Find the person behind the suit!

This a true story so I have changed some of the details to hide the people involved.

It’s an amazing tale which just goes to prove that there is a real human with a back story behind every corporate executive and if you persist and invest enough time you will find out more about them which may perhaps make it easier for you to do business together.

A while back a friend of mine told me a tale about meeting a new client and how the pendulum swung from near disaster to rip roaring success.

He was the MD of a PR consultancy and he had just inherited a subsidiary business into his group. He had a couple of months wriggle room before the good, and the bad, from this new business became part of his P&L so he decided to meet as many clients as possible. He reasoned that if any were thinking of exiting he could get them off his books before they became a hole in his accounts….smart move.

He met with the subsidiary consultancy boss and asked about the clients, all of whom, according to the smooth-talking colleague, loved them and would never leave. So far so good, he thought but he didn’t quite trust the snake-oil salesman that sat in front of him so he asked to meet the biggest clients quickly, one of whom was a growing business in the takeaway fast food market.

On the day that the marketing director for this client business came to their offices he booked a table at a nice restaurant and sought last minute reassurances from his colleague that she was a happy client and that all would be well.
Despite his colleague’s protestations that everything was great, my friend took one look at the client, as she sat in reception, and knew immediately that something was wrong. He had been round the block and he knew that you’re-getting-sacked-face if ever he saw it and she wore it with grim determination.

The lunch was, he told me, an unmitigated disaster. It was very evident that his colleague had pulled the wool over his eyes as the client showed no sign of interest in becoming part of the new, enlarged PR outfit and, try as he might, he could not engage her in anything but basic business chat and they sat in partial silence over their three course meal.
As I said, he had already decided that if they were going to lose clients they needed to do it before it became his problem so, whilst giving up was not in his DNA, he did know when defeat was breathing down his neck.

Throwing caution to the wind he asked her why she had made a slightly off the cuff disparaging remark about her takeaway business not having a branch in his home town in the north. It turned out it was her hometown too!

Guessing that they were around the same age as each other he asked the intrusive question we all ask when we meet people from our home towns – “where did you go to school?”

Caught off guard, the corporate mask slipped momentarily and she told him and, of course, he knew it. He replied that he had attended the equivalent boys independent school in the town and that they must have mutual acquaintances if not friends….remember by now, he didn’t really care he just wanted the frosty atmosphere to go.

Despite herself she couldn’t help but tell him her brother had attended the same boys school and that she had watched him play rugby there on a number of occasions. My friend was also a rugby player, so he asked her what her brother’s name was and she hesitatingly said his name – let’s call him Peter Hampson – to which he blurted out “Peter Hampson? You’re Peter Hampson’s sister? If you watched him play, you must have watched me as we were in the same team”.

And bang, the mood changed as they both immediately regressed to being 18 year A Level students in a northern town and not two poker-faced business executives who were acting out a corporate joust in London years later.

Needless to say the snake oil salesman was sent packing, another bottle of red was ordered and my friend, on a roll now, chanced his arm by asking who her best friend from home was. Genuinely, but unbelievably, he went to primary school with the best friend so by now the ice had melted and they got on like a house on fire.

So, what was the denouement?

She told him that she had indeed come to end the business relationship, citing a long list of cockups and errors of judgement but he was able to ask for a chance to fix things this time under his guidance and pledged to do better. She could hardly say no and three years later, when he set up his own PR consultancy, the by now nationwide takeaway business became his first client.

OK, so the chances of something like this happening are slim and you may only get one coincidence as dramatic as this in your whole career, but the point is that we are all people first and executives second. If my friend hadn’t picked up on the reference to their home town and given it one last shot at engaging her the sliding doors moment could have been very different.

I love that story and I use it as an inspiration with existing and prospective clients to find out as much as you can about the person behind the mask. Of course, with the advent of social media you can now find out too much about someone if they are not careful so I limit my research to LinkedIn but that medium can tell you a huge amount about the passions and motivation of the person you may be meeting for the first time….and probably even what school they went to!