10 Things To Impact Your Company Revenue (Part 2) | President Accretive Solutions Kerry Barrett

And is really a concept, you know, again, try to really make it relevant for you guys, but this is a concept I talk about when we are going out and trying to meet with our customers. All too often, especially our salespeople have a tendency to sort of ask a couple questions and then if the customer says, well, you know, this is my issue or problem, we have a tendency to pounce and say, great, you know, we do that, or we address that, or We solve that problem for companies. My belief is if you dig in and actually go 2 or 3 steps further, you could actually build your potential opportunity to be much bigger. So I'll just relate it back to what we do. I mean, consulting services, it's all intangibles. So in a lot of ways, a lot of people say that's actually one of the hardest things to sell, because you're just talking, you know, it feels like vaporware, but we— We do. We actually measurably move the dial for our clients every day on the top line and the bottom line. But if a client says, you know, I'm having this particular pain point, and we say, wow, that's really challenging, or I'm, you know, we're buying this company, wow, that's great, we do acquisition stuff, instead of saying, tell me more, how long has this been going on, how have you gone about, you know, what do you attribute this to, how have you tried to address this, how did that work for you, you know, taking two Asking 2, 3, 4, asking the follow-on questions, to me, leads to, first of all, building better credibility. At the end of the day, you know, we're all advisors. My firm belief about where business is headed is that we're in the business, we're all in the business of solving problems and we're all advisors. So the more that you can become an advisor to your client instead of a vendor, instead of, hey, I have a product that's gonna address your problem, it's like, I'm an advisor and I can actually be a business partner with you for life, you know, I believe it actually leads to bigger, more interesting, more dynamic relationships, and I absolutely believe it leads to greater revenue. Just to me, it just translates that way. So dig in is really a concept, again, I would just, you know, try to think about it in your own lives about how that would apply to your own lives, and as you're meeting with prospects and so on, investors, being naturally inquisitive, having natural curiosity, intellectual curiosity, which clearly all of you have because you're here, the more that you can use that as an asset, use that as something that, you know, when you're sitting across from someone, every person, everyone else is gonna come in and tell you how neat their product is. So if you can be the first one to say, well, clearly we think we have a product that's really valuable, but before I do that, I wanna hear more about what's going on with you. I do think it's really, really powerful. Oh, thanks. Is this the advance? All right. Get to know your client, yes. So again, this is a couple different concepts here. And I think this can be relevant for you as well. All too often, especially when you're pressed for time or trying to get your product to market or trying to sell more units or trying to just, you know, push through. There's a tendency to take any client, even a bad one, and we do it a lot in our business, or we've had a— we have a habit of doing that from time to time, especially if you're in a sales role and you're being measured by your revenue and you feel like, I just got to get revenue in the door and I don't care how it happens. It's really hard to say no to your clients, but coming back to that issue of time management, I'm a firm believer of The sooner you can get to no, that's N-O, the better. And all too often I see, you know, I'm sitting across from customers maybe with, you know, one of my colleagues and the customer says, hey, do you guys do XYZ? And it's clearly outside of our bailiwick, but we're afraid to say no. So there's a tendency to say, well, let me check on that. Or, you know, I don't know exactly, but, you know, maybe, or maybe it would be a stretch, or maybe I know somebody, you know. It's like you're just, you know, first of all, you're not building credibility with your client, and second of all, you're now wasting your own time on something that you probably can't fulfill anyway. And so I'm a big believer of just stating upfront, you know, that, hey, you know, that sounds like a really interesting issue. It's not something we do, but, you know, happy to, you know, happy to make, you know, think about it or make a call or put, you know, put an email out to see if that's something that one of our business partners could address. But, you know, that's not something we do. And believe it or not, how does that lead to revenue? Well, it leads to more time. It leads to more white space on your calendar. It leads to, you know, not spinning your cycles like we do, you know, RFPs and so on. I mean, those things will take, you know, 20 hours out of your time. So just— it's just a constant reminder to know your product really well. Know what you can do and what you can't do and your capabilities. And get to the NO sooner. Okay, expand your ecosystem. I think this one's really key for all of you, and I'm sure you're already doing that today. In our business, and we just, I really believe in today's business world, business happens in large part through partnerships, through alliances. I'm really careful about talking about expanding ecosystems, because I also think that you can spend a lot of time developing alliances and partnerships that don't bear fruit, and— or where you're, you know, giving and giving and giving, and, you know, and hey, this is all about expanding the pie and being a great business partner out there, but at the same time, ecosystem is really about— I just think about it like concentric circles. Who's your inner nucleus? You know, like I always say in my business, my inner nucleus is our clients and our employees. Like my employees in our firm are my clients, and I consider them just most critical. And our clients are critical as well. If you go out, you know, a ring, we have— we do technology implementations. We have tons of technology partners, NetSuite and Workday and all these things, and and then and so they're part of our ecosystem. And then we also have other firms we work with, and so on. As you look at your sort of those concentric circles, think about who are the people that directly influence me today, and am I spending most my time with them? And I think that's key. But there might be other influencers out in the marketplace that you ought to get to know, and you might give some thought to well who are those folks going to be or who are they? And how do I get to them, and what's the shortest path to do that? Recognizing that it may not ever materialize in anything, and it's really hard to measure that. What's the net worth of a relationship with, you know, a business partner? But I really believe in today's workforce, you know, what we find is more and more mobile workforce, people getting things done in different ways, people getting things done through partnerships. You have incubators, people working alongside each other. I mean, there's just, to me, a lot more of a business relationship sort of method to getting work done. So just think about that. Who are those people, relationships, partners that you ought to get to know as you build your business? And then think about what's the pathway to get there. If you ever want to talk about, I mean, my, you know, again, when you're in the business I'm in, I mean, all we do all day every day is meet with people. Because in a consulting business, that's what you do. I spent years at Deloitte Touche. I mean, we sold giant pursuits where you're meeting with 20 business decisions, decision makers. And in the firm today I'm at, you meet with multiple decision makers. But I mean, we meet people all day, every day. And if you ever wanna figure out, well, can you just help me with that process of getting to know people? How do you do that? Happy to talk about it. There's an art form to that as well. Questions on that ecosystem? Pretty straightforward. Prepare, inform, advise. So how am I doing on time? I know we— We have 20 minutes. 20 minutes, okay. So I'll talk for maybe another 10 minutes tops, and then we can, if there's any other questions, we can take them. Prepare, inform, advise. Again, going back a little bit to what I talked about earlier, just when you're out meeting with your clients, prepare. And I talked about being an advisor to your clients. Instead of showing up and just, you know, ready to talk about your features and benefits, I always call that show up and throw up, you know, be prepared to inform your clients. You know, you can be that person who says, you know, I've been studying the marketplace and here's what we see happening. These are the trends that we're seeing happening in the workplace, you know, in the industry that you are in or the industry that you serve. Here's what we're seeing happening, and those kind of insights are becoming more and more valuable today to companies. Now, if you're a CEO and you expect people coming to you, I mean, I would say, wouldn't that be interesting to you if you were sitting there, you know, and people were coming to meet with you, try to sell you products? You might say, well, you know, what's going on out there? You may not— one thing that you can bring to the table that they may not be able to do is the benefit of being out there in the marketplace. knowing what's going on. A lot of the people, so we primarily sell to CFOs, and so our business is primarily sold to CFOs who don't get out much, and so one of the best things that we can do is bring news to them. You know, we bring insights to them. Here's what we're seeing going on in the financial markets. Here's what we're seeing happening among our other clients. Here are the trends that we're seeing. Is this working? Is this happening with you? Gone are the days that we meet with people and say, what keeps you up at night? In fact, I'm gonna be giving a talk soon, and the topic is, what keeps you up at night, and 10 other questions that CFOs don't wanna hear. They don't wanna hear that anymore. They expect, everybody expects you to show up knowing something about their business, their industry, and so on. So I would say whether you're in a selling capacity, whether you're out there meeting with people, or whether people are coming to you, you're looking for insights. You know, what can you tell me that I don't already know? What can you tell me that I wouldn't glean just by looking at your website? So be prepared to inform and advise your clients. This has no relevance to you, so I'm gonna skip over it, 'cause this is about— this is when— Drop Anchor has to do with when you're selling into large global enterprise-wide clients and how do you go about building anchor accounts. So that's a term that's probably not going to cross your path anytime in the— In the next, you know, month at least. So we'll breeze over that one. Analyze and repeat. So with all of what I've shared, one of the things that again my firm can do more so, and I think this is really key, there's so much intelligence available today based on your customer base. So as you're taking your products to market and you're getting new customers, Analyze the data around those customers. What are your most profitable customers? Which customers seem to buy the fastest, has the fastest sales cycle? Which was the longest-tenured customer? Which is the customer that signed up more units, you know, most quickly? I mean, all that data is available now for most companies, and we have that data, and we don't take advantage of it enough. So we're trying to get better at practicing sort of that business intel— taking that business intelligence, the BI kind of data, and saying, hey, how do we figure out our shortest pathway to sales? And who are those customers that, by the way, tend to buy multiple services from us, where we have more than one service line in this customer? Those are the customers that we want to spend as much time with. By the way, what are those customers that are slow to pay and that we, you know, it kills us to get, you know, our first deal with? What do those customers kind of look like? You know, is there a certain— industry that's just not as, you know, doesn't work as well for us, and maybe we should spend a little bit less time there. You know, just again, this whole concept about being really smart about your time, being selfish about your time, being smart about your clients. Who are your clients that best serve you? The ones that best serve you are the ones that pay you promptly, don't give you a hard time, you know, sign up more business, and we have a lot of those, and we're really lucky, but we also have customers that are kind of a pain. And so, you know, get to know who those customers are, analyze, and then repeat the whole process. So the 1 through 9 that I've gone through, to me, that's just part of the process of, you know, what you can do as business owners. You know, I consider myself, you know, a business owner. I have not started a business from scratch, but when you run a business, you deal with a lot of the same problems. and a lot of the same challenges, and a lot of the same opportunities. I mean, it's really an exciting time, and it couldn't be a more exciting time in the marketplace as well. It's just been a joy. Our startup business is and has been our fastest growing business segment in our firm. We sign close to 2 clients a week in our startup business. So, you know, on average we're signing— That's great. It's about 1.5 clients per week in that business. It goes to show you there's just so much going on out there in the marketplace, and companies doing really neat things. We have fun startups. We just signed Shuttle. You guys probably know Shuttle. That's the space I'm in. I'm a mom. Shuttle's like an Uber for shuttling your kids around from soccer to— Just some really, really cool companies that are doing really neat things. I'd love to hear more about the things that you guys are doing or what space you're in. But this is sort of what I'd call kind of core advice, I guess, for what may be viewed as more enterprise-wide or enterprise-sized companies. But I really think that if you embrace some of these concepts and apply some of them in what you're doing, or just challenge yourself, you know, shake it up a bit. I think you're going to come out maybe with some new insights from that as well. So.