How We Sign The World’s Top Firms As Clients
Every message you send out should increase the number of people who respect you, not decrease it. If you send out spammy messages, you will lost respect of people.
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Don’t Send Messages Like This
It Does Far More Harm Than Good
Like you, I get sent several dozen direct sales messages on LinkedIn and via email each week.
Most look like this:
Some of the approaches are so similar that I suspect there’s a course or book which recommends almost the exact template above.
The steps are typically a combination of:
Build a list of prospects by keyword research.
Send an outreach message asking people if they can take on more clients.
If you get a response, send through more information and follow up etc…
The problem with this approach is it just doesn’t work. The efforts to optimise this process end up simply spamming people with messages they don’t want.
Why Sending Messages To Strangers Doesn’t Work
It’s best to imagine this behaviour in the world world
What would you do if someone turned up at your door and offered to improve your home’s energy efficiency by 50% for just $200?
If you’re like most of us, you would look a bit concerned and say ‘No, thank you’.
It’s not because you don’t want a more energy-efficient home. Of course, you do! It’s because you have no idea who this person is. They could be legit, they could be a con artist. Either way, you have no reason to trust them. So why take the risk?
The same is true for cold calling, unsolicited emails, and any direct messages from strangers. We don’t trust random strangers trying to sell things to us.
You can’t sell to people who don’t know and trust you. Trying to win big client projects by sending unsolicited messages is like walking into their headquarters without an appointment and making a pitch to whoever happens to be in the lobby. That you think this is an appropriate way to win their business is the very reason why they would rule you out of contention.
Kill Your Automated Marketing Efforts
Many people have bought into the dream of ‘marketing automation’.
This is the idea you can set up a largely automated system for finding prospects and converting them into interested leads.
And if you work for a major firm selling services at the three to four-figure level that might possibly work.
But it’s a dangerous trap if you want to build an independent consultancy practice. Marketing automation annoys the very people you most want to work with. It undermines your image, reeks of desperation, and costs you time and resources which could be better invested elsewhere.
This approach probably embraces the law of large numbers. If you send out enough messages surely, eventually, you will get a positive response. And that might actually be true.
The problem is getting one positive response may require irritating thousands of others. It’s marketing pollution.
Automated lead generation is perhaps the very worst way to build a consultancy practice. It annoys the very people you want to have a positive relationship with in the future.
Don’t Build An Audience, Build Trust
Learn The Simple Golden Rule To Signing The World’s Top Firms As Clients
This post from
is probably the best description of how we attract client today:This is how the No-Sell Sell works at McKinsey and for practically every other great senior partner:
First, you identify senior decision-makers you genuinely like and want to help. If you like the person, you'll come off as a missionary instead of a mercenary.
Second, you listen and be curious about their biggest business problems. Don’t bring up a proposal or anything commercial.
Third, you become radically generous and add a ton of value through casual conversations, helpful articles/data, and introductions to experts.
Fourth, you proactively frame huge upside opportunities and clever ideas for solutions for them.
Lastly, you wait…until they eventually say, “Please help me unlock this opportunity. What will it cost?” You then charge them a fraction of the upside.
Successful senior partners have 8+ of these conversations going on at any time.
I say this as someone who has signed Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Oracle, SAP, Sephora, HP, Atlassian, Intel, and many more as clients.
The golden rule to attracting clients is to build trust. The more people who trust you have unique expertise which can help them, the more requests for support you will receive.
Every single thing you do to promote your business should be to increase the level of trust and respect you have from the people you want to work with.
Sending out direct messages looking for work or pretending you have ‘a rare open consultancy slot to fill’ doesn’t do that.
The only thing that does that is:
Offering unique value people can’t get from anywhere else.
Showing up consistently over time and providing value.
Proving you can help prospective clients tackle the challenges they face.
Every single activity you take to promote your business should be designed to achieve the above.
Drip. Drip. Drip. It all adds up.
You can’t build trust in a single message. Trust is the result of your consistent actions over a long period of time.
This is why shortcuts rarely work.
It’s never about the size of your following as much as it is about the percentage of that following who trusts you. Plenty of influencers, for example, have a big audience by putting on an entertaining show. But they struggle to earn money much from their audience because they don’t have trust. You can attract a lot of attention by being entertaining and saying controversial stuff - but that won’t result in clients.
How We Signed Microsoft As A Client
A Typical Example Of Our Process For Attracting Clients
Between 2021 and 2022 we signed Microsoft, Meta, Google, SAP, Atlassian, Sephora, and many other industry giants as clients. And this wasn’t a particularly special year for us.
We didn’t make a single unsolicited sales call or pitch, nor did we cater our approach at any one time to an individual prospect. Every single one of these clients was a direct, personal, inbound request for our support.
And it wasn’t luck either, it was simply the culmination of a strategic approach we had been pursuing for over a decade. Let’s use Microsoft as an example.
I launched my mailing list in 2011 and have been publishing advisory content ever since. By 2021, over 70 Microsoft employees were subscribed to it. At no point did we ever pitch any of them individually on our services. But we interacted with many of them over the years - responding to questions and sharing our thoughts etc…
In 2019, we published a detailed breakdown of the Microsoft community. This led to some early relationship-building. A few months later, we contacted a few people on the mailing list to ask them some questions about their community for a research project.
The call went well and we stayed in touch. Occasionally they asked for my advice on a question they had and occasionally I asked for their experiences. In 2022, they attended a webinar I was hosting. Shortly thereafter they reached out about a community strategy project they thought I could help with related to the webinar.
After we finished working together, I helped them get a speaking slot at the industry’s top conference. At the conference, they thanked and promoted our work on stage in front of the entire industry. (It honestly doesn’t get better than Microsoft promoting you to your peers).
We’ve continued to work with them until the present day on various projects.
Begin With Awareness, Then Have Direct Interactions Where You Add Value Without Trying To Sell
This is probably the key behind it all.
You need to begin by having some platform where you build an audience. Then, over time, you begin building relationships with members of the audience without trying to sell to them.
You simply show up consistently and add value. It takes time and sometimes it doesn’t work out. I’ve got plenty of stories of organisations where I’ve given as much support as possible and nothing has materialised from it…
…yet.
And it’s the ‘yet’ that’s a challenge. All these efforts seem like a total waste of time until they succeed. Then it all seems like part of a genius strategy. So you have to trust the process.
Sure, not every person you’re helping and adding value to will become a client. But, eventually, if you add enough unique value to enough people, they will seek you out when they have problems they need to solve.
Great post! 🔥