// October 16th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // The Practice Paradox
In my experience in dealing with hundreds of accounting firms around Australia over the years, I have noticed that those firms that have one or more effective ‘rainmakers’ who are great at finding new clients for the firm and effective at up-selling existing clients onto additional services, prosper and grow well above the industry average growth rate.
Of course that’s not surprising.
Sadly, however, the vast majority of firms are not very good at rainmaking and they tend to potter along, growing by default at a slow rate through the occasional client or 3rd party referral.
There can be various reasons for this lack of rainmaking ability including never having been formally trained in the art and science (and psychology) of selling, but there is generally one root cause of a firm’s failure to be good at rainmaking: Negative beliefs about ‘selling’
This is a severely limiting belief for a business owner or principal.
Imagine if the owner of a small or medium business had a similar belief? Their success is likely to be modest at best.
This ‘selling is bad’ belief is not the sole domain of accounting firms. It happens in many businesses.
Following is an excerpt from a case study in my upcoming book, The Practice Paradox – Why Most Accounting Firms Don’t Help Their Clients More. It’s about a client of mine in the travel industry who faced this exact same issue in her business. (For a full version of the case study, you can email BookPreview [at] practiceparadox.com.au to be sent a free 50-page PDF of the book preview.)
Changing peoples’ behaviour is hard. If you focus solely at the behaviour level you will most likely fail. Here’s why:
To change behaviours, often it's ineffective to address the Behaviours directly as your first step. You need to drill deeper to the underlying Beliefs, and sometimes to the underlying Values.
A person’s behaviours stem from their beliefs and their beliefs from their values.
Shifting a person’s values is also very difficult. You need to employ people who share the appropriate and compatible values in the first place.
Values are like the tree trunk, beliefs are the branches and behaviours are the leaves. If you address a person’s behaviours without attempting to first understand their underlying beliefs, you are merely ‘hacking at the leaves’ of behaviour. This is futile. You might bring about, at best, a short-term change in behaviour, but in the medium and long term, a person’s behaviour will shift back into alignment with their beliefs and values. At worst, if you address only a person’s behaviours you will bring about resentment and resistance.
Beliefs, on the other hand, can often be shifted as long as a new belief is compatible with the person’s values.
A common value of business owners is ‘service’; providing service to and helping others. They like helping their customers/clients; that’s one of the reasons they got into business in the first place.
In a business, team members also often share this same service value. However, often the beliefs stemming from that value differ from the business owner’s.
Do you have team members who believe it is good service to only provide clients with what they ask for? They don’t like to ‘hard sell’?
You, on the other hand might believe that good service is ensuring clients’ needs are fully met and that this often involves educating clients about their options.
Let’s look at an example from a travel agency where we discovered that the travel consultants were merely “selling the flights” to clients and were not even selling important options like travel insurance.
Different Beliefs can stem from the same Values, resulting in entirely different Behaviours. This is an example from a selling scenario.
Once we discussed this as a group with the business owner and her travel consultants, the team agreed that if a person did end up requiring medical attention or hospitalisation whilst overseas, that it is likely to be a financial disaster for the client. They also agreed that the client, in hindsight, would think that the travel consultant should have explained this risk to them and offered them the option of the insurance.
The problem was, the young travel consultants had never experienced that; they had never had a client actually require medical treatment whilst overseas. The business owner, on the other hand, had seen the financial hardship that a lack of travel insurance can bring.
So I asked the business owner, “How do you discuss the travel insurance option with a client?”
“It’s easy. I just share with them a couple of horror stories about where uninsured travellers ended up incurring many tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses just because they didn’t have any travel insurance. In fact, I have a couple of news clippings about this.”
After first ensuring we shifted the travel consultants’ limiting belief we then built a system to support the desired behaviour. Soon the travel consultants started to consistently discuss the topic of travel insurance—and other options such as accommodation, car hire, shows and stopovers—with clients.
Sales of options such as travel insurance began to rise.
In fact, the average number of items per booking increased from a paltry 1.1 to over 3 items per booking.
The effect on the business was enormous, especially when combined with a dramatic improvement in conversion rates of enquiries to bookings. (You can read more about that in the Book Preview.).
This means that not only did we more than triple the business’ revenue, profitability increased by a greater magnitude because the optional products provided greater margins than the core product, the flights.
Next time you aim to bring about a change in your team’s behaviour, remember to first ‘go upstream’ and consider your underlying beliefs that support that behaviour. Discuss these beliefs with your team and ask them about their beliefs.
Once you feel you have achieved an alignment of beliefs, then you can address the skills and systems required to support the desired behaviours.
I’d be very interested to hear of your own experiences with your team members’ (and your own) beliefs regarding selling and how you have addressed that issue and brought about change, or not.
Please post your comment below. I look forward to the discussion.
