John Tyreman 0:00

Are you tired of building connections and relationships with prospective clients? Are you bored from actually winning new business? Well, today we're sharing 10 surefire ways to erode trust and completely alienate your clients. Get ready for a masterclass on exactly what not to do

Mark Wainwright 0:38

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. I'm Mark. I'm joined by my co-host, John Tyreman. John, how are you today?

John Tyreman 0:49

I'm ready to, you know, trust is built and drops and lost in buckets, so I'm ready to spill some buckets today, Mark

Mark Wainwright 0:55

Yeah. we've got, like John said, we've got some surefire ways here to wreck, client relationships, destroy trust, make them feel like they're lost, you know, adrift on the ocean, for sure. So this is a snarky episode, folks, but, if you read between the tea leaves here a little bit, we're gonna touch on some really important points. a lot of these ideas may seem, you know, maybe disparate, maybe they're just coming- we're coming at this trust thing from many different angles, which is totally fine. We think in a trust-based industry, in a trust-based world of professional services where people are making really big decisions, and a lot of them have a lot of risk associated with them, they need to establish trust with, the consultants that they work with. So, whether we like it or not, trust is a huge deal, and all of these things that we're gonna run through, all 10 of them, can either build up or erode trust

John Tyreman 1:55

That's exactly right, Mark. and we've, ordered them kind of in the order of what a sales process might look like, all the way from lead generation to closing a contract. So that's the method to our madness there. You wanna lead us off?

Mark Wainwright 2:09

Sure, sure. Yeah. So this one is the if you know anyone, air quotes, referral strategy, right? So this is, you know, if you succeed at maximizing the vagueness and ambiguity in your referral requests, you'll, you'll never have the pain of, of, of someone, you know, saying no or, or, or rejecting your referral request. Like, they'll just send you to anybody. Better yet, they'll never even introduce you to anybody in the first place, and you won't think anything of it. You're just like, "Yeah, I just told them like whatever." You know, if you know, if you've ever heard of anybody anywhere that we could do any work with in any way, just, just let me know sometime in the next five years, right? is that the vagueness, uh, we're looking for? Trying to achieve that level of yeah. Yeah, yeah, right. so here you go, right? There you go. The, the if you know anyone strategy, and folks, obviously we've gone into detail about how to do this right, but the if you know anyone referral strategy is almost this default behavior that people fall into. The last 30 seconds of the question, they say, "Hey," look them in the eye and say, "Hey, if you know anybody, we'd love to get an introduction." And then you just sit back and assume that your great work will magically just create new leads, referrals come stumbling at you, waiting at your front door. And heck, ultimately you never even have to ask for any introductions and do it the right way. Kills me. All right, John. Number two

John Tyreman 3:38

all right, number two, push new leads as fast as possible. I mean, don't even bother doing any market research. I mean, you are the expert here, right? and you know what? I think a, a time in pipeline is s- a sales metric that a lot of sales professionals look at. You know, how long from lead to close. Well, I think that you need to get your average prospect time in pipeline to zero. Go for that close in the opening pitch. I mean, why, why bother discovering buyer challenges when you can just push a prepackaged solution, Mark? I mean, we're out here to sell. We're not here, out here to be a therapist and to listen

Mark Wainwright 4:21

Good point, John. reducing the cost of sale to absolutely nothing would be, brilliant, right? So John, we're tying this to trust, right? And obviously the sales process is, you know, just like any other process that your firm does, right? It's actually an opportunity to build trust, folks

John Tyreman 4:36

Yep. Yep. And there's no way to destroy trust on the first touch than to talk about yourselves. So that's what you need to do is to push leads as fast as possible. All right, Mark, what's number three?

Mark Wainwright 4:51

All right. we're hitting some winners here, John. All right. Number three, death by slide deck, right? And this is re- yeah, recurring theme for sure. No better way to erode that trust early on than to completely skip the discovery phase and immediately launch into a 50-slide presentation. And we have listeners, John, that have done this, folks, so there you go. Nice job. Death by slide deck. Good job. So talking at the prospect for the entire meeting is the best way to prove your unrivaled expertise in the marketplace, right? how many resumes can we fit into that presentation?

John Tyreman 5:34

Oh, how many people do we have at the firm?

Mark Wainwright 5:36

yeah, yeah, we can hit

John Tyreman 5:37

how many 1099s do we have?

Mark Wainwright 5:39

Yeah, we can hit them with everything, and we have got, we've got Jerry, who is at the front desk, so yeah, death by slide deck. Surefire way to kill some trust. Number four, John

John Tyreman 5:52

Number four, let the robots do the caring. I will start this one off with a story, Mark. You

Mark Wainwright 5:58

Ja

John Tyreman 5:59

I get these automated AI, AIs to book webinars directly on my calendars over existing meetings. So they didn't ask for my permission and, you know, it's, it's great. you know, the simple system that brings in new customers every week on any budget. This is a webinar that was booked on my calendar. It says, "Most businesses owners don't have a traffic problem, they've got a funnel problem. And this one shift already turns more customers without spending a dollar on ads." I mean, this is awesome. They, they went, they booked it on my calendar without me asking. It was fantastic way to destroy trust. I even sent them an email saying, "This is a disgusting tactic. Please don't ever do this or invite me to webinars ever again this way." I mean, we-- Mark, we need to protect our billable time at all costs. We need to use automation and AI to delegate relationship building. That is how we erode trust.

Mark Wainwright 6:54

I love it. This p- yeah. P- p- people are not completely baffled, John. They're like, "Wait, do I use AI now or do I not use AI now?" Whatever. It's like, right, it's like, ah, yeah. So, but the title of this number four is, right, let the robots do the caring, right? So caring is this, we're tying this to trust here, folks. So right, is, is, is AI and tech the best way for you to, you know, build that trust? Hmm.

John Tyreman 7:19

Hmm, maybe not.

Mark Wainwright 7:21

Maybe not. Okay.

John Tyreman 7:23

All right. Mark. What's number five?

Mark Wainwright 7:25

Number five, the fire and forget PDF proposal, one of my favorite topics, absolute best proposal, John, frankly, that I've ever seen, right? Just they were beautiful. Pictures were great, and the words were spelled correctly. You know, I mean, the, the table of contents was fantastic But you just attach it to an email and send it off into the void, right? Fired it off. And you thought just when you did that, when you click send, right, there was this huge sort of rush of, Oh, job is done. I sent the proposal. now it's off on its own, and the client's gonna simply say yes," right? So fire and forget PDF proposal, right? You should, in addition to that, right, if they actually want to have a conversation about it, you should actively avoid having live, collaborative conversations about it. If they have some questions, frankly, even if they have challenges to some of the things that you've put forward in your proposal, you should either just, blame the client for being ignorant or, immediately strike those things out of your proposal and cut the price in half, right? So that's the best way to address any sort of, concerns, questions, or objections and stuff. So there it is. And yeah, trust, just about dead at that point. There you go.

John Tyreman 8:47

I mean, you gotta protect your billable time, right? you don't wanna be spending that having synchronous conversations. That's

Mark Wainwright 8:53

What a fantastic opportunity to build trust, to have that nice synchronous communication, that nice conversation about the proposal and everything else. What a fantastic opportunity for trust that you just blew off.

John Tyreman 9:04

But that's our goal. Our goal is not to build trust. Our goal is to destroy trust, so let's avoid those synchronous conversations

Mark Wainwright 9:10

Downs. and there's more, John. There's more. We have a lot here. Number six, go

John Tyreman 9:14

Number six, and speaking of that proposal that you just blasted off, um, in an email, if you highlighted everything about your firm in pink in that proposal and everything about the client in green, your goal is to make that document as overwhelmingly pink as

Mark Wainwright 9:34

green. Oh, pink, right. Pink,

John Tyreman 9:37

it's all about w- we, we don't want to build trust, we want to destroy it, so let's talk about ourselves.

Mark Wainwright 9:41

Oh, okay, good. Pink.

John Tyreman 9:43

Yep. I mean, an obsessive focus on your firm's history, how long you've been in the, you know, what the founder's favorite color was. That's what buyers truly care about

Mark Wainwright 9:52

yeah. But John, they asked you basically in the RFP they sent out, they basically demanded that you write a pink colored proposal all about yourself, right?

John Tyreman 10:07

clients know what they want all the time, Mark.

Mark Wainwright 10:10

Oh. what do they need you for then? All

John Tyreman 10:16

def- I can't defend that logic

Mark Wainwright 10:18

Can't defend that logic at all. Another opportunity to focus on the client, build trust, everything else. We've wrecked it by creating our pink highlighted proposal where we just talked about ourselves. Nice work, folks. On to number seven

John Tyreman 10:34

All right, number seven. What is this one, Mark?

Mark Wainwright 10:37

Yeah. Bury, you know, in a similar theme here, this is bury the client, front load the resumes, right? So it's, you know, what boilerplate stuff do we have out there that sorta fits this need that maybe we've proposed on in the past that we can just cut and paste and, "Oh, don't forget to change the name of the client organization," but otherwise we're good to go. Just, you know, stick our resumes in there, you know, talk about the accolades and all the projects that we've-- all of our projects that we've done. so jam it full of all that stuff and completely lose the client. Like, you know, hope that the client on page eight completely loses track of what they were even reading, right? They're like, "Is this even about me or us or our situation or..." Yeah.

John Tyreman 11:26

The goal is to get them in a comatose state where they, they just absorb the information by osmosis

Mark Wainwright 11:34

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman 11:36

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 11:50

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

John Tyreman 12:00

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

Mark Wainwright 12:06

and now back to the show. Number eight, John

John Tyreman 12:11

All right. Number eight, the art of the assumption. when you're talking with a client or a prospect, you should never, and I mean never ask any clarifying questions or trying to get to the root cause of a client's pain points. Always take them on the surface level, the symptoms, because you already know what they need, right? You've been there, you've seen it, uh, a hundred times. You know? It'll just save everyone a whole lot of time if you just skip the discovery, skip those clarifying questions, and just hand the clients the solution. That's the simplest way

Mark Wainwright 12:52

you get that eye roll from your colleague. You're like, "Are you really gonna ask them those questions again? Can't we just cut to it? Gosh."

John Tyreman 13:01

Mark, we already know the answer. Why'd you ask that question?

Mark Wainwright 13:05

Right, and I love the title of that, that number eight, "The Art of the Assumption," right? It's an art, right? Whether or not people listening to this know it, you've actually become really good at assuming all kinds of stuff, folks. So yeah, good, good, good work

John Tyreman 13:18

what did George W. Bush say? Trust but verify, right? And there's a little bit of wisdom in that, right? You

Mark Wainwright 13:25

but verify. You pulled that one out of the archives. that's so funny. Yeah. So we already know what they need. Why take the opportunity again to build an understanding that in turn builds trust? Let's just run right to the assumption. John, in the medical practice, this has a term. There's a term in, the world of medicine, it's called malpractice, right? and malpractice is, prescription without diagnosis, right? So there you go. So yeah, doctors get taken to jail for malpractice. other people in professional services just think it's their job,

John Tyreman 14:07

That's a fantastic analogy.

Mark Wainwright 14:09

Yeah. Like practice, malpractice. Yeah. Right. malpractice Is it the opposite of practice or is it just bad practice?

John Tyreman 14:16

I think it's just bad practice. mal in Spanish is bad,

Mark Wainwright 14:19

bad. bad. So it's bad

John Tyreman 14:20

Bad practice. So don't assume. Well, I mean, unless you really wanna destroy

Mark Wainwright 14:25

Yeah, unless you're interested in malpractice, right? So that's, yeah. Good. Good. You

John Tyreman 14:31

what is our number nine?

Mark Wainwright 14:33

Number nine is the wing it, air quotes, power move, right? So why bother? Don't waste your time doing preparation, background research, you know, coming up with an agenda or preparing great questions for a sales call. Just wing it, right? That's what all the good ones do, right? All the, all the high flyers, all those shiny suits, you know, all that slick back hair, and everything you've come to think about sales, salespeople, all of that, embrace it. Embrace it

John Tyreman 15:12

You know, Patrick Mahomes doesn't need to practice. He doesn't need to look at the game plan. He just needs to show up and play,

Mark Wainwright 15:20

Yeah. why do the same thing you've done over and over again and just, you're just gonna, you're just gonna wing it and, you know, I mean, it's worked at least, like, 40% of the time in the past, so wh- why

John Tyreman 15:34

And 100% of that was luck.

Mark Wainwright 15:36

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, here we go. Here's our, here's our tie back to trust. We were like, "What does winging it have to do with trust?" It's like, well, of course, right? you're on stage, John. You're on stage early on in these early conversations, and if you come in and you're just winging it and the client or the prospective client knows it, not a great way to build trust. But it sure looks good. Yeah.

John Tyreman 16:01

it sure looks good.

Mark Wainwright 16:03

Yeah. I mean, when your colleagues turn to you and it's like, "Man, I had no idea you were gonna do that in the middle of that sales call. That was something else. Client seemed a little surprised, but, you know, good on you. that was pretty risky." No, thanks. All right, and the last one. Bringing it home here, John.

John Tyreman 16:19

number 10, the smartest person in the room syndrome.

Mark Wainwright 16:24

Oh, this is a killer

John Tyreman 16:25

So if you want to go for the dagger and just completely eviscerate any shred of trust that you had left with your prospects, boast about your accomplishments and make sure that any stories that you tell are about you and the clients that you helped are a supporting cast. So, I mean, you are the expert. Asking simple why questions might make it look like you don't already know everything.

Mark Wainwright 16:58

Yeah.

John Tyreman 16:59

So be the smartest person in the room if you really want to take any trust that you had left and kick it out the window

Mark Wainwright 17:06

Mm. Smartest person in the room. Yeah, that's

John Tyreman 17:10

So Mark, we've gone through all 10 of these. What do you think is the worst one out of all of these?

Mark Wainwright 17:18

it's a, John, it is-- Well, depending on how you look at it, John, it's either a devastating list or it's a fantastic one, right? We've either, we've really, we, we've either nailed it out of the park, you know, just hit a complete home run on train wrecks, you know, in, in this whole world of, you know, for our deal doer sellers and business development stuff. Or where we've highlighted some major, major pitfalls. The worst one, gosh, I don't... That's, that's hard. You know, I, I'll, I'll tell you, uh, one of the ones that is top of mind for me is the highlighter test, right? It's, because you're actually-- you're fighting against a, whole bunch of different things in this one. The first of which is that you've probably, grown up and practiced in an industry who's just used to doing this, right? Even in college when, you know, our engineers and architects and, all those other professionals, accountants, everybody out there, when you were in, in school, you know, you were, you were needing to present, right? You were needing to be able to, get your, your ideas, your point of view, front and center. and, that's how you learned. And then you got into a practice, and you watched the long-timers, the partners, principals, whoever else in your organization do the same thing. And you just thought, "Oh, this is just how we're gonna do it. we're just endlessly talk about ourselves." So that behavior's built in, and then all of a sudden you start getting these requests, these RFPs, and things like that, where they're like, "All right, We're the city of Springfield, and we need a consultant to come in and, you know, do this particular work for us. We have this particular need." And they're like, "We need these 10 things," and they're all about you, right? You take that as a sign to just do nothing but talk about yourselves, and you don't pause for a split second and say, "Now wait a minute, this is a trap. This is a trap. The client wants us to come in here and talk all about ourselves, and we're not gonna acknowledge the critical element that's, part of every proposal out there, is that, we need to turn this back and be super clear about what we understand, what we've heard, what we've researched, and all the information we've gathered about the client and their specific need. And we need to make sure that the client knows that we understand them and what they need to, get out of this whole thing." We completely ignore that. So that one, to me, that's one of the steepest hills to climb, so to speak, right? That is one of the biggest challenges in this list, is for firms to actually be able to overcome and win the highlighter test, right?

John Tyreman 19:52

what would you say, and I'm just curious, Mark, what would you say, 'cause a lot of these RFPs have very, like, specific rules and, like, it, you have to follow, like, specific process, even, like, how slides are organized in some cases. So, what would you say to, like, a client who is saying, "But I have to follow this process"? Would you advise them to deviate from that?

Mark Wainwright 20:12

No, you shouldn't. the saying I've heard in these type of situations is you have to be compliant to a client's request, for a specific information, for a specific order or sequence or whatever else that information. But you cannot be complicit in a bad buying process, right? You can't contribute to, a bad buying, selling, competitive selection process, right? So you need to find opportunities to... And everything that you put forward, all the information that you put forward, you need to constantly be reframing it, from the perspective of the clients that you've worked with in the past, right? It's like, you know, your resumes are not going to be a laundry list of everything that you're fantastic at. It's like you have to reflect back who you worked with, what work was done, how happy they were with all that work. You know, when we talk about client success stories and case studies and things like that, we constantly have to put the spotlight back on the client, not on ourselves. So every opportunity you can, you need to do that. And, you know, One of the things we've talked about in the past is a statement of understanding that gets incorporated into proposals and things. And the statement of understanding is a fantastic way to set the precedent up front that says, "We're going to obsess and focus about the client first, and based on that understanding, then we're going to make some recommendations." And then you constantly have to tie those recommendations back to the statement of understanding. It says, "Because you said you wanted this, this is the recommendation we're gonna make here. Because you said you wanted to achieve this, this is the recommendation here." So we're constantly tying that back and forth. So there you go. Highlighter test is a hard one. Yeah. Yeah. How about you?

John Tyreman 21:51

Yeah, I, I guess it's maybe because it's just, it st- it stands out to me for whatever reason, I don't know. But pushing new leads as fast as possible, and I think maybe it's just because I come from a background of market research, but, I've seen go-to-market teams completely skip that phase, right? when you have a new product, or even if you have an existing service line that you wanna bring to market, there's oftentimes not a lot of research or discovery that happens in aggregate. Not talking about like one-to-one sales conversations, but just like going out to the market and just having a number of conversations to kinda get a pulse on the market. And it's viewed as, Like it extends calendar time. Like that's the big drawback to it. But you can get quick wins along the way. I mean, it's-- And it helps you in the end understand what the problems are so that you can articulate and that you can empathize and you can do all of these other things and, you know, look for the red flags and, um, kind of help to kind of you know, ask the right line of questioning. So that one stands out to me is not doing the research, not doing that before you go to market.

Mark Wainwright 23:07

Yeah, that's a great one, 'cause it fights against what a lot of people assume you know, being really good at sales is, you know, just going faster, more faster, that sort of thing. and a lot of times, you know, when I coach individuals and firms, I'll say, "Look, you need to slow down. We need to slow down with these opportunities because, we're not doing a good enough job up front, and we're not front-loading some of these really critical conversations, and we're paying for it on the back end." You know, that's the balance that I'm trying to have people understand is if they bring more effort up front, not, not like exponentially more, but just enough effort up front and earlier on in the marketing and sales process, then it's gonna make the back end way better and you're not gonna end up, negotiating to death, scope and price and, having, you know, 15 things sort of just existing in this vague world of, "Oh, I thought you guys were gonna do that. I honestly do think that sufficient work up front saves time on the back end in the whole sort of sales process, and frankly, when it gets to service delivery because everybody's really sharp and clear and defined on what needs to be done and what the client sees as success, right? So yeah, that's a good one for sure.

John Tyreman 24:17

Yeah, it's funny, we both kind of talked about a similar thing. The statement of understanding in a sales environment is very similar to the market research that you do upfront in a marketing campaign. So there are two kind of similar threads there

Mark Wainwright 24:33

and they're both the foundation and, you know, you'll go to somebody who's, in the middle of an opportunity and says, Show me the foundation. Show me the base. show me this big rock solid base from which you are making recommendations, from which you are pricing, from which you are, proposing different elements of work, et cetera." they're like, "What is that?" And they're like, it's thin, it's weak, and it's constructed, largely of assumption." Right? "We just assumed all this stuff."

John Tyreman 25:05

And then on the, on the marketing side of it, what's the foundation to set how you define your ideal client profile, and what pain points do they have And then how does your service help alleviate those pain points? That's all work that can be done upfront that can be worked into your marketing materials.

Mark Wainwright 25:22

Yeah, for sure. Good, good. All right, good.

John Tyreman 25:24

we couldn't help ourselves, Mark. we couldn't help ourselves staying snarky. We had to turn it back around.

Mark Wainwright 25:29

know. Well, we, we worked over the listener for sure, and if anybody's still listening to this, all right. So, first half was a pretty brutal, brutal attack, of snarky, snarky responses, and just, fantastic ways to alienate your clients and just destroy trust, for sure. So take it as such.

John Tyreman 25:47

Well, this was really fun, Mark. I'm glad that we, we went on the offensive there, but we turned it around in the end. So, um, this was great. Until next time.

Mark Wainwright 25:57

All right, John, until next time