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CHAPTER 2 How Clients Buy : Understanding the Client's Buying Decision Journey

      It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have.

      —Richard H Thaler, University of Chicago, Nobel Laureate in Economics

      I was having dinner recently with my good friend John Senaldi, who lives in the Bay Area. As we enjoyed a glass of 12‐year‐old Talisker, it occurred to us that it had been 30 years since we worked together at GE Aerospace in Syracuse, New York. We were in our early 20s at the time.

      After catching up on our kids and other small talk, our conversation drifted to our professional lives. John had spent most of his career in medical technology. By any measure, he had a very successful career leading to the CEO position at a tech company he helped turn around and sell.

      John had recently transitioned from corporate life to the role of executive coach and strategic advisor. He now leveraged his considerable experience in helping CEOs navigate through difficult business issues.

      “How's your new consulting practice going?” I asked.

“Well, I gotta admit, it's been a bit of a transition to the new role as coach and advisor,” John replied. “The hardest part for me is learning how to market my services to prospective clients.”

      “Tell me about your successes this past year,” I prompted.

      John replied, “It took a while, but I have managed to land two really good clients. I'm helping a couple of CEOs with issues I'm familiar with. I'm having a great time, and I feel like I'm making a difference.”

      “Where'd the clients come from?” I asked.

      “Well,” John paused, “my first two clients were people I had known for a while…. I worked with them previously. They knew me and felt that I could help them grow their businesses.”

      I smiled to myself, knowing John's story well. Many professionals I speak with have similar stories of how they got their first clients. I always make a point of asking rainmakers where their most recent clients came from. No two client stories are identical, but they have some interesting things in common.

      If we are to become successful rainmakers, we have to build authentic relationships with those we wish to serve. Our clients have to know us, they have to respect our professional abilities, and they have to trust that we are honest. And, in the absence of this, we have to be strongly recommended by someone the prospective client respects and trusts.

      If this is true, what do we have to do as professionals to get to know people, and have others respect and trust us? There's a lot to unpack there. And, we'll get to that soon, but the first step is to learn to think like a client. We have to understand the client's buying decision journey. The five rainmaker skills that we'll learn are built upon the foundation of the client's buying decision journey. In understanding how clients buy, we'll begin to see why these rainmaker skills work.

The Seven Elements of the Client's Buying Decision Journey

      The above description of how clients buy is the CliffsNotes version. It's true that clients have to know, respect, and trust us, but there is much more to it. Tom McMakin and I spent two years examining the longer version of the client's journey. We covered this in depth in our book How Clients Buy: A Practical Guide to Business Development for Consulting and Professional Services.

In How Clients Buy, we outline the seven elements of the clients buying decision journey. (See Figure 2.1.)

Our framework of the client's decision‐making process comes from our own personal experiences, in addition to interviews with successful rainmakers in a wide range of professions. Following are the highlights of what we learned.