Reintroduce yourself to your clients in six steps

• Gaurav Rastogi
• 25 Oct. 2016

Once you have recognized the need to reintroduce yourself to your clients, there are several steps to follow. In this series of posts, I will explain what the sequence is, and how to DIY your reintroduction. This note is addressed to company CXOs, but account managers and executive sponsors can use the sequence as well.

Here’s the sequence:

Step I: Change your belief about your company’s business and capabilities

Step II: Change your story and learn to tell your new story well

Step III: Change your body language (terms of agreement have changed)

Step IV: Change your language

Step V: Create and carry proof

Step VI: Reward the right behavior (yours as well as clients)

Find a coach

Each of these is a very powerful stage, and it’s important for you to have someone to keep you honest. You can fool yourself into believing you have mastered it, but a coach or mentor can keep you honest. In fact, the first step should be for you to find a coach or mentor for the account team.

Beliefs are fundamental to this continuous transformation, and its important to tackle these first. Beliefs can be unwritten and invisible, but their impact is undeniable.

"If you don’t believe your product, why should the client believe it?"

If your own team thinks the product is not ready, they will unknowingly self-sabotage the sales process.

I love reading the About Us section of company websites, because I am looking to see what’s their story, and whether I can connect with their story.

"Unfortunately, companies don’t all know how to sell their stories."

Stories have the power to provide meaning, and a good story can make a large range of behaviors easier to understand.

Without the story, it’s hard to think of Amazon.com as a company that used to sell books, then DVD, then diapers, and then streamed music, and then started selling cloud computing to large companies…these don’t make sense until we get into Amazon’s “core story”, and it is this:

"We're a company of builders. Of pioneers. It's our job to make bold bets, and we get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers.”

Stated this way, it makes sense that a company that sells books to people may also create a marketplace for small businesses to sell their wares, and for the company to make an AI based bluetooth speaker. They are taking risks and building new things their customers might want. A good story makes sense, and it brings order and meaning to a diverse set of actions. If people understand your story, they can know you better.

Storytelling is becoming fashionable in corporates, and there’s a reason for it. While we may work in a B2B company, we’re still human, and we’re still selling to humans. And humans evolved to tell stories to each other. Stories that have an emotional core, that have uncertainty and that have meaning. When companies think of themselves, its in terms of their own story, their own place in the Universe. If you don’t know what your company’s story is, you’re not going to be invested in it’s outcome emotionally. And if you’re not moved by your story, no one else will buy it either.

Body Language

Relationships change, and when they change the body language changes as well. I love etymology (the study of word origins), and I’m tickled by how the word “corporate” itself comes from the word for “body”. A corporate is literally “formed into a body”, so it’s easy to think of a company’s body language. A company’s body language may be in the way it sends emails, the color or their font, or the way their lawyers redline the contracts. With every step of the evolution, companies have to continually reinvent their body language. When ERP was all new, the ERP vendors had a certain swagger in their walks, a certain bravado in their annual customer meets, and a certain chutzpah in their customer interactions. At San Francisco’s Moscone Park, the annual events for Oracle were the biggest show in town, and one year it was rumored that a rival small company CEO was booted out of Oracle Open World. That was 2011, and the CEO was Marc Benioff of Salesforce, the pioneer of the SaaS business model. Only a few years later, when ERPs became less sexy, and SaaS became the new rage, it was Benioff’s annual Dreamforce that became the ‘IT’ event to be at, bringing in three times more people than Oracle’s event at the same venue. The body language had changed!

Language

When body language changes, so must actual language your team uses. If you were earlier “providing solutions that help bridge the gap” or something like it, you now have to “bring about a digital transformation”. Words matter, because it’s the first thing the client might read or hear. If the nature of your client relationship was one of an order-taker (it’s a cultural marker for an entire industry), and you want to become a “trusted transformation partner”, you would need to find new words and new language.

Do great work => create proof => share proof. Enough said. But language is just words.

Words have some weight, but people prefer proof. Speak softly, and carry a big stick. Proof of your business is other clients that have done things and got results. Your presentation is not proof. Its just more words. You talk a big game?! Prove it! Creating proof is under-rated in companies I have surveyed through my career. They could even give away the first few gigs because the proof is worth many more sales people’s salary.

Many companies don’t care to create proof by asking existing clients how they have succeeded with their product. These companies lose value, because the alternative to proof is louder talking. Doesn’t always work, but sometimes you can win elections with it. Meh!

Reward the right behavior (even customers). I read a story a few years ago about how Starbucks trained us to ask for the Double Tall Extra Hot Latte. Here’s how it worked. You walked into the Starbucks thinking it’s another corner-coffee store, and went on to order using the ‘wrong words’, like “Give me a large espresso please with milk and foam”. The checkout person were trained to then shout out loud the ‘right name’ of the order to the Barista, who’s really just standing about two feet away so there’s no need to shout, “Venti Latte”. Customers would soon learn to say the right names, saving everyone time and embarrassment.

When your team and customers behave in accordance with the “new you”, find a way to reward them. If they behave the old way, just ignore it, if you can. That’s what the “client whisperers” do really well.

In the notes to follow, I will lay out the DIY instructions for each of these steps in the sequence. Follow along.