You Don’t Want Richard Branson Flying Your Airplane

Are You Energised For the Final Push?

DATELINE: Brisbane, Australia

It behooves me to point out that today is exactly two months until Christmas. That’s still an enormous amount of time to complete 1-2 of your 2024 strategic priorities:

  • Don’t believe so? Give me a call today (+61 427 151 181) and let’s chat about how I can help
  • Feeling tired already? What will you do differently in 2025 – today’s article might help.

Great businesses fail to implement their best ideas for a variety of reasons – I used to run workshops on that topic. Often it’s the entrepreneurial spirit of the business owner/s not being matched to their personal capacity.

You reach the back end of the year and you’re tired (didn’t take enough holidays), frustrated (still doing too much Blue + Red, when you wanted to do more Green + Black), and busy.

As my coach explained to me recently, “busyness is laziness”. If you as the business owner are constantly too busy, that’s a sign you’ve been too lazy to hand over your work to your team in a timely manner.

And if that sounds familiar, then keep reading (or click through to watch the video version) about how to position your team with clients to hand work over to them sooner.

Blackboard Fridays Episode #86 – How To Better Sell Your Team

I’ve had this conversation with four different clients in the past month, which is usually a pretty good sign that there’s a lot of other businesses out there who need to hear this information. Here’s the problem that they were having.

My client, the business owner or as the director of a state or a region, is responsible for keeping a team of delivery personnel busy. When they go out to sell, to bring on a new client, part of their responsibility is convincing the client that Tom, Dick or Harriet is going to be the right person to actually deliver the work.

Understanding your Client’s Fear

The challenge is that those prospects have built up in their mind that this business owner or this regional director is the expert. They don’t want Tom, Dick or Harriet. They want the expert. So how in the sales process do you go about selling your team so that the client is satisfied?

Well, it starts first of all with our understanding what the client’s fear is. See, the client has found you some way. Maybe they’ve been referred, maybe they’ve done a lot of Googling, they’ve read some of your blogs, they’ve watched those incredible Blackboard videos that you do every Friday.

For some reason they found you and they’ve decided that you are worth talking to, that the risk of coming out from behind the veil of online and actually having a conversation is worth it because you know what you’re talking about.

You’ve been positioned high in their mind, but they don’t know Tom, Dick or Harriet. Their concern is that the quality of these people is not going to be as good, that the consistency is not going to be the same, that frankly there’s a reason you’re the business owner and they’re not.

And I want the best for my business and for my life. You’ve got to understand that client fear and then you’ve got to allay it. You’ve got to put those fears to bed and you do that sometimes by acknowledging them and by talking about the better value, the better opportunity that by working with one of your team that they will receive.

You’re the Strategist, They’re the Delivery Specialists

At its simplest, it’s about defining your role and their expertise. So what is your role in this situation as the business owner, as the person who is not going to be doing the doing, and is not going to be seeing the client as often. What role will you play? Are you still involved from a relationship perspective? Are you the person who will check in every quarter or once or twice a year to see how they’re going, to make sure they’re receiving value?

I find myself that this is one of the best ways of positioning myself as separate from my team by saying that I’m the person that they call whenever they have an issue, when they’ve got a concern. This person will help do the delivery, but I will maintain the relationship, keep the customer service going for the long term. I will be consistent even if over five, 10 or 20 years some of these individuals may change.

I also like to use humor in that situation. I draw the analogy of Richard Branson flying the aeroplane. Everybody loves Richard Branson, but you wouldn’t really want him as your pilot on a long haul flight across the Atlantic.

In that analogy, of course I’m comparing myself to Richard Branson.

And that’s your role, to go, well, I’ve got a separate role from the experts who are doing the delivery because I’m now a business owner, because I’ve now got all of those responsibilities, I’m actually not as good at the functional roles anymore.

You don’t want me doing your books. You don’t want me coming into your business and trying to run that culture project with the team. I’m just not on the tools anymore. That would be like getting Richard Branson to fly the aeroplane. Get him in his role and get the best person in to help you out.

The Power of Positioning

From an energy perspective, I sometimes like to think about positioning and that process through which you’ve been positioned and your opportunity to leverage that, to position up because this is how the client sees your business. You are higher than, you are better than your team. What you want to do is actually convince them that this person is better than you for what it is that that client specifically needs.

Now, you’ve already been positioned up. You’ve been bigged up as the expert, maybe as I say, through social media or through a referral. So your job is to take that energy, take that positioning of yourself as an expert and run with it. Don’t fight against it, but run with it.  So as someone who knows this industry, who knows the service, I have absolute confidence that Harriet is the best person to help you deliver it and I’m still going to be here if you need to call me and check in. I’m going to be checking in with you. But Harriet is much better than I am.

Because you’ve been positioned so highly, you’ve got an opportunity to put that other person up on your shoulders so that the client actually feels that they’re getting a much better outcome than if they just worked with you directly.

Sales in Sync: Selling as a United Front

This applies even if Harriet or Tom or Dick have found the lead. This is a mistake I’ve seen a lot of professional services firms where as careers develop, these individuals start to go out and find leads to work on their business development skills. They want to go and do that sales piece because they know how valuable that is to a business.

Don’t let them get too far ahead of themselves because their natural tendency will be to talk about how great they are and to a degree deposition you as being important in the process. Much better if they’re talking about how great you are, get you into the room and then you can, using your expertise, reposition them even higher. That gets them a double kick along instead of them having to talk about themselves. You start to get an appreciation here of why I preach so much about having a consistent sales meeting process.

Whatever you use and if you’re looking for one, the Gratitude Sales Model that we use is covered at length in episodes 40 and 55 because if you’ve got two or more people in a sales meeting, it’s critical you’re running the same process.

Otherwise, you’re going to keep crossing over each other with questions. You’re going to completely miss the energy and you’re not going to achieve that outcome. That outcome of Harriet being the right person to do this and of the client walking away from the sales meeting knowing that they want to work with your business for the long term.

With Love,

Jacob Aldridge

International Business Advisorv
WhatsApp +61 427 151 181
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