736: How High Performers Land New Business, with Matt Dixon

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
A lot of us know the traits of the kind of person who’s successful at attracting new business, or do we? What many of us don’t know is that what’s working today is actually different than what we traditionally think. In this episode, a detailed look at the professionals who are landing the most new business and what they’re doing that works. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 736. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:35]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Every leader has a responsibility, at least in some way, of helping their organization perform. Maybe it is landing new business. Maybe it is finding a new donor. Maybe that’s part of the role, a big part of the role, or maybe it’s an adjunct to it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:07]:
Regardless, understanding how high performers land new business is an essential concept for so many of us. Today, I’m so glad to be able to dive into that in detail with Matt Dixon, an expert who’s done so much thinking on this. Matt is a founding partner of DCM Insights, a global training and advisory firm, and a leading expert in business development and client experience. His first book, The Challenger Sale, was a number one Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller and translated into a dozen languages. His newest book with colleagues Roy Channer, Karen Freeman, and Ted McKenna is The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently. Matt, such a pleasure to have you.

Matt Dixon [00:01:50]:
Hey, Dave. Thanks for having me on the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:51]:
I was reading the book thinking about your work, thinking about this concept of sales, you know, and helping land new business. And I was thinking how often I’ve heard, and I know you have too, of folks that say something like, hey. I went to law school. I went to Harvard law school. I spent all this time becoming a accountant or whatever the professional service they did, and I didn’t do that to become a salesperson.

Matt Dixon [00:02:24]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:24]:
When you hear that, what’s behind that, and how do you think about that framework, that mental model that a lot of us have?

Matt Dixon [00:02:34]:
Yeah. It’s it’s tough. Right? And I and by the way, I I will say, and Davey and I were talking about this before we hit record, but I I feel like a lot of the sort of pejorative image that people have of sales come is thanks to Hollywood. So if you think about Boiler Room and The Wolf of Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross, right, which I just rewatched for the first time in years the other night, and it doesn’t paint salespeople in the the very best light. And I I think for a lot of people, their sense is, you know, sales is this icky thing. It’s something that you do when you’re trying to convince a counterparty, you know, client to do something they otherwise don’t wanna do. And I think what we find is this becomes a mental block. As you said, it’s a mental model that becomes very hard for people to navigate around.

Matt Dixon [00:03:21]:
Because here’s the reality is, you know, in the Activator Advantage, we studied, as you said, professionals. So we studied people who sell themselves where the person is the product. So think about consultants and lawyers and bankers and realtors and executives, headhunters and so and lawyers and so on and so forth. These people sell advice for a living. And for the vast majority and I’ve literally heard what you just said countless times from partners. You know, I didn’t go it to fill in the blank top tier law school to become a salesperson. But at the same time, these are senior partners of their firm, and the expectation of those folks is not just that they deliver great work, but that they sell work to clients too or they develop client business. And so it is like it or not, it is a big part of their jobs.

Matt Dixon [00:04:06]:
And then the thing I would say be even beyond that, Dave, is, you know, I I have it’s been interesting. You know, Challenger Sale came out in 2011, and the number of people I run into who are not in sales, it is not on their business card. It’s not you know, look them up on LinkedIn. They might be teachers. They might be in another walk of life. And I’m increasingly of this view, and I’ll steal shamelessly here from one of your other guests and a friend of mine, Dan Pink, who read a great book called To Sell is Human. That all of us are in sales. You know? So whether you are actually a salesperson or a sales manager, and that is on your on your w two, it’s on your business card, it’s on your LinkedIn description, or you’re a partner in a firm, and part of your job is sales.

Matt Dixon [00:04:48]:
Or maybe you’re a manager of a team, and what you’re really selling is ideas to your boss. You’re selling initiatives and change to your team. Or maybe you’re a parent and you’re trying to sell your kids on eating their vegetables and going to bed on time and not using their phone so much. But all of us, as Dan says, are in sales, and to sell is a human pursuit. It’s a human endeavor. But you’re right. I mean, this pejorative connotation that so many people have around it, it literally is a four letter word for many people.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:17]:
And a lot has changed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:22]:
You write “a survey of one level buyers conducted by our firm found that the social compact that once existed between professionals and their clients is fraying, perhaps irreparably.” What is it that’s changed?

Matt Dixon [00:05:37]:
So I think this is a this has been something we’ve been on for, you know, ever since that first book, The Challenger Sale, came out in 2011, is just to look at I think we can talk about how great sellers, how we’re they’re evolving their approaches and their behaviors and the way they spend their time and how they use tools and technology, but all of that is in reaction to changes in the ways that customers buy and what they expect of us as firms and as vendors and suppliers. And there are a couple of, I would say, sort of jet stream level trends that we’ve been tracking. I think the first one is that customers are out there learning on their own. This is something we first heard about in the Challenger sale back in 2011, and this has continued to to unfold. So let me unpack that a little bit. So you or I, Dave, like, we’re gonna go buy a new mobile device. We’re gonna buy a new car, new home, any number of things. We do a lot of research.

Matt Dixon [00:06:30]:
Right? We look at the reviews. We look at the you know, what does Wirecutter say? What are the Amazon reviews? We always start by reading the bad ones, of course, to see who hates it and for what reason and if those are legitimate complaints or not. We’re we’re trying to get, like, a sense of what we’re about to buy, and we’re self educating about the purchase. And what we’re seeing is actually that is unfolding as well and has been for a while in business to business too. And so what we found actually back in 2011 is that the average business purchaser, so whether it’s a c level executive hiring a consulting firm, whether it’s a head of HR who’s looking at a a new technology platform to manage people in the organization, whatever it is, that today’s business customer is almost 60% of the way through their learning journey or the purchase journey before they ever even talk to a salesperson. So they’re doing all this research and due diligence on their own. In fact, recent research has shown that that has marched even closer towards a %, that that buyers today are just waiting till the they’ve done a ton of due diligence on their own. They create a shortlist, and then they reach out to the salesperson.

Matt Dixon [00:07:33]:
And then in their mind, the three vendors who made my shortlist, they can all do the work. Now I wanna see who will who’s willing to do it for the least amount of money possible. So that’s one trend. I think the other one I would speak to, Dave, is the rise in in consensus based purchasing. So this is something we wrote about in a book called the challenger of customer that business purchases are now made by committee. This it may have been true back in the fifties or sixties that the boss would say, hey. We’re gonna go with this vendor, and everyone needs to get on board and get in line. That is not the case anymore.

Matt Dixon [00:08:04]:
Leaders, and I’m sure other guests you’ve had have talked about how leaders rule or manage by consensus. Right? They they harness the the expertise of their team. In many cases, they delegate decisions to their team, and we’re seeing this unfold in business to business. Back in 2013, we first started tracking this. The size of the average buying committee was five and a half stakeholders. Today, according to Gartner Research, it’s upwards of 20 stakeholders, even modest sized business purchases. I think personally, Zoom and and the pandemic were like the particle accelerator of buying committee growth. There’s no downside inviting everybody in your organization to sit in on the demo and to listen to what the vendor has to say.

Matt Dixon [00:08:44]:
And then the last thing I would say, you know, you mentioned this degradation in client loyalty, and I think we’re seeing this across the board. But that specific survey you just referenced, for professionals, for people who sell themselves, for consultants and lawyers and accountants and the like, the access upon which that business has spun for a very long time has been the the belief that if you do good work for your client and if you, deliver value and if you build a good relationship with them, they will automatically come back to you the next time they have to hire a consultant or a lawyer or an accountant. That’s been just the conventional wisdom and the conventional approach in professional services for a very, very long time, but that is starting to break down. So five years ago, c level executives, almost three quarters of them, said, sure. If this firm did a good job and I have a good relationship with the partner and their team, yeah, I would go back to them again. Today, that’s closer to 50%. And we asked C level buyers how that will change five years from now, and only a third of them said that they would automatically go back to the vendor they used last time. Now think about that.

Matt Dixon [00:09:43]:
You did a great job for your client. You have a great relationship, even a personal relationship with them, and they’re going to make you compete for the work. That throws everything up in the air and most professionals see that as bad news, right? That means everyone’s coming into my long trusted relationships with my clients and stealing that business from me, but the activators out there see this as, you know, game on. This is great because that means that the incumbent advantage is no longer a thing, and all of this business is up for grabs, and I can go win my share.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:13]:
It’s just it it changes so much of, like, a lot of the assumptions I think many of us had about sales and long term relationships. And I’m thinking back to we had, Raja Raja Manar on the show from ma Mastercard a while back, and he made the point that when you look at, like, the most important relationship people have in their lives, marriage, most people would say half of marriages end in divorce Yeah. Statistically. And, like, even in the thing that most people articulate as their most important, most loyal relationship, a lot of those relationships don’t last in Yeah. Our society today. And how when you think about something way less important to most people, which is a client relationship, a business transaction, how much less likely loyalty is to pay. And it’s fascinating just in the last, like, five years, those numbers you just shared, like, how much of that has changed? Like, what a what a huge shift in just how we’re approaching and thinking about relationships.

Matt Dixon [00:11:09]:
It it really is a a whole sea change, I think. And, you know, when when we spoke to a CEO of one of the biggest consulting firms in the world, and what, she said was that in her mind, most of her consultants, their their sales approach, if you will, is to, quote, unquote, aggressively wait for the phone to ring because they they’ve grown up in this world where clients just automatically came back to you. Right? It’s a lot of work to go hire a new consulting firm or find a new consultant, and why wouldn’t you go back and use the same team or the same firm you used in the past, especially if they did a good job and you like them? Like, why wouldn’t you do that? But that is that whole model is unwinding literally over the past few years, and it is creating a really, really tough environment where many of these consultants, many of these professionals, now feel for the first time that the bone isn’t ringing as much. They’ve gotta get out there in the market, and they’ve gotta do this thing that they have this deep aversion to, which is sell to their clients.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:14]:
And a bunch of people have figured this out, and you’ve studied them. And you did this massive study and established that there’s a type of professional you’ve called an activator that really represents the highest performance in landing business and building relationships by a by a big margin on a whole bunch of the metrics that you look at. And one of the things that they do, which I think speaks to the point you just made is the word consistency comes up so much. Tell me about that word, and what does that mean in the context of how activators perform?

Matt Dixon [00:12:39]:
Yeah. So, again, just to set the context here, the specific population, the study were were people who I think as it probably describe a lot of your listeners who are, quote, unquote, part time salespeople. They’ve got other things. So you think about a lawyer. They’ve gotta do legal work. Right? But they also gotta go find clients, and they gotta pitch them on business, and they gotta win that business. And then they’ve gotta find opportunities to renew the relationship and grow the relationship and all that good stuff. But they’re not full time salespeople.

Matt Dixon [00:13:04]:
And they certainly wouldn’t think of themselves as salespeople. Again, for most of these people, it’s not something they like doing. But we found when we we did this profile analysis that there were there were five types of professionals in that winning profile, which I won’t go into here. We can go you can get more information in the book, but the winning profile was this one we call the Activator. And there were really three things that make the Activator unique. And the the first one was having a commitment basically, a commitment to selling, a commitment to developing business. The second piece was connecting broadly and deeply, and the last one was creating value proactively. So we can talk about all three.

Matt Dixon [00:13:38]:
You go deep on one, but you asked about the consistency. Yeah. And this is specific to that first one, this commitment to business development. Now I will say and for any listeners who are trained lawyers, lawyers always call me out on this because lawyers love pointing out circular logic and tautologies. And so I’ve had many lawyers say, so hold on a second. You’re telling me the people who are the best business developers amongst all these thousands of professionals you study, these activators, that they do the most business development? And it is a tautology, but it’s actually true. Because, again, if you think about it, most of the people we studied do not like selling. They don’t like doing it.

Matt Dixon [00:14:12]:
They like to aggressively wait for the phone to ring, and they’re hoping people will just find them and ask them to sell them work. And what’s different about the Activator and by the way, when you don’t like doing it, you will find almost any excuse to let it get crowded off your plate. Right? Client work, firm initiatives, doing summer associate hiring, and, like, you will volunteer for almost anything just so you don’t have to go sell. And what you find is with most partners and firms, most professionals is the only time they’re actually selling is when they’ve lost a client or when the well runs dry in a big engagement and suddenly they’re scrambling. Right? And so, okay. Now I gotta go out there and find new business. It’s very different for activators.

Matt Dixon [00:14:50]:
They’ve got kind of a metronomic consistency, as you described, to their business development. And it’s not huge chunks of time, but they’ve built, you know, what James Clear would say or Charles Duhigg, these sustainable routines and habits. They start small, but then it sticks. And so, you know, they start with a few minutes per day, then it turns into fifteen minutes or thirty minutes per day. And what they’re doing is they’re never letting their foot up on the gas. They never let sales get crowded out by client work, by firm initiatives, any other party. And the reason they do it has to do with what we talked about before because your longtime client, the one you’ve you’ve sold to for years and years and years who’s never gone anywhere else, never talked to any of your competitors, that client might not be a client tomorrow. So if that’s the world we’re operating in, what activators know is you better have a backup plan.

Matt Dixon [00:15:40]:
Right? And you don’t wanna be caught flat footed. And so they always keep their foot on the gas around sales and business development and developing that consistency. But this is, I think, something that what I would say is a lot of people who I present this work to, they say, okay. Well, those people are born salespeople. They they just came out of the womb that way. Like, it’s natural for them. They don’t have to try as hard as the rest of us. They must be these gregarious extroverts, you know, these people, people.

Matt Dixon [00:16:08]:
And what’s so interesting to me is in the interviews we did with these activator types, most of them said, unprompted, that they were actually introverted and they didn’t enjoy doing this, and they had to learn how to do it and get comfortable. And the way they did it is by starting small, building habits that stick, right, and that become routines and workflows. The other thing many of them said is that they weren’t good at this. Theywere actually pretty bad at it when they first started, and so they’re also quite resilient. Right? And with that consistency in sales, even for the very, very best salespeople in the world, you’re gonna get more noes than yeses. And so you develop a thicker skin, you get comfortable with that rejection, and you learn from it. And that’s what these people have done, but it is, again, that consistency is the theme there. And it’s something, I would say, probably 80% of the people we studied do business development when they have when they get around to it.

Matt Dixon [00:17:03]:
That is not true of Activators. They’re doing it every day.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:06]:
One of the other key points you make is that Activators are really leaning in a lot on collaboration, and you you write on this. “Unlike most professionals who protect and hoard client relationships, activators purposely bring their colleagues into their client relationships. In our studies, seventy three percent of activators reported they frequently do this compared with only twenty nine percent of nonactivators.” That’s a huge delta.

Matt Dixon [00:17:33]:
It is. It is. So that speaks to that second key behavior of connecting kind of broadly and deeply. And I I think for an activator so they’re super connectors. Right? These people are very active on LinkedIn. They are the people who you know, you might see them at a conference. We go to with colleagues to conferences or, you know, whether it’s our company sponsored conference, a user conference, a customer conference, or it’s an industry conference, and there are always those colleagues who are, quote, unquote, working the room. And that’s what activators do.

Matt Dixon [00:17:59]:
And not again, not because that’s what they enjoy doing necessarily, but they know it’s necessary. They know who’s going to the event. They are setting up coffees and lunches and dinners and the whole nine yards, and they their mindset is, this is a business development moment. I’m not gonna stand in the corner and clump with my colleagues and hope a client approaches me and hands me a business card. I’ve gotta go make this happen. Now I think what’s so interesting so they do treat their their external network as arguably their most important business asset because, again, a lot of these people are generating their own sales leads, and a lot of those leads come from their professional network. So they are just absolutely laser focused on strategically managing their network as a business asset from which paying client work comes. But the other thing you said is is collaboration.

Matt Dixon [00:18:44]:
So they connect broadly and deeply, not just externally, but internally. And it’s so interesting because most of the firms we talk to- we work with the biggest law firms, the biggest accounting firms, the biggest consulting firms in the world, biggest search firms, and every single firm, every firm leader we talk to laments the fact that most of their partners do exactly what you just described. They have very sharp elbows. They don’t like bringing their colleagues in. They worry about, well, what might happen if I bring Dave in? And Dave might be an expert. I’ve heard good things. But what if I bring him into my client? My client doesn’t like Dave. And then suddenly not that they wouldn’t like you, Dave, but but, you know, another Dave.

Matt Dixon [00:19:20]:
So imagine they they didn’t like that interaction, and it rocks the boat, and it sets that relationship back. Well, I can’t afford for that to happen, so I end up boxing other people out. Activators do the exact opposite, and I think there are lots of reasons for this. I think the first reason I would point to is it might feel a little bit fuzzy or squishy, but this came through loud and clear in our interviews with activators. They have a tremendous pride in their colleagues. They think of themselves yes. They themselves are experts. They have their own expertise.

Matt Dixon [00:19:50]:
But more important for an activator is to be a general contractor for expertise. So they know that the client has complex issues and needs and opportunities, and they themselves can’t solve it on their own. Right? So they look for opportunities to bring their colleagues in so that they can serve clients and address bigger, more complex issues, and that’s really where the great paid work is, right, isn’t those big things versus the the kind of onesie twosie, very specialized niche work that an individual could could deliver. So that’s a big part of what’s going on here. But I think, again, it ties back to this different buying environment that we’re in because clients are less loyal today. It’s not a very sticky relationship with a client if the client is only loyal to me. But if the client is loyal to the we of the firm, if I’m making introductions and I’m bringing my colleagues in and now we’re supporting that client in many parts of their business, you know, many offices, many regions, many priorities, many different product groups, That is a very, very sticky relationship in the way that if the client’s just buying from me individually for a very specific thing, that’s kind of easy come, easy go. The client doesn’t think twice.

Matt Dixon [00:20:57]:
A better provider comes along and out you go and they go with your competitor. But if you’re supporting them across a whole raft of opportunities and initiatives, that’s a really sticky relationship and your client thinks twice before they sever that kind of relationship. So that’s another reason that activators are doing it. There is a business reason, right? It creates a much stickier relationship with your client.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:18]:
Yeah. This point in particular, like, it gives me so much hope because- and you mentioned this in the book. Like, a lot of the people who are activators, like, when you describe what a lot of us traditionally thought of as, like, networking events or going and working the room, like, they sort of, like, bristle at that. Like, they don’t want they don’t like that kind of a thing. And yet, the reason it’s hopeful for me is that it’s not just about them introducing their work or building the relationship. It is also about introducing the people they meet to their larger network and being there of service and support. And I think, like, what a great entry point for a lot of folks who may approach this thinking like, well, I may feel a little weird getting you know, starting relationships just for my benefit. But, boy, if I can approach this from a standpoint of, like, how does my whole firm, my larger network come alongside and connect with people? And I think, like and then they do that so seriously.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:16]:
And I just I’m thinking about some of the stories in the book where I think there’s definitely a group of people who go to, like, a professional conference, and it’s like it’s kinda like a mini vacation. It’s a reward. It’s like, okay. I’m gonna, like That’s right. You know, I’m gonna, like, go to the events and see my friends. And activators absolutely do not, like, show up that way. Like, they I remember one of the quotes in the book. Like, it is the hardest I work all year, one person said, like, when they go to the event.

Matt Dixon [00:22:42]:
And there’s a lot of game planning that goes in Yeah. Advance. Like, they have they have they are scheduled to the hilt. Right? And what’s so interesting, you can go back to this. Sometimes people read or they hear us talk about the Activator Research, and they kind of fall into this mindset of like, oh, this is a personality. Right? This is but that’s not actually what we studied. In fact, I there’s a story we tell in the book of a lawyer from one of the big law firms who had, like, a 30 or $40,000,000 book of business, like a top, top rainmaker in this very global firm.

Matt Dixon [00:23:14]:
And she said, for those listeners who are familiar with the Northeast Corridor, the Amtrak service, there’s the Acela, which most of the business people are taking back and forth from New York to DC and Boston, like, all day every day. And, there’s a quiet car on the Acela, and she said, I am deeply introverted. And whenever I’m on the Acela, I’m in the quiet car quiet car. There are no conversations, no phones like a library. Right? And she and then she also says when I go to client events, it’s the hardest I work all year. And the reason she said is that I’m an introvert, and it takes a lot out of me. And so for that reason, I actually don’t go to the bar afterwards. I don’t go to the evening event.

Matt Dixon [00:23:49]:
I’ve gotta go back to my room. I’m just exhausted. Right? It sucked a lot out of me, and I’ve gotta recharge for the next day. But those moments are so critical. And, Dave, I would tell you, you hit on something else, which is this third element of being an activator, which is creating value and doing so proactively. Mhmm. And this is so important. I I I might argue the most important element of the Activator approach.

Matt Dixon [00:24:11]:
So on the one hand, I somebody asked me the other day, well, why don’t you call these folks connectors? Right? Because they’re getting they’re gathering LinkedIn connections and business cards at events. I think it kind of undersells what they’re actually doing. Because what their goal is, it’s not free consulting. It’s not altruism. It’s turning these connections into paying relationships. But the way that they do it is so interesting. In a world and and remember, a lot of the people we studied are in a billable hour environment, so time literally is money. And most partners, most professionals won’t do work for clients unless they’re getting paid for it.

Matt Dixon [00:24:42]:
That is not true of activators. They look to pay it forward. So what they’re trying to do is reach out to people with new ideas, new ways to make money, to save money, to mitigate risk, to capture market share, to engage your team and develop your team. Whatever the outcome is that you help clients with, they’re bringing ideas to clients before the client has even recognized the need. Now they’re doing that for a few reasons. The first one is they’re trying to pay it forward. Right? They’re trying to establish some goodwill. I wanna be seen as helpful to this individual.

Matt Dixon [00:25:10]:
I’m not looking to get paid for this, but I’m looking to be thoughtful and helpful and establish that kind of posture of goodwill towards this this other person, this potential client. The other thing is if this client does if I do hook them on this idea and let’s say they do make me compete for the work, I’m gonna have a big leg up because I’m the one who brought them the idea. And furthermore, they I probably shaped their understanding of the idea in a way that benefits me where they see me as the preferred provider. So there’s all kinds of business reasons. But the other thing, and this didn’t come through in the quantitative research we did, but it came through loud and clear in the interviews. And I think this is critical for anybody. Right? Not not just for salespeople, not just for partners and firms. We’re again, in the spirit of we are all in sales, to think about the value that you deliver.

Matt Dixon [00:25:55]:
Now activators are very clear that there are three types of value they deliver to their clients. The first one is business value. So they’re trying to help clients make money, save money, mitigate risk, etcetera. The second source is trust value. So they’re trying to do that work in an above board, truthful, transparent, honest way that meets or exceeds the client’s expectations. Now if you took those two pieces together, the business value and the trust value, that’s the core of what most people would call being a trusted advisor to your client. And that term has been around for a very, very long time. Yeah.

Matt Dixon [00:26:26]:
It’s still kind of held up as the gold standard in sales and and in professional services. But what hacktivators will tell you is that that’s not enough today. Instead, they try to they say, look, it’s it’s absolutely important. If you’re not doing that, if you’re not doing business value, you’re doing it in a trustworthy way, like, you’re not gonna get very far. So they do that too, and they’re very good at that. But they will also say that the market is jam packed and their competitors employ a lot of trusted advisers as well. They don’t see themselves as having a monopoly on that kind of client relationship, and so they try to layer on a third dimension of value, which they would call personal value. Now when I say that to people, I think what they immediately go to is, oh, you mean remembering the client’s birthday or remembering their kids’ names or that they like to go skiing on vacation.

Matt Dixon [00:27:09]:
That’s just being a nice person. And by all means, I would encourage your listeners to be nice people. Right? We wanna do that. That’s just good. A good good ethic. But this is different. This is about knowing your client at a personal level and, specifically, understanding what’s important to them, what’s important to them in their careers, what are they challenged by in work, is it a new boss, is it an initiative that’s kinda going sideways, Is it an underperforming team member or maybe an underperforming team? Is there a personal cause that is something they’re passionate about outside of work? Maybe it’s a personal struggle, a health issue, for instance. And activators are always asking the question, can I help my client? Outside of the scope of our paid work, can I help them move the ball on these things that are important to them personally? Or maybe there’s somebody in my firm I can connect them with who can help them on this priority, or maybe it’s just somebody in my network.

Matt Dixon [00:28:00]:
And and this runs the gamut from really simple things. Like, for instance, I just noticed, Dave, you’ve moved to, you’ve moved to Hong Kong, and and you’re new in town. I’ve got a lot of former colleagues there. Love to introduce you. It’s just great to have some friends when you land in a new city for the first time. All the way to more serious things, right? Providing career coaching and guidance and helping develop team members. Again, activators are not getting paid for that work, but the reason they do it is it creates a level of stickiness that transcends simply being a trusted advisor, and it creates a lasting client relationship in a world where clients, as we talked about several times already today, are less loyal than they once were.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:38]:
And they’re so intentional too, the Activators, on making opportunities happen and being proactive. And one of the things that they do is that they reach out proactively. But they do it differently than how I think a lot of times we think about it. And I I grabbed this quote that you mentioned, which is, I think, fascinating. “Activators consoled against two mistakes most professionals make with respect to firm thought leadership. Spamming clients with as is content or not sending it at all.” And they’re not sending it at all, like, I get, and, like, we’ve all made that mistake. Right? Mhmm.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:18]:
But the as is content, I think there’s, something there. Tell me about that.

Matt Dixon [00:29:23]:
Well, I I it’s funny because I brought that up the other day at a partner retreat, and I said, well, there’s two mistakes you can make. You send it or you don’t send it. And that seems like a mutually exclusive set of options. Right? What what’s the other the alternative? And I think this is the crux of what Activators are trying to do to be helpful to their clients. They do send it, but they send it with some guidance or some overlay. So it’s the difference between, Dave, I just signed you up for my firm’s latest white paper, and here you go, and it’s 300 pages or whatever it is and, you know, enjoy, and an activator who’s gonna reach out and say, Dave, based on our conversation we had at that recent conference where we we first met, and you mentioned this is a top priority, I’d like to point out this graphic on page 53 or this specific section. By all means, look at the whole thing. I think you’d find it fascinating, but I think this particular thing really speaks to, what’s important to you.

Matt Dixon [00:30:15]:
And so I think it’s that again, it’s that thoughtfulness. We’re trying to save people time. We’re trying to be cognizant of all the other things they have going on. And I think many of us just fall into that mode of either, I’m not gonna send it because I don’t wanna bother them, or I’m gonna just send it as is, which is almost just as bad as not sending it at all. In fact, this is something that I find really fascinating, and it kinda goes back to the, you know, the the beginning of our conversation and this this, you know, sort of pejorative connotation people have of selling. One of the things that we found that a lot of partners and firms, they they, again, they fall into this trap of aggressively waiting for the phone to ring. And I think some of that is that some of them think they’re so well known that clients will just find them. But I think more often than not, it’s not that they believe that everybody knows who they are and they’re the leading light in their space.

Matt Dixon [00:31:03]:
It’s more that they don’t want to reach out to clients and sell to them because they don’t wanna bother them. And they’re they fall into this trap of thinking that clients will reach out to me when they need help. And if I reach out to them, I’m simply annoying them and bothering them, and it’s just not a good spend of their time. And it could disrupt our relationship. But when we talk to clients, they say that their number one grievance or complaint about partners and the firms they hire is that they don’t hear from them often enough. And how ironic is that? Right? Because you have these partners who think, well, I don’t wanna bother them, so I’m not gonna pick up the phone or send that email or send that piece of thought leadership, and point out the specific section they should read because they don’t want to annoy them. But clients say, Look, I am so heads down in what I’m trying to accomplish with my team and my organization and my company that I’ve kind of got blinders on. And you, as a professional or a partner, you’re going to talk to more people like me in a week and more organizations like ours in a week than I’m going to talk to all year.

Matt Dixon [00:32:01]:
So I rely on you to be a window into the outside market for me. And clients are very clear. Like, they don’t know what they don’t know, and they rely on partners and firms who are out there in the marketplace, who are monitoring the news, who are talking to lots of different organizations, some doing progressive things and some not so much. But they rely on them to bring those ideas forward. It’s not even something that they would tolerate or be okay with. It’s actually an expectation today. And clients say, look. If you don’t act proactively and you don’t think about my needs and you’re not trying to be helpful and bring those new ideas to me, then don’t be surprised when your competitor does and I hire them instead.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:39]:
Yeah. Indeed. There’s so much more in the book that we are not hitting. And, obviously, if you’re have a role where you’re doing business involvement, I mean, this is a must read. But I think even if you are not having that role, I mean, so many there’s so many principles here. I mean, just one example from the book, Matt, that I loved is an activator. Like, when they show up at a conference and they have a first conversation with someone, like, the six steps they follow, fascinating. Like, I mean, it’s worth getting the book just for that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:08]:
So I hope folks will jump in, get the book, like, really look in in all the different types that we didn’t hit on today in our conversation. Matt Dixon is coauthor of The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently. Matt, thank you so much for sharing your firm’s work with us. I so appreciate it.

Matt Dixon [00:33:25]:
Dave, thanks for having me on the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:32]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, three related episodes I’m recommending. One of them is episode 84, the surprising truth about influencing others. Daniel Pink was my guest on that episode, one of my favorite thinkers. Daniel has been ahead of his time on thinking for so many years. And speaking of years, it’s been over a decade since we aired that interview and over a decade since his book, To Sell Us Human came out. And as always, so forward thinking on how influence is gonna be so important in our world. We have seen that in the last decade. And if you’re looking to get better at that, episode 84 is a great starting point.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:08]:
And Daniel makes the point that sales and marketing skills, whether it’s part of your formal role or job description or not, is so critical for all of us, especially for leaders. I know it made a tremendous difference for me when I got serious about getting better at sales and marketing skills in my own career. And Daniel’s got a great message to inspire us to take that first step. Episode 84, if you’re looking for that. Also recommended episode 376, How to become the person you wanna be. James Clear was my guest on that episode. The author of the of atomic habits. It’s a book that’s gotten so much traction out in the world in recent years.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:44]:
And James provides a framework for how to shift to become the person we really do wanna be to take on the identity, to move forward on the habits that are going to help us get better. You hear me say at the very beginning of every episode, leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And that’s because, you know, of course, there are skills we all have that come more naturally to us than others. And we see other folks around us that have more natural skills than others. And yet leadership is so complex. It’s so broad that we do need to get better at certain skill sets and leadership. It’s one of the reasons we keep talking about that on this show. And James’s framework and atomic habits, a wonderful starting point.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:23]:
We use a part of it inside of the Coaching for Leaders Academy, some inspiration from him on helping us to get better and actually shift our behavior. Episode three seventy six for a bit of inspiration from him. And then finally, I recommend episode 521, the way to earn attention. Raja Rajamannar was my guest on that episode, chief marketing officer at Mastercard. He talks about many of the same trends Matt talked about in this conversation that how loyalty has changed, how customers think differently about relationships with their suppliers, their vendors, their partners than they did ten, fifteen years ago. Raja talks a bit about how Mastercard’s answering that question, but more importantly, talking about how to earn attention more broadly, an important and critical conversation for every leader, but especially those who have marketing and sales as part of their portfolio. Episode 521 for that. All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:19]:
One of the resources inside of the free membership is our episode library. Tons and tons of episodes there sorted by topic. One of those topics is sales and selling and marketing. So if you were looking for more there that will support you, many other episodes that I haven’t mentioned here that you can dive in on that’ll give you a starting point for that. Plus, as a free member, you’ll get a weekly message from me, our weekly guide with all the notes from every episode, the key points, the related episodes I just mentioned, plus a bunch more. Some of the resources I’ve been finding during the week that I know will be helpful to you. To get access to all of that, plus a ton more inside of the free membership, go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership. And one of the places that you’re gonna see inside of the free membership, that’s brand new is a section on expert partners.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:13]:
You know, whenever we get talking about marketing or sales here on the podcast, someone will inevitably reach out to me, usually a few people, and say something like, we’re having trouble making an impression right now. It’s a really noisy marketplace. Where do we start? Well, getting Matt’s book is a starting point. And another one is talking to one of our expert partners, David Hutchins. David helps teams and organizations get their message clear through the power of story. You’ve heard him on the podcast many times over the years, and a whole bunch of you have who have heard David on the show have invited him to come teach your teams and organizations how to better influence and get traction through the power of story. If making an impression is feeling a bit tough right now, and you’re planning an offside or training in order to get better, inviting David to support your team is a good starting point, and that’s why he’s now one of our expert partners. To get in touch with him or any of our other expert partners that might help in whatever situation you’re facing right now, go over to coachingforleaders.com/partners to begin the conversation with us there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:26]:
Again, that’s coachingforleaders.com/partners. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Alice Farris to the show. She is gonna be joining me to teach us about how to fundraise, especially for those of us who never wanted to have anything to do with fundraising. And as we’re gonna discuss, why it’s actually an important skill, not just for folks leading nonprofits, but almost every leader. Join me for that conversation with Alice, and see you back next Monday.