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O P I N I O N
Why me?
While clients want to be in the hands of an expert, they also want that expert to care deeply about the success of their project.
A best practice in business development/project initiation that you can adopt today is to always ask clients why they hired your team. Not just new clients – ask existing clients why they continue to trust you and your colleagues with valuable work. It’s important to know what we are doing that the market likes, and it’s a lot more fun to share this feedback than it is to share the “here’s what you’re doing wrong” feedback that we all have to endure sometimes.
Jamie Claire Kiser
there’s one thing I am, it’s alive and able to respond to an email or call. Responsiveness is quite literally the easiest differentiator – the “low hanging fruit” – and yet it is repeatedly, consistently cited as either an area of excellence or an area for improvement on client perception studies. Clients value responsive- “My favorite reason to be hired for a job is a glowing recommendation from a client. Something that I very rarely hear is that our technical expertise or resume was the most impressive.”
My favorite reason to be hired for a job is a glowing recommendation from a client. Something that I very rarely hear is that our technical expertise or resume was the most impressive. While clients want to be in the hands of an expert, in my experience, what clients really want is to be in the hands of an expert who cares deeply about the success of the project. I believe that the way we treat people matters, and that energy and ambition are more important than credentials (but again, I am a University of Arkansas grad). While I’ve heard dozens of reasons why a client engaged us, sometimes I hear reasons that shock me. Some specific examples in the “shock” category are below: ❚ ❚ Competitors took a week to respond to an in- quiry/RFP, or didn’t bother to respond at all. If
See JAMIE CLAIRE KISER, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER March 12, 2018, ISSUE 1239
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