Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And the last gift from me for today is a copy of a book we co-authored with some of our clients. It’s one of the books we co-authored. It’s called Nine Leaders in Action, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. And today we have with us Matthew Dixon, who is founding partner of DCM Insights. Matthew is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, best-selling author, and his books were translated to a dozen languages. Mathew, welcome.

Matthew Dixon  01:53

Thank you, Kris, I appreciate the invitation. I’m thrilled to be here.

Kris Safarova  01:57

Looking back at your career. What was a turning point that shaped how you think about sales, client, experience, leadership?

Matthew Dixon  02:05

So that’s a really good question. I so just some personal background before I founded or co founded our current company, DCM insights. And for those who don’t know DCM insights, we’re not a household name, so we provide business development training and behavior change programs for partners and associates in professional services firms, and then work with leaders of those firms to drive that behavior change at scale, based on our research, which we’re going to talk about today, but if I go back so my personal background, I was actually planning to become an academic, a college professor. Actually, I went and got a PhD in political economy, which has nothing to do with studying sales people in selling or professional services. But I found my way into a company called CEB. CEB is now a part of Gartner Group, which is the big global research company, and found that my skills were best applied doing, if you will, for profit research. So I had research training as an academic, but I found it really fascinating to apply those skills to different areas of business. In one of the areas I found most fascinating is sales and selling and client engagement and business development. In large part, I think, because there’s so much conventional wisdom about what good client engagement is, what good business development is in sometimes you find, when you test these theories and practices with data, that they stand up, but oftentimes you find that they’re wrong or that they haven’t evolved to keep pace with changes in the client buying environment. So we’ve had a number of big studies we’ve done over the years, which then became books. So the one that people know the best is a book called The Challenger sale that came out in 2011 and it really changed the way that business to business sales leaders were thinking about the best way to drive sales in their organizations given change in client buying behavior. Most recently, we’ve written a book that’s really specific to partners in professional services, which is called the activator advantage, which, again, is another set of surprises. But I find my career has been a series of turning points, I think, in terms of interesting things we find around the market and what the very best business developers are doing differently to sell to to clients. So again, we’ll, I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about that today.

Kris Safarova  04:33

Matt and could you explain to us what is an Activator in simple terms?

Matthew Dixon  04:38

Sure. Yeah. Maybe to back up. We did a ran a global study, because I think it’s important that people understand where this comes from. And by the way, for listeners who are interested in learning a little bit more, there was an article we wrote in Harvard Business Review at the end of 2023 that is called what today’s rainmakers do differently. That’s a really good summary. Of this research. And of course, if you want to learn more, the book the activator advantage is coming out as well. So just to back up, this research is based on a global study of 3000 partners across law, consulting, accounting, investment banking, public relations and executive search. So 3000 partners, we did a 45 to 60 minute behavioral interview with those partners, or behavioral survey with those partners, and then we asked the firms that those partners work for to provide performance data about those partners and their business development effectiveness. We ran a whole series of analysis on this data, and the most interesting thing that came out of this was that at the end of the day, all partners fall into one of five different statistically defined business development approaches. We didn’t make these up. It was the data that specified this. And what we know is that every partner has elements of all five, but they spike in one every one of us spikes in one of these areas. So maybe I’ll give a high level overview of those, and then we can talk about the activator, which was the winning profile, and maybe what makes those folks unique? So the five profiles are experts, confidants, debaters, realists and activators. So very quickly the expert is kind of I would call them The Reluctant business developer. They don’t like selling. They don’t like asking for client, you know, client business. They’re not comfortable doing it. What that leads to is a posture where they try to send a signal to the market through thought leadership, speaking at conferences, getting ranked highly if you’re a lawyer, maybe in the chambers rankings, for instance. And you’re trying to send a signal to the market that you are one of the leading experts in your area. And what you’re hoping is that if the client has a need that lines up with your expertise, they will call you, they’ll find you, they’ll put in a request on the website, and they’ll reach out to you for a conversation. As one CEO of said of a firm we interviewed, said experts like to aggressively wait for the phone to ring, so they very they’re very reactive, right? And what that means, in practical terms is that oftentimes the client, by the time they find you, they’re also talking to some other experts from other competitor firms, because nobody has an exclusive monopoly on expertise, and now you’re in a race to the bottom on price. So that’s the first profile. The second one is the confidant. The confidant I would describe as kind of an old school trusted advisor. They try to build a very small portfolio of key, deep client relationships. So think of, you know, two to three really big clients that they spend their entire career working with those clients is selling them work and delivering work to them. What they try to do is build a wall, or maybe a moat, around those client relationships. In the way they do that is they deliver great work to their clients. They really do pride themselves on the quality of their work. They are very responsive to their clients. They’re truly client centric in kind of a classic way, whatever the client needs, they take care of it, right? The client asks them to jump. They ask how high? And their hope is that if I have a great relationship with my client, not just a business relationship, but even a personal relationship with that client, then I have basically built a wall around that client, and it’s made it impossible for anybody else to come in and steal that relationship from me. You know, it would be unthinkable that this client would make me compete for the business, or that they would talk to my competitor. You know, it would be a violation of our relationship. Now, because those confidants have invested so deeply in those relationships, they don’t like sharing them with their colleagues, so they tend to have kind of sharp, elbowed behavior inside the firm. They don’t collaborate very well. They don’t put the notes in the CRM system. They get very upset when their colleagues call into their client and ask for meetings or ask for time, because their mindset is something could go wrong. If I bring a colleague into my client relationship, something could go wrong. And if that happens, I’ve only got two or three of these really big clients. I can’t afford to replace them, right? It’s too much work. It took me too long to build this relationship. The third profile is a debater. The debater is a kind of an opinionated know it all. What I mean by that is their business development approach is to go in and tell the client, you’re doing it wrong. You know, you think you should go left, you really want to go right, or you’re thinking about this opportunity in completely the wrong way. So they tend to really focus on trying to change the client’s view about what the right answer is for their organization. Now what’s interesting about these folks is we’ll see. We’ll talk about this in a moment. They don’t do very well in professional services, but the irony is that these folks do very well in business to business sales. So in that other book I mentioned before the Challenger sale, this was kind of the winning profile of these top performing salespeople. But that told me, as a researcher, that if you are selling a product, you can be a debater and you can tell the client they’re doing it wrong. If you are the product, as we are in professional services. Is consulting and in law and accounting, that’s a very tough posture to take with your client in Make no mistake, clients do want their partners to tell them when they’re doing it wrong, but they also don’t want to always hear that from their partners. It’s a relationship based business, of course, and or after all, and so clients will say, Look, if I’m getting it wrong, I want the partners I hire to tell me that. But if, every time I sit down with you, you’re telling me I’m doing it wrong, that’s exhausting. I don’t have time for that, right? Okay, the fourth one is the fourth one is the realist. The realist, I think, is sometimes accused of being a Debbie Downer, right? They’re very glass half empty. They really focus on telling the client how much longer things are going to take, how much more that’s going to cost, how low their expectations should really be of the engagement and the impact it’s going to have. And I think it’s unfair to call them Debbie downers. The reason they do this, when you talk to realists, is that they know every client out there, every single one has had a bad experience with a consultant or a lawyer or an accountant who over promised and under delivered, and they try to do the exact opposite. Their mindset is, I want to be the partner that tells my client what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear, and they will come to me because I am the honest person. But again, they don’t do particularly well either. But the when you look at the results and you talk to clients, they’ll say, look, I appreciate the honesty, but I also want the partners I work with that tell me what we could accomplish together, not just what can’t be accomplished through this work. Then that leaves the last one, the activator, so answering your question in a long winded way. So the activator is a super connector. They are very active on LinkedIn. They are building and managing their professional network to generate leads and business opportunities. So they treat their professional network as arguably their most important business asset or capability. They’re also very active in the live world. So whether it’s a conference, industry conference, or a firm sponsored event. These are the people who go to those events and kind of work the room, not in kind of a cheesy way, but what I mean is they go with a game plan. They know they don’t stand in the corner hoping a client will approach them and ask for a business card. They go with a target list of clients that they’re trying to have conversations with, and typically, they’ve set up coffees and breakfasts and lunches and dinners with those clients in advance of the meeting, and they’re going and they’re trying to establish these connections, take those business cards, and then they go back to the home office. Now I some people have asked us, Why didn’t you call these people connectors? Because isn’t that what they’re doing? They’re building connections and network, managing their network strategically. But I think that undersells what’s happening here. They’re not just trying to collect LinkedIn followers or connections. They’re not just trying to connect collect business cards. They’re trying to turn these connections into paying client relationships. And the way that they do that is very specific. What they do is they try to proactively bring new ideas to their clients before clients even recognize it’s a need or an opportunity. So they want to bring an idea to a client about a new way to make money, save money, mitigate risk, often an idea the client hasn’t even thought about before, and they want to do that not in a fee based way. So they’re not looking to charge the client for that insider expertise. They’re looking to pay it forward. They’re especially with a new client. They want that client to get some experience of what it’s like engaging with me, what kind of value and insight I can deliver. I want to be helpful in doing so I earned some goodwill that even if you decide you want to shop around and see which provider can provide the best support here, I’ve got a leg up, because I’m the one who brought the idea to you, and ideally, I’ve shaped your understanding of the opportunity in a way that benefits me and my firm. So I’ve kind of created a category of one, if you will. The last thing I’ll say about the activator is, unlike the confidant who tries to box their colleagues out, the activator does the opposite. They try to bring their colleagues in to the client relationship. They know that in today’s much more challenging client buying environment. It’s fine if your client is loyal to you personally, but it’s much better if they’re loyal to your firm. If they’re, they’re being supported by many colleagues, practice groups, offices, different teams in your organization. That’s a much stickier relationship. It’s a much more lasting relationship. It’s one that the client has a much harder time breaking because you’re supporting them across many aspects of their organization and their strategy. Again, if they’re just buying from you and they like the work that you do, that’s fine, but that’s easily replaced with a competitor, a cheaper competitor, or somebody, somebody new. So these are the these are the profiles. If I were to to summarize the the activator approach. What I would say is it’s really built on three things. One is a commitment to business development, and we can talk more about what that means. Two is connecting broadly and deeply, internally and externally, Building and Leveraging internal and external networks. And then third, the third thing, the third capability, is proactive. Bringing value to clients before clients have even asked right this posture of paying it forward and being helpful to your client, and those are the three key elements of being an activator.

Kris Safarova  15:10

And in doing all this research and coming up with this five types, what really surprised you? What did you not expect to find?

Matthew Dixon  15:17

So I think what’s surprising is that for the first thing I will say is that when we look at the performance data, first thing is, if you just put partners into their profile, 3000 partners, what you find is it’s pretty evenly distributed across the five types. So you find good representation. Now there are interesting spikes in different areas of professional services. So in law, in accounting, you find the dominant profile is that confidant profile, that old school trusted advisor. In consulting, we find the realist is actually the winning profile. So so there’s some interesting spikes there, and not the winning profile, but the leading profile, that’s where most of the partners fall into. But when we look at performance, what we find is pretty eye opening. And this, I think, was the biggest surprise, while you can be a top performer in any five of these approaches, and I think all of your listeners can think about colleagues that they work with in their own firms who fall into each of those five approaches and are top rainmakers in their firms, right? So we can think of these people. We know these people, and that is true, but the probability of being a top performer is not the same across the five profiles. In fact, what I would tell you is that while you can be a top performer being an expert, a confidant, a debater or a realist, if you look at the predictive analysis, what you find is that those partners are actually that that profile is negatively correlated with performance. In other words, the more partners lean into those approaches, the less business they actually sell. There are definitely exceptions, but in general, partners are going to be unsuccessful choosing one of those four paths. The only path we found that had a positive statistical relationship with performance was the activator approach. And to put it in layperson’s terms, if you took the average partner, the average performer, and you took them from being not very good on activator behaviors, time spend, use of tools and resources, and you got them to a high level, they would increase their personal revenue generation by up to 32% which is a really big number. And I think that’s the biggest surprise, is that 80% of partners fall into one of the four profiles that are negatively correlated with performance. And interestingly, in so many firms, you find the dominant profile is the confidant or the expert. And when we ask the question, why, I think there’s a lot of reasons right. One is the culture that we create in our firm that sends our partners, especially our new partners, down a path that is not well situated in today’s client buying environment or well adapted today’s client buying environment. It might be because of the mentorship they’re receiving from senior partners and practice group leaders, office heads who might have been successful 10 years ago, 20 years ago, using a different approach. But again, the client buying environment has changed, and that approach, while it was successful for them personally, is not going to enable new partners, younger generations, to be successful moving forward. So I think that’s the biggest surprise, is that, again, we have this conventional view of what it means to be a top Rainmaker in professional services. And what we find here is that, yes, that may have been true 1020, years ago, but it’s no longer true, and increasingly, the activator is going to become the dominant approach moving forward.

Kris Safarova  18:28

So what is happening that makes activator become a dominant type and doing well?

Matthew Dixon  18:36

Yeah, I think it really is. As I said, if we have done this research, we don’t have a time machine. We’d invent a lot of things in the research. We didn’t invent a time machine. But if I had a time machine, and I think we went back in time 10 or 20 years, I don’t think we would have found the activators the winning profile. I personally think it would have been the confidant. Because if we think about the client buying environment, let me give you your listeners one data point. We spent a lot of time interviewing C level decision makers and surveying them as well. So yes, we studied partners, but we also spent time with clients as well. And we asked a panel of a couple of 100 C level decision makers. So CFOs, General Counsel, coos, heads of corporate development, CEOs, board members, even, we asked them a battery of questions. And one of the questions we asked them was, if the partner that you use for your last engagement, or the firm you use did a good job and provided you have a good relationship with that firm, with the partner and with their team, if you had a new need, would you go back to the same partner and firm again? So five years ago, most clients said, five years ago, yes, I would go back. 76% of clients said, Yeah, I would go back to the same firm. After all, it’s a lot of work for a client to go find a new professional, to find a new firm, but today, it’s only about 50% 53% to be precise, of clients say that they would audit. Automatically go back to the same provider again. And we ask them what that will look like five years from now, recognizing predicting the future is an inexact science at best, but we asked them, take a guess. How would you answer this question five years from now, only 37% of those clients said yes, I would go back to the same firm again. So what is happening is that we are in a period of declining client loyalty. And if we think about professional services, law, accounting, consulting, executive search, investment banking, public relations, engineering, architecture, where we are selling advice, the axis upon which that industry has spun for 50 or to 100 years now has been the belief that if you do good work for your client, and if you’ve got a great relationship with your client, they will automatically come back to you the next time they need help. And increasingly, that’s less true. And when we talk to client, to clients, and we talk to partners, you hear this in those conversations. Clients say, You know what, I do have a great relationship with this consulting firm, but I can’t be seen in my company, putting my thumb on the scale for this fan, for this firm, over that firm. I want to let my team decide. I can’t be on the hook for establishing preference for one supplier or the next. So what used to be a black box of purchasing is no longer the case. Procurement is involved. It’s more of a consensus decision on which provider to go with than it was before, where the senior executive, again, could just tilt the scales in the favor of their preferred provider, preferred firm or partner. So that’s that’s happening in clients today. You see this happening on partners too. When you talk to partners, they’ll say, Yeah, you know, five years ago, I could regularly rely on my clients to keep coming back to me with more work. But today that’s no longer the case. Even clients who I have a great relationship with, I’ve delivered unquestioned, unparalleled value to, they’re forcing me to compete for the business. I’m losing client business to boutique and niche providers, alternate service providers that I never had to compete with before, and if I do win the business. Now, clients want fixed fee arrangements. They want outcome based pricing. They’re they’re much less likely to just go with our rates, not challenge them, and not allow us, you know, not have forced us to compete with our our competitors out there in the market. So again, I think what we’re seeing is a big change in the way that clients buy professional services, which is creating this environment in which activators win.

Kris Safarova  22:29

Matt, so many of our listeners are in consulting, looking for major firms, often and at relatively senior levels, responsible for sales, and now they’re listening to us and thinking, Okay, I need to become more of an activator. So let’s give them some advice.

Matthew Dixon  22:47

Well, absolutely. So let’s talk about, let’s go back to and of course, what this is sort of the high level, right? There’s a lot more in the book about this and in the article, but let’s focus on those three key behaviors, committing to business development, connecting broadly and acting broadly and deeply and creating value practically. And I’ll just give some some guidance here. So connect committing to business development. I think sometimes this can sound to consultants like a tautology, meaning it’s a circular logic, because what we’re saying is the people who are the most committed to business development, who do the most business development, generate the most business. That is true. But think about professional services for a moment. We are not full time salespeople, right? We are Doer sellers, or seller doers. We are responsible for generating the work and also delivering the work and executing on it. And in our world of professional services, think about this. May not be you as a listener, but think about your colleagues? How many of them don’t like selling? They don’t like asking for clients, for money or for business? And what happens is everything else on their plate expands to fit the time in that time that they might have carved out to do business development quickly gets scheduled over or rescheduled or canceled altogether. That is not true for activators. Activators are have a metronomic, rhythmic consistency to their business development. Most of the ones that we studied were doing business development every day, a little bit of time, not huge chunks of time, 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, always to keep things moving. And when you ask them why, they would tell you that they know that clients are less loyal today. They know the market is way more competitive today, and it’s radically changing, and it is a very, very tough client buying environment. So they always want to have a backup plan. They never rest on the assumption that their existing clients will remain clients moving forward. They certainly do everything they can to grow those relationships, but they want to have a backup plan, so they’re constantly investing in building new client opportunities and new opportunities within existing client organizations. So that’s committing to business development connecting broadly and deeply. There are three dimensions on which activators Connect. The first one, I think, is obvious, they they build and manage the. Professional Network. As I would argue, their most important strategic asset, that’s where their business is coming from. That’s where new business opportunities are coming from, is their professional network. In other words, they’re not waiting for their firm to provide leads from marketing or waiting for clients to fill out forms on the website. They are out there building and cultivating a network of ideal client profiles clients who look like their best clients, but maybe aren’t their best clients yet, and they’re engaging with them and cultivating them and trying to move them up in the hierarchy of their network and develop some proximity with them. The second dimension that activators connect on is internally, as we talked about before, they bring the breadth of the firm to bear against client issues. That does a couple of things. First, it helps them to solve bigger, more complex issues for the client, they’re not only selling their expertise, they’re selling the breadth of the firm’s capabilities. That creates much stickier multi point relationships into the client organization, again, much more resilient stickier relationships. It also enables them to deliver value, as I said before, to address those most complex issues that our clients have, which require us to bring all of the capabilities of our firms to those clients. The last dimension that activators connect on is within the client organization. So sometimes consultants we find get very focused on the senior executive, the economic buyer, the C level decision maker, the CFO, the head of corporate development, the COO, the CTO. And they do that to their detriment, instead of what activators do is invest in creating zippered relationships up and down the client relationship. So what they’re trying to do is, yes, build a great relationship with the senior most, but also build great relationships with those deputies that keep people one click below, and then as well, with their teams. Sometimes that’s them building those relationships. Sometimes it’s the team members that the activator brings to the engagement. But we’re trying to do is establish multiple points of connection, because that insulates us in the event that that senior executive leaves or gets fired or goes to another job, right? And we can’t afford to be exposed in that way, because we’ve only invested in a top of the house relationship. The last thing is creating value proactively. So there’s a couple of ideas here. One of them I mentioned before is this idea of bringing forward new ideas. Don’t wait for the phone to ring. Don’t wait for your client to realize they have a need. What are the things that you know that your clients need to know? What is the unique perspective you have based on your experience in the market? And bring those ideas to your clients? It’s one of the things that clients complain the most about consultants. The this is the biggest complaint we hear from clients, is that I don’t hear from my consultants often enough, and I think that surprises a lot of consultants, because they they infect themselves with self doubt. They feel like they’re going to bother their clients. I don’t want to. I don’t want to bother them. If they have a need. They know how to find me. They have my phone, they have my email. We’re connected on LinkedIn. They will find me. But what clients will tell you is, I am so busy. I’m so heads down on my own priorities, my own strategies, my own initiatives inside my company. I don’t have time to look out in the market, in the way that you do as a consultant, you’re going to talk to more clients in a week than I’m like me that I’m going to talk to all year. So bring tell me what I should be worried about, what what should be keeping me up at night? What should I be focused on? What are the most innovative clients that you work with, doing with your capabilities to drive new value or save money or mitigate risk in some new and creative ways, bring those ideas to me, and that’s what activators do. They don’t wait for the phone to ring. They’re always bringing those new ideas to clients. And then the last thing I’ll tell you, we talked about this idea of being helpful to clients and thinking about the client as a person, not just as a business, a buyer, right as a quote, unquote client, but thinking of them as a person. So activators look to deliver business value. Of course, they look to deliver trust value. They look to deliver business value in a truthful, transparent, honest, ethical manner. That’s the core of being a trusted advisor. When we deliver business value in a trustworthy way. We are a trusted advisor in the eyes of our client. But activators try to create a third element of value, which is personal value. Personal value is not knowing your client’s name or remembering their birthday. That’s called being a nice person, and you should, of course, do that makes you likable, makes you amiable, makes you somebody your client wants to spend time with. Personal value is about understanding your client as a person. What is important to them personally? It might be some career aspiration that they have. It might be some challenge they’re dealing with at work, maybe with an initiative they’ve been tasked with in a new job, with a new boss, with a team member or a team that’s underperforming. What are they what are they motivated by outside of work? What are they passionate about? What causes maybe? Are there personal challenges they’re dealing with? And then the question the activator is asking is, if we put the paid engagement work aside, are there other ways that I can deliver value to this client on a personal level? Maybe I can help them. Maybe somebody in my firm can help them. Maybe somebody in. NETWORK I can connect them with to help advance their personal objectives, and that is what creates the difference between an activator and a trusted advisor. Trusted advisors are great. It’s awesome, but it’s kind of table stakes. And activators will say, look, there are lots of trusted advisors out there. Many of them work at my competitors. You know, I don’t have a monopoly on being a trusted advisor in the eyes of my client in what creates differentiation is the personal value you add on top of being a trusted advisor that creates lasting relationships, sticky and resilient relationships, which are ones that can survive this fraught and challenging client buying environment that we find ourselves in today.

Kris Safarova  30:38

When you looked specifically in consulting, how common is activator type?

Matthew Dixon  30:43

Yeah, so activators, I can actually tell you, I’ve got the it’s funny you ask, because I was just walking through this data with a consulting firm recently, they asked the same question. So let me look over here. So the activator type is about 25% of all partners that we surveyed in consulting, but the dominant type is the realist. That was 33% of the of the profiles of partners fell into that profile in consulting. Why is that? I I have a theory, but I would be curious what you think and what your listeners think that you know, consulting is one of these areas. It’s different from law. It’s different from accounting, which are very technical areas. It’s hard to fake it in law, right? It’s hard to tell a client, if you are an IP lawyer, that you can help them win a big trial, I win a big case. You can be a litigator. You can’t really fake it in those areas, or in tax or accounting and audit things like that. But in consulting, that’s not really true. And I think the experience that many clients have had with consultants is that they tend to over promise and under deliver. So I reach out to a consultant who might be a digital transformation consultant, but I need help on supply chain efficiency, and that person, because they don’t want to hand that lead off to the supply chain consultants in the firm says, Oh, we can help you with that. My team can help you. And so then they can fake it, right? Because if we think about it for at some level, consulting is a black box purchase. You can’t test it, you can’t try it, you can’t demo it. In the same way you can a tangible product, like a medical device or a piece of software. And so you kind of have to take your consultant’s word for it. And I think that’s why you find that a lot of consultants feel like clients have been burned in the past, and so they fall into that realist approach, because they try to do the opposite of what most consultants do. They don’t over they don’t over promise and under deliver. They try to under promise and over deliver to their clients and be very, very transparent. And that’s the only one of the segments we studied where realists are the dominant profile was consulting. So I think it’s an interesting finding. But again, you also find a big chunk of experts and confidants in consulting as well. So I don’t want to make too much of too much of that.

Kris Safarova  32:56

That makes a lot of sense. So for someone who needs to develop his team, not just themselves, but his team, to become more of activators, anything else you want to share specifically when dealing with training your team?

Matthew Dixon  33:12

Yeah, so a couple of things. I think behavior change is hard in professional services. I think it’s especially hard at the partner level, because these are owners of the business. They don’t have to do what you’re asking them to do. They can do it their own way. They don’t have to use the technology you invested in and gave that gave to them. They could just decide not to use it. They don’t have to use the materials that marketing created. They can create their own and so driving behavior change in partnerships, I think is very it requires a different approach. What we know in sales is that in sales, you can actually dictate, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s the way we’re going to sell, here’s the way we’re going to have client conversations. Here’s the Here are the tools and technologies that you’re going to use. Some of your listeners might be familiar with the the old phrase, if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist, right? So if you don’t put this in the CRM system, we’re not giving you credit for it. It doesn’t exist. It’s very hard to drive behavior change top down in a partnership, again, because partners are owners of the firm, they elect their leaders, they they confer authority on a highly contingent basis. As Laura amson famously wrote, again, it’s it’s a world, it’s a democratic world in a partnership. And so to get change to happen, you’ve got to you’ve got to create a groundswell, right? You’ve got to create a movement. And so if you think about developing your team, the key thing for partners to think about is, how do they make activator? Something that is simple, is easy for people to adopt, is not a requirement, but is there for people to use if they want help becoming better with clients. And so firms that have been really successful with this don’t make activator a requirement. They don’t go. Tell their partners, we’re all doing this. You have to do this, or there’s the door, because that doesn’t work. Instead, what they do is they start small. They create some scarcity. So they might train their a small group of partners, maybe new partners, on being activators. They track their performance, they share their wins and and their improved business development performance. And that starts to create interest in in enthusiasm across the other partners, who then raise their hand and say, Hey, I would love to be trained on that as well. It’s also really important that, you know, we know this in professional services, oftentimes we go to sales training and we go right back to what we were doing before. And part of the reason is that clients are only part time or sorry, partners are only part time sales people, they don’t get the repetitions that a professional salesperson would get, because sales is their full time job, and when you’re a salesperson, and so it’s really important that we create kind of a nudge system, a way to reinforce behavior after the training is concluded. So there’s lots of ways to do that. One is internal communications and keeping this constant drum beat and dialing up the FOMO, if you will, the fear of missing out around activator and how it’s really driving great gains for some partners, and it’s a scarce resource. If you’d like to go to training, if you’d like to be trained, if you’d like to get some coaching, we can help you out with that, but it’s not unlimited. You’ve got to raise your hand so you want to create the pull through demand. The other thing is leveraging retired partners, or soon to be retired partners, to coach partners, because partners listen to partners on how to develop activator skills. Many of these folks are reaching mandatory retirement age, but they still want to be involved in their firms. They still want to invest in the success of their firm. And what they’re really passionate about is investing in that next generation of talent. So a lot of firms have been really successful using those newly retired partners and turning them into activator mentors internally, again, not requiring people to use those resources. But it’s here. If you want it, then the last thing I would say is firms are investing in technology, not heavy duty technology, enterprise systems like CRM, but rather light consumer applications that are easy to use on demand, that have tips and tricks and small videos and templates and tools in ways to help you prepare right before a pitch or as you’re thinking about how to spend your BD time and planning out that time. But again, very simple, very easy to use. The key here, when it comes to driving change with your team or across the firm is you can’t do it top down. You have to create this groundswell, this movement, and get people to raise their hand and say, Yes, I would like to learn how to do this. I would like to invest in my own approach. And then last thing, Kris, let me, let me add this. I think it’s really important for partners to recognize that the right approach, the way to think about this, is not to if you will become an activator. I know that that may sound counterintuitive. What I mean is, look at what you have done in your career that’s gotten you to this point, what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, and by all means you should keep doing the things that are working, and all of the five profiles have positive elements to them. But the question you want to ask yourself is, what can I adopt from the activator approach and add it to my current client engagement approach, so that I can become more successful, or so that I can future proof my success? If I’m an established Rainmaker, you know? I want to keep staying at the top right. I want to keep seeing my name in lights and being celebrated at the partner retreat. And the last thing I want is that the world passes me by and clients don’t respond in the same way to my business development approach as they once did. So again, the answer is not to become an activator. The answer is to understand yourself and then think about which elements of activator. Can I bring into my own approach to again, future proof it and improve my chances of success in this changing client buying environment?

Kris Safarova  38:49

Matt, you mentioned specific consumer applications. Are there specific applications you could recommend?

Matthew Dixon  38:55

Yeah, absolutely. So some of the firms we, we work with, have developed their own so in house kind of applications, but I’ll point you to two applications that we’re pretty excited about. One has been around for a while, but I think activators. Remember before I said activators are big users of LinkedIn, so using LinkedIn, which is, of course, not anything you need, every partner has it, right, but you’re finding that partners are after they’ve been trained on activator, are actually not waiting for their firm to buy them LinkedIn premium or Sales Navigator, which is like, you know, the premium, specialized sales application that sits on top of LinkedIn, but many of them are taking their credit card and buying it themselves, right? Because it’s a light, user friendly tool, and it really helps them harness their business development time spend and manage their network more strategically. The other one I’ll point to comes from intap. Intap is a company we’ve known for a long time. They were the original sponsors of the research, and they’ve actually built something their CRM product is called deal cloud, and they built a new application called deal cloud activate. Actor, and it’s a very light application using AI that is simply there to nudge and coach partners on following up with clients, on spending their time in an activator way, managing their network, strategically thinking about collaboration opportunities, or bringing ideas proactively to clients based on news and events and movement in the clients market. So very light, non intrusive, but the kind of thing that a partner would actually use, because we all know we struggle to get them to use CRM and some of these heavy duty technologies.

Kris Safarova  40:30

Matt and when your clients start trying to become activated, specifically in consulting, where do they struggle the most?

Matthew Dixon  40:37

So I think there’s a couple of things that we see partners struggle with in consulting. So I think the first thing we see is simply protecting the time to do business development again. If that time easily gets scheduled over or canceled or moved, we need to sometimes, you know, it’s client work. We’re busy. Clients are very demanding. But we got to ask a bigger question, which is, why are we letting that happen? And I think for many partners, it’s because they really don’t want to do the business development. They’ve fallen into this mode of I’ve got a few big clients. They keep coming back to me for more work. I’ve grown those relationships over time, or I’m very well known in the market, and I get enough leads from marketing, I get enough inbound demand and requests for my time that I can sit back and wait. But activators will tell you, that’s a very dangerous thing to do. And what’s so interesting about this is, when you talk to activators, they were not born to be sales people. Every single activator we spoke to said this did not come naturally to me. I had to work at it like anything else. I had to develop the skill over time. And that started by starting small and protecting a little bit of time on my calendar and then watching that time expand and not letting it get moved. You’ve got to be really relentless about protecting that business development time. So that’s the first thing we see consultants struggle with. The second thing, I think, is getting comfortable with this idea of going beyond your area of expertise so that you can find opportunities to collaborate. Now, partners get very nervous about this, because, think about it, they may have spent 10 years in their firm as an associate or a manager before they made partner becoming an expert in a very specific area, and so they are very comfortable talking to clients about that very specific area. What makes them uncomfortable is probing for opportunities outside of their area of expertise. And what partners tend to get worried about and consultants get scared of is the idea that the they might not know as much as the client about this topic or this issue or this opportunity, and suddenly they’re over the tips of their skis, and the client will see that they are not an expert in this area, and they will lose face with the client. The client will think less of them. Activators are unafraid to have those conversations. They’re always now. They’re very clear. They will say, Kris. You know, obviously we’re working here, but based on what you just said, I’d love to ask a little bit a few more follow up questions. Now, that’s not my area of expertise, but I know at my firm, we’ve, we certainly have somebody who is an expert around this. But can you tell me a little bit more about that, so that I’m a bit more knowledgeable and I could go find the right person that can help you out with this air, this opportunity or this risk. They don’t claim to have all the answers, but they’re comfortable asking the questions and and being educated actually by the client, so that they can bring that insight back to their firm and say, here’s what my clients focus on. Can anybody help? Oh, you can. Great. Let me make an introduction, so they’re unafraid to have those conversations that go outside of their area of expertise. Then I think the last one that consultants struggle with, again, is this idea of being proactive, of bringing ideas forward to clients before clients ask in the main reason, every single consultant I talk to has great ideas. Every single one I’ve never met a consultant who doesn’t know things. If you ask them, what’s the thing that you know based on your experience, based on what you’re seeing happening in the market, what’s the thing that you know that you wish every client knew, and if every client knew that, they would want to do a lot more business with you. And they’re all very quick to say, Oh, I wish they all appreciated this opportunity. I wish they all appreciate what AI could do in this part of their business. I wish they all understood this risk and that they need to manage that risk proactively. And then you ask the question, why don’t you go talk to all of your clients about that? And that’s like, well, I don’t want to bother them, right? And again, we tight, we we infect ourselves with self doubt. We kind of psych ourselves out because we’re worried that the client will see us as salesy, right? They’ll be offended, and you’re you’re bothering me, but clients are desperate for those insights. That’s why they hire us. They can get our specific services from lots of people. What they’re really hiring you for is the perspective you give them on the broader market. And consultants have that, right, so don’t be afraid to bring it forward. If you’ve got a great idea, pick up the phone, send an email. Text Your client say, Hey, we should go grab a coffee. We should hop onto zoom, because there’s something I think you need to know about, a way to make money, save money, or mitigate risk that you might be missing right now.

Kris Safarova  45:10

Matt and with advancements in technology, what do you think will happen with how consulting sales are done? Let’s say five years from now?

Matthew Dixon  45:17

Well, technology is, I think, stating the obvious. I think every consultant will roll their eyes when I say that. When I say this is advancing very rapidly. It’s changing. You know, by the time between today when we’re recording this and the time that you post this recording, I think the whole world of technology will change. I mean, just in the past year, AI, for instance, has changed just dramatically. So a couple of, a couple of things, I think, one the tech, modern technology, makes it much easier to manage relationships and networks at scale. So think about just the capabilities that LinkedIn offers, even the free capabilities, let alone premium or Sales Navigator. This is a way to manage your professional network that never existed to partners growing up, you know, 2030, years ago, in the business consultants today can manage a network at scale. Can track movement in their networks as people move from one company to the next or across industries, right in a way they never could before. AI is a really powerful tool for us to monitor and track changes in markets, and to think about our expertise and opportunities that might present to clients, and then get AI to help configure that. What is the best way to approach this client, or to even do some preparation or some diligence on a client opportunity before you reach out, or as you prepare for a meeting, or as you prepare for a pitch, for a piece of work, so the amount of time it can save us, I think, is really dramatic. What I would say, though, is that this is stuff that high performers have been doing and investing the time in for a very long time. What modern technology does is it makes these behaviors and habits and practices accessible for everybody, and doable for everybody, and shrinks the amount of time required for us to invest in those things. I think that the truism of being a top Rainmaker 2030, years ago is they put in the work, they carved out the time, they managed their network. It was very manual. They read the news, they found opportunities, they engaged clients, but they were the ones willing to invest the time because they knew of the payoff. Today, AI and tech have really built an elevator to the top floor for everybody else. It’s dramatically compressed the time required to be a good business developer. But it would also say that being a great client engager, a great business developer is still fundamentally a human pursuit. It’s about the quality of those conversations. It’s about thinking one step ahead for our clients, having this posture of helpfulness, paying it forward, looking for personal value dimensions. AI can help us with that, but it’s still on us to place the call and to have that conversation and make it happen.

Kris Safarova  47:57

Matt, so last question for today, stepping away from very important and exciting topic of sales and consulting and professional services firms. Over the last few years, were there two, three aha moments, realizations that you feel comfortable sharing that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

Matthew Dixon  48:17

Oh, gosh, that’s a big question. So I would say maybe two things. The first one, I think, is, is something that I’ve it wasn’t over the last two, you know, couple of years, but it’s something that, you know, my whole career has really been based on, is that we as business people, whether you’re a consultant or you’re a business leader and different kind of company or a practitioner, you should never accept, at face value, the conventional wisdom or the passed on wisdom within your firm, or you know, from others. And so often, when we test these things with data, we find that they don’t really stand up to the test. And part of the problem is that those things that conventional wisdom about the way to sell, or the way to, you know, engage clients through marketing, or the way to deliver client value or or what it means to be client centric, that those things were probably true at one point, but nobody ever goes back to update the conventional wisdom. It just gets passed on from a leader to practice group, leader to Office, leader to senior partner to partner to manager or associate. And nobody ever stops to question it. And I think the really important question is to ask, what has changed in the client world that might make that approach no longer as effective or no longer as relevant. And we have found lots of areas in business, business sales, and as we’ve been talking about with this, activator work in professional services, where the conventional wisdom hasn’t been updated in a while. It’s an old operating system, and it’s not the one that’s really built for the modern client buying environment. So I think that’s the first thing. I think the other thing, I would say, is there’s an interesting question here about what is activator. Mean for us in general, so outside of professional services, but think about business at large. And I think what it tells us is that, you know, we are in a world of massive changes in technology. Of course, we are in a world of disinformation, a lack of trust in institutions and organizations, alas, lack of trust in firms and vendors and partners. And what we’re really seeing is that the people who break through are actually over investing in delivering value, being helpful and building really solid relationships. What’s so interesting about activators, if you contrast them with other partners, most partners think I will build a great relationship, a relationship with a client. A great relationship, a deep relationship, is an outcome from doing paid work. So the first thing that’s going to happen is Kris is going to hire me and my firm to deliver a project to her organization, and at the end of that project, since six months to a year, we will have forged a really great relationship. But activators look at the that flow as kind of reversed. They start by building a great relationship, and for them, paid client work is just the logical evolution of that relationship. But what I want to focus on is, what are the ways I can deliver value to Kris, what are the insights I can share with her, what is the personal value I could deliver, and over time, Kris is going to want to hire me to do work an activator. I think put this really well in an interview we ran, he said, I think of the billable work that I deliver that pays my bonus this year, it’s all the unpaid work that I’m doing that pays my bonus next year and the year after and the year after that, and that’s the activator mindset, right? They’re confident enough to know that investing upfront in value delivery and relationships will ultimately translate to paid work. Most consultants, most partners, have a mindset of, I am not going to deliver value until I get paid work, right? And that’s just the opposite kind of frame of mind for activators.

Kris Safarova  52:01

Thank you, Matt. Really appreciate you being here, and thank you for doing this important research.

Matthew Dixon  52:06

Thank you, Kris. I appreciate the invitations. A pleasure to be with you, too.

Kris Safarova  52:10

Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything you want to share?

Matthew Dixon  52:14

Sure, I would encourage listeners to connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active. Active there. I don’t know if I call myself an activator, but I play the part of an activator and so connect with me on LinkedIn. Tell me you heard me on the show, and if you have a follow up question, I’d be happy to answer it. Also you can check out our company. We do activator training and behavior change programs for professional services firms, for partners and associates, and we are at DCM insights.com, so that’s our company, DCM insights. And then the last thing I’ll suggest to people is check out the book, so it’s out on May 20, and it’ll be available everywhere. Books are sold, online, offline, physical storage, you name it. And so check that out if you are a partner or a practitioner in professional services and you’re looking to improve your client development, your business development approach. I think it’s a good resource for you, especially in this new client buying environment we find ourselves in.

Kris Safarova  53:07

Matt, thank you again. Our guest today, again has been Matthew Dixon. Check out his book. It’s called The Activator Advantage. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is the resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And lastly, you can get a copy of our book. It’s called Nine Leaders in Action. It’s one of the books we co-authored with some of our amazing clients. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.