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Imagine you’re sick and bed-ridden. It’s the worst time of the year for you to take time off, as the office is really busy and you’re trying to get your projects’ tender packages out the door before everybody goes away on vacation in a few weeks. You feel like crap, but you manage to drag yourself out of bed to see a doctor. You think you have the flu, owing to the symptoms you’ve experienced in the past, which are very similar to what you’re living through right now. You also know that there are a myriad of potentially fatally infectious diseases that produce the same symptoms and therefore defer to a doctor instead of trying to self-diagnose. You enter your doctor’s office and tell him “I think I have the flu” and he proceeds to write down a prescription without further examination.
Flabbergasted, you storm out and go to another doctor, the trust you have in this professional being forever and irreparably destroyed. You take your medical file with you, vowing to never return.
Why we tolerate behaviours in our industry that other professions ban outright
I’m having trouble imagining a professional occupation where the idea of prescribing a solution to a problem without a proper diagnosis is thought of as a good idea. Indeed, you would never expect your physician to prescribe any kind of treatment without a thorough diagnosis of the symptoms. The same goes of your lawyer, plumber, accountant and pretty much any profession whose job is to provide you with a customized solution to your problems. A problem that you’re sometimes not even aware you have.
How do these professionals diagnose your problems? They ask questions and listen intently and carefully to the answers you give them. Given what they’re told, the gathered information is then filtered through the lens of their expertise and can slowly but surely come to a solution to your problem. Sometimes, the solution is pretty evident and easy to find, sometimes it requires further investigation. These people are paid well, because their years of expertise and experience makes them very valuable. If you were to try and come up with a solution by yourself, you wouldn’t know where to start and it would likely take a long time to do so.
Yet, in creative professions, somehow, that logic flies out the window and our clients routinely think that creative people have an instant creative answer to every problem, as if creativity was an innate ability that was gifted to some and not others. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone is creative, to a different degree and in different areas (the subject of an upcoming podcast). Creative professionals are merely likely to be more so than others, or even just better at being consistently creative.
As noted in my recent piece on procurement, asking service providers to do a whole bunch of work, sometimes covertly, in order to get “free” ideas from them is disingenuous, morally questionable and should be publicly denounced. What these procurement people are essentially asking us to do is to skip the diagnosis part and jump right to conclusions, which is counter productive and can be downright dangerous.
Instead, there is a much less time-consuming and costly way to go about finding the right clients, that allows for both parties to determine if they’re mutually a good fit and not waste a ton of resources answering to useless RFPs, that you are very unlikely to win. Since we can’t count on the fact that procurement people will magically change their minds and start acting like ideal clients, it is up to us to take control of the process by changing our own behaviour in a way that will elicit the right ones from our clients.
A very simple alternative
What’s the alternative you ask? Well, it is actually quite simple and perhaps even deceptively so. I’ve found (and I’m not the only one) that starting client relationships with conversations is a lot more productive way to effectively help clients solve the problems they actively need to solve. Often, people I talk to will want to hire external help to put together a social media strategy, when in reality it’s the entire positioning of the firm that needs to be re-thought. Time and time again, I encounter people who want to treat their symptoms when in reality a proper diagnosis would help reveal the cause of the problems, the symptoms either eventually taking care of themselves or being a much lower priority, will be treated down the road.
Conversations, in this context, make room for the clients to freely speak about what ails them and 99.9% of them reveal the cause of the problem in short order. All it takes is a few very pointed questions and the ability to actively listen to what your potential clients tell you. It’s the business equivalent of listening to your chatty friend talk about one of their problems out loud and coming up with their own solution as they talk themselves through it, while you’ve been listening silently, nodding occasionally and asking very occasional pertinent and pointed questions. I’ve been that chatty friend at times and it’s a very empowering position to be in. That’s the kind of trusting space we want to create for our clients.
In order to accomplish this, one has to give up the commodity mindset, thinking that they’re competing against a myriad other providers that are perceived as equivalent in skills and expertise. It requires a strong, specialist positioning, whereby positioning yourself as the top dog in a narrow niche, you increase your chances of being found by your ideal prospects and clients, because you actively work at deepening your expertise in that area. On the other side of the coin, it also requires to ditch the scarcity mindset by clinging to potential clients that are poor fits, just because you are afraid that they might walk away and feel like you need their dollars.
Every prospect should be treated as if we did not need them and have zero expectation of getting them as clients. By going into any meeting telling yourself “I don’t need this client”, you will slowly build your resilience muscle and be able to treat each prospect with professional detachment in service of a greater purpose, which sole focus is to accomplish great things for your clients and yourself. You will also create an atmosphere where clients sense that detachment and as a result will be much more willing to play the game by your rules, because there is no understanding on their part that you want this more than they do.
Ultimately, we can take one of two stances on the matter: 1. We keep bitching and moaning about the unfairness of the current state of affairs and always be mistreated by disingenuous clients who want to take advantage of us at every turn. 2. We can take charge of our destiny and change our behaviour with regards to our potential clients.
I see it time and time again. When I find a prospect who’s willing to make room for play and let me lead the conversation, It can lead to very fruitful and productive engagements in no time, where their business is significantly and deeply transformed because they were willing to take on another perspective on their seemingly intractable problems. Not every client is capable of being a good client and by changing your behaviour, you are making it your mission to find such clients and build deep meaningful relationships with them that will affect them for years to come.
Commodity providers do not effect deep and meaningful change, they patch a band-aid on their clients’ problems and ensure that they have to keep coming back for more. While as a short-term financial strategy, this may make you very successful, in the long term it’s detrimental to your client and your business, because you’re not meaningfully solving their problems, but basically providing a short-term fix. Ultimately, you want to do such a good job that you make yourself redundant. A small, short-term sacrifice for huge long term gains.
It’s up to you to control your destiny.
Arnaud Marthouret is the founder of rvltr and leads their strategy, visual communications and media efforts. He has helped numerous architects and interior designers promote themselves in their best light - pun intended - in order to help them run more effective practices and grow in a meaningful way.
If you have questions about this article or rvltr, or want to chat about your strategy and communications, you can leave a comment, share with a friend, or reach him at arnaud{at}rvltr.studio.