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Episode #247
Bob Wiesner

Business Development For Consultants Masterclass

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Summary

What is the winning rate in your firm? Are your strategies delivering excellent outcomes that lead to generating revenue? Listen to your host Michael Zipursky as he talks with Bob Wiesner about identifying ROI and profitability for business development and success. Bob is the Managing Partner at The Artemis Partnership in the America South-Western hemisphere. He is the author of Winning is Better: The Journey to New Business Success. In this episode, he emphasizes that if you know what’s happening in your organization, you can address any problem and make better leadership decisions. He shares the most effective new business pursuit practices for sales and business development. He also discusses the approach and positioning when it comes to attracting new clients and keeping them as well.

I am joined by Bob Wiesner. Bob, it is great to have you here.

Thank you, Michael. I am delighted to be here.

Bob, for those who are not familiar with you and your work, you are the Managing Partner at The Artemis Partnership in the America, South Western hemisphere. Your firm helps organizations like Toyota, Deloitte, KPMG, Barclays, and a whole bunch of other very well-known brands successfully sell complex solutions in competitive categories. Your book, which I thoroughly enjoyed, is called Winning is Better, shares the strategies and tactics that have led to consistent success for many top performing companies.

I want to dig in and get right to the “meat” because there is so much to unpack that you shared in your book. You talk about when going after new clients, you called them pursuits. That is how you referenced prospecting and engaging with clients. I want to understand from all of your experience, what have you seen is the big difference or distinction between clients or consultants who have a winning mindset and their actions that come with that as well as their behaviors and the distinction between those who tend to struggle? What separates a winning mindset, winning actions, and winning behaviors from those who tend to not see the results that they would desire?

There are a number of things that separate the winners from those who come in second. I had an old boss who used to react to firms that were very proud of their track record, “We came in second. We are close.” He would say, “When you came in second, that made you first of the losers. It is maybe not so much to be proud of.” The difference among many explanations that we hear often from the decision-makers, themselves, is that the winning firms were more client-centric. They were more focused on the wisdom, the insights, what is relevant, and what matters to the client whereas, the firms that do not win often are much more focused on their own capabilities and strengths.

Consultants are classic examples of how you can represent these two different sides of the coin and then have two different results. I am sure you and your readers have been through this. When you go into a consulting business, the first things you sometimes think about is, “What do I want to consult in? What are my solutions? What do I want to be doing?” That is fine. You need to get there.

The winning firms start from the premise, “What does the client need to hear? What do they need? What wisdom can I bring them that would allow me to stand well against whatever competitors are?” I want to emphasize the fact that winning requires a client focus. It does not require a focus on your own capabilities, but your insights and wisdom that a client can say, “Those guys get it.”

I want to dive deeper into this topic as we continue our conversation. One of the other things that stood out to me in the book and something that we do with clients as well, so it resonated, is this idea that most consultants do not focus on the ROI and profitability of their clients and their projects. They view any project as a good project or any client as being the same as any other client. You discussed in the book your example of the power of going through this exercise. Can you talk a little about what you have seen in terms of organizations and firms who do not pay attention to the profitability and ROI of specific efforts, pursuits, or client engagements and how that is played out for them either good or bad?

This is something that can be seductive for consultants. It can lead them down unfortunate paths. As consultants, we have this desire to get our foot in the door. We are looking for that first project with the idea being, “If we can get the first project, maybe we have to cut our price. Maybe we have to do something that is not the most exciting or the sexiest part of our business. If we can get in there, we can grow the client.” That has not worked out for enough companies often enough to justify it as a viable strategy because of several reasons.

Winning firms were more client-centric. They were more focused on the wisdom, insights, and what matters to the client, whereas the firms that do not win often focus on their capabilities and strengths. Click To Tweet

First of all, when you go in at a low price, it is hard to raise your price at any point down the road. You wind up operating without enough profit to reinvest in your business, grow your business, and keep the lights on a very practical basis. Secondly, when you go in to take an opportunity that has been presented to you that is not a core part of the reason you are in business, sometimes you get pigeonholed into that as the firm that does that thing. In the book, I tell the true story of an architectural firm that was eager to get an assignment from a large developer that would allow them to do what architects love to do, which is to design a whole new building.

That particular developer did not need, at this particular time, a new building, but they needed bathrooms to be renovated in one of their current properties. They thought it was a foot in the door so they raised their hand and said, “We can do the bathrooms.” They got the assignment. They did a wonderful job on the bathrooms. In the mind of that developer, they became known as the bathroom company. Subsequent to that and whenever that developer had a new building that needed to be put up, that architectural firm did not have an advantage over other firms that the developer knew who had done major buildings in the past.

You have got to be very careful that your first exposure to a new client is strategically correct. You are doing the work that you want to do. You are making the money that you want to make. The relationship that you are going to have with that client is going to be one that you are going to feel excited about, comfortable with, and be able to grow.

Oftentimes landing that larger initial engagement can be challenging for consultants, especially if they do not have an existing relationship with that buyer. Let’s say that they have gotten in with a discovery offer or a lower price offer. They are not discounting. They are still doing work that they feel good about. It is still profitable for them, but it is not the overall full engagement.

What are some of the steps that you have seen that can work well for them to go from just getting their foot in the door to expanding? Going back to the bathroom architecture example that you shared, now that they do have their foot in the door, to expand and not continue being labeled as the bathroom architecture firm. If want to capture more business and provide more value for that existing client, how should they go about it?

That particular example was flawed from the beginning because they should not have gone in to take the bathroom job. They should have held out for something that would be more akin to a larger project that they wanted. The relevant part of your question though is that first piece. If you take a smaller job than you normally would take, how do you grow that into a bigger job? That is a great question.

The way you do that is by having measurable outcomes associated with that job. For example, I’m helping a client to develop a new business strategy. They do not need a completely new business strategy, but they have this certain part of their business that needs a little bit of help. Instead of paying full price for one of our strategic solutions, they only have a fraction of the budget. I might be okay taking that, but what I want to do are two things.

First, I want to make sure that the work we are going to do is representative of the work that we are capable of doing. In other words, it is not bathrooms, but it is a new business strategy. Secondly, I want to have measurable outcomes. This is something that is hard for a lot of consultants to get. Because I have measurables, something quantified, I have something to talk about to those decision-makers in that company. Besides the fact that they like the work, I can point to outcomes. I can point to results that met goals or exceeded goals and led to some significant impact for that company. It is the metrics that make the difference.

To clarify, the metrics would be agreed upon by both you, as the consultant and strategist, as well as the client. It is not just saying, “Here is what we do with our clients,” and checking that off. You are saying, “What would be meaningful for you? What does success look like in these different areas?” Once you get clear on that, you would build that out or spotlight that as a specific outcome, metric, or goal that you would be working towards in that initial project. Is that correct?

CSP 247 | Business Development

 

That is very well said. You and the client should agree on outcomes that are meaningful and that are obtainable then you are off and running.

Let’s go back for a moment to the ROI profitability question or topic that we began this conversation around. Many consultants have no idea how to go about measuring that. They do not even think about it in many cases. All clients are equal. All projects are equal. We have seen when we have taken clients through this process that it is eye-opening for them to see that an area of their business that they did not think was that critical is their highest profit area in the business. What have you found is the best way to go about identifying which clients and projects you should be focusing on from a profitability perspective? How do you run that exercise to identify ROI and profitability?

We identify it in two different ways. First, if you have enough experience with different kinds of projects and clients, then you can qualify at the beginning whether you think that this is going to be worth your time. It reaches a point where you have enough experience to know things that affect ROI. It is things like access to decision-makers. “Is this going to be a long slog for me to get approval, or am I going to be able to quickly get to people who can make a decision?” You will know the sensitivity to price. “Do they have the budget to pay for what I am going to require them to pay for the work that I am going to be doing?”

You might have some inkling about reputation. “Do they beat up on their consultants and make them go through dozens of iterations of work? Are they easy to work with? Are they respectful of the consultant’s expertise?” You might also have a sense of how they treat their other vendors or providers. “Do they extend further opportunities to them?” You can find that out even by talking to other people they have relationships with. At the very beginning of the process, you should go through a qualifying checklist to anticipate whether this may be worth your time, money, and effort to pursue.

In your experience, would you say that one of the maybe dangers or pitfalls that not a lot of people pay attention to is that they start their marketing and client acquisition prospecting by casting too wide of a net? They are trying to go after too many people and by doing so, they are not able to do the homework and the customization that would be required in order for the buyer on the other side to feel that you get them.

How do you view that in terms of being able to market to a lot of people? It seems like what you are talking about here would require a fair bit of homework and looking around and being considerate and thoughtful about a buyer-specific situation. That becomes very challenging to do. What if you are trying to automate your prospecting or cast a wide net to go after a lot of people, which is what many consultants tend to begin with?

This is difficult for consultants to wrestle with. You can cast a very wide net initially for prospects, but your net has to have a fine filter attached to it. Only a few prospects will get through to the next stage. You have to be willing to prioritize a small number so that you have a greater chance of winning a high percentage of that small number. The interesting thing you will hear from the prospects themselves is about the process of selecting providers and consultants. They can tell who cared and put the time and energy into it. They can tell who did it on an assembly line basis.

Depending on what you are selling, it might not matter. If close relationships and bringing added value are important to you, then you want to be perceived as somebody who cared, who selected that client as somebody who believed you could offer high value. Your prospects can perceive that. I cannot overstate the importance of that. You are much better off with a smaller number of prospects that you can apply more effort or intensity.

Hopefully, it is a great reminder for many people. This is an area that we have been focusing on with many clients because there has continued to be a shift. If you go back several years ago, people were doing automation. You can still leverage automation, but it just seemed easier. Every year that goes by, there is just more noise in the marketplace. At the end of the day, building a long-lasting relationship with somebody takes time. You cannot send out this exact same message to 100 different people and have that connection. You might get a bite and some people are still successful with that.

Make sure that the work you do represents the work you are capable of doing. You should have measurable outcomes. Click To Tweet

Personalizing is an approach that we tend to recommend as well. I wanted to ask you, Bob. This is a connected topic. What do you see as the big difference between your approach and positioning when it comes to attracting new clients and keeping clients? You talk about there is a difference in how you position the firm or how you approach a new prospective client versus trying to keep an existing client and expand that lifetime value.

What is interesting about maintaining and growing current clients is that too many firms take it for granted. “If I have a project and I do a good job, the phone will ring and they will give me another project.” It does not work out that way nearly as often as consultancy would like that to be the case. It could be for any number of reasons, but none of the least of which is that there is somebody out there who did not do that project but wanted that client. They are doing the things that we recommend that they should do to attract that client. Meanwhile, you are sitting back, you finished a project, it went well, you got paid on time with some nice comments associated with it, and you are wondering, “Why aren’t they asking me for another one?”

You need to treat your current clients with the idea that it is still a competition to get the next job. You need to leverage your advantage as an incumbent. You know them better. You have deeper insights into what matters to them. You have results, which is what we talked about earlier. You have got measurable outcomes that you can put at the forefront of your next round of communication within that client organization. That is how you will grow your business. It’s by continuing to show that you care and love them and by continuing to put yourself ahead of your competition.

Can you offer me a tactical approach to that? Let’s take the example that you want a piece of business. You have done great work. The client is happy, and they have told you that they are happy. You may or may not know about a new project or a new initiative that is coming down the line. If that is you, Bob, what would you be counseling your clients to do to develop that existing relationship to win more business? If you could offer maybe 2 or 3 very tactical steps that people should be taking.

First of all, I would say care about their business way more than just the project that you worked on.

What does that look like? Give me an example of that.

Let’s take an example of an executive recruitment firm. Working with a client who had an opening, they hired you, gave you $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, whatever executive recruiters get nowadays, to go find them a new VP of something. You fill the job. They love the candidate. You are waiting for the next job opening to occur, and hopefully, they will call you when they need another position filled. Is that the right strategy to just sit and wait? Some might argue, “We will invite them out for lunch one day. We will stay in touch. We know when their kids are graduating college. We will give them a call.” That is fine, too. I am not opposed to that.

What I would rather see you do though, is take an interest in their business beyond filling that one role. That is vital. Take an interest in what their business looks like around this person whose job you just filled. What are some of the issues that they are facing? What are some of the pressures that this new hire is going to face in trying to grow their part of the business? What insights can you share from your other recruiting projects without giving away confidential information that can make this candidate and this company smarter?

In other words, stay in touch with them, but not on a personal basis. Stay in touch with them to show your interest in their business success. That information is available to you. You can find out how they are doing. Your candidate in this case would probably feed inside information. On a regular basis, make sure that they know that you care about their business. They are more likely to engage with you the next time they need a position filled.

CSP 247 | Business Development

 

What does a regular basis mean to you? Oftentimes, people worry about being in touch too often, bothering, or spamming people. They are concerned. They do not want to overstep. They do not want to be a nuisance. What have you found is an appropriate frequency to maintain that contact with an existing client? You are busy doing the work for them. Maybe that project is coming to an end. Regardless, what is that frequency that people should be thinking about that as appropriate?

I do not think there is anything wrong with staying in touch with a client twice a month, at least, through marketing content or email. Providing that all of that content is giving them value, insights, and perspective. It is not you sending out your case studies. It is not you sending out your capabilities. That is spamming them. Twice a month would even be too much of that. As long as you are giving them items of value, I would say a cadence that is about twice a month, even every two weeks with some client-centric marketing content, follow that up with an occasional call or an email with the invitation to talk about issues that are currently relevant or should be relevant to that client.

You do that once a month. You can do that in conjunction with one of those monthly touch points. Hope to get to talk to them at least once a quarter, if not, a little bit more often. As you have these conversations with them, you should be uncovering opportunities for you to have more conversations with them that can eventually lead to a project that you can take on.

Your firm, Artemis, works with a broad group of clients. We have talked about whether it is automotive manufacturers, advertising agencies, accounting, or professional services firms. It is a whole host of different types of industries and client bases. Was that always the case when you got involved with the company and when they first got started? Were they that broad or were they focused on one specific type of industry or client to begin with?

I do not think I ever thought of it quite that way, but that is a great question. My own background was in advertising. The first clients that I had when I went onto the side of the desk were agencies. Naturally, that was where we started. As we evolved our relationships with agencies and analyzed the work that we were doing, we began to see its applicability to other verticals. For example, we saw that accounting firms have to pitch or pursue business similarly to the way ad agencies do. The nature of the solution is quite a bit different, but the way they win business is much the same.

We saw the same thing may be true for investment banks and management consultants. It became natural for us to evolve our business beyond where my part of it started, which was the agency world. What made our approach transferable across very diverse verticals was not necessarily because we were experts in accounting or in management consulting, but because we developed an expertise in how buyers make decisions.

We quickly realized that buyers make decisions in similar ways in highly competitive reviews of their options. It does not matter whether they are reviewing an accounting firm or an engineering firm. They are still processing information similarly. With that as the basis, the applicability of our solutions across different verticals became quite clear.

You read my mind to a degree. It was part of the question I was going to ask you. In your case, you began with advertising agencies rolling this out. Why did you decide to start to apply this to other verticals? One option would be just to go deeper into advertising agencies and just be known as the business development specialists that help you to win large bids or RFPs. In the ad agency world, why not just dominate that as opposed to saying, “Let’s start to expand and do investment banks or do other management consulting firms?”

I am wondering about the thought process and the discussion that went on with you and your team. How did you make that decision? I would imagine that it does require a bit of a shift and some additional time and resources when you are applying to think about what matters to investment banks or even to some of your messaging to them or updating some documents or updating content on the website. Why not do more of what was already working? Why did you decide to expand the verticals from a strategic decision?

You and the client should agree on meaningful and attainable outcomes before you go off and running. Click To Tweet

I do not know that it was a strongly rational decision on our part. To be very honest, we knew ad agencies so well that we reached a point where we were not stimulated as much by the next agency work. It’s not that we did not like it or enjoy it. We very much did, but we wanted something different. We wanted to see what other professions were like and how applicable it is to work with their professions. I have sat down with defense contractors and learned about radar systems in warships. I have sat down with IT companies and learned about different software platforms.

I have sat down with investment banks and learned about M&A. That, to me and to the people who were working with me at the time and even now, is energizing and exciting. I understand why some firms love to focus on a particular area and the value that they can bring. On quite a personal level, we were just energized to explore other areas and learn more about different types of solutions.

You have had conversations with many different types of companies, defense contractors, ad agencies, and so on. One area that a lot of people struggle with is how do you get that first meeting with a potential buyer if you do not have a relationship? If you can get an introduction or a referral, that is the best way to go if you do not have that relationship already. Let’s just play with the idea for a moment that you want to meet somebody. You have five true ideal, dream clients that you would love to engage with and build a relationship with, but you do not know them.

You look at your LinkedIn profile. You use Sales Navigator. You look at all the different potential connections and there is nobody that is directly connected to those people. What is the approach that you would recommend in a situation like that to start to build a relationship to get that first meeting when these people, the buyers, are typically very busy? They are inundated with people that want their time, to pick their brains or buy them lunch. What is the approach you have found works best?

There is an approach that works best, but I will caution you and your audience that it does take time, patience, and perseverance. LinkedIn is a terrific tool. You mentioned Sales Navigator, which is a great feature within LinkedIn. What we do and what we advise our clients to do is identify decision-makers or influencers at those five companies that you want to work with. Send them invitations and attempt to connect with them.

As soon as they connect, begin pumping out insights and wisdom, not capabilities and case studies. On a regular basis, they should be starting to see the things of great interest and relevancy to them coming under your brand name. Even under your individual name is fine if you want to get a lot of value out of LinkedIn. Continue to do that. We usually suggest to our clients that they need to hit their prospects about 6 or 7 times before they should even try to get a meeting with them.

With that level of frequency, you might have some sense that they have seen your wisdom and insights. They might have a sense of who you are, then send them a note. You can use LinkedIn and their message feature, asking them for a 30-minute conversation to talk about a recent insight that you sent out and how it might be applicable to their company. Do not use that contact point to say, “I would love 30 minutes to tell you about what we do.”

They will probably not respond initially. You may have to send that same message out a week later. After 2 or 3 attempts, they might not respond, but continue to pump out your wisdom to them. After 2 to 4 months, there is a chance that you will start to get some nibbles and somebody saying, “I would love to hear more about this particular thing that you sent me. Why don’t we schedule some time?”

Bob, you opened this point by saying that you would caution people that you are going to need to have patience. That approach can take some time. Let’s flip to the other side of the coin. What is the preferred approach? Is it leveraging where you already have relationships in terms of getting referrals and introductions? Is there a preferred path for people to be able to see results faster?

CSP 247 | Business Development

 

We have experimented with a lot of different ways. We have even hired on behalf of Artemis. We have hired lead-generation firms to do cold calling for us. We were curious. We wanted to have firsthand experience with it because we get the question all the time, “Should we try lead generation?” The best way to do it is through referrals. Be very specific about who you want a referral to and how you want that positioning to be done.

There is a terrific book called No More Cold Calling written by a woman named Joanne Black. It talks all about referral selling. What Joanne encourages and we believe wholeheartedly is that if I find out through LinkedIn that you are connected with a firm that I want to talk to, I will go to you and say, “Can you introduce me to this individual at this particular firm? Here is the reason why. This is why they might want to talk to me.” I would give you some ammunition to do that. If you are, in fact, connected to that person, then you are now equipped to help make that introduction.

What too many firms do that does not work well is call up contact and say, “Who do you know that could help us?” That question is too broad and too vague. It rarely leads to anything that is going to be effective. They will go through LinkedIn. I will notice that there are 25 people you are connected with who work with companies that like to meet. I will say, “Pick and choose from the list of 25. Give me as many introductions as possible.” Once again, the strongest and quickest way to get a meeting and to get business is to ask your network for 1 or 2 introductions but to use a broader network. The more people you ask for 1 or 2, the more likely is that you are going to get meaningful meetings.

Bob, I have a few more questions before we wrap up. One is your thinking on the balance, how you spend your time, or think about delivering on client projects and engagements. You are in there with your clients. You are taking meetings. You are guiding them through your process, but also doing business development. As a boutique firm or a smaller firm, if you do not have hundreds or even 50 team members, how do you think about doing business development, generating new business revenue and profit, and at the same time, having the time to deliver for clients? What are you personally doing? How do you counsel or recommend clients if they are of a smaller size?

For smaller companies, it is hard, but it is essential that you have some plan. If you are in a position where you have 3 or 4 different people who are part of your firm, then you have to be able to say to all 3 or 4, “We need to spend 10% to 20% of our time over a 2 to 4-week period engaged in business development activities. We want to be billable. We want to be delivering great service and satisfaction to our clients with the other 80%. We have to be disciplined around spending 10% to 20% of our time on business development.”

If you can do that on a regular basis, then you can continue some business development momentum without sacrificing service to your current clients. What too many firms wind up doing is that they go all-in on their client projects, doing virtually no business development in the process. Months later, the project is over and they are staring at an empty calendar and no revenue coming in. This discipline of spending 10% to 20% of your time on business development is essential.

How you spend that 10% to 20% is extraordinarily important. I have got great advice from my own marketing director who said, “Every week, send out 35 to 40 LinkedIn messages. If you can do ten a day, which you can do at night, that is even better.” Have the discipline and the strength to stay awake long enough so that on days when you are heavily involved in client delivery, you can still get out those ten or so LinkedIn messages.

By the end of the week, you would have sent out 40 or 50. That is going to help. You will get some responses. You can schedule some conversations, even if you have to postpone them until you are out of client work. With that regular schedule and discipline, you have a better chance of keeping business development going.

We have seen many clients over the years who have become so successful that they stop marketing. Inevitably, what will happen is exactly as you said. It might be weeks or in many cases, months down the road, all of a sudden, a client project stops before they expected or winds down naturally as it should. They have not been doing any marketing, so their whole marketing engine is getting rusty. They have to use so much more energy and effort to get things back up and running again. We always recommend even putting your foot very lightly on the pedal. Keeping that pedal down and accelerating will have a compounding effect for the benefit of the business. I agree with you on that.

Buyers make decisions in very similar ways in highly competitive reviews of their options. It does not matter whether they are reviewing an accounting firm or whether they are reviewing an engineering firm. Click To Tweet

If you look at everything that you have been doing in your firm, is there anything that you have done that has been different or new that has had a big impact? It could be around your pricing, service offerings, or something you do in a proposal. It could be anything that will come to mind, “This has been a game-changer for us or something that has had a bigger impact than we expected.”

There are a few different things. One of the things about our company is that we are forever learning. We do not assume at any point in time that we have figured it out. We are always experimenting. One of the things that have helped us a great deal is we keep our pricing firm. We believe that we are at the right price point that brings the right amount of value to virtually any firm that wants to engage with us in whichever area of business development that needs addressing.

Is your pricing custom for each client and each project? Is it more productized where you take clients through and that is set regardless of how big the client is? What does your pricing look like?

It is the latter. You accurately used the word pursuit several times. Business development is a pursuit. There are different activities that take place along the way. We have segmented out those different occasions or milestones within business development. We have different solutions that we can offer at each of these different steps. Each solution has been mapped out to have specific parts to it.

Therefore, they have a specific price. If you are a 50-person firm or a 50,000-person firm, you are going to pay the same price for that same solution. It is not because we think that the 50-person firm is equally capable of paying the price that a 50,000-person firm is. It is because that solution has been architected to provide the same value to the small firm that it provides to the big firm.

Even if the revenue is significantly greater for the larger firm and they put it into action, would they not necessarily gain greater value? Each project for them, let’s say, for one client, might be a $1 million win. For the other client, it might be a $100 million win. What do you think about that component of value in relation to your pricing?

We do not like to link pricing to the value of the pursuit. First of all, a lot of firms do not know the value of the pursuit. Pricing is not set for them until after they win the piece of business. How do they know? How do we know? It is complicated. Furthermore, in terms of would a $100 million pursuit be more valuable than a $1 million pursuit? Certainly, it is. It may not be more profitable, however.

We like to connect the value that we are providing, not to the size of the revenue, but to the size of the profit. Depending on how you conduct your pursuit, you can make a pretty nice profit on a $150,000 pursuit or a $1 million pursuit. That profit could be as significant for you or more so than the profit that a big firm will make on a $10 million pursuit.

You are not connecting your pricing to the size of the deal that your client is going after because that could be different for different sizes of companies. It seems like you are very clear on, “This is what we provide as part of our program or process. We know what is involved and we know how much time it takes us.” Rather than looking at the deal size of your clients to figure out the value that it could create for them, you are using the more of the filter of, “In order for us to even work with a client, they need to meet certain criteria. If they meet certain criteria, we know that the value will be there if they go through our process.” Is that what you are thinking about or I am missing some piece there?

CSP 247 | Business Development

 

You are not missing anything there. That is pretty much what we are thinking about. Our ideal client is a firm that wants to win more opportunities at a higher profit level and at higher revenue per opportunity. We are not specifying what that revenue number is. If you are winning 30% of your opportunities, the average one is $150,000 in revenue and $20,000 in profit. Our solutions can take you from a 30% win to a 60% win. It can take you from $150,000 value per win to $200,000 value per win and from a $20,000 profit per win up to a $50,000 profit per win. It should not matter how big you are. That ought to be awfully appealing to you and the basis for which we can work together.

You are focusing on a certain size of a company. When I say size, you are not looking at the accounting firms that are generating $500,000 or $1 million a year. You have a baseline where you would begin to say, “This makes sense for us to even have a conversation or to pursue ourselves.”

There is no question about that. We are looking for firms. For the most part, these are firms that probably generated about $10 million in revenue and up. They probably pursue projects that are minimal to $150,000 per project. If they are below either of those two thresholds, they are going to have a hard time, not just on a financial basis, wrapping their minds around what we do, but even on a cultural basis, thinking about the approaches that we advocate.

Before wrapping up, I have a couple of final, quick questions. You have a lot going on. What are your best practices when it comes to habits? I am wondering, how do you maintain your focus, level of productivity, and performance? What are 1 or 2 things that you do on a regular basis that helped you to make an impact and create success?

I learned this the hard way by doing everything else wrong. I am an early riser, between 6:30 AM and 7:00 AM. It is not between 4:30 AM and 5:00 AM, which is what some people think of early. I am usually in the gym every morning. I block out my calendar so that I do not have my first business meeting until 10:00 AM. I may get to my desk by 8:30 AM or 9:00 AM, but I take the morning to clear out my emails and get myself all set up. From 10:00 AM until the end of the day, I am either doing client delivery, business development, or management of the company.

I have a to-do list that I put into Salesforce. That is my task list. I am pretty disciplined about getting those tasks done during that particular part of the day. I rarely work past 6:30 PM or 7:00 PM. Sometimes I have to, but I rarely do. That means that the next morning I can start out pretty fresh. I can clear my head during the evening. I can get things done and set myself up for the next day. To me, that works the best of all the different configurations I have tried.

What is one book that you have either read or listened to that, it can be fiction or nonfiction, you just feel you have enjoyed and would recommend to others?

I do read a handful of business books. I try not to overwhelm myself with a business book because my brain tends to capture too much of it. Suddenly, I cannot think of other stuff. A book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational is terrific. Also, around the same time, I read Dan Kahneman’s book called Thinking Fast and Slow. Because I read them around the same time, I sometimes have a hard time parsing out, “Was that Ariely or was that Kahneman who said that?”

Both of them have made a tremendous impact on me. I have recommended them heavily to people. It is because you can take their findings and extrapolate them into your business pursuits, “Why did that prospect not choose me? What do they want? Why is it that they make such snap judgments and I never seem to be able to change their mind about things?” Both of those books give you a lot of clues, and insights into how people think. You can easily transfer that into how business people think and how decisions are made. I strongly recommend both of them.

Bob, I want to thank you so much for coming on here. Before leaving, I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, your work, and your book. What is the website address that you would want to send people to so they can learn more about the book and what you are up to?

The company’s website is ArtemisPartnership.com. The best way to connect with me is through LinkedIn. It is Bob Wiesner. Go find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, and send me a message that you read the episode. I am sure Michael would love to find that out as well. The book is called Winning is Better: The Journey to New Business Success. It is available exclusively on Amazon in paperback and in Kindle edition. Go check that out as well.

Bob, thanks so much for coming on.

Michael, thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.

 

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