Recognizing Seeds of Opportunity

Learning how to spot opportunities, start a conversation, and inserting the impact of your firm’s offering into a capital spending project is critical to driving revenue growth.

Watch this video to learn how to effectively bring that together.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve continued to talk about the elements of leveraging client intelligence. I’ve even exposed you to some of my team to talk about how do you project manage the client intelligence process. So let’s tie these elements in together. Let’s talk about, how do you spot an opportunity? How do you start the conversation? How do you insert the impact of your firm specifically into capital spend? How do you shape an account so that you end up with an account and not just a project?

We coach our clients to read a lot about what’s going on, not only in what they’re focused on– if you’re in health care, I want you to read about higher education or mission critical– but also what’s happening in other geographies. Because what’s happening in your area may be important, but what’s happening in other areas, you could learn from and leverage.

Here’s an example. University of Arizona building $136 million biomedical research campus. What is that really about? You may say to yourself, well, I’m in Atlanta. I’m in Seattle. I’m in San Francisco. I don’t know if I care about that. I don’t care about biopharmaceuticals. I’m not even sure I care about higher education.

Here’s a picture that many of us have seen. It’s a picture of an old woman and a young woman. But when we look at that picture, it’s really easy for us to pick out the outline of the young woman. What’s harder for most of us is to pick out the outline of the older woman. And that’s got the parallel to this particular article. When we read an article like this, it’s really easy to see the surface. It’s easy to see the headline, geography, the vertical, what it’s really about. It’s harder to see the old woman portion of this article.

There’s another cliche we use all the time– just follow the money. And that’s great, and I’m not disagreeing with that, but I think there’s more complexity to it. I think what’s more accurate to say is that you’ve got to follow the complexity and intricacies of capital spend. And that’s really what this article is about. This article is not about just the building. It’s about IT infrastructure. It’s about mixed-use developments, about how the companies are going to connect to this.

So if you’re a CEO, for example, in Seattle that’s selling HR management software, why would you care about this? There’s a lot of HR elements to the capital spend around a project like this. And the only question you’ve got to ask yourself is first, not, can you get involved in a project like this, but is this happening near your sphere of influence? Is it happening in the state of Washington? Is it happening in a place where you’re connected to, like the state of Montana? And how could you start this conversation using this article as a model to insert the impact of your firm into that discussion? Because that’s how you start to leverage client intelligence from the beginning. That’s how you start the conversation. That’s how you move it along. That’s how you create an account. It’s looking for the seeds of opportunity that are represented in this article, looking for the strategic part of what this article really represents, and then thinking tactically, how am I going to start that discussion, so that you end up with inserting the impact of what you do into the capital spend aspects of what this article really represents. It’s easy for us to see the young woman in this picture. It’s not as easy for us to see the older woman.

Thanks for listening, and be safe.

Here is a link to the article I referenced in today’s video: UA breaks ground on $136M research facility at biomedical campus in downtown Phoenix.