Selling Professional Services to Senior Executives

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Selling Professional Services to Senior Executives

Source: Journal of Management Consulting, Inc. Sep 2001

Selling Professional Services to Senior Executives
Break the mold, and create a new market base while you're at it.

What do you do for a living, and who hires you? Take a minute to write down your answers to these two questions. At the conclusion of this article, we will ask you the same questions again.

Here's another question: What do you do to avoid having a senior executive quickly "slot" you into a distinct category and then dismiss you? If you're like many consultants, you may not have discovered a foolproof answer. Here we describe two nonexclusive ways to escape categorization: create a new category that you can dominate, or transcend categories by addressing the dilemma(s) your prospective client faces.

The Spiro Agnew Trap

Spiro Agnew served nearly two terms as Richard Nixon's vice-president but was eventually forced to resign due to his involvement in a bribery scandal while he was Governor of Maryland. During a news conference in 1968, a reporter noted that Agnew seemed to be making prescriptive statements for people living in the inner cities, when he had hardly ever ventured into these areas. Agnew's response was:"If you've seen one inner city, you've seen them all."

This response was vintage Spiro Agnew. In a more important sense, however, Agnew embodied the way your buyers cognitively organize their world.

Your buyers are senior executives. Assume for a moment that their companies have downsized, reengineered, or right-sized.They are easily working 1.25 jobs instead of one. They feel that there's not enough time to focus on the things that are truly important. And they feel overloaded with stimuli.

Under such conditions, people create mechanisms to actively block out responses to new stimuli. Hence, the Spiro Agnew Trap-sample one item in a category, and then declare you have enough information to draw conclusions about the entire category-is both rude and necessary.

Create a New Category and Dominate It

One way out of the Spiro Agnew Trap is to create a new category and dominate it.

For example, when we ask an audience to say the first thing they think of when we utter the word car, we are likely to get no group consensus. But if we ask that same audience to say the first thing they think of when we say safe car, we quickly form a group consensus around "Volvo."

Volvo dominates the "safe car" category, even though a 2001 issue of Consumer Reports shows that there are many American, European, and Japanese cars that meet Volvo's safety levels. The reality may be that Volvo no longer dominates the category, but the image is stronger than the reality.

Mention the word software, and there is little consensus. Mention the word groupware, and most people in high tech would respond with "Lotus."

Mention strategic planning to consultants, and a number of consulting firms come to mind. Mention the category "strategic planning with CEOs of Fortune 100 firms," and the framework will narrow considerably to no more than five firms. And the probability is high that McKinsey & Company will be on that list.

There was a time when there were just three categories of mutual funds: equity funds, bond funds, and money market funds. Morningstar next came up with the idea of classifying equity funds into nine categories. Recently, Mutual Fund Magazine defined 64 categories of equity mutual funds.

Can you create a new category for yourself, one that you will dominate?

The firm that owns the category defines that category. If a larger player in your market owns the public image of that category, you will rise or fall with the tide created by that larger player. For example, you may be a strategy consultant who works with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. You may have no connection with McKinsey & Company, but a negative public perception of that company would affect your business negatively.

Category Busters

The example in the sidebar shows a technique for getting prospects' attention by creating a new category and working around the Spiro Agnew Trap. Another technique is to eliminate categories by describing your services as responses to the dilemmas faced by prospective clients.

A dilemma is defined as a choice among options that seem equally unfavorable. "I should hate you, but I love you" is an example of a dilemma.

Your senior executive prospects often have business and engineering training from schools that teach bright people how to be outstanding problem solvers. Once an issue is defined as a problem, for example, there must be an optimal solution, or at least a satisfactory one. Dilemmas, on the other hand, are not transactional-- oriented problems that can ever be "solved." "I should hate you, but I love you" is an issue that needs to be managed daily.

F Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time and still be able to function.

Dilemmas are powerful because they crisply capture the core issues that clutch at senior executives' sense of inadequacy: dilemmas are solution-defying.

Those of us in professional services are constantly trying to paint word pictures for our clients and prospective clients. Dilemmas are complex word pictures that are category busters. They cut through the Spiro Agnew Trap.

Here are some examples:

* "We do business law" would be the functional way to describe a firm's specialization in legal matters. On the other hand, saying, "We help corporate clients make mergers and acquisitions happen," describes a value proposition clearly and concisely. There is a third way of expressing the same idea:

We are retained by corporate clients who find that if they move too quickly, the company may not be acting in shareholders' best interests. But if it doesn't move quickly enough, the company may fail in its fiduciary responsibility.

This expression of a dilemma captures several messages at once. It conveys "we make mergers happen" while adding the following themes:We know how to manage the pace of M&A negotiations; philosophically, our focus is on our client company's fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It also clearly defines the decision maker: company officers most at risk in exercising their judgment on behalf of shareholders.

It takes one second to say, "I do business law." It takes two seconds to say, "We make M&As happen." It takes an additional 18 seconds to articulate the dilemma. Notice how much more information was packed into that addendum.

* "We do communications consulting" clearly expresses the functional perspective. "We help align the company's message with its strategy" clearly states the value proposition and also helps define the client. Alternatively, we could say:

We work with companies that find communication a risky proposition. And it is an even riskier proposition if they fail to communicate early, often, and with zest.

* "I am a financial planner" clearly expresses the functional perspecfive. "I am retained by companies to assist senior executives in putting together financial plans to help them achieve their meaningful life goals" expresses the value proposition. A dilemma framework might look like this:

I work with senior executives who say, "I don't trust "experts." On the other hand, if I don't find some expert I can put my trust in, I fear I will never be able to achieve the financial goals I have.

Notice how the dilemma construction moves the framework from the focus of the financial planner as a competent professional to one in which the financial planner is someone who earns the trust of mistrustful people.

* "I do human resource consulting" describes HR consulting in a functional way: Or you can describe it in a value proposition way: "I help align compensation, recruiting, and training to the corporate strategy." Or you can take a dilemma approach:

I work with clients who find themselves with the following dilemma-if we take a rigid approach to how we treat people, we lose our best people. And if we don't create appropriate human resource structures, we fail our obligations to manage corporate risk.

Dilemmas are powerful because they simultaneously touch the cognitive and emotional issues facing prospective clients.

Revisit the Questions

In the beginning of this article we asked you to write down your responses to What do you do for a living, and who hires you? How would you respond to these questions now?

Those of us in the professional services must manage our own dilemmas while helping our clients manage theirs.

And our dilemma is:

Clients hire us for our depth of knowledge. If we stick with what we know, we will surely become obsolete. But if we constantly reinvent ourselves, we will surely become superficial.

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Selling consulting services

THE CASE OF Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire

We created our firm, Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, in 1979 as an outplacement firm. At the time, the industry was relatively new in the country and clearly in its infancy in the city of Boston, where we had only two competitors.

Outplacement was originally defined as a benefit offered to senior executives. It was a consulting service designed to help senior people think "outside the box" and help them better manage their careers in the future.

Over time, several large, well-capitalized firms came to dominate the Boston outplacement market As they grew, they redefined the category by focusing on helping job candidates learn how to network

and create resumes rapidly, providing mostly group programs augmented by software. By contrast, outplacement as defined by Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire was one-on-one consulting with senior executives.

We had embraced the category, but the category no longer described what we really did. More important, our larger competitors eventually owned the category.

We later said that we did "executive outplacement,' which differed from standard "outplacement" Our move was designed to create a message

similar to the "coffee" versus "premium coffee" categories.

Today we describe ourselves as a firm that helps companies manage the Senior Executive Assignment Cycles"'. This is a new category we have created and trademarked. It was important for this new category to actually have something new to it We did not want to put three old bottles of wine-outplacement, coaching and retained search-in one carton and call the carton an "innovation.' We had to create something truly novel.

We created a structured coaching program called The First One Hundred Days(TM) as a comple

ment to our other, traditional services. It is a structured program designed to help integrate the new executive into a new environment The First One Hundred Days is offered as the concluding part of our retained-search program. We also employ it as part of our full-service executive outplacement program. Thus our commitment goes beyond helping executives find new opportunities to working with them on the front end of their next assignment

We don't do traditional retained search. Nor do we do traditional outplacement Our category is "helping companies manage the Senior Executive Assignment Cycle'

LAURENCE J. STYBEL and MARYANNE PEABODY are cofounders of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire. Since 1979, this Boston-based firm has helped companies manage the Senior Executive Assignment Cycle" through retained search, coaching and helping key executives find new chapters in their professional lives. This article had its origin in a talk given to the New England chapter of IMC (U.S.). Today there are 114 Lincolnshire offices around the globe. Their website is http://www.boardoptions.com/.