• You may misunderstand the political dynamics in the client management team and misread how the buying decision will be made...

(…) jak masz dziś wykitować, to dziś wykitujesz, i nie pomoże ci żadna ochrona.

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Perhaps you’re just being manipulated by one member of the client’s management to get at a rival and they’ve actually no intention of ever buying anything from you.
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And, of course, there are many more.
To compensate for their vulnerability as they’re trying to sell, we teach our selling consultants certain tactics, which can help them manoeuvre clients to the glorious and necessary ‘yes’ in spite of the numerous obstacles in the way. While running Executive Selling courses for up-and-coming project managers at one major worldwide management consultancy, I listed over thirty selling techniques and tricks that we advised our people to use to persuade clients to buy large projects from us. Here I’d like to shed light on just a few of these tricks of the trade.
I’ll limit myself to five of the key ones here:
1. Presentations become working sessions
2. Using client Joint Teams to sell for you
3. The joys of Conspiratorial Selling
4. Turning your weaknesses into strengths
5. Managing the decision network

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1. PRESENTATIONS BECOME WORKIN G SESSIONS
When you sell a First Phase or Study or Analysis, you agree with the client that you will give them a regular series of updates on your work. Often this can be every week. You make out that you are giving these updates for the client’s sake, but in fact they are a critical part of your sales process. Nothing could be more dangerous than doing five weeks of work, then going to the client’s management with the results and finding out that they don’t agree with you. By touching the client and their management each week, you get the chance to continuously feel your way forward and course correct if necessary so that you produce a result that you know they will buy. Plus, by cosying up to them each week you get to understand their personalities, the politics and tensions, the things they want and don’t want to hear, the levers to pull to make each of them say ‘yes’. All in all, weekly updates are vital to your sales effort.
However, there’s one other trick we often play with these regular updates. Clie nts are, in general, used to people like consultants giving presentations. But walking into a management team and giving a presentation is a risky way of convincing a group of people to do what you want:
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A couple of attendees may not be listening properly.
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There may be others who use the meeting to score points off each other.
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Others may see every meeting as a chance to voice off their opinions about anything that happens to come into their normally empty heads.
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Some may disagree with you on details, where either they or you don’t have complete information at hand.
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And so on.
But above all, when managers go into a presentation given by consultants, they could either react by saying ‘this is incredible, you consultants are so clever, we would never have come up with something so brilliant, we really want to give you a lot of our money’ or they could sit in judgement over you and try to find holes in your arguments. You don’t have to be a genius to guess that most tend to follow the latter course. Ergo, first rule of making presentations to client management teams – don’t! Don’t ever present to a group any material unless each of the group have already individually seen, understood and reacted to that material. So, although you’ve committed to management to give them regular, even weekly, updates you manage to squeeze out of this foolish commitment as follows:
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You casually suggest that it would be useful to see each of the meeting attendees briefly one-on-one before each update ‘just to get your guidance and make sure we’re on the right lines’.
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At these one-on-one pre-presents, you take them through the whole update to find out whether you’re in the right ball-park and whether they’re personally in tune with you.
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You also test out how they think the other management team members will react to your material.

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Finally, to take their attention away from picking your presentation apart, you give them a task or a problem to solve before the formal update. This means that they use their energy making sure they don’t look foolish at the upcoming meeting and, of course, distracts them from thinking too much about what you are proposing. This task could be just something simple like finding some key numbers or deciding in which areas your team should do studies or choosing which employees should work with your consultants or choosing the benefits targets at which the implementation programme should be aiming.
So, when you actually come to the so-called Update, you’ve already pre-presented, discussed and patched some of the holes in your material. This allows you to just give a brief resumé of your work and then use the rest of the time to work with the management team on making some kind of joint decision, such as those mentioned above –
deciding in which areas your team should do studies or choosing which employees should work with your consultants or selecting which of their customers your team should interview or prioritising some streams of work in the implementation programme you want to sell them or setting performance targets for the implementation programme. Thus, quite subtly, you’ve changed the event that the client expected to be a presentation of new material (which you want to avoid at all costs) into a working session where, by taking some decisions jointly with you, the client’s management team have ‘skin in the game’. Later, as you reach the end of the first study phase, you can justifiably claim that your results and proposals are actually not your results but in fact the joint results of consultants and management team working together. That makes it quite difficult for them to then say that they disagree with the conclusions that you have reached as they have apparently been reached ‘together’.
2. USING CLIENT JOINT TEAMS TO SELL FOR YOU
There’s always a risk that a client’s management simply won’t believe you, when your team tries to prove that a client must either buy a pile of consultancy from you or else their organisation will wither away or even promptly collapse. They may not agree with your approach, they may dispute your figures, they may find fault with your conclusions, they may even suspect the whole thing is an enormous smoke-screen designed to let you slip your people past them so your consultants can attach themselves to the very entrails of the client’s organisation. And in many cases, they may be justified in suspecting some or even all of the above.