Mark: 0:00

All types of consultants find themselves in a position where their heads down focused on right air quotes, the work, and no one pauses to ask if we're still going in the right direction. What if we had a regular meeting designed not to do the work, but to improve how we are doing? The work. I think it's a cool topic and we're gonna talk about it today on the podcast. Welcome everyone to Breaking Biz Dev. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Mark, and I am joined by my trusted co-host, John Tieman. John, how are you today?

John: 0:58

I'm Well, this topic is a fun one because we hear that trope all the time working. I'm working too much in the business and not enough on the business, and so I think this is an interesting spin on that. Excited for this one.

Mark: 1:11

Yeah, it kind of, where did it, it kind of came outta nowhere almost. It was, we were just talking about it and I said, you know, I kind of do this thing in my. engagements with my clients where I, we, we just find a, a moment to pull back and see how we're doing together and, right. Just like a lot of things. Just let's do an episode about this and hopefully we're able to connect the dots for everyone on how this thing, how the actual kind of like, working, in the business, on the business, how this whole thing kind of connects to breaking biz dev.

John: 1:42

Yeah, totally.

Mark: 1:44

that's the hope here.

John: 1:46

This is gonna be a fun one, but before we get into the topic du jour, folks that are listening, follow the show please. There's that little plus button on Apple. There's the follow button on Spotify and on your preferred listening platform. Leave us a rating. Leave us a review, and then in the show notes we have a link to a listener feedback survey if you wanna give us some feedback or suggest a topic that we should cover on a future episode. So mark, there, there's a few things that stood out to me, so I'm, I'm really excited to, to dig in. But first, let's start with, you call this an engagement meeting. What is an engagement meeting? Let's start there.

Mark: 2:24

Yeah. It could be, it could be called a number of different things. I've kind of settled on that. different types of. Professional services firms and the professionals in those firms, do different types of work. It could be project work, it could be long-term, sort of retainer based, sort of, relationship work. You know, any, type of consulting firm or consultant has a particular way they go about their work, but a lot of times. At least what I've seen is that that's really all they do. They'll jump into the contract and start, you know, focusing on the deliverables or, you know, milestones or whatever else it is. And I ask, well, do you, do you ever, you know, call a timeout and just, you know, sort of reset and make sure that you know everybody, everything's headed in the right direction or, or whatever else. And they'll say no. And I say, well, that's important. And that's, that's how I would define this whole thing there needs to be certain people in that conversation, obviously including yourself, that need to have certain sort of subject matter that we're gonna talk about, um, a little bit later on. And you know, priorities sometimes that shift, sometimes that move around. It's like, oh, this was a priority back then and now we have these other things that are a different priority now. And yeah, we have to understand how to now shift and reprioritize. So

John: 3:46

without this kind of a meeting, that it's inevitable that these conversations come up. But the difference is, is on one side it's very reactive, right? You go too far in one direction and you realize you're so far apart that it's a fire drill and you have to get on the horn with the client. You have to hash things out and get in the same page. Whereas what you're proposing, mark is a little bit more proactive.

Mark: 4:13

Definitely something that's already scheduled, something that's on the calendar. And those reactive ones are, you know, when something goes so hard, left, something breaks that, all right, we gotta. Pull everybody together and, and, and have this kind of semi painful conversation and everybody's cringing and, you know, scared for what's gonna happen, all that sort of stuff. And, having this regularly scheduled diffuses that not totally'cause sometimes when bad things happen, you know, good intentional open conversations need to happen. But if you have it scheduled regularly, you're gonna have, okay. Well that's what we're gonna talk about next time. And by the time everybody gets To that next scheduled meeting. Maybe people have put a little bit of thought into it. Maybe people are less reactive and more sort of, all right, let's figure out what happened, why it happened. Let's switch gears. Or we have new priorities now, or things are changing. So yeah, it's super, super powerful. and I want to tie this into Breaking BizDev'cause people are thinking, well Mark and John are talking about what to do during your consulting engagement and what does this have to do with breaking biz dev. Hopefully some of this, if, if you've listened to the, to the podcast or at least you kind of understand what we talk about, this is screamingly obvious how this can be a benefit. Just to be explicit about it, it matters because it builds trust and transparency with the client. It serves to air those grievances, you know, we're gonna talk about. Any, any problems that have arisen and it elevates you from just a sort of consultant, vendor person? There's an opportunity to move to people use the term trusted advisor or partner or you know, just heck a friend, right? Instead of it having, you know, instead of it being this sort of just vendor, you do what you do thing. We're paying you to do this. Give us our deliverable kind of thing to, uh, professional friend, where you are now coming around to the same side of the table with them. And that John is like the holy grail of what we're trying to do here you don't have to get second place when you were chasing after a certain project or something like that, right? You're the default answer. You're the obvious one. So that's why this matters so much in Breaking Biz Dev, is that This elevates the relationship to the point where you're just like, it's, it's bulletproof.

John: 6:40

Yeah, so it sounds like there's cl, there's a clear connection to client retention, there's a clear connection to, working on the re relationship, creating an environment for account expansion.

Mark: 6:52

Yeah.

John: 6:54

And in doing all of this, another byproduct would, would be down the line. This I guess would be a lagging indicator, but increased client lifetime value. So I think those are like a couple of clear, tangible connections to either bottom line performance or, you know, business development KPIs.

Mark: 7:14

Yeah. And everything you talked about there are, are things that I associate more with sort of the selling end of things to harken back to our marketing and sales continuum. Those are more on the sales end. spectrum. Right? On the marketing end of things, the obvious one that comes to mind for me is think of the stories that you can tell. Oh yeah. Let me tell you a story about this fantastic client that I've worked with for a long time and we've developed this sort of, this relationship that's just rock solid. And one of the reasons we do that is'cause we regularly get together and just, make sure that we are aligned and focused and prioritized on the right things. And yeah, so it's great.

John: 7:54

So you, you said regularly get together and this is one kind of like. area that I wanted to jump to immediately,

Mark: 8:01

Yeah.

John: 8:01

I like to jump to the details, but, um, so let's talk about that regularity of these, these meetings. So we're working on the engagement, we're not working within the engagement. Is this something to where, let's say you have a weekly meeting and you say, Hey, let's sub out one of these weekly meetings a month to work on the engagement. Or is this something to where you need to, like, could, this needs to be completely separate? And then how frequent should you have these meetings?

Mark: 8:27

the easy and obvious answer is it depends, if you are a project based firm and you have a, like a fast burn project. There's a lot of activities happening and the timeline is shorter, and I would say the timeline is, you know, like a fast timeline is 90 days, right? You have to do something in 90 days. Maybe the frequency of this needs to increase, but to be super clear is that this is not something that's duct taped or in place of any other meeting. This is. It's a standalone conversation, and if it's a fast burn project, then maybe spending a full hour every single week on the project is a lot. So maybe it's, 30 minutes every two weeks, or maybe it's even 20 minutes every week or something. It's just a real quick sort of here's the two or three things that we need to talk about. and on that subject, right, what do you talk about at these, meetings? It's, it's good to have a general set agenda, always, make sure everyone's focused on results. Like where are we progress, you know, working towards this ultimate result that we all want to achieve together. That's important. If you have a very long-term project, do you do that every single time? Maybe not. You know, if it's a multi-year engagement with a client, do you sit down and drill down on the metrics every single time you get together? Maybe every month? No. You maybe do that every quarter. Um, but. So it varies and it depends. Um, but you should have a set agenda. So it's checking in on goals and expectations, figuring out what's going well, what's not going well, what do we need to fix, what warning signs have we seen. you know, I like to call out the red flags early. because a lot of people will think, oh, it's not a big deal. And I'm the guy saying, I've seen this enough. This is a red flag. so then we figure out what needs to change and we start making some, changes. I like to always begin these types of meetings, these conversations with a, all right, here we are. What's top of mind? What do you have sitting there? Because a lot of people can't get past that thing that's sitting top of mind. So I always let that, let that get out there first and people sort of empty their heads, um, first off. So that's a, yeah, it should have an agenda. I'd laid out a few things that could be on the agenda and yeah, it needs to be tight. It needs to be a tight, focused conversation.

John: 10:46

So set, set, check in on goals and expectations. I liken this to the, uh, entrepreneurial operating system of the scorecard. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but there's like a scorecard review component of that system and like the checking in on our eet, our, our goals and expectations. And from what I gather, that should never be all green or all red. So there needs to be some level of yellow and some red and some green in there to show that like the goals aren't too easy or too hard.

Mark: 11:18

Right.

John: 11:19

So like, I guess that could be like a, like an outcome of, hey, we're, we're not setting the bar high enough, or we need, you know, or we're setting it too too low. Um. That's interesting.

Mark: 11:30

You're, you're absolutely right. That's, EOS, brings some, some structure and framework to, to, to something like this. And they have their built-in meetings where all of this is, is discussed. one thing I was gonna add to that is, is, is that it's important I think, to make sure that this conversation, what we're talking about today, balances, uh, the scorecard. Mentality with the sort of, how are we doing? You know, it's like the, the temperature check are people, you know, engaged with this? Are they rolling up their sleeves and digging into it or, you know, are you getting lots of eye rolls? one of the parts about this specific conversation that I, that I find so useful are the, you know, what's the water cooler conversation? Right? I mean, that's the old sort of like the meeting after the meeting or what's the buzz about this particular thing in the organization? How are we do in there? And you can't, that stuff's hard to fit onto a scorecard.

John: 12:28

Yeah, it is. And that, that's kind of what where I was going is it's an interesting blend of like, first of all, how's the engagement professionally? But then how are the individuals. how is their mental state, what are their emotions like? And I, I like that. What's the water cooler talk? Because that's kinda gives you an an indication of, you know, what the overall sentiment is with the project team, with the people that are in adjacent, you know, supporting roles and things like that.

Mark: 12:55

Yeah.

John: 12:55

so you've got this, uh, this other bullet point here to keep it short structured and focused on outcomes. What's, what is an ideal length of an engagement meeting? Is this is like, is it something you can knock out in 20 minutes or is this something where it needs to be like an hour long conversation?

Mark: 13:14

Again, it's tied to frequency, but I think usually the, the, you know, and this is specific to me, but the, the, my hope is to work with my clients for an extended period of time, at least a year, sometimes two, maybe even longer than that. So it seems appropriate for me to have a monthly cadence for this conversation. And I'll tell you, I scheduled for 60 minutes and we managed to fill it up just about every single time. it's rare. When, you know, we are at 35 minutes and we've just sort of run out of stuff to talk about. It's, this is, a full conversation. you know, and there's to do items and action items and change this and do that and everything else. But there's also the sort of just the sharing that happens in the conversation that is so helpful for building relationships.

John: 14:02

And your clients feeling heard, you feeling heard, and everyone feeling understood and appreciated. Yeah.

Mark: 14:08

Right. That's right. We talked about understanding, endlessly, John, but this is a great way for a consultant to practice this whole active listening. Mirroring, understanding sort of thing. So if I heard you right, you know, this is what you said, this is, you mentioned this, you mentioned that. And you can do that, you know, in the conversation. You can do it in your follow up, you can do whatever else. So they start to really feel heard, and that's, as we know, that's so critical.

Mark Wainwright: 14:36

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 14:38

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 14:53

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 15:02

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 15:08

and now back to the show.

John: 15:12

Totally. Alright, so we talked about what an engagement meeting is, how that relates to business development, what a good engagement meeting looks like. So let's, let's share with our listeners some practical tips. How can they get started with, um, maybe introducing the concept of an engagement meeting to an existing client and they wanna start getting more reps at this. What was, what's the first thing that folks should do?

Mark: 15:38

Yeah, that's, uh, so you called something out specifically there. How do we integrate this into an existing client relationship? That can be harder than starting this from the get go. So, just a, side note here, if you feel like an existing engagement would benefit from this type of a meeting where you're not working in it. You're working on it. The bigger picture stuff, if you really think it would, benefit, then you have to show the value of it. and that sometimes is, can be hard if it's not built in immediately particularly with people who are looking at hours and time and things like that and you know, billable hours and stuff. This can be a tough thing to bite off. And the client's looking at this like, I'm not gonna spend the time to do this so you do, you have to get to a certain point where everyone can mutually agree that this is a valuable thing to do. And I think the way you can do that. I think you can kind of highlight and point to previous situations where this would've helped. You're like, Hey, we ran into that little hiccup six months ago. It's my sense that if we would've been on top of this and been sharing and talking about it, you know, then it, it wouldn't have been a problem. And if we had this opportunity to take a step back every month and say, okay, this is what's changing, this is how it's changing, that would've helped mitigate some of the little hiccups we ran into there. So you can point to some previous situations where it would've really helped and hopefully they buy into it.

John: 17:00

So you, you gave an example there. I thought this was a really good one'cause I asked you how our listeners can get started, but then I immediately, uh, thought of, well, wait, wait, hold on. Like, how do you know which engagements need an engagement meeting first? And you gave an example about, you know, maybe something happened six months ago. It's a problem that could have been avoided. So maybe there's some like, Retrospection that needs to happen in terms of like looking back and, and looking at each engagement individually. But maybe let me ask you that, mark. So how do you know which engagements need an engagement meeting?

Mark: 17:35

Well, that's the easy one for me to answer is I think they all do, um, you know, because I think that, issues arise whether you're the consultant delivering work to your clients or you're the clients, whatever the arrangement is. I think issues arise in consulting situations, not because of the difficult technical nature of the work, right? It's not because the engineering was too hard, or the architecting was too difficult, or the consulting, you know, the consultant was just like befuddled, right? That's not why problems arise. Problems arise because of people. Personalities and communication and interaction and openness and transparency and everything else, and we spend so little time focused on that stuff. So I think every engagement needs one. I think it, you know, it's, it, some may vary, some may need to be more frequent and more intense. others less so, but I think they all, benefit from it. Plus it gives you the opportunity to say, we are absolutely not talking about deliverables, timelines, deadlines, milestones, whatever else in this meeting we're focused on all the stuff that's never discussed. And it's easy to come up with your agenda'cause it's like you've got a pile of things that you stumble across, last month, two months ago, whatever else that are just sitting there and nobody's talked about it. You're like, oh, what are we gonna talk about? We're gonna talk about this pile of stuff that we've been amassing, you know, over the Over the course of this engagement that we haven't talked about yet. Like, where'd Bob go? You know, I was working pretty closely with Bob and all of a sudden Bob left. What happened? And Bob took two people with him. What happened? Like, what are we supposed to do now? Uh, you know, it's like, oh, we're gonna figure it out. It's like, well, let's figure it out today. Let's figure

John: 19:16

Yeah.

Mark: 19:17

You know? So some of the bits and pieces that you mentioned, sort of practical tips is that yes, you need to have sort of an agenda, you can have a standing agenda. Here's kind of the stuff we talk about. You always need to make sure you're leaving room for people either to add to the agenda item or just come into the meeting ready to kind of empty their heads. That's important. The framing needs to be important. This is not a, project status. Meeting. We are working on our relationship, as a sort of client consultant sort of relationship here. We're working on that. This is a good discussion. We want everybody to be talking. It's not just the consultant sort of reporting out stuff. It's, it's a good conversation. Um, and yes, absolutely you need to document what was discussed, what everybody's gonna do next, and by the next time we all get together, what kind of stuff do we want to have done. So

John: 20:03

Can you, can you share some examples of those next steps? Like in an engagement meeting, what, what would be an example of like. A to do or an outcome, because I guess that's like May maybe because Can you share any examples from the engagement meetings that you've had with your

Mark: 20:18

Well, I can, um, you know, and, but I don't wanna be too specific to, to my work because some people I want, an example that people can connect with is, is maybe something like, Hey, okay, we're doing this particular work with you, you, the consultant, you are focused on working with these particular team members, and you're, you're working towards these particular outcomes. By the way, we've seen some interest and some engagement from these two younger team members. And you know, without changing job descriptions and changing roles can you find opportunities to start bringing those people into the conversation more? Can you see if what we are seeing is actually true? Right. And the work I do is on the sales work. So a lot of times that sounds like, hey, we've seen the others, these other two people have some success with sort of engaging with existing clients and having good conversations and stuff. Can you push on them a little bit? And lo and behold, sometimes there is and they're like, oh great. These are people actually we need to really dial into this to this work. And maybe that example applies to other folks out there, maybe it doesn't. So there's just things like that where it's like, hey, kind of off the record, we're noticing this one thing. What are you seeing and what changes can we make to change it or improve it or whatever else. So there's a lot of that.

John: 21:36

That's, uh, that's a really great example. And one that ties into, uh, you know, a few different past episodes that we've talked about and like succession planning and business development. is this something that should be brought up in the business development process with new opportunities as well? Or when do you introduce the concept of an engagement meeting with a new prospect?

Mark: 21:57

Yeah, fairly early on. It's not the first thing I, I, I've I talk about, because, you know, most consultants need to be outcome focused, So the first things you're talking about is making sure everyone's crystal clear on the outcomes. And once we get clear on the outcomes, you know, this is one of the building blocks that I bring into as a compulsory part of the work that I do, and obviously we're recommending that this become a compulsory part of all this stuff. And people look at it. They're like, wait, wait, what is that thing? You're like, oh yeah, here's where we do this thing. I'm working with these folks and this, we do this and we do this, and then there's this meeting. People get, wait, who? What's that one? What are we doing that meeting for? It's like, oh no, this is one of the most important ones. This one's critical. This one exists to make sure that we're all in alignment and headed towards these big outcomes. They're like, yeah, but the project meaning does itself. And it's like, no. You know what? There's so many things that come up. Outside of the, doing the work that aren't ever talked about. And that's why this meeting's so important. So they say, oh yeah. Great. And you know, who needs to be in that? It's the consultant, obviously the lead consultant. If it's a team, it needs to be the lead consultant. And hopefully you're working with the senior most team members. On this because these are the people that you can have these bigger conversations with. Oh, and by the way, if you're not regularly meeting with those people in the course of project work. This is a fantastic way to be engaging with those senior team members, building a relationship with them. So for the future, when the opportunity comes around to do more work, additional work, the senior team member, has a relationship with you.

John: 23:33

So there's, there's a, like a balancing act that needs to happen,

Mark: 23:36

Yeah. And soon as this feels like a committee, it's not gonna be helpful anymore because really you're looking for some good transparency here. So I have the most success when I'm meeting with two other people in my meetings, because, it's a good triangulation of ideas. I think three people in a conversation is always very, very helpful. I think any more than that, things get a little complex. It turns into a committee, it turns into an us and them thing, rather than sort of this nice little sort of triangle. Um, and meeting with one senior person who's fine as well. That's, that's good. Um, but yeah, the number of people is important. It needs to be small. It needs to be tight focused. It needs to move quickly. All those things can't be wasting anybody's time. Um, yeah, I think this is a high value thing, so.

John: 24:20

Alright. Um, mark, I think we've effectively broken down the engagement meeting and, shared some actionable tips for our listeners. Let's bring it on home.

Mark: 24:32

I would invite all the listeners out there to think about how to launch this with one of your existing clients. If you're seeing this increasingly large pile of. issues that haven't been discussed or sort of conversation items that can't find their way into a project or, you know, a a, a regular, you know, sort of working meeting. If there's that pile sitting there that needs to be talked about, see if you can wrap this in there and if you need some help and guidance, do not hesitate to reach out to me anytime.

John: 25:01

Awesome. well, mark, I think I'm definitely gonna try to apply this to some of my engagements think that's kind of why it piqued my curiosity when we were like talking about this episode. But I'm, I'm glad that we went through this. This was a great one.

Mark: 25:14

Yeah. Very good. All right, John, until next time.

John: 25:18

Until next time.