Meeting People – How a service business finds new clients

Posted on 30 Aug at 11:37

How do we find new clients when the service is hard to understand?

This month we’re out and about – exhibitions, client site visits, and I will be speaking at a conference – but standing behind a stall modelling our latest products isn’t the way new clients find us – for one, it’s quite hard to show off a piece of software that mostly works behind the scenes! However, there’s a good reason for all this – much more than just getting the Get John name out there.

This article could help you understand how to get more value from your technology supplier, or if you are a supplier, help you find the right clients and deliver more value to them.

Meeting People where they’re at

A business can have technical issues without even knowing – if my car had a little clanking noise going on, but otherwise kept going, I probably wouldn’t rush to get it looked at, but it could become a serious and expensive issue later. In business, we see staff just working around little irritations, that could become more serious later. If the management team don’t know about these things, they’ll never get fixed until they’re visibly on fire and can’t be hidden anymore.

So how does that affect the way we speak to people? We get curious – learning about their business the way you’d learn about a new love interest on a date. Our skill and experience helps guide that questioning – for example, we know that smooth connections between a website and a sales system can massively reduce the amount of admin that the sales team does, so when someone says that every order needs to be looked at by a human, that’s a red flag – we’ll ask why, and whether that’s good use of the sales team’s time.

Building relationships where open conversations can be had helps the client learn about what’s possible with good technology, and where their opportunities are. In turn, we can spot the opportunities where we can help, or where another technical partner would be a better fit.

Meeting People with an open mind

When people first start selling, they’re often focused on trying to only speak to potential clients, and only focus on closing a deal. Unless you’re selling a clearly defined, tangible product, that approach misses out on a lot of the value in a good partnership. Comparing it to a romantic relationship, it’s like a transactional situation (I’ll wash up if you cook) versus a far-sighted partnership (I can see you’re having a tough week, let’s order takeaway tonight).

Open Minded chat could lead to so many opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be seen – introductions to the right partners, ideas for new improvements, or just building up trust that can benefit both parties later.

Meeting People in the right context

I’m busy… it’s fashionable to be busy, and although that’s thankfully changing, we still have phrases to reinforce that – “better than the opposite problem”, “too busy, too tired, same old, same old”. So expecting to have one of these interesting and productive conversations during someone’s working day is difficult unless they seek you out for help with a specific problem.

Instead, we aim to show up for people by “being present” – this could look like having time at an exhibition when they’re away from their desk, and are in the right mindset for learning and finding out things. It could be sitting in a client’s office, available to chat to and seeing what bugs the team during a normal working day. It could be being at an event for developers, sharing pizza and chatting about their experience of work – sharing stories.

Meeting People with trust

One of the talks I do for small groups is about trust – building up trust with people through repeated positive actions over a long period of time. In romance, you don’t expect someone to immediately trust you, even (or especially not) if you tell them to trust you! So why would it be different in business?

It takes time to build trust, and that’s why strong supplier-client relationships don’t form overnight. Since trust is so easy to destroy, it has a very high value, which means that relationship won’t be lost over price, market pressures, and even hard times – like in any relationship, those things can be talked through and walked through together.

Meeting People – and actually creating new clients

All this is so much lovely fluffy talk – how does a relationship actually get moving and deliver value?

At some point, when some problems or opportunities have been identified, they need to be explored. We call this “discovery” – the process of finding out what the problem really is, and what should be done to solve it. To understand this more, the British Design Council have a model called the “double diamond”[1]

Many technology suppliers are so keen to get a sale, they will do this discovery process without charging a client – but in doing that, everyone has an interest in taking shortcuts, not going deep enough, and so both the client and supplier are missing out on value and creating future problems. The reason is simple – the deeper you go in discovering the issue, and designing a good solution, the more certainty you create. So it’s a small investment in order to create more certainty later.

Without a discovery process, neither the client or supplier will fully understand the problem, and we’ve seen (and experienced) cases where lack of understanding and depth of knowledge caused missed deadlines, mismanaged expectations and soured that relationship.

Meeting People who become happy clients

We’re always learning here at GetJohn. So much so, that we’re always looking for ways to improve the service – and recently, we’ve been very focused on that discovery process. Since it’s an investment for the client (to give you an idea, it could range from £500 to £15,000) and is often 10-20% of the eventual project price, we are currently working on ways to use our past skill and experience to make the process quicker and deeper at the same time. A small bit of added value at that stage could deliver 10x that value by making the project run more smoothly and deliver more profit, happier end users, and more.
Meeting People like the GetJohn team!

Would you like a conversation like this? Talk to us in September 2024 at: