that you should worry about teaching your client what they need to know to be One-Up. They are not likely to surpass your One-Upness because they will not be able to acquire your experience selling what you sell. Your experience is deeper and wider than your clients who make a given buying decision once every few years at most. You help clients and prospects make those decisions every day. If you sell in different verticals, you know things that other people don't because you spend time learning from your contacts, but you recognize that you lack the expertise of your clients in their industry.
How Being One-Down Makes You One-Up
One of the ways you improve your ability to be One-Up is by being One-Down when you need to be. In one of my first jobs as a field salesperson, I called on large distribution centers in my territory of Columbus, Ohio. It was a target-rich environment, and I had homed in on a number of very large prospects, each one spending millions of dollars with companies in my industry. Having won one of the largest retail distribution centers in the city, I was learning how best to take care of their needs. My main client was a seasoned veteran of the business, and he invited me to sit in on his planning meeting, an indication that he favored me over my competitors.
The conversation I was listening to was in a language I didn't speak. First, the managers and leaders used a lot of acronyms that made no sense to my ears. Second, they used lot of jargon. While I didn't yet have the concept of being One-Down, I felt it. I was lost. When I left the meeting, I asked my main contact to help me make sense of what I heard, especially the term throughput. It's not difficult to guess the meaning of the word, but for this group, it was a math equation. He patiently explained to me that the throughput was a calculation based on how much product they shipped divided by the cost of their labor. They had goals around throughput. He showed me how they kept score on a spreadsheet. A few weeks later, I walked into a different prospective client's distribution center and asked my main contact what their throughput numbers were like during their peak season. He was stunned by the question, as no one else in my role would have known to ask. There is no way I was One-Up when it came to running a distribution center, but I was One-Up on any and all of my competitors. Without knowing that I was being taught to be One-Up, I was gaining a competitive advantage by asking my client to educate me about their business, correcting my One-Downness.
Learning From Your One-Up Client
There are many things you need to know to successfully help your client change and produce the outcomes they need to be successful. But at least in these three areas, you need your client to help you understand what you need to know and how to use that knowledge to help them succeed.
Their Industry Unless you have worked in your prospective client's industry, your client is certain to know more about their industry than you. What you want to be is an expert on the line where your industry and your client's industry come together. You are already an expert in your industry, and you understand what's on your side of that line. Because your client is an expert in their industry, they have the knowledge and experience to be able to help you understand their side. Every interaction with a stakeholder provides you with an opportunity to be tutored by experts in a specific industry. When your contacts tell you how their business works, how challenges show up in their world, and what the optimal change might look like for them, you have gained information that allows you to be better prepared for future conversations with other clients or prospects. In a conversation with a new prospect, you are starting out less One-Down than you might have been had you not learned from your previous clients.
What's even better is discovering that some companies have beliefs and ideas that conflict with other companies in the same industry. When you are aware that some approach works in some scenarios and fails under different circumstances, you have situational knowledge to understand what works, when it works, and what conditions need to be present for something to be true. Every industry has a number of things that differentiate it from other industries. Your client can teach you how they think about their business and their industry, providing you with the context needed to understand why they do certain things in a certain way. Industries also tend to have a set of concepts and a vocabulary that is all their own. You want your client to teach you how to think about their business and how to speak their language. You want to sound and feel like an insider, someone who is “one of us.” Every interaction with a contact inside your prospective client's account is an opportunity to learn something that will benefit you now and in the future.
What Your Contacts Believe Your contacts are operating based on certain assumptions, some of which are false. Those false assumptions may not have started out incorrect, but they have outlived their value as the world changed. It's much easier to help people adjust their no-longer-accurate assumptions when you understand what assumptions they have now. We are laying down two sets of tracks here: the beliefs that prevent your client from producing the results they need, as well as the things they believe that are true. Both tracks are valuable to you in helping them improve their results.
The reason stakeholders don't love your slide deck presentation when you propose an initiative or project is that they prefer to grill you with not-so-hypothetical hypotheticals to ensure what you propose will work for them. In previous conversations, you might not have captured all of these questions and the responses to the questions you ask to gain greater clarity—organizing your knowledge, increasing your knowledge and experience, moving ever closer to being an expert. Now you know better.
Navigating Their Company There is one area where you are no match for your contact when it comes to being One-Up: how things work in their company. Unless your contact is new to their company or their role, they know how things get done inside their world. There is a lot of tribal knowledge inside any group of people that spend most of their waking hours together. Your contacts are going to know where all the landmines are buried. Your lack of knowledge about how to traverse this ground makes you One-Down and open to the types of mistakes that can cause you problems as you help your client pursue the results they need. You don't know that any criticism about Jimmy's sacred cow is going to lose his support. Unless you are able to pick it up in meetings, you have no idea that Jenny has had all she can take from Jimmy being so averse to the change she believes is necessary. The people who have a map to this terrain are your contacts, many of whom lack formal authority but have tremendous insight about their peers and how best to pursue change inside their company. Later, your map is going to be helpful to you and your contacts, putting you in the One-Up position because you will know more than your client.
One way to remain forever in the One-Down position is to ignore all of the things you see and hear when you are meeting with your clients. You can work toward being One-Up by learning from your clients. I promise you that by the end of this book, you will be One-Up, and you will value every client conversation in a new way.
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