From the moment you establish contact with new, prospective customers, you should be differentiating yourself behaviorally. They are assessing you as a supplier from that moment forward, so your earliest contacts are part of the chemistry test customers use to determine whether they want to work with you. Beyond determining whether you are a good business fit for them, customers are judging your responsiveness, interest, care, and commitment to serving them. To pass the initial chemistry test, you should demonstrate:
That you are interested in them and their business, which you show through your knowledge of their industry, their company, and their value proposition to their customers; and through your persistence and the lengths you are willing to go to meet with them.
That you are highly responsive, which you demonstrate by meeting as soon as they are willing; by promptly returning telephone calls and other messages; by sending whatever information they request as soon as possible; and by answering their questions fully, even the ones that are difficult to answer. Further, if you don’t know the answer, you say so and then find the right answer and give it to them as soon as possible.
That you care about them and their business, which you show through your thorough preparation for meetings, through the types of questions you ask, through your patience (i.e., not trying to close the sale because you need to make your numbers), through your empathy toward them and their business, and through your earnest desire to help them solve their problems and meet their needs—all of which signals that you put their interests ahead of your own.
That you are committed to serving their needs, which you confirm by having your senior leaders available for early meetings with customers’ senior leaders, by devoting the resources necessary to explore their needs and understand their problems, by taking the time to diagnose their value proposition to their customers and adding insightful suggestions where you can to improve that proposition, and by taking the long view of your growing relationship with customers and acting like a partner rather than a vendor.
David Maister, author of Managing the Professional Service Firm, observed, “How you behave during the interview (or proposal process) will be taken as a proxy for how you will deal with me after I retain you. Unlike the process of qualification, which is predominantly rational, logical, and based on facts, the selection stage is mostly intuitive, personal and based on impressions.”⁵ During early middle game, you may also need to demonstrate your competence and credibility as a supplier, but you are always undergoing the chemistry test as well. When potential customers are getting to know you, they ask themselves these kinds of questions: “Can I trust this person and this company?” “Would they be good to work with?” “Do they know their stuff?” “Are they honest and straightforward? Reliable?” “Will they be there when I need them?” “Is this someone I want to work with?” Unless you are the sole provider of your types of products and services, which is unlikely, and assuming that you are competent to serve the customer’s needs, then the principal test you must pass early in a developing customer relationship is the chemistry test. By the way, if you fail that test, you may never know why because most customers are reluctant to be that candid with suppliers they don’t want to work with. It’s too much trouble. Instead, they’ll be unavailable for meetings, or stop returning your calls, or pass you off to someone else, usually at a lower level, who will let the communications die.
So to win early middle game, you first have to demonstrate high interest, high responsiveness, high care, and high commitment. Bear in mind that in early middle game you are not competing for a contract. An opportunity hasn’t surfaced yet. Rather, you are competing for the customer’s time, that finite number of minutes the customer allocates for meeting with outside providers. Only when you win that time-share competition—getting more of the customer’s hours than your competitors do—can you begin to build mind share, which is how you build preference prior to endgame. To build time share, you need to be extremely responsive to customers’ requests for information. Give them more than they ask for, and do it promptly. Further, customize the initial information you send to them. Avoid boilerplate materials, standard brochures, and cookie-cutter presentations. Those tools look like the labor-saving devices they are, and the message they send is that the customer isn’t worth the trouble to do more. While you are devoting the time and spending the money to create customized materials for the customer, take heart. You are studying for the chemistry test, and most of your competitors are probably not investing the time you are, so they are likely to receive a lower grade.
Since your goal is to extend your reach inside the customer’s organization and establish an ongoing dialogue about his or her needs and problems, you should also involve others in your company. Senior-level networking is most critical, so if you can interest your CEO, CFO, COO, and senior executives in meeting with their customer counterparts, you will be taking strides that many of your competitors will not be taking, which will differentiate you. However, contacts at all levels are important in building the kind of zippered network that provides value to both organizations. So try to get more people in your company involved in early customer meetings and calls: executives, engineers, project managers, technical experts, and so on. Demonstrate—rather than just state—your interest in the customer’s business through as many conduits as possible.