How To Land New Clients, Even During A Crisis

Are you a consultant or business development professional struggling to get new clients right now, or even meetings? Are you looking to jump-start your sales development process? 

Recently, I had the chance to catch up with legendary business development expert, Andrew Sobel. Sobel is the author of nine bestselling books including Clients for Life and Power Questions. (In fact, it was Power Questions that taught me the magic of the “how did you get started” question which I always use in first time meetings. Absolutely results in 10x rapport and trust.) 

Sobel’s new book, It Starts With Clients: Your 100-Day Plan to Build Lifelong Relationships and Revenue is based on his own experience landing multi-million dollar consulting engagements an on interviews with over 8,000 C-Suite Executives and top business development professionals. 

The interview below has been edited for space and clarity.

Kevin Kruse: Andrew, it seems like nobody is buying right now. Everything is frozen. Don’t we just have to accept that and wait for things to get back to normal?

Andrew Sobel: There are always going to be crises, and so we need to learn to build client relationships and sustain our business in any market conditions. My motto is, business development or sales may slow or stop, but client relationship building should not. I know it's a little cheesy, but hopefully memorable, and it's true. Even if lots of clients in the market aren't buying, or they've slowed their purchases, or even if you have just one of your clients that you know pretty well, but they are not buying any of your solutions, that's the time when you actually need to stay in touch, listen, understand their evolving agenda, and add value.

Secret #1: Be at the Crossroads of the Marketplace

Kruse: OK, so where do we begin? 

Sobel: You need to be at the crossroads of the marketplace. The more you're in the flow, the more you know and the more value you can bring to your clients. When a company's not buying, what kind of salesman are they willing to meet with? It's the sales executive who has interesting information and insight to share about market conditions, about their competition, about trends in technologies, and products, and services. Clients will always want to meet with that kind of person.

So think about being in touch with your network, calling past clients, not just asking them how they're doing, but also asking them specifically about the issues that they're facing, the challenges they're facing. You'll be able to share what you're seeing, what you're hearing from other clients. The more you do that, the more you're in the mix.

Secret #2: Shift From Expert to Advisor

Kruse: You say we need to shift from expert for hire, to client advisor. What’s the difference? 

Sobel: First of all, don't get me wrong, you have to have great expertise. That's your ticket to entry. But when we have that expert mindset, it's narrow. As experts, we love to tell. As advisors, we ask powerful questions and we listen. As experts we're for hire for anybody who will pay our fee. But if you have that advisor mindset, you choose your clients carefully, you're willing to push back and say, "I don't think this is the best way forward." 

Experts are narrow specialists, advisors are deep generalists. Experts analyze, advisors synthesize. Analysis is a commodity. It's tearing the problem down into pieces. Synthesis is putting it back together. It's a rare skill C-suite executives really treasure. The advisor or the supplier who can see the trends, see the patterns, help them reimagine the problem, and so on. 

Secret #3: Ask Power Questions

Kruse: How do we do that? How do we make that shift?

Sobel: If you want to be a client advisor rather than an expert for higher, you need to use power questions. So what do I mean by power questions? First of all, they're open-ended. They're also surprising. They're not cliched. I still hear people asking clients, "So what keeps you up at night?" That's a question salespeople have been asking for 30 years. It's a lazy question because it shows no preparation whatsoever. Power questions focus you on the right issues, so sometimes I'll say to a client, "Look, we've got an hour today, what's the single most important issue you want to make sure that we focus on?" Or, "We've got 20 minutes left in our meeting, what's the most important issue we ought to talk about before we leave today?" They help uncover the client's agenda. 

Lastly, they build personal knowledge. I love asking people, "You've been in this business for 20 years. How did you get started?" There are many questions you can use, but three essential ones are simply:

• What are your aspirations for...? 
• What's the gap between what you have today, and where you want to go? 
• What are the organizational and operational capabilities you need to develop to reach that aspiration? 

Secret #4: Become a Proactive Agenda Setter

Kruse: You also say we are too often reactive when it comes to the agenda. What do you mean? 

Sobel: If you want to grow your client base, grow your relationships, build clients for life. You have to move from being reactive to being a proactive agenda-setter. I define the agenda, your client's agenda, as their three to five most critical needs, priorities, or goals. Over the next six months, say it could be four months, six months, eight months, nine months, somewhere in that time period. 

I think you go through different agenda-setting phases. We start with agenda reacting. Like that client of mine who said, "My clients know what I do and if they need me they'll call me." Now some agenda reacting can be good. If you have a relationship client you've worked with for many years, and they just call you up and say, "Hey Andrew, can you get started on this for us?" Well that's a great kind of agenda reacting, but you can't live just on that. 

With agenda-setting you're anticipating. You're actually going to your client saying, "Look, here are some things we're seeing that I think are going to have an impact on some of the priorities that you're investing in right now." You actually are helping to anticipate what their agenda should be, and you were collaboratively developing their agenda. 

And then when you’re agenda setting, you've got to be going to your client with your thought leadership, with ideas, points of view. Maybe you take a deep dive into an issue that you know is critical to your client and say, "Hey, I'd love to have lunch with you and share a set of ideas around that culture change, the problem you're struggling with, or around the challenge you have of enabling employees to work better from home," or whatever it happens to be.

Secret #5: Frame and Reframe with the Compass Method

Kruse: You also talk about the power of framing and reframing. 

Sobel: Framing and reframing? Clients often bring you an issue that's very narrowly defined, and they do that for a lot of reasons. Sometimes they're more junior in the organization, and so naturally their conception of it will be, we'll be fairly narrow. Sometimes they've only been given a piece of the puzzle by their manager. Sometimes they have a small budget and that's all they can bite off, and so on, but you having had a lot more experience in solving similar problems in other companies, your job is to define the right problem and the total solution. That's the goal of reframing.

Let me give you just a few simple tips to start reframing with clients, and I call this the compass method. 

• I ask about strategy. "How does this fit into our strategy? Which key strategic initiatives or goals does this program that we're going to launch support?" 
• I go east into enterprise-wide implications. “What are going to be some of the interactions and implications for other parts of the organization?
• South is implementation. “Let's talk about implementing this. Who's going to work on it? How's it going to be done?”
• And then I go west into change management. “Who are the key stakeholders who have to be part of this initiative, or who are going to be impacted by it, who is going to help make a decision about whether you go ahead or not, right? 

The Takeaway

For business development professionals, if you want to be able to add value in between contracts, or in between transactions, you've got to be the crossroads of the marketplace. Strive to act with advisor behaviors instead of expert behaviors. Ask power questions in every meeting with your clients. Move from being a reactive to a proactive agenda-setter. And finally you want to reframe for maximum impact. Define the total problem or opportunity and the total solution.

Kevin Kruse is the CEO of LEADx, a digital platform that makes it easy to scale and sustain leadership development through nudges, AI-powered coaching, and micro-learning. Kevin is also the author of Great Leaders Have No Rules, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, and Employee Engagement 2.0.