrate your value-adding capabilities
on the client’s real-life situation, in real-time,
rather than by describing others’ situations.
- Embrace third party consultants and purchasing agents
as the new clients, rather than trying to fight them
or go around them; help them like you would any client.
- Recommend other solutions for the client to explore
during the sales process, don’t just pitch yourself.
The
idea that developing trust with a client takes a long
time is a myth. People form judgments very quickly about
whom they trust. The opportunity to influence that initial
impression is long gone by the time the sales process
is over.
Trusted
relationships with clients lead to reduced transaction
costs, faster client decisions, and less total time
to generate the sale—for buyer and seller alike.
Trusted consultants can increase creativity, collaboration,
decision quality, and other revenue-enhancing features.
Trust-based
relationships are a far surer path to profitability
for a consulting firm than the best competitive strategy
or the lowest cost.
`````````````````````````````
Charles H. Green is the founder and President of Trusted
Advisor Associates, the author of Trust-based
Selling, and coauthor of The
Trusted Advisor, with David Maister
and Robert Galford. Green, a speaker and seminar-leader
for major consulting organizations, spent nineteen years
in consulting with the MAC Group and Gemini Consulting.
|
| To Express Your Rage, Please Press 1 |
 |
The
digitized voice on the phone that tells us to enter
our seventeen-digit account number so we can be “helped”
is driving many customers crazy. According to recent
research, consumers are at the boiling point because
of how companies they contact are treating them.
If
you’ve ever fumed about shoddy customer service,
you’re among the 73% of people who were either
upset or extremely upset with how a business handled
complaints.
The
Customer Care Alliance, in collaboration with researchers
at Arizona State University, recently released their
National
Customer Rage Study. Yes, that’s rage.
Organizations
spend countless hours and dollars trying to find a balance
between the need for responsive customer service and
the cost of providing that service. But according to
rage researchers, most companies are missing the boat.
Customer
rage is on the rise, and it’s not always due to
poor product or service quality. Over the years, product
quality has improved. What has changed is the number
of products and services we use. The result: more contact
with customer service, and more rage.
For
many companies the response has been to place a digital
firewall between customers and the company. Facing multi-tiered
phone menu options, automated response features, and
poorly written FAQs, customers are seething.
In
fact, more than half of customers felt they got nothing
as a result of their complaints. Of those who did get
some resolution, it took more than a month of effort.
What’s
worse is that it took customers between four and five
contacts with the company to get an issue resolved.
According to researchers, if a complaint takes that
many calls to resolve, the company has lost. Once a
customer is forced to make three calls to seek help,
satisfaction with the outcome drops to almost zero.
Want
to help your clients avoid the wrath of customer rage?
The study’s authors offer these recommendations:
- Say you’re sorry. Customers
react positively to explanations, assurances, apologies,
and the opportunity to vent. An apology means a lot
to customers, so don’t hesitate to offer one.
- Pick up the phone. Self-service
technology leads the list of unpopular customer service
tools. Customers need an option to talk to someone,
even if they choose not to use it.
- Avoid rage-inducing practices.
Customers’ rage rises when they have to repeat
information as they move through a customer service
system.
The simplest method of assessing the effectiveness
of a customer service operation is to place a call and
follow the process from beginning to end. And don’t
forget to have that seventeen-digit account number handy,
or you might end up in an endless loop.
|
| Note to Ethics Consultants |
|
After
years of wrangling and legal maneuvers, the long-awaited
trial of the former chairman and the CEO of Enron kicked
off last week. As the trial unfolds, expect renewed
interest in the role of ethics in business.
It’s
tempting to think that ethical lapses are confined to
the executive suite, but white-collar crime extends
to all levels of the corporate org chart. Research suggests
that in two out of three company scams, ordinary employees
have their hands in the company cookie jar.
In
a 2004 study, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
reported that the average American company loses 6 percent
of its annual revenue to white-collar thugs. The total
cost to the US economy has skyrocketed by 50 percent
over the past eight years, to roughly $660 billion.
The global loss is hard to imagine.
To
the mix, add shaky shareholder confidence, lousy public
opinion, and the threat of additional legislation, and
you have the makings for an ethics revolution in business.
But
don’t expect that a rehash of past clean-up attempts
will help. After all, you can bet that the Enron accountants
took ethics training courses.
Hollow
ethics programs that fail to address the cultural issues
driving questionable behavior should be tossed aside.
Instead, expect that efforts to fundamentally reshape
individual behavior at all levels will be the norm.
People
follow the example of ethics set at the top. Look for
a top-to-bottom change in how a company’s core
values align with the behavior of those in the executive
suite and throughout the company.
What
do you get without a connection between the core values
of a business and the ethical decision-making process?
Enron.
|
| Coming
Attractions |
|
 “We
should measure the effectiveness of leaders by examining
the behavior of followers. The behavior of a leader’s
followers defines leadership, not the leader’s
behavior.” - Aubrey Daniels
With so much written on the subject of leadership,
it’s surprising that businesses are constantly
hobbled by high levels of unplanned executive turnover.
In the US, the failure rate of business leaders is estimated
at 60%.
Management consultant Aubrey Daniels offers a solution
to the problem in his new book, The
Measure of a Leader. Daniels shows
us practical tactics to improve the effectiveness of
leaders at any level of an organization.
Look
for the interview with Aubrey Daniels in the next issue
of Management Consulting News on March 7, 2006.
|
We
have fundamentally changed the rules to the extent
that your employer is the last person you should
want to provide for your healthcare, from a privacy,
financial, and value standpoint.
