First published 8 May 2023 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
We'd had another gap between episodes before this one, and Nigel had a decent excuse. He'd just got back from the Americas and was heading off to the UAE, then Australia. So I asked him quality or quantity. "Always, always quality." You can put out an episode a day if you're happy for it to be rubbish (I used a ruder word).
That got Nigel onto potential versus performance. He told the story of a young Usain Bolt turning up at a track in Jamaica where the coach sat in a garden chair. Bolt wasn't the fastest there. The coach saw something anyway. Nigel picks clients the same way now, and one CEO has taken him along nine times in 20 years. He's a bit like Sam Allardyce, Nigel says. Gets brought in before a company is relegated, sorts it out, leaves with a good payoff and rings Nigel from the next one.
I'm all about the long game with clients. That same day I'd met someone I've worked with on and off for six or seven years who's about to make a big career move. Whether any work comes out of it for me doesn't matter. Marketing's a lot easier when people know you and trust you.
Nigel pushed that further with what he calls TRP. A one-off job gets you a relationship, and the clients who stay are the ones who've become partners, where you get a key fob and don't sit in reception for half an hour. He also reminded everyone I was late when we first met. And six or seven times since, apparently. I'm not always late.
My story was from a conference 15 years ago or more. A sales trainer put up a photo of two teenage lads in football kit. One was told he'd play for England, the other that he'd barely scraped into the academy and needed to pull his socks up. Half the room recognised the second lad. The first was the trainer on stage. Nigel guessed Wayne Rooney. It wasn't, and I never named anyone because I couldn't remember who they were.
What I took from this one
- Pick clients for where the work could go, as well as what's on the table today.
- New people will always turn up promising your clients what you promised at the start. Becoming a partner is what keeps them.
- Know your PB for the thing you get paid to do.
- Go for 1% better. Trying to jump 10 or 20% every time is too hard to keep up.
Marketing's a lot easier if people know who you are and they trust you.
Neil Martin
You have to have a one-off transaction to create a relationship.
Nigel Risner
