Mark Wainwright 0:00

At what point should you stop listening and start advising? It's a pretty rich question, and whether it's been said exact like that or slightly differently, I know I've run across this in the past with my clients. So today, we're gonna talk about it on the podcast

John Tyreman 0:43

All right. Welcome to another episode of Breaking BizDev. I'm John, he's Mark, and today we are going to explore, uh, the big question, Mark, which you introduced When should you stop listening and start advising your clients? So I think this is a very, very interesting question

Mark Wainwright 1:02

Yeah, You know, we talk all the time, John, about listening and understanding, but at some point you gotta stop and start advising. when does that happen? Is it all of a sudden, do you do it really early? do you have to ease your way kind of into it? at what point do you stop listening and start, start advising? That's the question, and I know there's, I, I know there's people out there, I mean, if I have particular clients that I've talked to about this exact topic, they're n- they're like rubbing their hands together like, "Oh, now we're gonna, now we're gonna hear them really dig into this one." So yeah, it's a meaty one for sure. What, uh... Do you have any, do you have any burning examples of this at all in your head, John?

John Tyreman 1:46

So I had a, uh, a prospect recently, an opportunity. they're a B2B service provider. They have an existing podcast. They wanted to do like an audit and strategy engagement, right, before moving into monthly production support. So they really wanted to like me to understand, they're paying me to understand their business really, understand their podcast. And, they were on the fence with working with me, so they wanted to see a sample of a deliverable. And so this is where I, I-- Well, you might not agree with my approach here.

Mark Wainwright 2:19

Yeah. Okay.

John Tyreman 2:21

So I'm curious to hear your thoughts. But w- so what I did was I went through, uh, an old deliverable, and I didn't wanna just send that to them, right? what I did was I went in and I, CIA style redacted some like key recommendations, and what I consider some secret sauce. But I wanted to showcase the deliverable and the breadth of the insights. also wanted to showcase my ability to produce some digital media. So instead of sending them the redacted PDF, I did a video walkthrough for them. It was only like five or 10 minutes, but I didn't wanna give them a PDF that they could reverse engineer.

Mark Wainwright 2:58

I'm tracking with you. I just wanna make sure everybody out there, the listeners are tracking with you. So what you're, what you're... 'Cause the question is, right, at what point do we stop listening and start advising, right? So, so you saw this as a, "Don't ask us any more questions, we wanna see your stuff," which is, which is one of the points, right? That like, we want, we want you to stop asking us questions, and we just want you to show us, show us some stuff, right? Show us a, a, a deliverable, which is a slippery slope, and it's a trap, John. I mean, we talked about traps in the past, so this was a trap, right? Clearly. So you did not completely take the bait. you said, "All right." So you took some content, redacted it, did whatever you could to create a conversation piece where you could continue to listen, right? showed them something. It's like, "What do you think? There's this, there's that." And you got some questions back and, all that other stuff. So how'd it, how'd it, how'd it go? I mean, how'd that, how'd that whole thing play out?

John Tyreman 3:57

They'll-- They're, they're a client now, so they're-- We're gonna go through that, that audit and strategy engagement, and we'll see what happens after that. But, um, it worked.

Mark Wainwright 4:07

you made a conscious decision just I'm not gonna be prescriptive, right? I'm not gonna be, I'm not gonna tell, or if I tell, I'm just gonna tell a little bit, and then I'm gonna leave the rest open for us to discuss, co-develop, whatever else. So there you go. All right. Okay. I like it. I like it. that's a good one.

John Tyreman 4:26

All right. So what's, uh, that was, that was my first example. What's, what's on your list for at what point should you stop listening and start advising?

Mark Wainwright 4:33

Yeah. So this is, I mean, a lot of people feel like this is a rhetorical question and it's just a big softball, for me to hit. But, so, right, I come across experts all the time that wanna stop asking questions and get right to, air quotes, "The work," right? 'Cause the sales stuff, discovery stuff is not the work. The work is the pen to paper, doing the... Engineering firms wanna engineer, right? The architects wanna design, I mean, it's, it's, all those, all those consultants want to consult, right? They wanna solve business problems, when you stop asking questions means that you stop discovery, you're like, "All right, we're not gonna ask any more questions. We've, we've learned a sufficient amount of information." That's what people are thinking, right? They're like, it's like, "We've learned enough to be able to apply, some solution, some recommendation," whatever else, right? Unfortunately, if you shortcut or maybe heck, John, even skip discovery altogether, right? You've mentally, you've pre-sold yourself on a, on an approach or a solution even before the first, for this meeting. You've already got this thing in your head, like there's no more layers of the onion for you. You're not constantly unwrapping this thing, trying to get to, get to the root cause, whatever else. there's something burning there in your head and I'm seeing it. I'm

John Tyreman 5:46

we talk about curiosity and inquiry being two very important, like, skill sets, right? So it seems like curiosity would be at play here, right? So you ask enough questions that you think you know what the solution should be, but you don't know what you don't know, right? And so, like, how can you, how can you maintain that curiosity in that situation?

Mark Wainwright 6:10

the big fat answer, right, the big reveal in this whole thing is you can't, you can't ever. Because if you're, if you're in, if you're in the right, if you've got your head in the right place and your head, your head needs to be in the right place, it's like, "I don't have all the answers and I need to keep exploring," that's gonna, gonna exist throughout the entire, not just the entire sales cycle, but thr- throughout the en- engagement, If, if you stop asking questions too early in this whole relationship, and we're talking the span of the relationship, John, we're not just talking like closing the deal, right? From day one to day whatever in your entire relationship, if you stop asking questions, that's going to show up throughout your entire relationship. I mean, someone who's genuinely curious and genuine, genuinely interested, the, the, this sort of, sort of ever-present pursuit of, of, of answers and, opinions and feedback and all that other stuff, like that's so critical throughout the entire engagement. So if you stop, right, if you stop and you provide your expert... W- when do we start applying our expertise and stop asking questions? It's like, well- You don't,

John Tyreman 7:15

that's a great mindset shift. I, I, I like that. D- so discovery is never ending. It doesn't-- That's not just a part of the sales process, that's a part of the client engagement, is a continuous discovery. Because change happens all the time. New information is introduced all the time.

Mark Wainwright 7:32

I've got some little layers of detail I think that we can kinda, kinda dig into a, a, a little bit on, on that one. But, I'm just gonna say the obvious right up front. I'm not gonna wait till the end. It's like, well, you you don't, right? So all right, there you go. I'll, I'll, I'll f- N- now that people have heard from me, I'll ping-pong it back to you. they're like, "Uh, Mark

John Tyreman 7:52

Well, at some point you have to start advising. So then maybe the question is less when should you stop listening and asking questions, and when should we start advising, right? And so I guess that, like, it's a good segue into the next point on my list is like once you fully understand the prospect's situation, and I guess like to date maybe, if I could amend that a little bit based on what we were just talking about with new information coming in, things changing. It's like when I worked in research, there's this thing called le- a confidence interval. Have you, you, you're probably familiar with this, right? Where it's like these, this survey of 1,000 people is representative at 95% confidence, right? So that's like the, the research, it's essentially equ- uh, the equivalent of saying that if we were to project this out to the entire population, there's a 95% chance that we would replicate the results. So I guess, like, let's use that confidence interval as sort of a rating. Like what percent in your mind, Mark, what percent confidence would you need to have on, of the prospect's situation in order to start co-creating solutions?

Mark Wainwright 9:03

Are you, are you asking me? You're, You're, you're, you're, like, "Come

John Tyreman 9:05

you, what do you think?

Mark Wainwright 9:06

Come on."

John Tyreman 9:08

Hun- it can't be 100%.

Mark Wainwright 9:10

I just said we never really stop, right? We never stop being curious. We never stop asking questions. Of course I'm gonna walk that back a little bit, for sure, right? So, but we're, we're, we're getting there. We're getting there. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting there.

John Tyreman 9:25

what I have here on my bullet point list is when you start, When the prospect starts introducing solutions, there's this, there's, uh, there's a switch that happens, at least in my experience, when I, when I'm asking questions in, uh, early on in the sales process. There's a point where in my own head I'm like, "Okay, the solution's becoming clear. Maybe I've got, it's-- I'm pretty sure I know." But once I start hearing, uh, prospect start to say, "Okay, well, we can do this and we can do this," and they start bringing these ideas to the table, that's in my mind, they're-- we've turned a corner and we can start developing solutions.

Mark Wainwright 10:04

No, I, and, and I, and I totally agree with that one. But, as you and I have mentioned in the past is like we're still at the point now where we're, we're ready to present some recommendations, typically three options, But we're not certain which direction they're gonna go. So we're still asking questions. We're, "Here's option one, what do you think? Here's option two, what do you think? Here's option three, what do you think?" So we've talked about how to use those, presenting those three options or three recommendations as a tool in the sales process to, to guide decision-making. We will often have in our heads, which, whatever the recommended option is, we're like, "Yeah, okay, that's kind of the direction we need to go." But we still, even through pricing and presenting options, we still need to be asking the questions. "Oh, what do you like about this one? What don't you like? What do you like about this one? What don't you like?" we're still curious, we're never creating those three option tables 100% confident that they're gonna pick one, right? We should obviously be, prepared to, respond when they say, "Well, I don't know. You're the expert. What do you think?" Right? "Sure, pick option B." But we're never, we're never certain about it.

John Tyreman 11:17

I would say that, like, even the, the fact that, like, even the act of presenting three different options, you even said it yourself, like, it's guiding prospects, right? So that's sort of a form of, uh, advisory saying, like, "Here are the different paths we could go down," right?

Mark Wainwright 11:34

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I

John Tyreman 11:37

kind of like

Mark Wainwright 11:38

We're get- Some people that have listened to me in the past, and maybe even clients, they're like, "Oh, there's a, there's a magical moment that Mark's gonna say is that here's when you stop asking, being curious, and asking all these questions, and here's when you start, sort of dictating direction." It's like, "Nope, we gotta go, we gotta go this way." Because there are so many clients out there, so many people, experts in professional services firms, it's like, like that's, that's all they want. They're like, "Just we, we have to stop, stop yakking and start, telling the client what to do," right? which direction to go, whatever else. And, I think, John, just we probably should put this in the beginning of the episode, but I think one of the things that prompted this episode was, a recent interaction that I had on LinkedIn there was someone who, had posted something, and it was a, generally in supportive of a consulting friend connection professional, that they know, that said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we're not gonna in, in-- We're, we're not doing the options. We g- we, we've, we've given our client one direction, and that's what our client wants and needs because, we're the expert, so we're gonna dictate a particular direction." and I think this was tied to options and pricing and other stuff, and the conversation kind of wove its way around a little bit. And, as most do, this one ended up, and it's like, oh yeah, in certain situations as the consultant, it's appropriate to stop asking questions and start being the advisor. that, that ki- I think we kind of like situationally, sure. But I think in the vast majority of, situations, no, it's, it's, it's never, it's never okay to kind of be that, be that sort of advisor who says, "Okay, here's the path. Take it now." And I know I'm sounding kind of, like it's an ultimatum sort of a thing, but yeah. that was, that was the gen- that was kind of the nature of the conversation a little bit. what we, what, what we've been referring to is what is the moment in time, right? I think people are thinking like, what is the moment in time, right? Tell us what, tell us when is the right moment. And, and for me, it's not a, it's not a time thing, It's an information thing, right?

John Tyreman 13:50

Okay

Mark Wainwright 13:51

So you can stop asking questions and start advising once you have sufficient information to do so. And there are three bullets here that I wrote down that, first one is: What is the real problem? not just the symptom.

John Tyreman 14:13

Not what they say, what, what's underneath.

Mark Wainwright 14:15

is the root cause?

John Tyreman 14:17

Okay

Mark Wainwright 14:18

If you and the client can both sort of acknowledge this and respond to that question, step one, check. Step two, and this is, it's a pretty common question. what's, what's your vision of success? What does success look like? what are we gonna measure and how will we know we've, crossed the finish line successfully, And the third one is something that, man, I talk about this a lot, and so few people are willing to go take the conversation this far. But unless you've asked the question and come up with a sufficient response together, you're still not there yet. You still have to dig deeper. And the last one is this, right? What is the cost of inaction for them, right? And I call that implications. Like, what are the implications of doing nothing Or doing it this particular way and not that particular way, or doing it to this degree and not to this degree, or, So what is the cost of inaction? And until both of you together have uncovered the answer to that, you're not there yet, right? So I think that the moment is not time-based, it's information-based. And I think together you need to uncover the real problem. You need to, to be clear on the picture of results,

John Tyreman 15:37

Mm-hmm.

Mark Wainwright 15:38

and everybody needs to be clear on the cost of inaction, because the cost of inaction is the fire that is going to keep everybody moving, right? It is the prime motivator. It is, it is not these... The vision of success is a great motivator, sure. I mean, people can picture, you're on your marathon, you're running, and you're picturing yourself kind of crossing the finish line. Sure. Right. It's, yeah, you're picturing yourself. So the, the, sure, that's a motive- motivator in certain circumstances. We're talking about, professional services and not necessarily marathons, but, people are trying to get that, attain that picture. A lot of times when we cross the finish line, it's not that exact picture anyways, right? But we've got a kind of a general idea of what that picture is, But the thing, the thing that is pushing you step after step, right, to use our marathon, analogy here, step after step, mile after mile, is like, if I stop now, like, what's the downside? Like, all this time I've spent, all this, What is the cost of inaction, right? And I'm projecting a little bit 'cause John, I'm not a marathon runner, right? So the cost of inac- Ri- right, exactly. Right. The cost of inaction is, wow, I just, you know, I let a bunch of people down that were supporting me. I spent years training for this. That is the cost of not achieving this is a prime motivator relative to, crossing the finish line is a vision of success. Great. Yeah. High fives all around. Good. Good. we've achieved what we wanted to, but the p- the payoff is, like, all this time, this energy, this effort that you've invested into it. So, and people have to lay bare, like, what is the cost of inaction if we do nothing? It's like, oh, well, yeah, we'll be, we'll be 10 times worse than we are today. So I think that's it for me, right? There's the big reveal for me, is that when do you stop? You stop when you have those three questions answered.

John Tyreman 17:32

Well, I, I would say that it's, it's m- even more than that. I'd say it's not just when you have those questions answered, but it's

Mark Wainwright 17:38

when the client does.

John Tyreman 17:39

client are in alignment on

Mark Wainwright 17:41

For sure.

John Tyreman 17:42

to those questions. Go

Mark Wainwright 17:44

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman 17:46

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 18:00

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

John Tyreman 18:10

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

Mark Wainwright 18:15

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman 18:19

Yeah. So it's, uh, root cause, success metrics, and then the, the cost of inaction, the opportunity cost of it all. Love

Mark Wainwright 18:27

forget about that one. and the reason I underscore that last one is that it's, that's the hardest one. That very last one, what is the, what's the cost of inaction? That one is so hard to figure out. And the right posture and the right mindset coming into all of this, one of inquiry and curiosity and digging deeper and wanting to lay bare all these things that are kind of like buried, issues that are unrecognized, uh, opportunities that, they don't see, all that, that stuff. Like, what are the implications of, of, of, of all of this? Because I think there's just too much assumption that happens. It's like, "Well, sure, we just have to do this," Or bad things will happen," Or, "We want to achieve this particular thing," or, you know. that's what the client wants, so we're just gonna go do that. It's like, well, what's, what's driving them? What is driving them to do this, so there you go. That's, that's, that's my thing. So that's, that's the point, right? When you and your client can successfully, state the response to those things together as in, in alignment with c- with clarity, that's when you stop

John Tyreman 19:27

That's good. And that doesn't have to always happen too. I, I think that there, there are times where the answers to those questions could unearth themselves in like a-- I wanna go back to this audit example, right? So, g- getting to be able to, take that extra step in understanding and digging deep into, those root causes and what the success metrics look like. I mean, maybe in my world there's a lot of times where clients don't know what the, what success should look like

Mark Wainwright 20:01

Sure, sure. So, so, so what you're, what you're referring to there is we're gonna bite off a chunk of this work. so you're probably able to answer specifically to, let's say, an audit or with a number of clients that I work with is like there's a, there's an, an initial, an init- not to, not, not to confuse sort of sales discovery with sort of, consulting discovery, but they're very similar to an audit, right? Where you're uncovering information. It's like there's, there's often an opportunity, to, to do that, do that work, and I think likely you can answer those three questions pretty easily on that chunk of work, right? So what is the cost of inaction of not doing an audit, right? So you're gonna say, "All right, we're gonna sign up for this, this little first little phase." What is the cost of inaction of not doing an audit? It's like, well, we could get started on the wrong things. We could be focused. Yeah, yeah. We could be, we could be out of alignment. So you can probably answer confidently with your client. You could respond, what does success looks like? It's like, well, success looks like we have a number of questions answered. We now have more answers than we do questions, right? 'Cause coming into an audit or a discovery phase or whatever else, it's like we have more questions than answers, and an audit gives you, gives you more answers now than questions. so that's, I think sure, if you're looking at it piece by piece, you're not gonna be able to a- you know, answer the full big question on why you're doing this big thing right now. But at least okay, this is kinda why we're gonna do this first thing, and then after that, maybe, maybe we addre- we tackle the big one, So there you go. It's not time-based. It's not, it's not s- it's not, "Ah, isn't one meeting enough?" "Isn't a 60-minute conversation enough to get going?" They're just like, "Gosh, we've met with them four times, and they keep adding new people, and there's new things coming up, and there's..." It's like, well, sounds like you're not ready for a contract, you

John Tyreman 21:46

Sounds like there's still a lot of discovery to

Mark Wainwright 21:48

Sounds like there's still a lot left to, to do, right? But the client's getting impatient. It's like, well, the client isn't leading this, and if they are, then you're in a bad place, right? And, and, if, if you're actually the expert, then you know how best to navigate all of this, 'cause you do this more than they do, right? navigating this buying/selling process more than they do, 'cause you're selling your stuff more than they're it, right? That's just how it works. there you go. All right, John, did I respond to that sufficiently?

John Tyreman 22:20

Uh, yeah, no, I think this is, th- this is awesome. I love those three bullets. Is there anything else that you had, Mark, in terms of like at what point you stop listening and start advising?

Mark Wainwright 22:31

No, I, if people can take those, bullet points, right, that we listed there at the end, if they can, if they can treat that as their litmus test, I do this with my clients, John. It's, you know, I will ask them the three simple questions. it's like, can you, do you really know what's causing this? Have they, have they said, have they been explicit about what success looks like? And is everybody super clear on it? What happens if they do nothing? That one, that one rarely gets answered, So if people can do that confidently, I'm like, "Great. All right. Let's put forward your three recommendations that will get them, part of the way there, all the way there, or all the way there with, gold gilded something." it's like, right, there's our three options. now we're ready for that

John Tyreman 23:08

I'm gonna answer my own question. I'm gonna say anywhere between 90 and 95% confident. That's what it is in statistics. Like,

Mark Wainwright 23:17

I'll take it.

John Tyreman 23:17

the same methodology here.

Mark Wainwright 23:19

I'll take it. I'll take it. John, if I was 95% successful in whatever the heck I was doing, I'd be pretty happy with it for sure, so all right. Folks, m- John's is 95% and mine is questions. There you go.

John Tyreman 23:33

Yep.

Mark Wainwright 23:34

Okay.

John Tyreman 23:34

this has been an awesome conversation. I think those three questions, that's the golden nugget. That's the big takeaway from this one for our listeners. so Until next time

Mark Wainwright 23:42

Until next time